This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Episode Transcript
Lee C Camp
Justin McBrayer
We face a fake news epidemic, the likes of which we've never seen. And at least one of the ingredients in that epidemic is the fact that we have access to this wonderful technology.
Lee C Camp
That's Justin McBrayer, professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College, and executive director of the Society of Christian Philosophers.
Justin McBrayer
The same technology that makes it easy to find the truth also makes it easy to produce disinformation. Think of how strange it is that on social media, you get to pick your friends. Technology has allowed us to create environments after our own image.
Lee C Camp
Today, we discuss Justin's new book Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation. It explores the current crisis of a world built on false information, worsened by new technology and media; We'll also talk about some surprising ways in which we ourselves often play oblivious roles in the perpetuating of such a crisis; and some practices we may adopt to combat the spread, both within ourselves and within our larger communities, of fake news.
Justin McBrayer
This same technology that can contribute to the problem can also be part of the solution.
Lee C Camp
All this, coming right up.
Part 1
Lee C Camp
Justin McBrayer is professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He's also the executive director of the Society of Christian Philosophers. And he's the author of the recently released book Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation. Welcome Justin.
Justin McBrayer
Happy to be here. Fun to talk to you.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, it's really good to have you here with us today and you're, uh off in Colorado in the midst of a snow storm. The day we're taping this.
Justin McBrayer
That's right. So this is one example of how technology allows us to circulate information around the globe at the snap of a fingers. Doesn't matter what the weather is. Doesn't matter how much money you have. Easy to get information out there.
Lee C Camp
Which is precisely part of the, at least at one level, the problem that you're pointing us to. Right?
Justin McBrayer
Yeah, that's exactly right. We face a fake news epidemic, the likes of which we've never seen. And at least one of the ingredients in that epidemic is the fact that we have access to this wonderful technology, the same technology that makes it easy to find the truth also makes it easy to produce disinformation.
Lee C Camp
Well, we'll dig into that a lot and I do really appreciate your book. I find it smart as I would expect from a philosopher, but I also find it beyond that. I appreciate that you're very intentional about being non-partisan. And there's enough examples in the book, enough to bother partisans of either right or left, which is always a good sign, I think
And pointing us to the practical ways in which philosophy matters. So grateful for the book and all, all that you bring together in this book. I think that it points as well to the way in which academics often get depicted as kind of ivory tower dwellers who have nothing to say to the real world, but it seems that you have something you desperately want to say to the real world.
Justin McBrayer
Yeah, I think that's right. I think academics have a reputation, sometimes well earned, for living their lives in the ivory tower and debating these arcane issues that don't seem to have any bearing on the lives of normal people. Well, fake news is definitely not one of those problems. So when it comes to figuring out why there's a fake news epidemic, when it comes to figuring out how we can get ourselves out of it, both at the personal level and at the social level, philosophers, theologians, economists, psychologists have an awful lot to say about that set of issues
And over the last five or six years, we've seen that they've stepped up to the challenge and are really trying to help us as a public, to think through this cluster of issues.
Lee C Camp
Did any particular episode or incident get you as a philosopher, especially interested in the issue of fake news?
Justin McBrayer
Yeah, I actually, Lee, I fell for it. My family and I were in Austria in 2016 during the presidential election and in the aftermath of the election, both conservatives who were very happy and liberals who were not, we're trying to figure out what was happening. It didn't look like Donald Trump was going to win the election
People were really interested in how people had got the prediction so wrong. And at least part of the story, there was the presence of fake news stories that had circulated on social media. So I naturally started looking into some of the stories that it circulated and it turns out that I found one that I liked, it really hit my buttons and I forwarded it to some friends
And so I had been a victim of fake news and that just got me thinking, gosh. You know, this is something that hit home with me. Surely it's something that affected other people that I know and that I care about and I chat with. And so I started investigating fake news because I was on the wrong side of it.
Lee C Camp
Before we dive in a bit more, why don't you give us a sort of definition of fake news since you're using it in the book?
