The Truth About Misinformation with Cailin O'Connor

Published Feb 28, 2024, 8:01 AM

It’s hard to solve a problem when some people don’t even believe that it exists. Researcher Cailin O’Connor joins to talk about the spread of climate misinformation- and what we can do about it. 
Show notes from Chris:

  • Sadly, action on the climate crisis has been badly delayed by huge amounts of disinformation and misinformation, and much of it orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry. If you want to learn more, the groundbreaking book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway is an absolute must-read.
  • Click here for a very powerful article about what happened between Fred Singer and Roger Revelle.
  • Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall’s wonderfully insightful and hugely readable book is “The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread”. I can’t recommend it enough.
  • Other great advice on how to beat misinformation is by treating it as a ‘virus’, described in the fascinating book “Foolproof” by Sander van der Linden. One super promising approach is to ‘inoculate’ ourselves by debunking misinformation before it takes hold. There’s a great review and summary here.
  • Oh, and that argument about bird kills and wind farms? Recent work by Erik Katovich has published a US-wide study in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology and found no measurable impact on bird populations around wind turbines. But this study found a 15% decline around fossil fuel developments, like shale oil and gas production, the opposite to what’s often claimed…

There's a lot of misinformation that's developed for these extremely cynical reasons. I mean, part of why we're here is to talk about climate change, and here we see industries spending massive amounts of money so that they can make more money, and doing it purposely to confuse people, and doing it in a way where they know they're going to kill people and potentially wreck theater.

Oh fucked.

Welcome to I'm Fucking the Future, the show where we learn about surprising and innovative ways of scientists, entrepreneurs, activists, and even philosophers are fighting for climate crisis. I'm your house, Chris Turney, and I believe that together we can unfuck this mess. Let's get started.

Weird Fucking the Future.

Okay, you've been here a while. You've heard about the bad a.

Mass evacuation this morning along Australia's southeastern coast, with bushfires looming and extreme danger ahead.

A fierce heat wave is gripping parts of Europe, with temperatures reaching more than forty degrees celsius after.

Twenty four hours.

All that remains our flooded homes and floating debris. On Sunday and Monday, Mediterranean storm Daniel swept through eastern Libya, washing away entire neighborhoods.

But let's pause for a moment and consider an amazing possible future. It's twenty fifty and I'm Chris Turney, a retired climate scientist. Almost everything around me has been electrified. Our homes, our work, are cars. People no longer live in those harmful little suburbs. We live in small communities where we know our neighbors, and it's just a short walk to the grocery store. And if we do need to go further, we can just use for clean, affordable public transportation that's widely available across the world. Fossil fuel companies are a thing of a past, and the people who are working in coal and oil now working green jobs. At school, kids learn about smog and wildfires, but not because they need to learn how to survive them. They're learning about these events in their history classes. Natural disasters because of climate change have largely stopped, or at least become less frequent and less extreme, And the world just feels pretty damn good. While this might sound like a total fantasy, it's totally within our reach. We're going to have to work really fucking hard to achieve this vision, but one of the most pressing challenges is that a world is full of bad actors pushing bad information in bad faith. Misinformation cast out on the urgency of a climate crisis, and it distracts us from a real issue. We need to take immediate action at speed and scale. It's easy to find examples of how mis and disinformation is influencing the climate crisis, like the idea a walkable fifteen minute cities is some sort of plot for totalitarian control, or that the wildfires in Mary last year were started by energy weapons or space lasers, or that shifts in the Earth's magnetic field and not human activity, is responsible for a climate crisis. That one was promoted by Joe Rogan and got millions of views on TikTok. All of this is easily disprovable, of course, by any of the world's thousands of climate scientists who look at the actual facts and data and models all day long. But too many people are believing these things, and that's all of our problem. Today we're going to talk about how and why misinformation came for a climate crisis and what we can do about it. Our guest is Kaylen O'Connor. She's a professor of philosophy at University of California, Irvine, where, among other things, she researches misinformation and how false beliefs spread between people. And Kaylen is not like other philosophers. She's a cool philosopher. On her website, she's got this beautiful photo of herself, her kids, and a chicken. It's not the kind of headshot you see most academics posts. They're normally quite formal. And I've been intimidating.

I'm in a discipline which is like very male, very.

White philosophy, even though it's in the humanities, has been like the humanities discipline where it hasn't diversified as much as other ones.

So as a you know, as a woman, as a.

Full professor, I sort of like to open the doors a little bit and be like I'm a real person to younger women who want to join the field, like you can be a real person who So in this picture, I have my three kids and I bring them along to conferences sometimes and they show up one zoom with me, and I tell everyone who will listen about my chickens.

Yeah, those chickens are a pretty big part of her life.

I am zoned to have up to three chickens, and I have seven chickens, and I recently had to build them a new enclosure because my neighbor was like, enough with the damn chickens. They're all different breeds. They're very beautiful. They are named Starfrost and red Velvet and Molasses and cream puff and Oreo, mostly after desserts. That's a wolf.

So you must be dragging your eggs on you? Or do you give them out to you? Maybe apiece your neighbor?

Do you give them a Yeah, I just I just give them to neighbors if we have too many, And like my neighbors and I, we have you know, like someone brings over the extra lemons, someone brings over the extra ginger cake, someone brings over the extra eggs.

It's like a very nice little.

It sounds lovely. It sounds lovely. In that Star's hollow esque setting, it could be easy to forget the existential crisis we're facing, but Kayla says she's rarely not thinking about the environment. Part of that is Judo her upbringing.

My dad was an environmentalist.

I used to read Ranger Rick magazine, and my grandfather wrote an article I think in the seventies about the threats of human omission and possible emergence of climate change as a result. So yeah, I've been worried about climate change literally since I was five or.

Six years old.

Really, that's sometimes.

Depressing to be.

Like now I'm forty and I'm even more worried about it than before.

The twenty sixty US presidential debates made Caylen feel particularly concerned about our future.

I mean, I still remember in one of the Trump Clinton debates, Hillary Clinton saying something like the Russian government is making these claims about me, and kind of jumping back up, like.

The Russian government, what are we talking about? You know.

At that point, I at least was just not aware of the way that big forces were starting to use social media to try to control or shape political events and outcomes. My collaborator James weather Or and I both started thinking like, oh, this is really going to matter, this is going to be important. But one thing that's kind of funny is that we we even writing this book on misinformation.

So we wrote this book The Misinformation Age.

Starting then, we really underestimated how serious of an issue it would be, and how long term, So we thought we have to write this book really fast.

The book for Misinformation Age, How False Beliefs Spread is an impressive and stellar contribution to the field. It's totally digestible for the general public, and it digs into how people understand what is truthful and what is not, and ultimately how misinformation has become such a huge issue in our digital world. So getting into your work, you call yourself a philosopher of science. Now, if a word philosopher to me makes me think of Confucius or Aristotle, and people whose feels to study definitely do not overlap with mine at all. So what does it mean to be a philosopher of science?

Well, first of all, I'll just point out all the sciences used to be philosophers. I mean, Aristotle wrote on all sorts of things biology and physics and astronomy, you know everything, and then the science has kind of peeled away and philosophy was what was left. But philosophy of science is an old discipline and there are a lot of things philosophers of science do. So one thing is work on understanding how science as an enterprise works.

You know, how do scientific progress work?

For thousands of years, philosophers have asked questions about the way we live and why, about how we work together, and why societies work the way they do.

One thing that's a very traditional question in philosophy is how does knowledge work?

How do we come to know anything?

And also what does it mean to have a belief in something that's justified. One thing that a lot of philosophers work on now is what's called social epistemology.

That's the study of how people understand knowledge, how they understand what is true, and how we search for truth.

So Descartes was focused on these really these questions about individual knowledge, like how can I, as this one little isolated unit.

Have confidence that the things I believe are true?

But increasingly people came to understand that that's not really how human knowledge works. So other people tell us things, we choose to trust them, We uptake those things as beliefs. We do some other things we reason about, like is this consistent with the other things I believe? Should I trust this person for what reason?

Or should I not?

Our knowledge, in fact, is just very very deeply social. So one thing a lot of philosophers study is social epistemology that relates to philosophy of science, because a lot of things in philosophy of science or work on how groups of scientists come to know or believe things.

So how does a group.

Of humans who are interested in climate change come to believe the climate is warming and at these rates and as the result of these causes. So those are things that philosophers work on.

So with fake news, then it's an element of actually, you've got a belief that's not true that is being presented effectively as a truth.

So, first of all, I don't necessarily love to use the term fake news, because, as a lot of people have pointed out, fake news was this term that was like very much applied to this specific phenomena happening in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, when people would make fake news sites and fake news articles, and then the term got co opted by the right to describe a lot of true things as fake when they weren't.

