The Outside World and the Pictures in Our Head*
Confirmation Bias, Digital Echo Chambers, and Social Media Bubbles
“ ‘Creepy’ Joe Biden roasted for strange selfies” blared a recent Tweet from a news outlet. Below the headline with a link to their full story was a side-by-side two-frame picture of President Joe Biden looking in through a window with two young girls in a picture. The first frame shows an unsmiling, slightly menacing looking Biden with semi-alarmed looks on the girls’ faces. The second they are all smiling. The social media post (and corresponding story) made it seem the President just walked up to the girls and stared in the window unannounced.
It gets better. If you click on the link to the story it opens with the famous line from the movie The Shining — you know, the one where Jack Nicholson’s character slowly descends into madness as a caretaker in a vacant resort. Instead of the movie’s famous line, “Here’s Johnny” as Nicholson’s character goes on a homicidal rampage, the news story leads with, “Here’s Joey!” as a way of further painting the “creepy” picture for its readers.
The news report itself isn’t original reporting but is actually a story about what people are saying on social media about the pictures. The story states, “Social media users roasted Joe Biden over ‘creepy’ selfies with kids where the president is seen lurking in the background of children’s selfies with his face up against a window.”
However, this example is a symptom of a larger disorder. Let me explain in more detail.
It’s the classic digital echo chamber wrapped in a social media bubble that reinforces certain people’s impression of the president which is further reinforced by a news outlet with an ideological bent against the president.
At the bottom of the story, the reporters eventually mention other people they found on social media who didn’t see an issue with the president’s behavior. Similarly, they finally note that it was the girls who yelled out with “excited cries” as the president was walking by a restaurant they were at during a visit to Nantucket and asked him to come over. However, the entire story was framed as if the president was that creepy uninvited uncle that shows up to your house for Thanksgiving anyway.
As a recent analysis in a paper called, A systematic review on fake news research through the lens of news creation and consumption: Research efforts, challenges, and future directions found:
“Most of the links shared or mentioned in social media have never even been clicked. This implies that many people perceive and process information in only fragmentary way, such as via news headlines and the people sharing news, rather than considering the logical flow of news content.”
Many stories bury nuance (if it’s included at all) making the headline and photo even more important. As a person casually scrolls past a post or reads over a newspaper, they take that small bit of information and translate it through their preconceived lens.
Walter Lippmann in his seminal work, Public Opinion said, “What reaches him [the reader] of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs, anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions.”(1) It’s not simply misleading news stories or false news. It’s how we, as readers, interpret the world. Not only do we gravitate to what we already believe or want to believe, we don’t spend a lot of time taking in all the content.
In other words, readers don’t read the fine print — and many outlets capitalize on this. Stories can be framed in a completely different way in the headline and opening paragraphs, even though the overall story is technically accurate in the most hyper-technical way.
That’s what plays out in the Biden story above. The story plays to the paper’s readership and factors in that people won’t get much past the headline or first couple of lines in the story.
But the headline, the pictures, the bent of the story paint a much different picture than the reality. In the end it wasn’t just the girls that the president went up to in those pictures. There was a crowd of people in front of the girls — all taking pictures of the president. This, of course, wasn’t shown in the “Creepy Joe” story. In the story’s version, Biden snuck up on two unsuspecting young girls. However, the lens on what was actually going on was found in the local newspaper’s Twitter feed, the Nantucket Current, which had a much different look.
This isn’t the first time a story of post has been framed to change what actually occurred to fit some alternative narrative, nor will it be the last. And news outlets across the ideological spectrum are guitly of it. It may not be an outright false story — they didn’t make up a story from whole cloth, but it certainly wasn’t the most accurate version of events (to be diplomatic about it).
Disinformation in news has been around for centuries. For history check out NPR’s, “Long Before There Was ‘Fake News,’ There Were ‘Fake Photos’” or a summary of yellow journalism which pushed sensational, but not fully accurate pieces in to generate sales. In addition, anyone who has ever stood in line at the grocery store has likely seen a tabloid claiming outrageous things most of which we don’t take (too) seriously.
But social media has altered the landscape. A Pew Research study in 2018 found that nearly 70% of Americans now get their news from social media. But, with social media the lines are often blurred between what people know to be real and what is a tall tale. False news is better concealed and packaged online.
While the Pew Research Center study found that a large portion of respondents read news on social media with a healthy dose of skepticism, other studies, like Fighting Fake News and Post-Truth Politics with Behavioral Science: The Pro-Truth Pledge in the journal Behavior and Social Issues found various instances where “American adults are prone to be deceived by fake news.” The study found that, in many instances, fake stories received more engagements than real stories.