Justin McBrayer
Yeah, sure. Fake news isn't really a technical term. It's a term that's been bandied about for a number of years and I'd use it for any sort of information or misinformation that distorts your picture of the world. So you can think of information as just being true statements that are not misleading
But there's also information that's misleading. It's strictly speaking true. But when you accept that information, it distorts your view of the world just the other day. I asked my sons if they left me any cereal in the box. And one of my boys said, yeah, I left you some. Well I go and look and there's, you know, two flakes of cereal in the bottom of the box
Now, technically what he said was true, but it was misleading information. So fake news also encompasses that sort of thing. And then philosophers distinguished between misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is false material that's being spread unintentionally. So for example, when a reporter makes a mistake. And then disinformation is false information that spreads on purpose with the goal of deceiving an audience
So fake news is a kind of an umbrella term that covers misleading information, misinformation, and disinformation. And it turns out that there's an awful lot of all three out there.
Lee C Camp
You use the analogy of pollution to describe the epidemic of fake news. Why that particular term?
Justin McBrayer
I mean, if you think about a landscape. Your enjoyment of the landscape, the pursuit of your goals of having a good time outside and so forth can be marred by the fact that a landscape could be littered. You know, if there was junk everywhere and litter everywhere, it would be really hard to appreciate the beauty of the scene
Well, fake news functions in the same sort of way, it's sort of like pollution in your informational environment. You're trying to figure out what's true. You're trying to achieve particular goals and it's difficult for you to do that if your informational environment is so littered with fake news, that you literally can't see the truth
So I think it's useful to think about fake news as a kind of pollution. It's pollution on the TV channel. It's pollution in what you read. It's pollution on your social media feed. And it's that pollution that I think is driving things like partisanship, and driving really bad decision-making at the personal level.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the kind of the genealogy of fake news. You point to historical precedents here that the notion of misinformation and disinformation is not necessarily new, going back, for example, to 19th century partisan newspaper publications, right?
Justin McBrayer
Absolutely. So it's not as if fake news is a new problem in that sense. People have long had an interest to deceive one another, to deceive the public, and so forth. But what's unique about the crisis that we're facing now is that it's just so much worse than it has been at any point in time in the past. We face a really acute problem and at least one of the ingredients for why the problem is so acute now, even though it's not a new problem, is the fact that we have technology that allows us to produce and disseminate misinformation and disinformation, literally at the touch of a button. That's something that our forebears in the 19th century couldn't do. It costs money to buy a press, to buy ink, to circulate papers. And so it was actually quite difficult to manufacture, you know, fake news. Not so anymore! You can do it from a laptop just about anywhere in the world.
Lee C Camp
You point to the ways in which local newspaper outlets, I think you said you had what, five or six newspapers there in Durango, Colorado in the 19th century, but that there were kind of built in mechanisms to check the unchecked proliferation of partisan news or fake news. Describe that for us.
Justin McBrayer
Sure. I mean, you think about how news outlets in the 19th and 20th century operated, they used physical copy. They were stationed in particular locales. So they didn't have a kind of global reach or national reach. And the fact that it costs money to print papers, the fact that you had to have someone to run across town and deliver it at a doorstep, that limited the reach of the information, good or bad. It limited the scope of your audience, so to speak. Well, not anymore
Now we've got multinational corporations that are spinning news across the globe, and it costs them nothing to distribute it and next to nothing to produce it. Well, as soon as that happens now the incentive is to capture a readership and the incentive is to make a profit. Now, those incentives are not checked by things like location or how much paper is on hand or how much ink is on hand or how much your delivery guys can get out
There's no limit now on the way that we compete for readerships. And as soon as that happens, you're in the sort of wild west media environment. And that's forcing people in a kind of arms race to capture audiences. And truth is just a victim of that sort of arrangement.
Lee C Camp
Right, yeah. I was fascinated too, by the way you pointed it out. This made plenty of sense once I thought about it, but I had not thought about it. The ways in which in a local community you can have people you're working right next to reading a multiplicity of views from these different newspapers. And you're naturally going to have conversations with people that see things differently than you in your day-to-day life
Whereas increasingly we live in these siloed sorts of existences that don't have that same sort of give and take.
