Inbound & Agile

Tag: Misinformation

  • Fake News Works Because Trust Usually Does

    Fake News Works Because Trust Usually Does

    Most of what holds modern life together is something we rarely notice: we trust what we have not verified.

    When we pay for a product, we trust that the thing inside the box is the thing described on the outside. We trust that it will not poison us, catch fire, or quietly fail in a way the seller already knew about. We also trust that if the product turns out to be bad, the seller or manufacturer will make it right.

    They may have warranties, contracts, reputations, and laws encouraging them to do so. But none of those lets us verify the product before every purchase or guarantees that someone will behave honorably afterward. The transaction happens first. Proof, if it comes at all, comes later. Every ordinary purchase therefore includes a small, unsecured loan of confidence.

    The same thing happens when we eat at a restaurant, turn on a faucet, board an airplane, fill a prescription, or cross a bridge. We do not run a chemical analysis on lunch. We do not inspect the water system, audit the maintenance log, or calculate the load-bearing capacity beneath our feet. We rely on long chains of people and institutions whose work we will never personally examine.

    Trust is not merely a soft virtue. It is infrastructure. It lets us act without requiring every person to become an investigator, engineer, chemist, lawyer, and auditor before breakfast.

    News used to sit inside that same background of ordinary trust. A reader could disagree with a newspaper or think a television network was biased while still assuming that reporters were trying to describe events that had actually happened and that editors would not knowingly publish an invention as fact. That trust was never perfect and never deserved to be absolute. But it was substantial enough that a headline could function as information rather than the beginning of a forensic investigation.

    Now the same screens, formats, and social signals carry reporting, opinion, advertising, satire, propaganda, and synthetic material produced at almost no cost. We still have to trust because nobody can verify everything. Yet we are less certain which signals deserve that trust. That is what makes fake news such a difficult problem. It exploits a habit we cannot simply abandon.

    That was the idea I kept returning to after my conversation with Ming Ming Chiu on The Unfolding Thought Podcast. Chiu studies how people communicate, create, mislead, disagree, and learn together. At first those subjects may look like separate research programs. I think they belong to one problem: how do groups remain open enough to think together without becoming easy to manipulate?

    The usual answer to misinformation is some version of “be more skeptical.” That is directionally right but structurally incomplete. A society in which nobody trusts anyone may circulate fewer lies. It will also struggle to circulate knowledge, organize work, or solve problems. We need a better process for deciding what deserves trust without destroying trust itself.

    Most of life runs on unverified trust

    Every claim carries more possible questions than we have time to ask. Who produced it? What did they observe? What did they omit? Which incentives shaped the presentation? Could an alternative explanation fit the same evidence?

    Trust compresses those questions. It substitutes a working judgment about a person, institution, or process for a complete investigation. That is not intellectual laziness. It is how finite people operate in a world with more information than any one mind can evaluate.

    This is why falsehood cannot be understood only as bad content. It is also an attack on the systems people use to economize attention. A fabricated story borrows the visual grammar of journalism, the intimacy of a friend’s recommendation, or the authority of a confident speaker. It tries to collect the benefit of trust without paying the costs that make trust warranted.

    A society that trusts nothing may be harder to deceive. It will also be unable to do much of anything.

    The dependence runs both ways. Lies need a background of truth to remain cheap. If every email were fraudulent, email fraud would stop working. If every headline were invented, headlines would lose their power. Deception is parasitic. It needs ordinary reliability to create the expectation it violates.

    A lie designed to move is different from a lie designed to hide

    Chiu and his colleagues make a useful distinction between personal lies and fake news. A personal lie often tries to become invisible. It may be designed to end an inquiry, avoid a consequence, or keep someone from acting. Fake news is usually built for the opposite purpose. It wants attention. It wants movement. It asks the reader to click, share, fear, donate, vote, buy, or join.

    That difference changes the writing. A message built to travel may address “you,” ask questions, activate emotion, or attach itself to an identity. It does not have to offer the most coherent account of reality. It has to become consequential before careful judgment catches up.

    We also make a mistake when we treat every share as evidence of belief. People pass information along for many reasons. They may find it funny, alarming, identity-affirming, or simply worth asking others about. Someone can share a claim while still wondering whether it is true. Yet distribution systems often collapse all of those motives into the same observable event: engagement.

    That ambiguity is useful to a manipulator. The platform sees circulation. Other people see apparent social proof. The original sharer’s doubt disappears from view.

    The attacker needs a conversion, not a consensus

    We tend to imagine propaganda as an attempt to make most people believe the same false thing. Sometimes it is. But mass agreement is not always necessary.

    A scammer does not need everyone to respond. A political operation may need only a small number of people to become more afraid, more cynical, less likely to vote, or more willing to act. A fabricated health claim may be commercially successful if it reaches one unusually vulnerable audience. The relevant question is not always, “How many people believed this?” It may be, “Did the right person act?”

    Misinformation does not need universal belief. It needs the right person to act.

    Artificial intelligence makes that problem more precise. A message no longer has to be merely plausible to a demographic category. It can be adjusted to an individual’s interests, language, anxieties, and prior responses. In a series of experiments involving 1,788 participants, researchers found that language-model-generated messages became more persuasive when they were personalized with information about the recipient.

