August 7, 2024
As commonly used, the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” suffer from an unreasoned literalism. With their focus on information and its veracity, they separate facts from context. In so doing, they place the onus for discerning fact from fiction squarely on the consumers of information, and the responsibility for creating misinformation on bad actors — without acknowledging the rich systemic contexts in which rumors, half truths, and propaganda thrive, and the relations of power that run through information systems, past and present. Popular conversations about elections, synthetic data, and pandemics, for instance, often focus narrowly on the technical capacity to produce information that is false but looks true, at the expense of attention to the legacies of institutional mistrust and the emergence of global chains of mediation that set the context for these technical innovations.
A more conducive approach to understanding contemporary information flows contextualizes information’s truth-value within historical institutional failures and global relations of power. Information produced by powerful institutions is often blinkered, when not blatantly biased. Communities who have not been part of the perspectives and the data that governmental and traditional news media put forth have little reason to put their faith in those institutions, and to trust them to be arbiters of truth online. For government officials, researchers, journalists, and medical or legal professionals, among others, building long-term infrastructural relations of trust with these communities offers one way to address the problem of misinformation.
Some experts seated within traditional information institutions may find an impasse in the gap between the work of producing information based on rigorous data collection and vetting, and communities’ historical mistrust of information in general. Yet one only has to look at the long traditions of producing counter-data and alternate epistemes to find a way forward. Projects such as W.E.B. DuBois’s Data Portraits and Ida B. Wells’s A Red Record mark signal interventions into an information economy that was singularly suppressing the knowledge of violence against Black bodies and their varied life experiences. DuBois’s project used hand-painted data visualizations and portraits to illustrate comparative statistics on Black lives, while Wells’s project traced the number of lynchings and extra-judicial killings of Black people after the formal end of slavery. Other early projects traced the working conditions of factory laborers during the industrial revolution, as in Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels’ writings based on observed conditions of workers in Manchester, England. These are part of a lineage that extends to the present day and includes such projects as tracking femicides in Indigenous communities across the Americas, mapping police surveillance of Dalit and Adivasi communities in India, and tracing the missing datasets in worlds where so much is being collected.
Such counter-data projects provide a way to think about information in a broader context: information is always incomplete, yet it can be of good-enough quality and be enunciated in contexts of good-enough trust to be used to make decisions that affect the common weal. For instance, Du Bois’s visualizations were displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition, where, as M. Murphy writes in their 2023 essay “With and Against: Conspiring with Aliens Towards Possible Worlds” his “use of evidence [. . . ] was crucially not an exhibit of ‘facts’ and ‘data’ that made black people in Georgia knowable to study, but rather a portrait of variations and difference [that could] dislodge race as a coherent object of study. In other words, “good enough” data does not pretend to uniformity or homogeneity, but is a snapshot of a particular set of conditions at a particular time and is amenable to revision. Similarly, the Paris Exposition (notably, outside the United States) offered a venue where DuBois’ evidence could be aired with the possibility of it being heard.
By their very nature, counter-data projects depend on an acknowledgement of the incompleteness of data itself, and the alternative records they create reinforce that incompleteness. In such projects, trust in data is established on the grounds of a relationship among hegemonic data and the lived experience of its incompleteness. In the contemporary period, contexts of building trust as a relationship can be established on various grounds, from peer review to co-presence, and careful consideration of these contexts can be established over time through concerted efforts at community-building. Te Hiku Media’s language revitalization, information, and Indigenous data sovereignty effort, and the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project’s Countermapping Pandemic Policing efforts are examples of successful work in this vein. Te Hiku Media is a project in Aotearoa (New Zealand) that includes Maori community radio and television projects as well as AI projects that operate according to principles of Indigenous Maori sovereignty, including using these tools to promote the use of the Maori language. The Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project uses data collected from Dalit and adivasi communities in India to understand the use of data-rich police surveillance. Both of these projects take an approach to information that is grounded in understanding the institutional contexts in which it is produced, and draw on that understanding to intervene in the information produced by those institutions through data-projects that are in service to the community.
Counter-data projects raise the question of what conditions make information persuasive, and to which audiences. These are fundamentally questions of trust that go in two directions: which information is trusted or mistrusted, and what kinds of people are deemed trustworthy sources of information? The “truth” of information is established through information’s performativity — that is, information is enunciated in a context and whether it is successfully communicated depends on that context, the entity presenting the information, and how the information is received. Each of these roles in turn depend on a history of other utterances established over time and in everyday life. As such, today’s counter-data projects must be put into a larger world-wide context, where information is subsumed within shifting fields of power.
Information takes part in campaigns that traverse the globe, where movements spread and learn from each other. Research demonstrates that local events can become fertile ground for spreading narratives globally and can be used in a variety of context-dependent ways to further particular political agendas. To take one salient example, the Israel/Palestine conflict has been taken up in other contexts to make local arguments against immigrants, in support of strengthening national borders, and to criticize national media for purportedly orchestrating particular narratives. Widening the scope of analysis to encompass these cross-border trends once again emphasizes the context in which information is discounted or made persuasive — but this time globally.
All of these dynamics suggest that misinformation and disinformation are misnomers to the degree that they sustain focus on the veracity of information and detract attention from institutional legacies of trust and mistrust, on the one hand, and the infrastructural and world-making contexts of information as a relation of power, on the other. Of course, these two contexts — the historic and diachronic, and the territorial and synchronic — implicate social media companies as responsible parties, as institutions that are both inheritors of systems of power and create new relations of power globally. Social media companies draw on legacies of concentrated knowledge and power that add to their authority as arbiters of truth. They also create territorial, world-wide geographies that draw together disparate political and epistemological trends and concentrate them. To date, remedies to these issues have largely focused on the networked character of information campaigns, often coded as virality. Much less attention has been paid to remedying the historical mistrust of traditional institutions as arbiters of the truth. Perhaps in this next election cycle and beyond, projects that turn their attention to creating good enough information and that reestablish trust through relationality will emerge with renewed importance.