Misinformation Rules!? Could “Group Rules” Clean Up Online Personal Messaging?

• In Event: How to Counter Misinformation Online

Abstract

Online personal messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat are hugely popular globally. WhatsApp alone has more than 2 billion users, Facebook Messenger 1.3 billion. Over recent years, evidence has grown that these services are implicated in the spread of misinformation, particularly in group settings where citizens communicate for a variety of purposes. Examples include far-right conspiracy theories, sectarian religious myths, the promotion of fake remedies, and hate speech. A newly-emerging wave of research is grappling with how to study these platforms’ impact on citizenship and democratic norms. Yet how messaging affects the spread, reception, and correction of misinformation remains under-theorized and poorly understood. We address this by exploring how and why some citizens create “group rules” to try to keep misleading information out of their everyday interactions.

We use a longitudinal qualitative research design. Our findings come from in-depth interviews we conducted over sixteen months with people we recruited via a national opinion polling company (Wave 1 N=102, Wave 2 N=80). Participants roughly reflected the diversity of the UK population across gender, age, ethnicity, educational attainment, and digital literacy. In addition, by using a customized secure smartphone application participants could send us examples of misinformation they encountered in their everyday messaging streams.

To analyze these data, we develop a new conceptualization of messaging platforms as hybrid, public-interpersonal communication environments. They afford ongoing connection and habitual, everyday interaction among trusted ties. Yet they also afford (mis)information’s easy transition from the public world into relatively private, interpersonal communication networks, where different norms of correction might apply, or not apply at all. Rumors and misunderstandings in one-to-one or small-group interactions can also spread across other, larger messaging groups and acquire a semi-public character.

Main findings

First, group rules are used by some citizens to tackle the harmful affordances of the platform. The distinctive public-interpersonal context of messaging encourages some people to try to soften the impact of three particular affordances: weak information provenance, minimal verification opportunities, and frictionless sharing. Participants perceive these affordances as increasing the circulation of misinformation that harms social ties by fostering misperceptions, sowing acrimony and division, or derailing a group’s purpose.

Second, group rules emerge because the spread of misinformation on messaging platforms is shaped by personalized trust that springs from strong emotional bonds of kinship, friendship, or local community. Trustworthiness is perceived to inhere in the close relationships and shared experiences among members of the group; it is less dependent on whether information shared is externally verifiable. However, some citizens perceive that this social structure makes political misinformation more emotionally difficult to challenge and social ties more likely to be inadvertently exposed than in other communication settings. Group rules are seen as a way to collaboratively reduce this vulnerability.

Our third finding is that rulemaking involves metacommunication that inculcates norms of epistemic vigilance and collective reflection. It can boost the perception that rulemaking mitigates misinformation’s spread and therefore serves to valorize rulemaking as a collective good. Reflection on rules communicates social signals stressing the importance—as an end in itself—of developing desirable norms of discourse. Even if minimal and fleeting, this can have positive long-term impacts. As our longitudinal design reveals, some participants reported that new group rules reduced false and misleading information over time in their messaging groups.

However, in larger groups with a mix of close and more distant ties, members are less likely to be involved in the creation and maintenance of group rules; such delegation can diminish individual and collective agency and potentially leave members more vulnerable to misinformation when the perception arises that rules are the responsibility of others, whose role is hazily understood.

Among our participants we found little evidence that rules were driven by grand notions of deliberative discourse. They do not require the demanding optimism of accounts of deliberation or even “crowd wisdom.” Yet, if encouraged, rulemaking, even of an informal nature, could scale up and have an impact on the flow of misinformation. This approach transcends the kinds of technological quick fixes much-vaunted by platform companies, such as restricting forwarding. Subject to further research, rulemaking on personal messaging could have previously untapped advantages in the continuing struggle against online misinformation worldwide.

Authors

• Andrew Chadwick, Loughborough University

• Natalie-Anne Hall, Loughborough University

• Cristian Vaccari, University of Edinburgh