Even by recent standards, it’s been something of a banner week for our informational hellscape. The Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report debunking conspiracy theories about the FBI’s decision, in 2016, to open an investigation into potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, only for the attorney general of the United States, William Barr, to publicly dispute the IG’s findings. (Barr told NBC that the Russia probe was based on “a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press.”) We learned, thanks to the Washington Post, that officials, over many years, systematically lied to the American people about the state of the war in Afghanistan. In Britain, a crucial general election has been muddied by fake news and crude manipulations—many of them pushed out by politicians. And then there’s impeachment. As Peter Baker, of the Times, wrote Monday, “There are days in Washington lately when it feels like the truth itself is on trial.”

Yesterday, these stories (and many others) formed the backdrop to a conference on disinformation at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, convened by CJR and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “It seems almost unnecessary to talk about why this is important because I read the newspaper this morning,” Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, said by way of introduction. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center, concurred. “I read Twitter,” she said.

Watch: Prepping the press on disinformation efforts in 2020

The conference was a reminder that disinformation is never a discrete problem: it operates across our global information ecosystem. On the day’s first panel, Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, offered environmental pollution as an analogy. “You would never point to one square foot of the ocean and restrict pollution to just that one square foot—that’s not how pollution works,” she said. “Pollution suffuses.” As with the natural world, industrial-scale polluters exist in the informational sphere—but, as Phillips pointed out, “You do not have to intend to pollute on this earth in order to pollute this earth.” Even the people trying to fix the problem are part of the problem. That includes journalists.

The day’s discussions—on election reporting in the disinformation age, the new mechanics of voter suppression, and the role of social-media platforms in our present mess—were an effort to parse the various, overlapping levels of the disinformation problem: the public and private, the national and international, and, importantly, the local. Leon Yin of The Markup, a soon-to-be-launched investigative news site focused on tech, reflected on research he conducted on the Internet Research Agency, Russia’s “troll farm,” and its activity on Twitter during the 2016 US election. Yin found that IRA accounts shared far fewer fake news stories than they did local news stories, especially those focused on crime and race. Many of the accounts he studied were themselves styled as fake local news outlets. “Local news is a vulnerability,” Yin said. And “race is a tool that can be used to draw divisions in American society.”

Disinformation—like pollution—does not respect national borders. Still, the nation—and one nation in particular—remains an important regulatory locus. The US “sort of bears responsibility for the entire world,” Carole Cadwalladr, the British journalist who helped break the Cambridge Analytica scandal, told Pope in her keynote interview at the conference. “You’ve got jurisdiction in a way we don’t have, and your news organizations… are taken notice of in a way which the rest of the world is not.” During the final panel of the day, Olaf Steenfadt, a former German TV journalist who now works for Reporters Without Borders, noted that when France moved recently to tax tech companies, the Trump administration threatened retaliatory tariffs—an indication, Steenfadt said, of the way the US prioritizes corporate welfare. “No judgment here,” he said, to laughs in the room. “Facebook and Google are a product of this, for better or worse.”

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Just as America’s regulatory heft makes it a magnet for scrutiny, our national elections next year—and media coverage of them—will be watched the world over for clues as to the state of global informational health. In his introductory remarks, Pope noted that disinformation adds layers of complexity to a climate that is already challenging for the press. “I don’t have a sense that lessons have been absorbed” since 2016, he said. “It seems to me that we’re heading down the same road.” Throughout the conference, panelists suggested ways in which we might change course. Shireen Mitchell, who works on diversity issues in media, tech, and politics, noted, for instance, that reporters should be more circumspect with stolen information, lest they aid malicious actors’ efforts to weaponize it.

As Phillips said, acknowledgement that we are a part of—not apart from—the hellscape is an essential prerequisite if we are to make progress. So is recognizing the scale of the problem we face. Returning to her environmental metaphor, Phillips said we need something like a Green New Deal, but for information. Even then, she warned, “It’s an open question as to whether or not we’ve crossed the Rubicon.”

Below, more on disinformation:



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: The Rise and Fall of Facts

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.