00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D 

Welcome everybody. It’s the 25th of June 2024, but you’re listening to this podcast episode of Domen Savič / Citizen D podcast on the 15th of July same year.

With us today is Sacha Altay, postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford within the Reuters Institute working on misinformation, trust and social media. So of course we’re going to talk about football. That’s a little opening joke. So welcome, Sasha. Thank you for being with us.

00:00:38 Sacha Altay 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m not with the Reuters Institute anymore, now I am at the University of Zurich. I was, you know, in Oxford last year.

00:00:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D

OK, excellent, things change so fast. And speaking of you working in the field of psychology and disinformation and trust in social media and so forth.

It seems that our world nowadays seems to run on disinformation in various areas. You have disinformation in politics and economy and environment and public health. There are numerous attempts in the EU, in the US, all around the world to sort of level out the playing field for the media consumer, you have regulatory attempts, self-regulatory protocols, increased efforts in education.

My opening question to you would be how did we get here? Was it always like this or did something change in the recent past so that disinformation became so prevalent and so influential in so many areas of our lives?

00:01:49 Sacha Altay

So, I’m going to answer this question first by talking about how people talk about it rather than whether there is more disinformation or misinformation today than before. Just how do people talk about it and whether people talk about it more today than before?

And I think it’s pretty clear when you look at the scientific literature or the number of news articles published or Google searches, that people are more interested in myths and disinformation or conspiracy theories now than before. And by now, I mean broadly, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit in the UK. After these two major events, interest in misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theory really spiked both in the news headlines, in intellectuals’ circles, as well as in scientific research.

And I think clearly the COVID-19 pandemic, where the director of the World Health Organization, said that, you know, there was an infodemic, like a lot of misinformation about COVID-19 etc. So, I think interest also piped during that time and more recently very recently with the release, or at least the democratization of the ChatGPT and worries about the power of generative AI.

There have been new fears again about the impact that generative AI may have on elections. For instance, during the 2024 elections that are being held almost everywhere around the world. So, I think, yeah, clearly people are more worried about it. Recently at the World Economic Forum, for instance, missing misinformation was considered the number one risk in the next two years for democracies in front of climate change in front of war in front of any other risk. So clearly people, scientists and leaders are very worried about it, and I think it’s unprecedent.

But of course, we don’t have very good data. About 100 years ago, we were also extremely worried about this stuff. I doubt it, but if it’s possible, we don’t have very good data on it. But let’s say at least that yeah, now we are very worried about it, more than in the past as we can document it.

00:04:13 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Would you say that these threats or the perception of threats of this and misinformation are credible? So, is it really that big of a problem then, like the media and the politicians and everybody I guess is saying?

00:04:28 Sacha Altay

Yeah, because I’ve talked about perceptions. Now let’s look at the evidence. Let’s say that before 2016 there was some work on it, but the work was quite limited compared to today, and I think that since 2016 there has been a lot of great empirical work to look at.

The prevalence and impact of miss or disinformation, and most of this work, at least in Western democracies, like the US or Western, Europe has shown that mis- and disinformation is very, very small.

It’s consumed by a very small number of people who have pre-existing attitudes that basically predispose them to consume and accept the messages in the mist and disinformation. So, in the US, for instance, we know that it’s mostly, I don’t know, for Trump supporters that are consuming mostly for-Trump misinformation, and you can say the same for the other. It’s the same the other way around, so that’s what we know because we know that the average news consumer doesn’t consume or even stumble upon much misinformation. So that’s that has been well established.

And regarding the impact, it’s a bit trickier, but all the attempts we’ve done suggest that the effect is small and smaller than most other things like even just following the news like of course, when you follow the news, you get more informed about what happens in the world. But you also may develop some biased perceptions of the world because of course, the news doesn’t cover everything perfectly and they are not completely neutral etcetera.

So let’s say that the impact of mis- and dis-information is very small compared to just media bias effects and of course a lot of people just don’t consume the news and just not very interested in the news or politics and so are just broadly, uninformed about many of these things, and this has a much stronger impact than misinformation could ever be.

00:06:24 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, it sounds like we don’t have a problem there.

00:06:30 Sacha Altay

I mean the way I see it is that we have problems. For instance, I don’t know, we have people who deny that climate change is happening and that it’s human cause. And I think it’s a problem that people disagree with, that it’s a scientific fact that has been established people disagree with. It’s a problem.

And these people will also say that they believe in misinformation, etc. And so, I think often people jump to the conclusion that “people who vote for populist leaders also believe in fake news”. It must be because of false news that they vote for populist leaders or like the same for Brexit, for Trump, etc. All these people, they say they believe in fosters. And so, I think we tend to attribute this bad stuff to false information, and I think false information is most often a symptom of other problems.

For instance, we know that at the country level in countries with more corruption like I don’t know, countries in the Middle East compared to northern Europe, countries in the Middle East are more corrupted than countries in northern Europe like Denmark and belief in conspiracy theories is much higher in like the Middle East than in Denmark, for instance.

And that’s because it makes sense to believe that elites are corrupt or competing against people in corrupt countries. So, there is some rationality to it. And we also know that people who distrust institutions for various reasons, some good, some of the, the less good, are more likely to believe in misinformation, conspiracy theories… literally because they are looking for information that goes against the establishments against institutions, and sometimes people are warranted to do so.

But let’s say that in Western democracies, where elites are often right, it leads to bad, bad outcomes.

00:08:15 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, you would say that that this whole, let’s say one of the main reasons or important reasons for the prevalence of let’s say belief in disinformation is actually decrease in trust towards let’s say public institutions, governments, mass media outlets and so forth.

00:08:37 Sacha Altay

I think it depends. I think, I don’t know, for instance, in times of war, I don’t know if you look at Russian propaganda, some of the best predictors of believing in Russian propaganda is identifying strongly as Russia. And I don’t know, believing in the Great Russia narrative, for instance, that you want a great Russia. So, you’re going to buy the Russian propaganda.

But if you’re Ukrainian and have a Ukrainian identity, you’re not going to believe any of the of the Russian propaganda. So, in that case, it’s mostly about identity and I think most of the time identity plays a very important role. People believe stuff that aligns with identity, people and various identities.

You can have political identity, national identities, many kinds of identities. But yeah, as you mentioned, I think at least for conspiracy theories, they are often constructed really in opposition to events that are covered in mainstream