But it’s not just social media. Various mainstream news outlets have had similar issues. Below is an article from the New York Times where ABC News faked footage in 1989. The event happened — but their footage was recreated, a simulation of the real event. The problem at the time was that viewers didn’t know it.
Nor is the phenomenon relegated to one side of the ideological spectrum — every side has had their fair share of slightly altered reality to drive their particular ideological view. For instance, Leon Trotsky, wrote in The Stalin School of Falsification, of how he was written out of all official Soviet history after his falling out with Stalin — a case study in how history is written by the victors.
Far away from the vestiges of failed Soviet policy of mass control, the above Biden example does raise an important area we have ongoing challenges within a democratic society — welcoming free speech and open debate even when it’s untrue and when we’re largely talking to ourselves.
The explosion of new social media platforms was supposed to empower everyday citizens, especially in democratic societies, and create unprecedented access to information and the free flow of ideas — or the new and even better public square. But as some experts, like legal scholar, Cass Sunstein have argued — that while that may be true in theory, it may not be so in reality. He argues that even in the era of unprecedented access to information, we often gravitate to the views we already agree with — or an information echo chamber.
Cass Sustein’s fear of information echo chambers are exacerbated by technological advancements, like artificial intelligence (AI). As a recent study, Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption in Public Opinion Quarterly found, alongside social media platforms, AI allow these socials media and other digital platforms to further personalize content “through machine-learning models.” The end result is “filter bubbles” within the already robust echo chambers — all further driving people to things they already believe, as opposed to new ideas.
While we are able to connect more than ever, Walter Lippmann’s finding still rings true from 1922 that, “For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.”(2) As the world opens up, we further close it off.
In other words, more access doesn’t necessarily mean a greater free flow of ideas. As another study, A systematic review on fake news research through the lens of news creation and consumption: Research efforts, challenges, and future directions in the journal PLoS One stated:
“Over the past decade, news consumption channels have been radically diversified, and the mainstream has shifted from broadcasting and print media to mobile and social media environments. Despite the diversity of news consumption channels, personalized preferences and repetitive patterns have led people to be exposed to limited information and continue to consume such information increasingly. This selective news consumption attitude has enhanced the polarization of the public in many multi-media environments. In addition, the commercialization of digital platforms have created an environment in which cognitive bias can be easily strengthened. In other words, a digital platform based on recommended algorithms has the convenience of providing similar content continuously after a given type of content is consumed. As a result, it may be easy for users to fall into the echo chamber because they only access recommended content.”
Woven into this challenge is the ability for false news or disinformation to spread rapidly. One recent study found that on Twitter (note: a favorite social media site of mine) posts with falsehoods spread 70% faster than truthful posts — and not because of web bots, but as a result of real people reposting and resharing away.
What are we to do? This is a complicated question. Maybe news isn’t the medium after all. As Walter Lippmann said, “…news and truth are not the same thing…the function of news it to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”(3) In that case what is the best vehicle?
Social media has expanded our access to information. It has allowed average citizens to be part of the debate and conservation. It’s the new public square. But as mentioned above, it has resulted in more confirmation bias, not less. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion logically landed with a solution of creating objective Platonic philosopher-king type officials who would objectively distill and amplify truthful information. Lippmann’s diagnosis was correct, but his cure of more centralized control over information is worse than the disease. In the United States — a place where we created a Bill of Rights, including free speech, because of our fear of government control — would be and should be DOA.
There have been numerous efforts to fight disinformation. For example, after World War II countries united to combat false news, particularly war propaganda, but in the end what the world settled on was a weak tea study to do studies on the matter. But the recognition of the problem was important.
Others have suggested things like a Pro-Truth Pledge for both private citizens and public figures, which rewards truthiness through mechanisms such as positive reputation. But given the current toxicity on social media, a Pro-Truth pledge could simply be transformed into another cudgel to be used against each other.
Cass Sunstein in his provocative book, Republic.com 2.0 argues that we do need some regulation, but what kind and how much is where it gets thorny. Various legislation at the state and federal levels have been introduced to address some of these issues, but it’s a complicated minefield of how to potentially regulate free speech.
The debate over engaging in our new public square is an important one. Perhaps the debate over how to engage is finally the way to break through our echo chambers wrapped in social media bubbles in order to connect with one another in a meaningful way.
NOTES:
*This was the title of the opening chapter to Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion.
(1) Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, Free Press Paperbacks (1922): pg. 111.
(2) Walter Lippmann at pgs. 54–55.
(3) Lippmann at pg. 216.
