Can Social Media Help the Search for Truth?

Truth and social media posts may be regarded as having only a passing acquaintance. Perhaps as a consequence, social media posts are regarded with some distrust, and much research and political effort has been expended in trying to determine truth from falsity in the digital realm. The issue is taken to have great significance for the management of misinformation in times of natural disaster, political crises, or societal debate. However, what if this focus entirely misses the point? Truth is never determined by social interaction alone, which is the stock-in-trade of social media. Failure to understand this deep philosophical and psychological issue has beset human endeavour—indeed, the endeavours of most social species, long before the advent of digital communication.

"A Farrago of Invention"

An anecdote may illustrate the problem and illuminate what has come to be known about digital information transmission. Long before the advent of social media, on 4th November, 1988, Nigel Lawson, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer for the United Kingdom, gave a private briefing to a group of journalists. His remarks were meant to be an off-the-record heads-up about policy development, but they were widely reported, causing concern, if not outrage, across the political divide. The Chancellor then roundly denied the media reports, characterising them as a: “farrago of invention”¹ (concocted in “a tent”, no less). The journalists defended their reporting by pointing to both consensus (claiming that they had all heard the same thing) and that other people, who were not there, also had the same information independently. Despite the weight of consensus (the Chancellor versus a pack of journalists), nobody knew the truth of what was said then, and we still don’t know now.

This is not an isolated political incident, and it doesn’t amount to very much in itself, except that it prompted analyses of the criteria for truth² that have implications for our digital age. The criteria appealed to by the journalists were "consensus" and "independent verification by another."² The problem is that neither criteria, in themselves, can establish truth in the sense we crave it—a statement reflecting the reality of the objective world. "Consensus" can only ever relate to agreements between people’s statements about reality; it does not necessarily touch reality itself. "Independence" is of dubious merit when applied to statements, as it relates only to the other’s link with the social group who are making the statements, but does not speak to the other’s relationship with reality—how do we know they don’t dissemble for their own reasons?

Social Media and Disinformation

So, what does this have to do with social media and disinformation? For the most part, social media does not deal with actual events, but with people’s statements and opinions, which may, or may not, be about actual events. The prime concern of most social media posts is not transmission of fact, but transmission of private experience and social connectedness.³ As a result, analysing such digital statements is quite a different matter to analysing the nature of the world, and analysing their truth-value may well be a futile waste of time and effort.

The critical error when putting "social media" and "truth" in the same sentence is that social media is not set up to tell truths, but to communicate. Human communication generally has little to do with telling truths about the world; it is about transmitting personal needs and wants.³ These may serve a community, or the truth, but that’s not their point. Truth and everyday language are not from the same realm. They can have a relationship,⁴ but special forms of language are needed for transmission of scientific truth.^4,5 However, this form of expression is often convoluted and technical and is not ideal for quick social media posts. Thus, like most social communication, the mode of expression on social media is not set up to establish the nature of reality.

Post Retransmission

Research into which social media messages are regarded as important and retransmitted around the digiverse continually corroborates the power of the personal and the social in the process. However, the criteria people say that they employ in retransmission decisions involve judgments of perceived truth. In fact, these judgments appear to come down to personalities and "social might," not reality, and revolve around evaluation of popularity—as the journalists in the tent implied: "We must be right, as there’s only one of you."¹

For example, one study found that the sender of the post, and the size of the post’s audience, were determinants of retransmission.⁶ The more followers the sender had, and the more people who had looked at the message already, the more it was disseminated. In another laboratory study of what people were willing to believe on social media, posts that were obviously true were mixed in with posts that were manifestly false. When there were about even numbers of true and false posts, people were quite good at telling them apart. However, when the proportions of true and false posts were altered, then people became less adept at truth-detecting and followed the majority view.⁷

It might be thought that including an external link on the post may help to combat the effect of the source or majority view by taking it beyond the opinion of one person (remember the "independence" criterion). Indeed, when such a link is included, the number of followers a sender has is less influential in retransmission.⁶ Another study⁸ found the extent to which external links were viewed as providing independent verification of a post’s truthfulness lay in the attractiveness of the link—suggesting factors beyond reality still determine belief. This study⁸ also noted that retransmission was limited by the perceived personal involvement of the sender and their apparent anxiety about the content. Neither of these is a direct measure of truth, but they are certainly indices of social factors.

When the Lawson briefing "farrago" and social media posts are analysed side-by-side, similarities in the discussions concerning veracity emerge. The debate always descends into "There are more of us than there are of you, and we are nicer, so we must be correct." The problem is that such a consensus criterion places truth in a precarious position. The solution is not to look for means of truth detection but to recognise that social media is about communicating feelings and opinions, not truth, as it allows no verification or disconfirmation of statements beyond the social confines of the media. It should, thus, be regarded as an opinion forum, and it is dangerous to assume that it does anything else—certainly, not tell truths, which is not its function, and it is an error to view it as such.