Justin McBrayer
That's exactly right. Think of how strange it is that on social media, you get to pick your friends. That doesn't happen in a classroom. That doesn't happen typically at a church. You know, that doesn't happen in your workplace environment. You work with your colleagues, you go to school with your school mates and so forth. But technology has allowed us to create environments after our own image, so to speak
Conservatives move to certain kinds of environments, liberals move to certain kinds of environments. We pick the people that we are comfortable with, that we like on our social media feeds. And what we're doing is we're sort of building our own silos that are blocking out people who are different from us. And when you do that, it's really hard for your bubble to burst, if you're not coming into contact with people who see the world differently from you.
Lee C Camp
And increasingly, I mean I try in my own socials, I don't do social media a whole lot, but I do it some. But I try to check myself when I want to unfriend someone. But when I know that when I've seen them repeatedly share stuff that in my mind is simply fake news that has no credibility to it, it's like, I don't want to hear that. I don't wanna listen to that. I don't have any personal relationship with this person, so there's no need for me to have that in my feed. But then of course, that does mean that my feed starts looking increasingly like something else, rather than thinking I don't want to be exposed to it.
Justin McBrayer
Yeah. Lee, what it ends up looking like is you...
Lee C Camp
Yeah.
Justin McBrayer
… because what you're doing right is you're sort of holding up a mirror and the further away these people get from, you know, your theological views or your political views or whatever, I guess the more you're sort of rubbing one another wrong. So as those people fade out of your social media life, what you're left with is the people that you're really comfortable with.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. You talk a great deal about the ways in which there are incentives, particularly financial incentives, that the way our economic systems work naturally facilitate this sort of proliferation of the pollution fake news. So describe that a bit for us.
Justin McBrayer
Sure. I think the key insight is this, at least in the United States and much of the free world, the informational market is a free market. What that means is there are consumers who are willing to pay for information or put up with advertisements or whatever. And then there are producers of information who are willing to go through the hassle of producing and disseminating the information provided they get a paycheck. That's just how the free market works. Well, in any subject matter, whether it's toasters or information, the free market doesn't give you the perfect product. Instead free markets give you the product that people are willing to buy. The toaster that you go down to Walmart and buy this afternoon isn't the best toaster that we could possibly make. It sort of meets some minimum functioning threshold that people are willing to pay for. Look, information is no different. If information is being circulated in a kind of free market, then the kind of information that people consume isn't necessarily going to be purely factual or reliable or backed by good evidence or whatever
It's the consumers who decide the quality of information that will be traded on a free market. And the sad fact of the matter is humans often have mixed motives when it comes to the truth. And we often care about other things more than the truth and in a free market. That's what you're going to get.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. I don't know if we can do this for podcast listeners, but you have this fascinating Diagram in four quadrant ABCD. And at the top side of the square, would be most truthful or perfectly truthful as obviously at the theoretical construct
And then at the bottom least truthful. And then on the left is left partisanship, and on the right, right partisanship. Can you describe that and kind of what you've discovered about the layout of American sources of media in that kind of system by looking at things.
Justin McBrayer
Right. So this is just looking at two different ways to evaluate a new source. And I just picked a political way of looking at it, you could pick religious, you could pick whatever you want. But if we're looking at political bias what we find is there's a variety of effective business strategies, a variety of different ways of making money
And each of those different ways differs depending on what sort of readership you're trying to capture. So for example, if you're imagining that that space in front of you, where at the top of the piece of paper, that's a perfectly accurate source at the bottom, it's a perfectly inaccurate source. What we find is that business strategies occupy a kind of pyramid. At the top of the pyramid there are companies who have kind of made their name in providing unbiased, really accurate information. These are places like the associated press. Places that then sell their information and their stories to news outlets, both on the right and on the left. Then sliding down from the top of that pyramid you get sources that become ever more partisan on either side. But they also become ever less truthful. And the fact of the matter is there are readerships all along that pyramid. So there are some people who are willing to pay or put up with advertisements to see really partisan shows that beat up on the other side
Those are our viable business spaces, so to speak. And in a free market, you would expect that businesses would figure that out and then exploit them.
