‘Enough!’ by Michael Beirut, an instance of disfluent, but appealing, design.

The End of Fake News

How existing social media interfaces drive us crazy

The news I’m reading on my screen—I’m loathe to call it news because its intention seems to be terrorize rather than inform—is set in sans serif fonts. The sheer amount of it makes the reader feel adrift in the flood of bad faith actors: foiled plots, death tolls, political agendas, tribalism, thoughts and prayers but said with a proud sneer.

But for me — with effort — whatever trepidation I feel vanishes, because I know that I can pry myself away and reflect. I reflect that I am here. Terror feels like this, and I am its perceiver; disjoined from it. Or rather, that’s a perception I carry away from my time as a meditator. Another perception is that we are not passive observers to outside things, but rather active participants, who are fashioning experiences and getting ourselves stressed over the raw materials outside.

And, therefore, I reflect again.

How did we end up in a world like this, where we are all artificially connected yet unable to pull away? These social media companies—to our knowledge—weren’t out to undermine democratic institutions in the world, or to revive the specters of racism writ-large, and yet that’s exactly what happened. How is it that a user interface can turn ordinary people into enraged partisans?

1. Defining Disfluency

Imagine you’re going down the road and on your right you see a green exit sign. What does the sign’s font look like? It’s probably a bold sans serif that you can read at a glance and know: Okay, this is a trustworthy source of information.

Now imagine that you’re home and you’re reading a book. What does that book’s font look like? It’s probably a bit like what you’re reading right now: with serifs to encourage you to slow down and reflect on what you’re reading.

This taps into a psychological concept known as fluency. The greater a concept’s fluency, the easier it is to understand.

Conversely, there’s disfluency. Disfluency is a measure of cognitive load on an observer when presented with a new concept, like pronouncing an unfamiliar name. The greater something’s disfluency, the harder it is to process.

“People feel easier about stuff that’s easier to process.” says Dr. Adam Alter in a 2012 interview with Edge.org. He is a Professor of Marketing at the NYU Stern School for Business and his research specializes in metacognition and technology addictions. “What I mean by that is when something is difficult, that should act as a meta-cognitive alarm or a signal that you don’t understand it as well as you perhaps should.

“We’ve shown that disfluency leads you to think more deeply,” Alter continues, “That it forms a cognitive roadblock, and then you think more deeply, and you work through the information more comprehensively. But the other thing it does is it allows you to depart more from reality, from the reality you’re at now.”

A funny thing happens when incoming information is disfluent, and it has everything to do with how our brain’s process that information. Dan Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, writes that we have three levels of processing information. First, there are the visceral processes, which are unconscious, reactive, and affective. Second, there are behavioral processes, which are influenced by both the visceral and reflective processes. And third, there are reflective processes in-and-of-themselves, which concern executive functioning, and they direct our thoughts towards a particular object or aim. Reflective processes also lend themselves to the kind of ideation and escapism offered in books.

You could think of an idea in-and-of-itself as being a balloon, and its disfluency as how much helium it contains. Its string is tied down to a floor surrounded by a three-story room, with each floor being called visceral, behavioral, and reflective processing, in ascending order. As the balloon’s disfluency increases, the balloon fills up and starts to lift. At a certain threshold, it ascends into our conscious awareness—our behavioral and reflective processes, and we’re left reflecting on the matter in more careful detail. Note that, if information is fluent, it stays at the bottom—overlooked from reflective processes altogether.

Some of the known and applicable benefits of disfluency are profound. Back in 2011, a study was conducted at Princeton on 28 college students. It asked them to recall facts from two biological profiles on the fictitious pangerish and norgletti species. One profile was set in gray 12-point Comic Sans or Bodoni font, and the other was set in black 16-point Arial font. The rate of retention for the profile set in the hard-to-read Comic Sans/Bodoni was 87% compared to 73% for 16-point Arial.

