Before we begin, can we check that we agree on two things? First, that incentives define outcomes. Second, lies spread faster than truths.
If you don’t believe me on the second point, it may surprise you to know that Stanford & Cambridge’s now-famous disinformation study in 2020 showed that over 87% of news links shared on Facebook in the months to June were either “entirely false” or contained evidence that had been “dangerously misrepresented”.
This article is about what happens when incentives and lies collide on an industrial scale, about what this really means for the fabric of society and about what we should do about it.
A climate of impartiality
Before we explore how technology is able to accelerate people’s descent into confusion, let us first explore the more benign, sedate world of BBC broadcasting habits and how they have traditionally helped to shape reality for millions here in the UK.
The BBC, like all British broadcasters, are obliged to ensure they uphold the standards of “due impartiality and due accuracy” - rules governed by OFCOM and designed to protect the sanctity and safety of our public discourse.
According to these rules, “in dealing with matters of major political and industrial controversy … an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight”.
These rules are important and valuable but they are not immune to error and manipulation. In fact, by following the rules carefully it is entirely possible for a broadcaster such as the BBC to end up generating a significant “reality distortion field”. This happens when, for instance, science and opinion are given a false equivalence in the name of balance.
To understand how this happens, consider a debate programme discussing the issue of climate change. In an effort to create a lively, watchable debate with “an appropriately wide range” of views one should pit a climatologist against someone who doesn’t believe that humans are significantly contributing to climate change.
Since these are both “significant views” and there has been, during my lifetime, major “industrial controversy” around climate science, it’s unsurprising that any British broadcaster would platform these two individuals. It also makes for great telly.
The real question here is, do our impartiality rules say anything about reflecting reality or about weighing the veracity of opinion?
In truth, balance, on its own, can be extremely misleading.
“Due weight” in a televised debate on climate change might better be represented by a panel of 60 speakers, each given a minute to speak, where 59 panellists are climatologists and only one is an opinionated commentator for the opposition.
The reason this is important is that false equivalence generates a reality distortion field. It doesn’t actually matter how convincing or articulate your speakers are. By providing 50:50 airtime to people from opposite ends of a debate, people’s perception of reality becomes that the truth is somewhere in the middle, between the two extremes.
This distortion propagates through society, fuelling controversy and thereby legitimising false equivalence in the future. Our perception of reality becomes the average of any two extremes - and control of public opinion is defined by how extreme each side of any debate chooses to be.
Industrial truth.
Manipulating public opinion, however, is as old as civilisation itself and there have always been social, commercial, ideological or political incentives to draw the public perception of reality towards your way of thinking.
But today something new and far more pernicious is happening to public perception and it is far more effective, far harder to fight and far more dangerous that anything society has faced before.
We are in a guerrilla war for people’s minds and we are losing. To understand the battlefield, let’s go back to our first maxim - incentives define outcomes.
We have each lived through the genesis of the internet and its rise from novelty to ubiquity and today a huge proportion of our information diet is derived from the internet. Significantly however, the greatest proportion of the British information diet derived from platforms owned by just two organisations - Alphabet (Google & YouTube) and Facebook (including Instagram).
What these platforms have in common is that they are free at the point of use and their dominance is perpetuated because they both act as the gateway for every other organisation competing for a slice of our attention.
What they also have in common is that they both thrive on discord.
Both Facebook & Alphabet’s platforms are algorithmically manipulated marketplaces. Both give corporations and members of the public an opportunity to grow and monetise an audience. Both are in the business taxing the efforts of others to capture our attention.
Herein lie the incentives we need to examine.
Until 15 years ago, earning money from advertising required a huge up-front investment to build an audience large enough to sell to advertisers. A handful of newspapers and magazine conglomerates thrived. Small publishers remained small.
Today, one can break into the content business on a massive scale, amassing vast audiences and millions of pounds in advertising revenue in a matter of months but doing so successfully requires finding a niche that you can exploit.
With the middle ground sewn up by traditional media, the richest seam of exploitable niches exist at the fringes. Just past the boundaries of acceptable reality lies intrigue, division, debate and all of the energy that Facebook & YouTube’s algorithms go wild for.
A vast industry of small pseudo-news organisations, commentators and “influencers” now exist to capitalise on the liberalism of the attention economy - but success does not lie in “due impartiality and due accuracy”. That doesn’t get anyone’s attention.
Descent into madness
For the average citizen, Facebook & YouTube play a huge part in defining their reality. Since neither Facebook nor Alphabet produce any content for their platforms, the incentive to make money drives the programming choices made by their content producers.
The outcome is a million of hours of content per day, produced with the specific goal of attracting your attention. Why should anyone care about accuracy - it doesn’t pay.
It’s easy to understand that if all climate debates give 30 minutes to a climatologist and 30 minutes to a climate denier that our perception of reality becomes that the truth of our climate situation is somewhere in the middle. But the reality is that there isn’t really a debate at all.
With a million hours of attention-grabbing content going online every single day Facebook & Alphabet’s YouTube generate a reality distortion field of unparalleled force.
Before you dismiss how pernicious this problem really is, consider how easy and tempting it is to fake facts to get attention or manipulate your understanding of the world. Take “Stanford & Cambridge’s now-famous disinformation study in 2020” for instance. It doesn’t exist. I made it up. You may or may not remember tomorrow that I made it up. All those who didn’t make it past the second paragraph will have gone away with that study in the back of their mind. Few will fact-check its existence.
These distortion fields have real-world consequences.
In a month where two videos of fictitious COVID vaccine side-effects can amass over 10 million views online, we have to ask ourselves; what is the true cost to society of “free” media supported by an industry that intentionally incentivises the production of an increasingly distorted reality?
For society to avoid the accelerating descent into madness we must change the way we pay for information and we must re-examine the incentives on which our reality is built. If we do not, the outcomes will inevitably be disastrous for us all.
Jim Morrison, Founder of OneSub