Lee C Camp
I'm reminded as you're saying that, I have often thought that in listening to the ways in which I hear people of partisans, kind of left or right, talk about their partisan viewpoints. It oftentimes strikes me as it's the sort of way, sometimes, I hear people talk about their sports teams and it is a sort of game
It seems like a lot of times in my experience with people, where they're just trying to one up the other side and that then reminds me of a quote. And I can't remember who it was from. It was from a British journalist, I think. Orwell, right, that you quoted, who says that very often what happens is that our truth claims, especially our political truths are never tested against real life realities. They don't have to bump up against it. And then he has this foreboding line about, unless finally he gets tested on a battlefield. But describe that dynamic for us a bit more.
Justin McBrayer
Yeah. It was Orwell. So this idea is that when it comes to a lot of claims in politics, we do not have strong incentives to get to the truth. Just take one innocuous case from a few years ago, how many people attended Donald Trump's inauguration? People look at the photographic evidence
People come away with very different beliefs about it. Look, if you're a conservative in deep Trump country you have no incentive whatsoever to believe truly about how many people showed up at the inauguration. Doesn't make one wit of difference to how your life is going to go, how many people showed up at the inauguration. But fitting in with the people around you, cheering for your team, sticking one to your liberal friends
Now you've got an incentive to do all of those things. And so you have no incentive to really figure out what's going on in this case, how many people showed up at the inauguration. And you had these other really powerful sort of team based incentives as you are describing them, or I would almost want to say tribal incentives to fit in with your people
And in a case like that, where you have no incentive to get to the truth, and strong incentive to root for your team, it's not surprising at all that people would disagree about things like how many people showed up at the inauguration.
Lee C Camp
Throughout the book you're not just speculating about these things. You're often quoting kinds of social science studies that have been done on the tribalistic nature of our truth claims and so forth.
Justin McBrayer
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the points in the book is that we shouldn't just speculate about these things. We shouldn't just go with our gut intuition about how these sorts of things work. When it's a big question, when it's a question that we can't answer with our own God-given faculty
So we need to rely on the work of experts. So in this case, there's plenty of work that's been done by behavioral economists and by social psychologists, testing how people respond to these sorts of situations. Let me just quickly mention one of them. This is just absolutely fascinating, this point about how we conform with the people around us
In one classic study social psychologists drew lines on a wall. All three of which were different lengths. There was A which was quite tall, B was in the middle, C was shorter. And then they invited participants in to ask them which line was tallest. And they would invite, you know, eight or 10 people in at a time. And one of those people was a true subject and unbeknownst to them, the other eight or nine people in the line were actually confederates of the experiment. They were grad students who were lined up. And what they would do is have the participant answer last and have everybody else in the line before them say that the middle line was actually the tallest one. And then we would get to the last person that subject who would at this point, be totally bewildered
She could see that it wasn't the tallest, but everybody in front of her said it was the tallest and 70% of the time she would just agree with them. If we would agree with someone or something, just so blatantly obvious, then of course you can see how these kinds of pressures would crop up in political circles and so forth.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. That's truly terrifying to consider the way in which such peer pressure operates on us. So you talked a bit about the ways in which the purveyors of fake news have incentives that are misleading. And you started pointing them to the ways in which consumers, too, have an incentive to be misled by our tribalism and so forth
Are there other things that we need to be aware of ourselves about the waves in which we're playing individually into the problem?
Justin McBrayer
Yeah. So the point about incentives is this idea that you don't always want to get to the truth. Sometimes you'd rather just see the other side get beaten up. Sometimes you just want to feel some emotion. Sometimes you want to be entertained and so forth. That's not the whole of the problem because often we really do want to get to the truth
So often we really do care about, you know, these deep political questions. Like, you know, will minimum wage help people in our country get ahead and that sort of thing. So often we do want the truth, but even then we're plagued by the fact that just our human equipment has not left us in a position where we're perfect truth seekers. The kind of mind that we have can be exploited in particular ways
And it has what I call these kinds of intellectual blind spots that leave us in a position where we too often gravitate to mistaken answers. Even when we do deeply want the truth.
Lee C Camp
What are some examples of that?
Justin McBrayer
Social psychologists call these things heuristics. They're sort of like mental shortcuts. And it turns out that there's a whole bunch of mental shortcuts that we take in our everyday life to try to figure out what the world is like around us
One example of this is called anchoring bias. Think of an anchor on a ship. If you drop an anchor off, the ship can only wander in a certain amount on either side of that anchor. The anchor restricts its movement one way or the other. Well, it turns out that human thinking is prone to a kind of anchoring bias
The first piece of information that we get, the first number or piece of data that we get, anchors our mind in a certain way where we only think in limited increments on one side with the other. Let me give you a concrete example. Psychologists took some subjects and asked them how old Gandhi was when he died. For half of the subjects: they invited them into a room one at a time and said I can't remember, did Gandhi die when he was eight years old or older? Now immediately when they said eight years old, that anchored those subjects' minds. And they thought, well, obviously he wasn't eight. He freed India. So he must've been older than eight. Uh, you know, I'll guess 51. The other half of the subjects: they brought them in and they said I can't remember how old Gandhi was when he died. I think it was 140. Is that right? And people thought, oh no, definitely wasn't 140, no one lives that old. But how much less was it? Ah, maybe he was 86. And so you see what happened was this random piece of information, that wasn't even anywhere close to being correct, biased people's ultimate judgment calls about what's going on. People who got the eight year old number, upfront guessed a number in the fifties. People who got the 140, guessed the eighties. This huge spread because we were anchored. And this is what happens day in and day out in the news
Just think of what's happening right now with the democratic proposal for a kind of stimulus or coronavirus bailout. They're throwing around the 1.9 number. As soon as that number is thrown out anyone who listens to the story doesn't think maybe we don't need one at all. Maybe we need one 10 times larger
Maybe we need one 10 times smaller. Instead you start at the 1.9 number and you just sort of vary it slightly on either side of that. And when you're aware that our minds work in these sorts of ways, it's a lot easier to confront fake news.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, that's fascinating. I've heard people who teach negotiating use that very same technique as leverage in negotiating. Right? So if you put out the first number, then you've set expectations about a kind of range within which this is going to go. And it's a very powerful, very powerful sort of rhetorical move.
Justin McBrayer
Yeah. That's exactly right. When you're selling your house, you want to be the one to offer the first number.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, right? Yeah, alright. Are there other ways in which consumers have this incentive to be misled?
Justin McBrayer
I mean, the fact of the matter is we spend most of our life absorbing information incidentally. You know, when you're on the train you read the news. Or, you know, while you're cooking in your kitchen you have the news channel on or whatever. The fact of the matter is we have all sorts of motives, all sorts of goals in our everyday life, and getting a perfect read on what's going on in the world is often not at the top of the pile
So we have competing interests coming from family and from work and from a need for entertainment and so forth. And I think anytime you're in that kind of mixed motive environment we shouldn't be surprised that people consume information in ultimately a kind of irresponsible way. At least irresponsible with regard to getting the truth
Instead, they're going to consume information in ways that meet all of those other needs.
Lee C Camp
Right. Well, I know for myself that The Economist is my main printed source of news. I don't know where it would fall on your upside down V. I suspect it's fairly somewhere close to the middle
Yeah, a lot of times my conversations that I have with family or friends sometimes will come out of that, but sometimes it will come out of just whatever headline pops up on my iPad. I admittedly don't read the story. I'm just looking at the headline. And that becomes a matter of conversation with friends or family.
Justin McBrayer
Right. And actually Lee, this flags one interesting way in which technology is contributing to the fake news problem, other than just making it easy to produce disinformation and circulate or whatever. It's fascinating how much technology controls what we end up reading. You say you click on stories at the top of your headline
That is no accident that those kinds of stories end up there. The stories that end up in your Facebook feed. Even as I found out in doing the research in this book, what you Google. If you Google something from Nashville, Tennessee, and I Google something from Durango, Colorado, you and I are almost certain to get different results
So it's not as if there's this pool of information that we all somehow have equal access to. The information is being curated behind the scenes to give us the stuff that we like, that we'll click on, and so forth. And if technology is being used, algorithms are being used to curate information in that way
Well then of course, it's no surprise that people in the United States disagree about things like climate change. When a climate change denier searches something on Google and the climate change acceptor Googles something, they're getting wildly different results.