“One thing that tends to happen,” Alter says, of fluency and facts, “is when something feels fluent you assume you understand it really well, and that can be a trap.” Alter points out that there’s another famous study, called the Cognitive Reflective Test, where users are asked a series of mathematical questions that are phrased in such a way as to lure you into giving an incorrect answer. For example: When you add the cost of a bat and a ball together the sum of those two is worth $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

“What happens is, for some reason the first and intuitive response is that, I guess the bat must be $1, the ball must be 10 cents.” Alter says of common answers to the question. “That adds to $1.10. That seems about right. But, of course, the difference between $1 and 10 cents is 90 cents, not $1. The correct answer is that the bat is worth $1.05, the ball is worth 5 cents. They add to $1.10, and the difference between them is $1. And people generally struggle with these questions. They’re lured in. They give their intuitive response, and they’re incorrect.

“But if you present the questions in a font that’s a little bit more difficult to read, we found that you can increase their accuracy pretty dramatically. They make fewer of those intuitive responses.”

This characteristic of disfluency — that increased effort to understand something increases retention and comprehension of an idea — is the key principle that makes sense of the woeful state of both our news and social media environment. From this, we can begin to construct a picture.

2. Priming and the Facebook of Yore

There is a great example of the way social media companies drive disconnection, and it’s found in the work of Jay Van Bavel. Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology at NYU, who researches what kind of information humans respond to on social media. When we sit in a corner at a coffee shop near Washington Square Park, I do my best to hone in on his insights over the hum of caffeine in my body and Celine Dion belting out My Heart Will Go On from an overhead speaker.

“Social media is extremely implicated with the spread of memes, fake news, and propaganda, [as it concerns the erosion of] democracy.” Van Bavel says. Vox’s Strikethrough recently profiled Van Bavel’s research, which found that, quote, “when it came to divisive issues like gun control…tweets with moral-emotional words like blame, hate, and shame, were more likely to be retweeted than tweets with neutral language.” While humans often take distinct positions to stake out in-groups from out-groups, historically, social checks—like hurt feelings—reined in the most extreme of these tendencies.

But those social cues won’t do for social media companies that rely on people staying on the site for as long as possible to make a profit. Therefore, those social checks can now be overruled with a block or mute button, and algorithms are in place to ensure that you see more content that reinforces your view. Bad actors can then step in and make a profit through proliferating extremist views, and do so without fear of either recriminations or counterarguments.

‘Vox: Strikethrough. Why every social media site is a dumpster fire’ (21 Sept 2018)

Van Bavel waxes nostalgic over Facebook’s early days. “Facebook was different [eight years ago,] the types of stuff I posted was different. The types of stuff I saw was different. It was just little whimsical comments about my day. I don’t even know if in the early days that you could post a photo, because my old posts never [had] photos attached. It was never news stories—which is now what I share a lot of on Facebook—none of it was divisive or partisan… now, if you look at my feed, it’s like New York Times articles about the terrorist attack in Pittsburgh… [Facebook in 2008] was structured in a way that led you to just weigh in on your thoughts on the day that wasn’t adversarial or combative.”

Priming of statuses was a big differentiator between past and present Facebook. Facebook’s original comment format was John Doe is ______, which forced users to respond within that sentence. It would be grammatically incorrect to turn it into a rant. Similarly with Twitter, as Van Bavel recalls, “Back in 2009, 2010, to retweet something was a hideous looking thing! It said ‘RT @ so-and-so’ and then you had to add your comment in; it made it hard to make things go viral, but it also made it effortful. So you couldn’t just, on a whim, hit the RT button to something that pushed an emotional button; you had to do two steps, which buys you an extra four seconds to go Is this something I really want to share?”

Now—this is strictly a hypothesis, but, if it is duly verified, it could be huge.

That little extra effort in sharing information on the Facebook and Twitter of yore—the disfluency those systems induced when sharing information—perhaps that evoked reflective responses in users. This could have overruled their immediate emotional urges to, say, retweet something or fire off an angry comment.