    The old economics of persuasion required choosing a message that was acceptable to many people. The emerging economics can generate many messages and discover which one moves each person. This is not just a bigger megaphone. It is a feedback system.

    Distrust is a defense that destroys the asset

    If deception exploits trust, the obvious defense is to withdraw trust. But skepticism applied without discrimination can deepen the same problem it is meant to solve.

    People rarely stop trusting altogether. More often, they transfer trust. When institutions, journalists, scientists, and unfamiliar people are treated as presumptively corrupt, identity becomes the shortcut. The trustworthy source becomes “someone like us.” A community that rejects external authority may become more dependent on insiders, even when those insiders have weaker methods and stronger incentives to distort.

    That is one reason echo chambers are resilient. They do not eliminate trust. They concentrate it and make it conditional on belonging. Evidence from outside the group becomes suspicious because of where it came from. Evidence from inside acquires credibility because it confirms the relationship.

    “Trust nothing” therefore cannot be the foundation of media literacy. Nobody has enough time or expertise to verify everything from first principles. The more durable goal is calibrated trust: confidence that rises and falls with the quality of the process, not with the familiarity of the speaker.

    Politeness is part of the truth-seeking system

    This is where Chiu’s work on creativity and disagreement becomes unexpectedly relevant.

    It is tempting to treat politeness as a matter of tone, useful for comfort but secondary to whether an argument is correct. Chiu’s research suggests something more consequential. In a study of group problem solving, disagreement was associated with more small creative advances, while rude actions were associated with fewer. In a separate study of online political debates, polite disagreement was associated with receiving more audience votes and winning more often.

    The point is not that civility makes a claim true. It is that respectful communication helps keep potentially useful contributions in the system long enough to be examined. Rudeness changes what people are willing to say, how carefully others listen, and whether a partial insight survives contact with the group.

    Correctness is not self-executing. A correct person who cannot be heard, or who causes everyone else to retreat into defensive positions, may contribute less to a group’s eventual understanding than an imperfect person who makes continued inquiry possible.

    This distinction matters online, where we frequently confuse aggression with rigor. Humiliating someone for sharing a false claim may establish the responder’s intelligence to an audience. It may also make the original sharer less willing to reconsider, and it signals to everyone watching that uncertainty carries social risk.

    If our goal is truth rather than performance, the question is not merely whether a correction is accurate. It is whether the correction improves the group’s ability to think.

    Add friction to the claim, not the relationship

    One of Chiu’s own practices offers a practical starting point. When he disagrees with someone, he first asks, “What is this person saying that I think is right?”

    That question is not an obligation to manufacture agreement. It is a way to separate respect for the person from acceptance of the claim. It forces the listener to understand before attacking and gives the conversation a piece of shared ground. From there, the evidence, logic, and assumptions can be tested more directly.

    Respect people. Test claims.

    The same separation can shape platforms and institutions. Friction should be attached to the moment a claim moves, not to a person’s basic membership in the conversation. Ask whether someone has read the article before sharing it. Surface the source. Show the date. Make uncertainty visible. Add a pause before a highly emotional claim is amplified.

    Small prompts can matter. A meta-analysis of 20 experiments involving 26,863 participants found that brief reminders to think about accuracy reduced intentions to share false news by about 10 percent. That will not solve coordinated deception. It does show that some sharing happens because the environment makes reaction more immediate than reflection.

    A ten percent reduction may sound modest. At the scale of a social platform, modest changes in the probability of sharing can alter what millions of people encounter. More importantly, an accuracy prompt does not require treating every user as an enemy. It interrupts an action while preserving the relationship.

    Shared reality is maintained, not inherited

    Individuals cannot outwork industrial-scale deception. Media literacy matters, but no curriculum can make every person an expert in medicine, economics, climate science, warfare, law, and every other subject that may appear in a feed. Personal vigilance is one layer of defense, not an excuse for platforms and institutions to avoid responsibility.

    Healthy information systems need provenance, transparent moderation, meaningful appeal, and friction that reflects the possible harm of amplification. They need institutions willing to show their work and correct errors without pretending that error and fraud are the same thing. They need education that teaches people how knowledge is made, not only how to spot a suspicious headline.

    Most of all, they need norms that let scrutiny and cooperation coexist.

    Chiu’s research points toward a useful symmetry. Misinformation becomes powerful when it exploits our relationships while bypassing our judgment. Productive disagreement does the reverse: it protects the relationship so that judgment can become more demanding.

    That is disciplined trust. It does not ask us to believe people because they are familiar, polite, or on our side. It asks us to preserve enough mutual regard to investigate claims together, then place confidence in processes that expose themselves to evidence, correction, and challenge.

    The opposite of fake news is not a world in which nobody believes anything. It is a world in which trust is earned, claims encounter thoughtful friction, and disagreement helps us get closer to the truth instead of driving us farther apart.

    Listen and read further

    Eric Pratum and Ming Ming Chiu on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.
    Listen to Ming Ming Chiu on The Unfolding Thought Podcast.