The Weapon in Your Pocket

Digital media is one the 21st centuries most dangerous weapons. Russian hacking in the 2016 presidential election undermined how Americans define democracy. How could the most prestigious process in America’s democracy be tainted by a social network?

We are no longer only consumers. We are now what media professionals call “prosumers.” Instead of only consuming media, we create and interact with it. You read a New York Times article on Twitter. You share it on your Facebook feed with your own commentary. Your aunt who lives across the country comments.

Prosumers not only interact with what they consume, but they choose what they see. You’re not confined to the information you receive from your local news station or newspaper. Now, you can go online and search for a specific topic. You might even have a specific news outlet you turn to more than others. You can follow or unfollow certain people whose information you want or don’t want to see.

While this all sounds like fun and games, the implications of digital media and the extensive social network it has created are just being discovered. And let’s be clear, these are serious implications. Take Pizzagate for example.

When Alex Jones posted on a popular website, Info-Wars, that Hilary Clinton was sexually abusing children in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, people took his claims as fact. Some were so convinced they decided to act. Edgar Maddison Welch took Jones so seriously that he walked into the pizza parlor with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a .38 handgun, and a knife.

False information in the news media is dangerous and if you are not media literate, you may just believe everything you read online.

While Jones' online commentary was fake, Welch's weapons and the threat he posed to patron's in the pizza parlor was not. This is a prime example of how media literacy can pose a tangible threat to society.

Recently the term “fake news” has been used to describe some of the content produced by news organizations. Fake news is supposed to describe news that is inaccurate, however, it has started to become a form of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias describes the phenomena when someone is more likely to believe something because it aligns with their own beliefs or values. For the people who have not been taught media literacy, it can be hard to distinguish fake news from real content. This is especially difficult in issues like politics that are increasingly bipartisan and have both sides making opposite claims.

“Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories,” writes Robinson Meyer in an article in The Atlantic titled “The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.”

And here we meet the real threat that digital media presents. With traditional media, it was easier to distinguish where your content was coming from and if it was credible. However, within a digital media environment, it is more challenging.

According to medialit.org, media literacy is defined as “the process of understanding and using the mass media in an assertive and non-passive way. This includes an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the media, the techniques used by them and the impact of these techniques.”

Being media literate in its most simple definition means being able to read, evaluate, analyze, and interpret media. While this seems like common sense it can be very difficult in a digital media environment.

A January NPR article titled “5 Things to Know About Screen Time Right Now” states that people under 18 represent one in three internet users globally.

You would think that people who use digital media the most would be more media literate than those who don’t. However, a 2016 study done by Stanford University found that 85 percent of middle-school students found it challenging to distinguish advertisements from news stories.

“The authors worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish,” writes Brooke Donald in a 2016 article on Stanford’s website about the study titled “Stanford Researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online.”

So how does an audience that lacks media literacy translate into a threatened democracy?

Well, take the 2016 election for example. We now know that Russian bots deployed campaigns on social media networks, most notable Facebook, in order to influence the results of the election. Non-media literate individuals were not able to distinguish between actual news articles and information being spread by these Russian bots. The Guardian reported that Russian misinformation was able to reach 126 million Americans.

According to a study done by Statista in 2017, on average, people over 16 years old spend over two and a half hours a day on mobile device online. During this time, they are consuming media, whether it be on official news sites, social media networking, or any online website and having to make decisions on what they are seeing. Is it accurate? Does it come from a credible source? Are they trying to persuade me to do something? Do I need to act on what I see?

Most of the time when you are consuming media, you make these decisions without even knowing it. It could be as simple as liking an article, sharing it with a friend, or commenting your thoughts.

However, in the digital media world, sometimes it is not the most important news that gets the most views, but the most interesting news according to the viewers.

According to a 2016 article in The Guardian titled “FGM: number of victims found to be 70 million higher than we thought” states that at least 200 million girls have undergone female genital manipulation across the world. In Somalia, 98% of females between the ages of 16 and 49 have been cut. But in the United States, the news cycle rarely reports on FGM and instead focuses on celebrity gossip.

In a situation like Pizzagate, the news was so outrageous and because it involved a very controversial presidential election, viewers tuned in. One person’s online lies caused many people to believe terrible things about a presidential candidate. And here lies another issue in the digital media environment, everyone has a voice.

While it may seem that everyone having a voice in the digital media environment is good, false balance is not. False balance is when both sides of an argument are presented more equal than the evidence to support them.

“When the weight of scientific evidence points incontrovertibly one direction, doggedly reporting both “sides” equally can result in misleading coverage,” writes David Robert Grimes in an article for The Guardian titled “Impartial journalism is laudable. But false balance is dangerous.”

Take issues like climate change or the supposed link between autism and vaccines. There is a huge imbalance in the data presented in these arguments, however, both sides have been covered equally causing many people to believe the evidence is equal on both sides.

And while everyone is allowed to have their own personal beliefs, some of these beliefs based on false information are having real life impacts on society as a whole.

Some states are seeing resurgences of measles, once eradicated in the United States. The effects of climate change are becoming more clear than ever, however, the anti-climate change movement has infiltrated the top levels of our government threatening to cause catastrophic effects felt throughout the world.

While some people have received education on how to read and understand the media, not everyone is as lucky.

On Sept. 18, Governor Brown signed a bill requiring media literacy materials to be accessible for California students. His reasoning for this goes back to the 2016 Stanford study that found students were unable to distinguish advertisements from credible news sources.

But what about people who are not afforded the luxury of an education?

These individuals are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to media literacy and a direct target for those looking to influence viewers for their own personal gain.

According to a study done by the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of individuals without a high school diploma used the internet. In contrast, 97 percent of college graduates were internet users.

Lack of internet access limits the variety of news sources these individuals are able to obtain decreasing their ability to evaluate the credibility of the information they are receiving.

Being media literate does not mean that you can just tell what is true or false in a news story. It also means that you can interpret how the story wants you to feel about a certain subject. News organizations do not have to necessarily report false information, it is the way they present the information they have that sways viewers. It is also important to look at the facts omitted from the story.

This comes back to false balance and confirmation bias. If only the side of the story that represents the views of that organization is reported, non-media literate individuals might not realize there is more to the story.

And if media literacy wasn't complex enough, now we have government officials releasing official statements on social media accounts.

The Washington Post reported that according to a Harvard study in the New England Journal of Medicine the death toll of Hurricane Maria reached 4,645 deaths. However, on Twitter, President Donald Trump denied these claims.

“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report large numbers, like 3000,” @realDonaldTrump on Twitter.

It is confusing for people to read two conflicting statements and have to determine which one is true, especially when the one that is false is being released by the president himself.

Our democracy depends on journalism, but journalism is reliant on media literacy. Journalists can work for years on reports with thousands of documents and witnesses to back up their claims, but if their audience is not media literate, it will not make an impact.