Online Readers Wallow in Misinformation

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In the old days of journalism, conservatives had a legitimate beef about the way that newspaper editors and broadcast outlets served as gatekeepers for the dissemination of news. I got my start in journalism in a city that had one newspaper that was delivered to the doorstep every morning, and it published only one right-leaning column a week. In the face of declining readership, it decided to open the pages to more conservative voices, and I eagerly jumped at the chance.

In those days, we had too many gatekeepers, but the recent dissemination of a false story (reportedly started as an irreverent joke) about GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance has reminded us that we now have too few gatekeepers. There’s no easy fix to create a sense of fairness, balance, and decency. I would never advocate the involvement of government or excessive online policing, but I’m not optimistic that we can significantly improve the current media environment.

In those old days, that newspaper’s news pages weren’t any better balanced than its opinion pages. This was in the early 1990s. These days, I often hear Americans remember when TV news talking heads “impartially” reported on the day’s news events, forgetting that, at the time, we all complained about the liberal bias of the three virtually indistinguishable nightly news hosts. Conservatives were frustrated at how hard it was to get alternate viewpoints and important news stories onto the air.

With the creation of social media, the attempt at balance has become something of a moot point. Americans now read whatever sources conform to their existing biases. Online influencers and personalities have built massive audiences catering to their particular niches that inflame those biases and passions. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. One could never have expected balance in any particular article or publication. One can only find balance by reading a variety of pieces and journals — provided a reader actually seeks out balance.

But it’s frustrating that in the new wild, open online world, there’s so little self-policing of content. You can now set up an account on X and can become a media celebrity. Nuanced views rarely draw legions of readers, so the system rewards the most outrageous personalities. It also rewards absurdity and rumor, even if they are rooted in parody.

The Vance example serves as a reminder of the dangers of a world without editors — but also of the reality that many people just don’t care if the information they are enjoying is untrue. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of the Ohio senator. There are plenty of critiques that fairly center on his policy positions. And Democratic partisans have every right to target his past speeches. In the past, none of those videos (many of which are enlightening) would have surfaced.

However, my X feed is inundated with jokes about Vance and, well, sofas. For those of you who missed this nonsense, some online writer apparently claimed that Vance’s book included a section where he admitted to having had a sexual encounter with a sofa. It was joke (a bad one), but it has spawned endless sofa memes. It became such a thing that the Associated Press reported on it and noted that the story was a total fabrication. Then AP took down its fact-checking story because it didn’t go through the publication’s standard editing process.

That fiasco revealed the tough position mainstream media finds itself, as it feels compelled to respond to online rumors — even as it tries to uphold traditional journalism standards. As the New York Post reported, “The salacious hoax spread like wildfire on social media, reportedly sparked by an X user who tweeted out a description of the alleged lewd act complete with a bogus citation. Of course, no such passage exists in Vance’s bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, but that didn’t stop the rumor from spreading — with many apparently believing it was true.”

Whatever one’s views of Vance, he really shouldn’t be subject to salacious hoaxes — nor should anyone, no matter how much one might dislike their politics. I read myriad posts by online snarksters promoting that particular story and was flabbergasted that many of them clearly knew that it was a hoax and yet reposted it anyway. Say what you will about traditional media sources, but it’s still not acceptable in that medium to spread stories that aren’t true.

Academics have engaged in voluminous research about the dangers of misinformation (false stuff) and disinformation (purposefully false stuff) — and proposing a variety of mostly pointless and censorious government “solutions.” I still believe the new media world is better than the old one, as a world with too few gatekeepers seems less dangerous to me than a world with too many of them.

Nevertheless, I can’t come up with a good answer to this question: What do we do when news consumers aren’t particularly interested in the truth?

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

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