The misinformation discourse is a distraction

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In economics, shifting from a concentrated market with a handful of dominant players to a highly competitive market of small players is usually considered a good thing. But when the products these players are targeting at different sets of consumers are alternative versions of reality as we know it, it’s not so clear that society benefits.

For all the attention given to misinformation, a narrow focus on objective falsehoods distracts us from a much more fundamental shift. The emerging democratic risk is not so much that people believe false things — they always have. It is that they no longer believe the same things as one another, false or otherwise.

If this sounds overstated, try a recent example. In January, after Elon Musk drew fresh attention to Britain’s grooming gangs scandal via his social media platform X, almost half of Reform UK voters said they had heard about the story in the news in recent days, compared with just one in 10 Labour or Lib Dem voters.

This is not so much a question of whether a particular piece of information is true or false, as of whether different people encounter the same information at all.

In the past, established media organisations largely followed the same news agenda, within national boundaries. But in an increasingly borderless and splintered information environment, the old gatekeepers and norms are increasingly bypassed.

This has led to the ongoing bifurcation of publishing platforms online, including social media, into overtly right- and left-leaning spaces, where different agendas abound. As a dual citizen of X and Bluesky, there are clear differences in the topics I see on the two platforms.

Here’s another weakness of the misinformation discourse: that this is uniquely a problem on one “side”. Research finds that while America’s conservatives are on average more likely to believe false statements about climate change, liberals are more likely to believe false statements about nuclear power. Other studies of the US find those who went to college are no better judges of news veracity than those with only high school education.

I don’t highlight this to criticise any particular group. Quite the contrary. I do so to emphasise that most people — left, right, more and less educated — simply don’t interrogate every claim they encounter.

Humans are efficiency-maximisers, seeking shortcuts at every opportunity. The truth is the vast majority of us are never going to invest time fact-checking or evaluating all the information we consume. If it seems plausible and comes from a source we don’t actively distrust, that’s good enough.

Combine this heuristic with the explosion of upstart information providers, who tend to operate in pockets of an unprecedentedly fragmented media landscape, and you will get interesting results.

While the evidence on echo chambers and filter bubbles has been mixed to date, most research predates the very recent shift to finely tuned real-time recommendation algorithms.

Analysing data from the British Election Study, I found that people who got their news from TikTok were more likely to become supporters of Reform UK between 2021 and 2024 than those who didn’t, even after controlling for age, sex and education level.

Notably, the pattern is much stronger among men than women, consistent with the idea that different groups now inhabit quite distinct information and political environments online — even within the same platforms.

Similarly, in Germany, the strong TikTok presence of both the AfD and Die Linke is believed by some to have boosted their support among young men and women respectively, contributing to a stark gender gap between young Germans’ voting patterns in last month’s election.

The link between this fragmentation and democratic dysfunction shows up everywhere you look. America’s polarised media ecosystem is matched by far wider political divides than in nations with more cohesive media landscapes. Longitudinal studies find a divided media engenders polarised politics.

And looking across age ranges, young people, whose information sources differ most starkly both from previous generations and from one another (in terms of young men and young women), now display the widest ideological divide on many measures.

The misinformation discourse will doubtless rumble on, but like the teen glued to the screen, it misses the broader context.

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch