Today’s society does not have a problem with the truth, at least no more than our ancestors did. Instead, it has a severe dilemma with information, and therefore, with communication, credibility, and trust.
A father and son both stare at the boy’s June report card and focus on the four he received in mathematics. The story of how that number came into their lives will significantly vary depending on which of them tells it. What neither of them will be able to deny is that it’s time to move on to September. Data brings our stories together, especially in times of crisis; join us as we reflect together on the challenge of misinformation over the next few weeks.
A riddle for communication experts only:
67% of the Spanish population of legal age affirms to be worried about the impact that disinformation has on their daily decision making; 85% share the belief that communication platforms deliberately attempt to manipulate them and, nevertheless, 92% feel that the widely criticized and attacked social networks, the root cause of the disinformation and manipulation shift itself, are the communication channels that most accurately represents them. Two of these data pieces have been carefully extracted from the First Disinformation Survey carried out by the ATREVIA Research Department together with Intermón Oxfam and Maldita.es; the other, despite having been selected with the same degree of care, is false. Place your bets.
67% of Spaniards are concerned about the impact that disinformation has on their daily lives.
We repeatedly hear that we live in a new and frightening era of post-truth and that lies, and fictitious information surrounds us. One of the most astounding falsehoods circulating the Internet since the beginning of 2006, understood by some as a joke, by others as a conspiracy theory, insists that Australia, the island 7.692 million km² and with 25 million inhabitants, does not exist. Naturally, it is astonishing and incomprehensible that thousands of people around the globe live with this belief from sunrise in the East until sunset in the West and internalize it as a fact in their innermost being.
However, a glance through history shows us that the disinformation phenomenon is nothing new. Even the habit of denying entire nations has a long pedigree, whose origins go back centuries before Brexit, Putin, or Trump. As Yuval Harari, who inspired the ideas for this paragraph, pointed out that the British settlement of Australia was justified from the very beginning by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (“no man’s land”), which denied 50,000 years of Aboriginal history in the blink of an eye. China’s denial of Tibet, Russia’s invention of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Prime Minister Golda Meir’s denial of Palestine…if communication can make half the world vanish for several, it is understandable that our increasingly savvy and knowledgeable audience is concerned.
Communication experts should be equally concerned about the following data if we value our work: “one in two Spaniards (54%) feel that there is such a great deal of misinformation in society that they no longer believe anything”. “Nothing” is too little to justify our companies’ investments in communication.
85% share the belief that communication platforms deliberately attempt to manipulate them.
Intoxication, in medical terms, is a diagnosis that we have all received but left without a prescription for treatment. This diagnosis comes with a symptom that particularly affects organizations and brands: the loss of trust. Today, when short-term information dominates communication and efficiency does not require the stability of truth to achieve its objectives, time-consuming methods are in danger of being lost, such as ancient rituals. Successfully building trust is one of these methods. In addition to requiring multiple ingredients such as empathy, dialogue, consistent behavior, commitment, and transparency, it must be prepared over time.
In their runaway production of new tactical information, today’s communication strategies often have a broad reach thanks to new channels, an uncertain impact, and limited trust management. This is the only way to explain why 47% of the Spanish population believe that companies create and spread false information in the media and social networks, 66% say that influencers contribute to this, and why 76% say that political parties are also accountable for participating. In total, counting the media, NGOs, and public institutions, only 2% of citizens believe that no relevant social group in Spain spreads hoaxes (the margin of error of the Disinformation Barometer is ± 2.19%).
To explain the confidence crisis in a sector such as finance, Raymond Moley, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisor during the Great Depression years, used to resort to the following anecdote:
When I was a little boy, an Irishman came up from the quarry where he was working, went into the bank, and said, “If my money’s here, I don’t want to withdraw it; if it isn’t, then I do want to take it.”
Communication professionals manage information in the same way that financial professionals handle money. Trust is our currency; if it fails, our work is devalued, and clients disqualify us as experts. Therefore, we must address the information ecosystem in a more sustainable and coordinated way, ensuring the actions of a few and the lack of control of all do not continue to increase the social climate and cause damage that will be difficult to recover within our social environment.
92% of Spaniards feel that social networks are the communication channel that best represents them.
In discussing the role of the Internet in our lives, we are forced to find common ground between this optimistic proclamation by John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at the dawn of the Internet in 1996 and the not-so-optimistic words of free software activist and Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde in 2015. It is clear that the Internet itself should not be the subject of either criticism or praise in this dialogue, with the forces driving its use being those that should find themselves in the spotlight. It’s likely that the 70% of Spaniards who favor more social network regulation and the 76% who think that new platforms should assume similar commitments to those of the traditional media also hold a similar view to this.
41% of the population affirms that freedom of expression should be above all else, compared to only 29% who deny it, and where 30% cannot position themselves in this debate. With this in mind, we must also agree to recognize that we cannot control broadcasters’ temptation to resort to hoaxes or fake news as a means of increasing the impact of what they are sharing. Moreover, the choice to get excited about false facts and fake actions should always be available to the receiver, thanks to humor and irony. Furthermore, 59% of the population favors keeping hoaxes and misinformation on the Internet as long as they are clearly pointed out.
Ultimately, we can all agree that the digital world and the physical world do not stand alone and share the same truth, whatever that may be. Hanna Arendt called truth that which we cannot change. After dedicating several months to the Disinformation Barometer, ATREVIA Research can affirm that today’s society does not have a problem with the truth, at least not any more than our ancestors did. On the other hand, it has a severe problem with information and, therefore, communication, credibility, and trust. Suppose the Internet is the house built with bricks of information, and our soul tends to take on the dimensions of the room in which we reside. What does the fact that only 8% of citizens feel represented by the polarized climate of social media say about our work as ”information architects?
Jaime González, director of Social Research at ATREVIA
Contact: jaimegonzalez@atrevia.com
