Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner
MIT Press
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THIS is a book about pollution, not of the physical environment, but of our civic discourse. It concerns disinformation (false, misleading information deliberately spread), misinformation (false, misleading information inadvertently spread) and malinformation (information with a basis in reality spread specifically to cause harm).
Communications experts Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner finished their book just before the election that replaced Donald Trump with Joe Biden. That election and the seditious activities that prompted Trump鈥檚 second impeachment have clarified many of the issues the authors were at pains to explore. You Are Here: A field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape is an invaluable guide to our problems around news, truth and fact.
The authors鈥� US-centric 鈥� but globally applicable 鈥� account of 鈥渇ake news鈥� begins with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Its deliberately silly name, cartoonish robes and the routines that accompanied all its activities, from rallies to lynchings, prefigured the 鈥渙nly joking鈥� subcultures of Pepe the Frog and the like that dominate social media.
Next, their examination of the 1980s Satanic panics reveals much about conspiracy theories. They also unpick QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a secret cabal of cannibalistic, Satan-worshipping paedophiles plotted against Trump. This pulls together their points in a way that is more troubling for being so closely argued.
Polluted information is, they say, a public health emergency. By treating the information sphere as a threatened ecology, the authors push past factionalism to reveal how, when we use media, 鈥渢he everyday actions of everyone else feed into and are reinforced by the worst actions of the worst actors鈥�.
This is their most striking takeaway: the media landscape that enabled QAnon isn鈥檛 a machine out of alignment, or out of control, or somehow infected, but 鈥渁 system that damages so much because it works so well鈥�.
It is founded on principles that seem only laudable. Top of the list is the idea that to counter harms, we must call attention to them: 鈥渋n other words, that light disinfects鈥�. This is fine as long as light is hard to generate. But what happens when that light 鈥� the confluence of competing information sets, depicting competing realities 鈥� becomes blinding?
Take Google. The authors characterise it as an advertising platform that makes more money the more people use it. The deeper down the rabbit holes our searches go, the more Google and others earn, incentivising promulgators of conspiracy theories to produce content, creating 鈥渁lternative media echo-systems鈥�. When facts run out, create more. Media algorithms don鈥檛 care: they are designed to serve up as much as possible of what Phillips and Milner call pollution.
The authors bemoan the way memes, rumours and conspiracy theories have swallowed political discourse. They teeter on the edge of a more important truth: that our moral discourse has been swallowed too. You Are Here comes dangerously close to saying that social media has made whining cowards of us all. So what is to be done? The authors鈥� call for 鈥渇oundational, systematic, top-to-bottom change鈥� is mere floundering. It has taken the environmental movement decades to work out mechanisms to address the climate emergency. Nothing in You Are Here suggests the media emergency will be less intractable.