Lee Camp
You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us. We'd love to know where you are listening from. Send us an email at podcast@tokensshow.com
Remember too, you can catch us for our special public radio episodes on Sundays here in Nashville, 2.00 Nashville time on WPLN 90.3, or streamed all over the globe at WPLN.org
And, we'd be delighted to have you join us for our live events, either in person or online. For more information visit tokensshow.com
This is our interview with professor Justin McBrayer on his book Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation. Coming up, more troubling truths about the fake news epidemic, and some hopeful practices with which we may be able to combat it.
Part 2
Lee C Camp
You're listening to Tokens and our interview with Professor Justin McBrayer on his book Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation.
Well, let's talk a little bit about possibilities for doing better. So what sorts of prescriptions do you have for us?
Justin McBrayer
Two pretty obvious things that we can do. One, we could be aware of our intellectual blind spots and two, we could make an intentional effort to engage other people with whom we disagree
So let me say something quickly about both. When you're driving and you're going to change lanes, at least I was taught, you should look over your shoulder and check out this kind of spot. You know, by your rear bumper, a spot that doesn't show up in your side mirror. It doesn't show up in your rear view mirror
It's literally a blind spot. And the idea is if you stop for a second and take an intentional look, you'll save yourself from some accidents. I think the same is true when it comes to the consumption of information. If you know that you suffer from an anchoring bias, if you know that we have confirmation bias and some of these other intellectual blind spots, then when you're reading the news you'll just take a second
You'll know that you're prone to falling into certain kinds of traps and you'll look over your shoulder and do a good job of making sure that that blind spot isn’t getting you into trouble. That's one thing we can do. And then the second is we can make an intentional effort to read sources that are coming from the other side, have conversations with people who are on the other side, and try to engage the informational environment in a more neutral way, rather than in this sort of served up partisan way that has become so easy with technology.
Lee C Camp
Related to those skills you talk about big questions and little questions?
Justin McBrayer
I'm trying to distinguish between questions that we can reliably answer on our own using our own God-given equipment. And then questions that require some kind of outside expertise. Here's an example of what I mean: many people think the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Well, here's the fact of the matter, whether or not it was stolen is a big question. You can't think about it from your armchair. You can't talk to your friends about it and try to figure out what's going on. It's well beyond our cognitive tools. I mean, think of how, think of what a big question that is, and what you'd have to know to figure out that it was stolen
So if you want to take a stance on whether the election was stolen or not, you're going to need outside help. You're going to need the word of experts. You're going to need some special technology, or whatever. So the idea is once we're clear on the fact that some of the questions we face in life are big questions and some are small questions, then we can reliably sort questions into the kind that we need to ask for outside help on or not. And in the election case, it's a perfect example. We shouldn't endorse the idea that the election was stolen, unless there's some kind of outside expertise that could run a study or provide extra evidence that would confirm that that’s so.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. As you were saying that I was thinking back to a story, an episode in which someone that I was privy to was saying they felt like that there had been a lot of fraud in the election. And this other person said, why do you think that? And they said, I just have this gut feeling that there was
And that's precisely what you're pointing to. And on the big questions to reply I just have a gut feeling, should be off the table as never acceptable.
Justin McBrayer
That's exactly right. Big questions are the ones that we can't answer with our gut feelings, or intuition, or even our kind of natural faculties. A question like that is the kind of question that we need outside help on. So if you're tempted to answer a big question with something like, oh, I can just see that it's so, or I just have this feeling or whatever. I urge you to resist that temptation.
Lee C Camp
Why do you suspect that we see these various forms of opposition to expertise?
Justin McBrayer
Oh, my Lee, that's a big question.
Lee C Camp
Yeah.
Justin McBrayer
That in itself is a big question that I would need help answering.
Lee C Camp
What's your gut tell you about that?
