Misinformation and Misogyny: How two seemingly different areas are interlinked

With the US elections around the corner, and the September decision by the British government to make extreme misogyny a crime, we dive into misinformation and its implications with Professor Sander van der Linden in episode 182.

Misinformation explained

Misinformation is misleading or incorrect information, it can exist without specific malicious intent, but always includes incomplete, inaccurate, misleading, or false information as well as selective or half-truths. Importantly, it is spread by people who believe it is true.

Misinformation is the type of risk that creeps up everywhere.

Prof. Sander van der Linden

As misinformation gets mostly spread via the internet, and most of us don’t tend to read the newspaper in the morning anymore, but rather read it online, or get our information online, this spread of misinformation becomes easier. Young(er) readers, think GenZ and below, tend to get all their information from the internet, this is not a bad thing, one can read scientific articles as well for example, but, young readers don’t always know how to fact-check. Newspapers being bought by people who sympathise with the far right, means that your news will be based on far right rhetoric, think of The Sun or The Times, as well as the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, and The Australian, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are all owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is a Trump supporter. Moreover, the rise of AI can be dangerous too, as it has given birth to new forms of misinformation, the manipulation and modification of data is an example. Finally, deepfakes and speech synthesis are on the rise, they currently look and sound slightly odd and non-human, which tends to be when most people realise that it has been fabricated, however, some people still believe them and with deepfakes and speech synthesis becoming better and better it is going to be extremely hard to know what is real and what is not.

According to UNESCO there are three causes enabling the spread of misinformation:

1. Digital transformation of storytelling and newsrooms leads to more platforms that give news, but not always properly investigate facts.
2. The creation of new news ecosystems, where people trust their networks and their algorithms which often are echo chambers with inaccurate and misinformation.
3. The collapse of traditional business models. In the past traditional newsrooms used to have more resources, which ensured quality news and fact-checked articles. This decline has led to more ‘click-bait’ journalism and thus, less fact-checked articles.

How misinformation and misogyny interlink

Misinformation is breeding other risks in the background and entangling with other risks like polarisation and extremism.

Prof. Sander van der Linden

We’ve discussed misogyny before on the podcast with Dr. Elizabeth Pearson and Nicholas Martin. Misogyny is not a new phenomenon. Believers believe that women are best left in the kitchen, being a housewife, and obey. Now this is more radical misogyny, which is common, but not as common as ‘small misogyny’. Small misogyny is for example the belief that having a male doctor is better than a female doctor, or believing that there are characteristics that belong to men and women, think empathy with being a woman, and having a short fuse with being a man. Neither of them are true.

Algorithms have allowed certain men to create spaces where misogyny is allowed to grow and where ideas can be exchanged. As discussed in our US Election series with David Dunn, Christian Nationalism is on the rise, a visible link between misogyny and misinformation and extremism. Don’t get me wrong, not all men are misogynistic, nor are all misogynists christian nationalists or extremists, but holding certain believes makes you more prone to fall into the algorithmic rabbit hole of extremism. We discuss this in depth here and here. Believing that women are less capable than men and that, for example, women have smaller brains than men, is false. However, there are a lot of people that do believe this misinformation and spread it, especially with media algorithms amplifying misogynistic content, hence the link between misinformation and misogyny.

How to counteract misinformation?

As West and Bergstrom mention, there are four main risks:

1. Misinformation interferes with democratic decision making processes
2. Misinformation endangers the well-being of the planet
3. Misinformation poses a risk to international peace
4. And misinformation threatens public health

Ultimately, misinformation undermines the collective sense of making and undermines collective action. So what can we do about it? According to the Financial Times there are seven steps for Newsagents:

1. Newsagents need to be more transparent on how decisions and assumptions are being made.
2. They need to join forces to collaborate and fact-check news.
3. Newsagents need to incorporate image checking, ensuring that there are no AI made images or out-of-context images.
4. There needs to be a review of editorial standards, where they advice to use the ‘truth sandwich’, a method where unverified quotes are not being put in the headlines, and where click-baiting is avoided.
5. Archive images need to be labelled with date and provenance, ensuring that they cannot be used for different purposes, such as the spread of misinformation.
6. Newspaper’s systems need to be protected against cyberattacks.
7. Finally, they say that there is a need to invest in media literacy, where audiences learn how to identify misinformation.

But how can we, as news readers, identify misinformation? We can start by fact-checking, have you read an article that seems outrageous? Try finding it on news agency websites such as the FT, AP, Reuters, or the BBC. If they do not have the topic of the article you just read, it probably is not accurate or is misleading. Moreover, if what you read is a statement of opinion, you should treat it as such, an opinion. In addition, if the title screams it probably will be misleading and is part of click-bait. You can also research the account or the person, to see what their viewpoints are and where they believe they stand politically. This will tell you a lot about the information they spread.

Sander van der Linden mentions pre-bunking, which tries to prevent people from falling for misinformation in the first place. The idea is to expose yourself to a weak version of misinformation with the information that it is going to be false and explaining why. Want to try it out? Bad News is a game to see if you can recognise misinformation!

The UK has a pamphlet explaining in depth what you can do here.