If you cook and eat food from a sewer, you’re going to get contaminated. It’s not a matter of “if”, it’s a matter of “when”. And even before the inevitable poisoning, you’ll keep throwing up from disgust or sensory discomfort (or both). You will be sick because your environment is sickly.

This is the state of the exchange of information online, yet most don’t seem to have noticed.

Sure, everyone’s angry about Cambridge Analytica. Many hate clickbait. Most are unsatisfied with the state of political advertising online. But these are symptoms, not causes. And many of us are not formulating (what I believe to be) the most important question:

What is different about the environment in which we consume information today (not just about the information itself)?

According to research by Pew released in 2019, 55% of US adults get their news from social media, “sometimes” or “often”. This is the highest the number has ever been and marks the first time “that a majority of adults surveyed by Pew said social media played a sizable role in their news habits,” according to Quartz. In fact, global consumption of news online (and via social media) is on the rise — a bigger piece of research released by Pew in 2018 showed 42% of people surveyed across 38 countries said they get news online and 35% got daily news via social media. This is an important shift.

What changes when you stop reading news that’s written by trained professionals — written on the static and finite surface of paper, using a process that few can afford — and start reading news in an online setting (which creates contrasting conditions)?

It is not just the structure of the information we call news and the people who create it that changes — the area surrounding the news also changes. And this is where content-corrupting signals come into play.

What are content-corrupting signals (CCS)?

Content (in the world of online media) can be defined as text that has informational value. But, context and audience affect the informational value of a given string of text.

For example, the sentence, “Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell,” could be classed as content by an eleven-year-old trying to understand cellular biology but not by a graduate looking for a sales job. Similarly, “AAABBBBXTXTXTXT,” could be deemed gibberish by most of us, but invaluable to a spy who knows the string can be decoded to reveal the secrets of a rival nation.

I emphasise the “informational value” element of content because it is the attribute we have over-exploited to our detriment. The value attached to information resides in the minds of the people who perceive utility in that information. So, if you want to mine that value, you need to drill into people’s heads. People are hyper-alert to and relentless in hunting information that they deem valuable, so we’ve turned the Internet and social media into heavy machinery for mining the value in all content — even types we shouldn’t mine, like news content. And, most of the time, pollutants spill into the minds of those consuming content.

This is humanity in the early days of oil prospecting all over again, except the Internet and social media have given everyone the ability to drill anywhere and into anyone. Most of the time, these spills don’t happen because people are evil — they happen because we don’t know better. I’ll illustrate.

Imagine that, like many, you care deeply about elections in your country and your country is America. You’re scrolling through Twitter and see this tweet:

You care about the content — US elections and politics — but before you even get to that, you have to go through a polluted environment:

The user’s Twitter handle signals their bias about a political candidate (this could bias you for or against the post before you’ve even read it)

The user’s profile picture could trigger an in-group (defensive) or out-group (aggressive) response, depending on how well it resonates with you

The user posts their commentary about the publisher’s comment and this primes an emotive response

There are comments about the post and each comment basically replicates the polluting effects present in the original poster’s tweet

The publisher’s sensationalist comment invites you to catastrophise about the topic, so you’re emotionally compelled to stop and look at the post

Signals (like these) that surround content but have no substantive relationship with it — such that you can’t get to the content without first going through these signals — are what I call content-corrupting signals (CCS).

The change that’s wreaking havoc on our society is that we’ve gone from harvesting brain food from farmland, to foraging in a dumping ground.

We’re generating and sharing news in environments with conditions that are terrible for news

This isn’t just a matter of clickbait… we’d be lucky if it were that simple. Before you’ve seen a headline or read an article (which is, itself, often designed to incite extreme emotions), you’re overloaded with signals projecting how to feel and what to think about what you’re about to read.

Many online platforms, not just social media, are optimised to elicit compulsive posting, egocentrism, impulsiveness, tribalism and attention gluttony.

None of those things are fatal if all you’re doing is sharing cat pictures and gym selfies. But am I the only one who is tortured by the tragedy of what such an environment does to news and political discourse?

It doesn’t matter whether Mark Zuckerberg fact checks political ads or Twitter bans them. That’s like insisting on using clean plates and cutlery as you dine in the sewer.

The problem is way deeper — social media is no place for the generation and proliferation of political or news content. It wasn’t designed for that and it’s not good at it. The incentives and reward systems are out of whack, and that’s why the problem feels so intractable.

You used to be able to read a newspaper or watch an anchor without any (or, at least, almost none) of these corrupting forces. Not that I’m calling for the halcyon days when noble new outlets told us the truth — I believe the news media community is one of the worst aggravators of this problem. But, even if things weren’t perfect, they didn’t come with many of the global scale, democracy-compromising issues proliferated by today’s growing media formats. Let me expand.

Imagine that after seeing the tweet I shared above, you saw this one next:

And this tweet right after that:

You can see how this quickly adds up to a landscape that is so polluted with CCS, it is sewer-like. And I don’t mean to pick on Twitter, you could perform the same exercise with Facebook, Youtube or Reddit and come to the same conclusion.

T his Salon example is particularly troubling because it also exemplifies the blurring of the line between “news” and “entertainment”. The outlet describes itself as being “The original online source for news, politics and entertainment”.

The qualities you need to do each of these things well (news/politics vs entertainment) are different and often contrasting — for example, relying on emotive yet unrepresentative anecdotes is great for entertainment… but absolutely terrible for news. Simultaneously pumping out these different content types (especially via the Internet) makes cross-contamination likely.

In this example, people were no longer talking about the facts or even ideas — they were simply reacting to each others’ reactions. The conversation became personal and adversarial, rather than objective and constructive.

No one was focussed on the question, “Are Hallmark movies, in fact, racist?” They were too busy saying, “You’re a reprehensible human and I hate you.”

No wonder it’s so easy to trick us with clickbait. Manipulate us with misinformation. Cheat us with doctored images.

Everything is set up to make it easy for us to be exploited. For the extreme value we place in certain types of information to be mined until we’re mindless.

A new, healthier platform for political content and discourse

The genie’s out of the bottle — we can’t rewind to a time when everyone wasn’t using the voice given to them by the Internet and social media, the same way a child would use a power drill. But we can create new environments, optimised to support the healthy generation and dissemination of content about politics and news. Environments where drills and pollutants aren’t lying around.

To that end, one of my biggest endeavours has been the creation of òtító:

òtító is the new media format that empowers you to fight misinformation and access reliable content on important topics. All in an environment that’s free from content-corrupting signals, and full of tools to help you improve the quality of information that users see on the platform.

Its articles are organised into claims or statements of fact, each of which must be supported by at least one source. Anyone can contribute information as well as counter, dispute or vote on the reliability of any claim and its sources.

If you share my apprehension about content-corrupting signals, check out òtító.

In my next article, I’ll cover some scientific research on how we consume information and what we can infer from it about content-corrupting signals.