They are the enemy of the people, and we could have a country that would be able to heal and get together, except the media fomens it. They're so corrupt, and you know, I call it. I came up with the term fake news a long time ago. I don't know if I'll get credit for that, but that's okay.

As Kaylin said, fake news has taken on a new meaning for a lot of people. It just means anything I don't like, So I.

Often will use misinformation or misleading content. So that's why I'm like switching language a little bit. So there are a lot of ways that people spread misinformation or misleading content, and a lot of reasons why people like uptake it. The most basic just has to do with this fact that we're social learners, where we necessarily have to trust each other in order to learn most things we know about the world, which means that people tell us things. You know, most of the time it's in our best interest to believe those things, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes those things are wrong, but we just don't have the ability to always differentiate between the stuff we're getting from other people that's true and that's false. And so social knowledge is tremendously powerful. But once you open up that channel, this door for social information to come through, you're going to open up a channel for misinformation for fake news to come through too.

That's a really powerful analogy. I really like that, Kayley, so I have to ask. I mean, I'm very aware that I have done this. Have you ever fallen for any news articles that are basically misinformed?

Oh?

One hundred times.

Yeah, I think people would find that reas.

I mean, it was stressful to write a book about misinformation because I guarantee somewhere in that book we say something false, probably multiple things false, even though we did the best research we could. But yeah, I'm a human, and like all other humans, I often fall for misinformation. One of my favorite little examples is I was doing an interview on misinformation and someone brought up an example of like a propagated false belief, which is that Daddy long legs these spiders in the US are the most poisonous spiders in the world, but their mouth they're too small to bite you.

And as he was saying it, I was like, yep, I believed that one.

Until I've not heard that one. Actually, that's amazing. It's a crowd of story.

As soon as he said it, I was like, oh, yeah, that's very dumb. Of course that's false, but no, I hadn't believed it until that.

I've done it too. A few years ago, there was this news article about a polar bear who had become stranded on a Scottish island after the melting Arctic ice. Ha'd separated the poor animal from its home. And I remember reading this piece and going, oh, that's amazing. But of course this is just an April fool's prank have a newspaper, even I, as someone who studs as a climate and melting ice fell for it. Now, that kind of misinformation is fairly harmless, both to us and of the Daddy long legs and polar bears not in Scotland. But other misinformation is developed by bad actors to influence politics, the economy, and the very social fabric of our communities.

We're a fucking the future. We're a fucking the future.

One of the most interesting, or perhaps most terrifying things about the miss and disinformation landscape today is how oil and gas are using environmental and nature activists to spew falsehoods.

There's been a lot of stuff spread by oil and gas about how windmills kill birds and how windmills harm whales. So here are people trying to glom on to people's environmental impulses, their desires to help other animals protect the environment.

But what they're.

Actually trying to do is to stop action our.

Climate change, really pressing those emotional buttons. Now, what if you could help clarify for me and the listeners as well, what is the difference between misinformation and disinformation?

So the way people typically pull those apart is to say that disinformation is false and it's intended to mislead, it's misleading, and someone's trying to mislead you, whereas misinformation is misleading but there's no intention to.

Lead you astray.

Ah.

So some of the times when we're talking about these climate issues which are being deliberately misleading, are actually effectively disinformation. Is that right?

Yes? Though I think that when we talk about information on social media, it's not like this is a bad way to differentiate things, but it ends up not, I think, always capturing what's happening on social media, because a lot of what you see is disinformation created by cynical parties that then becomes misinformation.

Ooh, so that they are actually sharing it not with the intent to mislead, they think it's true exactly.

So most of the people spreading, for example, say of the whales, are not going to be people who are trying to mislead to anyone or not going to be people who want a bad outcome. Environmentalism so in that it sort of transforms into misinformation, and it's designed to transform into misinformation.

In Kalin's book The Age of Misinformation, she and are co author James Owen revel right about Roger Ravel, a climate scientist who was one of the first people to study global heating.

He was a major influence on al Gore, who of course has been a climate activist. As a politician, he did a lot of work showing that carbon diaxterrad was increasing in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuels. So he really spent his career showing that the climate was changing and in fact raising alarms about global warming.

By the time Jim Hansen gave his testimony in front of Congress in nineteen eighty eight, Ravel was already seventy nine, and as he aged he became very sick. Now during his time, a man named Fred Singer came along, took money from oil and gas. He was basically paid to sow skepticism and doubt about climate change. Fred Singer has a long resume to name some of his greatest hits. In the nineteen eighties, he helped promote confusion about the causes of acid rain, the health effects of smoking, and ye ozone hole depletion. And in nineteen ninety one, Fred took some of his previous writing, repurposed it into an article and added Ravel's name as a co author. Now all of this happened at a time when Revel was gravely ill.