That latency, in turn, could have made it much harder to spread fake news. In this scenario, it was only with the rise of increasingly fluent experiences that the spread of fake news on social networks became possible.

3. A Little Pause In the Daily Grind

The New York City Subway system introduced a new map for New York City’s subway system in 1972, which was praised for its minimalist aesthetic as designed by graphic design legend Massimo Vignelli. But New Yorkers loathed it because it failed to accurately reflect geography in a time where crime was on the rise, and minimizing time away from home could be a matter of life-and-death.

Most graphic designers consider Vignelli’s map aesthetically superior to the current map that’s in use. They also point to existing research from MIT that claims to support the diagrammatic aesthetic. “A computer model developed at MIT scans an image and produces a readout of how that image is captured by peripheral vision.” says a video explainer over at Cheddar on Youtube. “The readouts, called mongrels, show how much of an image is comprehensible [to peripheral vision] when the eye focuses on a specific point… the mongrel of [Vignelli’s] map support this.”

The ensuing readouts are indeed clear. And yet, taking into considerations the points laid out so far about disfluency, might it be the case that the ability to glance something over quickly is inversely related to both recall and deep comprehension about its contents? And if so, does that carry an important message for how we design user interfaces? Might it be the case that ease of use is driving people to effectively surf the web on automatic pilot, making it harder to evoke critical thinking as it concerns disinformation and, possibly, foreign subterfuge?

Steph Sabo is the Senior Art Director at BigWideSky and she writes about disfluent fonts in a Medium post titled Disfluent Fonts in Design and Marketing. “The jarring disruption [of disfluent fonts] prohibits the reader from getting comfortable with the conventions of a typeface.” writes Sabo, “There are several ways this can be achieved; setting paragraphs in alternating typefaces or using an uncommon font with irregularities or flourishes can act as a legibility speed bump… [my research found that] it isn’t necessarily about the ugliness of a typeface, but rather its unexpected form that increases the recall.”

However, in the case of web interfaces, there is a real danger that increasing disfluency will result in people abandoning a given website altogether. An eye tracking study from Jakob Neilsen found that “Most users read about 20% of the words on the average webpage.” To which Sabo adds, “If this post were more strenuous to read, many people wouldn’t make it past the first sentence. Disfluent fonts can act as an inhibitor when the reader’s attention or motivation is weak to begin with.”

The implications of this are that we need to, from a business standpoint, tread carefully in reimagining our user interfaces. We need to find a balance between too-much disfluency and too-much immediacy. We also need to explore if such a balance can even be found, because the existing research strongly suggests that increasing disfluency increases our capacity to reflect.

Furthermore, given that media illiteracy and succumbing to fake news gives operations—like Russian state funded troll farms—outsized electoral influence, it’s plausible that font choice could have ramifications for national security. With Brazil’s recent election of authoritarian-sympathizer, Jair Bolsonaro, on a wave of fake news, and with Donald Trump besieging the press’s legitimacy, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Professor Van Bavel agrees. “As [tech companies] changed their features to be more addictive, it’s had an unintended consequence of making it easier to engage in political propaganda and warfare.” We are about to leave the coffee shop, and head off into the disfluent tangle of Manhattan streets called Greenwich Village. “The quality of information that the average citizen has is a lynchpin of democracy.” he continues, “Because you need educated citizens in order to figure out who to vote for… But if a third of people are reading nonsense, that can tip elections and change history. And who is fake news going to appeal to? It’s not going to appeal to systematic, educated thinkers; it’s going to appeal to people that are not well versed in navigating the media, or have ulterior motives; and [both] special interests and leaders will ill-intention are going to leverage that to engage in demagoguery and promote authoritarianism, which is antithetical to what [both social media companies and democracies claim to] stand for… And once things get closed off…once you have authoritarian governments in control, they want to control the whole message completely.”

Perhaps the solution to fake news is not in something dramatic, but something simple—imperceptible even—something that gets someone, somewhere, reading an incendiary comment online; to pause, strain their eyes for just a bit, and for the first time in maybe a while, reflect.