Justin McBrayer
The only thing I can say with any level of confidence is this: there is a long strain of anti-expertise in the United States, going back at least a couple of centuries. So given the, kind of, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, independent thinking, you know, that Americans cherish. Americans have fraught relationships with experts and there's quite a bit of really interesting research out there about how we're willing to disregard the word of experts when doing so, you know, gives us the answer that we want. In fact, there's a really good book called The Death of Expertise that Chronicles some of that anti-expert phenomenon here in the United States.
Lee C Camp
But practically speaking, most people, sure you can have some folks who were completely off the grid, for example, or refuse to employ the benefits of western medicine. But it seems that most places, practically speaking, we're always dependent upon people who can answer the big questions with some sort of expertise.
Justin McBrayer
Absolutely. And the fact of the matter is we're just being convenient skeptics when we disregard the experts that we don't like. I mean someone can turn around and take an aspirin knowing full well that it will relieve a headache and then turn around the very next breath and say something negative about vaccines, despite the fact that it's the same group of experts that provided the knowledge in both cases. So it's not that we have this sort of wholesale rejection of experts. It's just that we pick and choose, and we accept their work when we like what they're saying. And we reject it when it's contrary to the lines of our tribe.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Justin McBrayer
By the way that's not just conservative, I mean, both sides do this. Right? So, you know, liberals have their stories about, you know, minimum wage. And, you know, they're disregarding work that's happening from experts in different economics departments or whatever
So this is not a partisan issue. All of us have this urge to sort of trust experts when we like what they're saying and not otherwise.
Lee C Camp
Let's talk a little bit about the issue of censorship, which obviously is a huge issue right now in the wake of the 2020 election and the realities of some of the moves that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram have made recently. What's your take on the practices of censorship?
Justin McBrayer
Sure. Well, just a bit of background first. If the informational environment is polluted, you might just think, well, let's clean it up. You know, if the problem is you've got all this fake news out there, let's just stop the flow of fake news. And, voila, problem solved. And that's the kind of background thought that gives rise to this idea that what we need are better controls. Controls from the government, controls from social media companies or whatever
If we could control the flow of information we have a better shot at, you know, cleaning up our informational environment. This is controversial, but I think that strategy is deeply misguided. I don't think that putting a Facebook monitor in charge of deciding what's true, and what's false, and censoring the things that she thinks is false, is a good idea
Just yesterday someone was banned from Twitter for circulating misinformation about vaccinations. Everyone by this point in time knows that Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter, for tweeting misinformation and that sort of thing
Where does that end? I have no idea how someone in Silicon Valley can patrol social media and clamp down on stories that they think are false and somehow save us from the polluted informational environment
If nothing else, what we'll find is the environment starts to look more and more like the sensor and not more and more accurate.
Lee C Camp
It's been 25 years, probably, since I read this essay by Stanley Fish, who's a philosopher at Duke. The title was something like why there's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too. And again, I don't know how much I can recollect about his argument. I know that it has sat in my psyche over the last number of decades. It has caused in me a question about whether or not the whole notion of free speech as such is a false construct
So I mean, for example, I think one of the most laughable obvious examples of this is if you go from Nashville over to the smoky mountain national park. And you stop at the visitor center on this side of the park. Outside the visitor center there is a sign and I've got a picture of it. There's a sign there that says this is a free speech area, free speech permitted
I don't know what it is, within a 100 yard diameter. And I just think, you know, it's like, that's a really good picture of the practicalities of free speech, right? We're always imposing certain limits upon legitimate speech in all contexts. I don't think that there's a direct line from what I just said to a kind of heavy-handed censorship either
But at the same time, it does seem to be helpful to realize that the process or the practice of speaking freely always entails or constraints judgment. What's going to get said when, what can't be said when, and so forth. So I don't know. Give me some other thoughts about that or pushback on that or what that race is for you.
