“We’re like grapes enclosed in their skins alongside other grapes, but we don’t have a clear picture of what the person next to us is seeing,” said Ana Laura Pérez, MBA—digital product manager at El País and academic coordinator of the Journalism and Data Analytics and Innovation tracks within the Bachelor of Communication program at Universidad ORT Uruguayduring the conference “Disinformation as a Political and Social Tool.”
The event, organized by the Department of International Studies in the School of Management and Social Sciences, took place on Thursday, October 22, 2020. It was held as part of the Media Literacy Against Disinformation Initiative (MLADI) program, developed and proposed by the Center for the Study of Contemporary Open Societies (CESCOS), and was sponsored by the U.S. Embassy.
The Different Forms of Disinformation
Disinformation has become a tool capable of influencing election campaigns, destabilizing governments, and damaging the reputations of companies and organizations.
The U.S.-based organization FIRST DRAFT categorizes disinformation into seven types:
- Satire or parody is a form of communication intended to be humorous.
- Misleading content is used to incriminate someone or something with information that may or may not be true.
- Fake content impersonates genuine sources, claiming that someone said something they did not actually say.
- Fabricated content is used when there is an explicit intent to cause harm through, for example, the use of photos, the design, or alterations to articles.
- A misleading connection occurs when headlines do not match the content. For example, a headline might refer to the fires in the Amazon, but the photos used to illustrate the story are of other fires.
- False context. The content is genuine, but it mixes true and false situations.
- Manipulated content. This is when a montage or editing technique is used to make it seem as though something happened that did not actually occur.
The Three S's for Dealing with Communication Crises
Pérez stated that people associate the internet with freedom, when “in reality, given how it currently works, it bears much more resemblance to a bunch of grapes than to freedom.”
People are fragmented into filter bubbles, as Eli Pariser noted: their own information universes, which depend on who one is and what one does, and which are the result of algorithmic mechanisms and the personalization of internet searches. We live in a reality mediated by algorithms that act as intermediaries on the internet, and we lack transparency regarding how much influence we have over them and how much we do not.
“We are like grapes enclosed in skins next to other grapes, but we lack clarity about what the person next to us is seeing,” Pérez noted, and presented the three mechanisms for addressing communication crises, also known as “the three S’s”:
- Storytelling. “Misinformation feeds on emotions,” said the expert, explaining that, in that sense, if a video containing false information were accompanied by emotionally charged music, a brief statement would not be an effective response to that video. Storytelling involves conveying information through a story in order to connect with users.
- Honesty. “Misinformation is sometimes based on events that actually happened,” Pérez said. In that regard, the expert noted that we must be very honest about the facts that did occur, not hide them, and clarify which events did not take place.
- The Streisand Effect. In 2003, actress and singer Barbra Streisand tried to stop the publication of photos showing the grounds of her Malibu home, but in doing so, the photos went viral.
The “Streisand effect” is an internet phenomenon in which an attempt to stop the spread of certain information actually causes that information to spread even further.
In that regard, Pérez recommended assessing whether it is worth debunking a piece of information based on how many people saw it.