Bhaskar Chakravorti is the dean of global business at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he launched Digital Planet, which studies the impact of digitalization and emerging technologies. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Boigon: Digital Planet just released its findings about which states are most vulnerable to disinformation. Why did you decide to do this research? Chakravorti: This year, 2020, you have the combination of a pandemic, the political campaigns and everybody is spending so much time digitally. It’s the perfect moment for information of all kinds — good, bad or indifferent — to be coursing through the systems. There has been an enormous amount of focus on what the social-media platforms have been doing or what they can or cannot do, from the perspective of moderating this tsunami of misinformation. What we said is, let’s look at the other side of the picture. How does the picture change if you were to consider the demand side of misinformation -- not that we are demanding misinformation, but we are consuming the information -- and does it vary depending on where you live? And it turns out, indeed, there is an enormous amount of variance depending on which part of the country you’re in, in terms of your vulnerability to misinformation as an average person. Boigon: What factors put people at greater risk? Chakravorti: We saw that there were several underlying drivers that helped explain the people who are more at risk. One key driver has to do with where you are on the political spectrum and how polarized you are on that spectrum, and how ideological you are. That then translates into what media you use to get information of all kinds, and do you use only one kind of medium or do you triangulate your knowledge through absorbing information from different sources? We also considered the nature of the media. Do you actually subscribe to it, or do you just go on the internet and get it? Or do you use social media to filter what you get? Another factor we found played a role was age — we found that people who are older have a greater likelihood of liking something or sharing it, and that sort of plays a role, in terms of their risk of both consuming and sharing and thereby dispersing misinformation. We looked at a number of different drivers, and then we determined where there were clusters of these different contributing factors in different parts of the country, and from that created a model for essentially where the risk was predominant. We scored every state according to that, and we found that there are some states that are significantly more at risk than others.
Boigon: What did you learn about how the U.S. can more effectively fight disinformation? Chakravorti: The nature and objectives of misinformation vary based on where you are, and therefore any counter strategy has to be mindful of that. It’s not enough for Facebook to put a label, or deprioritize, or fact-check this thing. If this is being done in such a super surgical focused way, then the counter strategy also needs to be focused along these lines. You have to be mindful of the narrative that’s being developed, and how to create a counter narrative, and who is best positioned to do that. Maybe it could be done by Facebook and Twitter. If not it needs to be done by local media, including radio and television channels, and quite often Facebook pages that are set up with local residents, and then ground campaigns, whether they’re citizen groups or political campaigns. All of this needs to involve a counter campaign that is locally tailored and that’s the way to manage and control the misinformation. Just like politics is local, misinformation is also local. |