Justin McBrayer
I think the general point is right. The general point is that free speech isn't an all or nothing thing. And I think that's the point you were making. It comes in degrees. And in different contexts, in different social environments, those degrees might be tightened up. Or they might be loosened more
And I think that's fine. I think that's appropriate. What I don't think is appropriate is that we should have some non-elected official in Northern California who gets to make a call on whether something's true or false, and then silences someone because they think it's false. That seems like, even if free speech always comes in degrees, that's too far on one side. To have unelected private company people making calls to permanently silence, you know, members of their social community, because what they're saying is false.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, it's definitely tricky. Because I would assume that you would think that there are certain things that you would want Facebook perhaps to not permit on Facebook.
Justin McBrayer
Yeah. I mean, one sort of minimal line would be whatever the legal line is here in the United States. So things like defamation and classic examples, like, you know, shouting fire in a crowded theater. If there's a sort of legal line that's one thing. Then Facebook, say, is enforcing the law
But when they're going beyond that, coming up with their own policies, their own procedures and censoring people merely because they're saying something that's false, that's a step too far.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. At least with the law, there's been some sort of extended social process of discernment around that, right?
Justin McBrayer
Exactly. And at least in that case it's public. You know what the law says, you know what the standards are, you know what you're being held accountable to. It can't be changed without elected officials approval and so forth.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. As you've done this kind of work and with all the examples you give in the book, what are some of your favorite things you've discovered that, on the one hand, should be a big surprise to a liberal, and on the other hand, would be a big surprise to a conservative?
Justin McBrayer
Ah, great. I looked at some empirical research coming out of Harvard that looked at stories that were retweeted or stories that were shared on social media. And it was quite surprising to learn that the center-right had been more or less hollowed out. So here's what I mean by that. If you were to look at, say, a continuum with on the far right of the continuum, the people who are the most extreme right-wing, left side of the continuum, the most extreme left-wing, you would sort of expect a parallel between those two sides. You know, center stories get shared this month, center-right and center-left the same, and then extreme right and extreme left the same. That is not in fact what you've seen in the last four or five years. On the left stories are more or less equally distributed. Center-left stories get passed around over social media and far left do and so forth
But on the right, there is a distinct valley where the center-right would be. Center-right stories were not being picked up or shared nearly as much as center stories or far right stories. And that was news to me, and really interesting to see that piece of our political economy, so to speak.
Lee C Camp
What about a favorite episode of something on the left?
Justin McBrayer
So the left seems to think that many mainstream media news sources are not leftist as maybe you’d think that they would. And it turns out that there are reams of studies showing that many mainstream news sources, places like CNN, New York times, and Washington Post, really are liberal by almost any way of measuring it
And here's one thing in particular that struck me when I was doing this research. It turns out that while journalists as a whole are pretty liberal, journalists who cover political stories are almost uniformly liberal. One easy way to measure this is to go onto a news site, get all of the names of the reporters who work the political beads, and then contrast it or match that list of names up with election contribution data, which is public
And when we do that, we find that political reporters almost uniformly donate to democratic candidates and democratic causes and almost never contribute to Republican ones. And that's a surefire reason for thinking that the kind of political reporting you're getting from some of these mainstream places is going to be biased to the left.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, fascinating. You've given us a few things a moment ago, but any other kind of finishing encouragement on better practices?
Justin McBrayer
Well, I think if you want to end on an encouraging note, I think there is reason to be optimistic. One reason to be optimistic is that people across the free world are now talking about fake news. They're worried about fake news. They're thinking about fake news. In a recent poll that was conducted in a number of western countries fake news turned out to be more worrisome to citizens than things like terrorism. And I think that's a reason to be optimistic. We understand that this has the power to disrupt our lives, to disrupt our political systems. And we're thinking about it. The second reason we should be optimistic is because this same technology that can contribute to the problem can also be part of the solution. It can be part of the ways that we connect with people who are different from us. It can be part of the solution to sorting which stories are legitimate and which ones have been manipulated. So people know and care about this issue
And we do have at least some of the tools to do a better job. So I'm optimistic that we will in the near future.
Lee C Camp
I've been talking to Justin McBrayer, professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, about his recently released book Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation. Thanks so much, Justin, for your work and for the great conversation today.
Justin McBrayer
Thanks. Delighted to be here.
Lee Camp
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our interview with professor Justin McBrayer
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