The paper was skeptical about climate change.

So you've got this subject matter expert, now in old age, claiming that maybe the science behind global heating isn't as solid as he previously claimed, maybe it shouldn't be believed, Maybe there's nothing to be concerned about here.

And so Revel's reputation as a climate scientist was weaponized for climate skepticism.

But people who knew Revel, including his research assistant who had been working with him for twelve years at this point, said Revel had been hoodwinked into attaching his name to the paper.

A lot of people cast doubts about whether Revel was really able to consent properly to being an author on this paper.

And the paper had serious repercussions on the public debate around climate change. For example, the then Senator al Gore had been talking about the greenhouse effect and climate change for many years, but now the top scientist on climate change was apparently doubting his own work. It cast doubts on the whole thing.

This was made to use to make Al Gore look foolish.

You know, the person who you told us had showed all these things about how the climate is warming, even he doesn't actually think it's warming. This is something we've seen happen again and again in the climate skepticism movement.

Is that, you know, oil and gas.

The people sort of working to fight understanding on climate change. They get real scientists to take up climate skeptic positions. However, these scientists are very rarely like climate scientists.

In fact, it's almost always physicists.

I don't know what is wrong with physicists producing these people who are willing to do this, But so they'll get these very prominent physicists to sort of be the face of climate skepticism. And because these are actual scientific experts and people usually trust scientific experts, their skepticism ends up looking very powerful.

Fred Singer was repeatedly interviewed about the paper Have the Huge Change in Revel's view on global heating in the interviews, he just outright lies about the situation.

When he joins US Live from Washington, DC, Doctor Singer, what was Roger Ruvel's view of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas when you co author that caused most article back in nineteen ninety, he was very relaxed about it. He basically.

Looked at this as a grand geophysical experiment.

And this, of course wasn't the first time something like this happened. The Roger level case is just one of many alarming examples of how a big oil lobby uses real scientific experts to amplify their quack science.

I mean, there have been others, so I mean, this was a strategy that was really engineered by big tobacco in the fifties and sixties. But for example, they created a group called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee that was supposedly going to research whether tobacco was harmful. It was in fact a propaganda body. But it was headed by a molecular biologist who didn't like genetics, and so he again was a scientific expert. He of course was in no way like a health expert or a doctor or a medical researcher, but he lent the sort of way of expertise to this group.

So when we think about misinformation, we think about Russian state television, but one of the things you write about is actually way way scarier. And it's our idea that these days the propagandis are family and friends, and that's because of social media. I wonder if you could take us way back to twenty sixteen and explain how social media really changed the state of misinformation. Yeah.

So social media, we can think of it broadly as having changed the way information can flow between people. It's kind of special in that it changes very quickly, and there's always new platforms, and the way information is flowing is always changing. First it soundbites, and then it's pictures, and then it's words, and then it's words and pictures, and then it's videos, and so the change is so fast that it's sort of hard to respond regulate. Here's a few of the things that really matter about social media and why misinformation can spread so well on there. So one thing is that people can get big platforms even when they don't really deserve big platforms. Another thing is that it's hard to know the source of information. So if you're thinking about like person to person social exchange of information, you're looking at another person in the face. You can see who they are, you know where they live, you know how you met them, You probably know other people they're connected to. You have a lot of information about who they are. Once you get onto social media, you're looking at profiles where there may or may not even be a real person corresponding with that profile. That profile could be bought, it could be a Russian agent, it could be another political agent, it could be someone's secret earner account where they're trying to do something, and so you have less ability to judge your social sources as trustworthy or not trustworthy. In addition, we see propagandists able to take advantage of various aspects of social media to sort of tweak our social feelings of trust in ways that are much harder to do person to person. So, for example, they can get a bunch of bots to like a piece of misinformation, and then that looks to us like this is very popular.

A lot of people like it, a lot of people trust it.

That's a cue to us that it is trustworthy that we we ought to engage in, or that we could share, and so there are ways for our you know, our normal knowledge forming mechanisms to get hacked.

And Kalin says that right now a lot of people don't trust the institutions that we've historically gained knowledge from, like traditional media and subject matter experts.

A lot of people argue that for the most part, people are trusting of experts still, including of scientists, and yet we do see this kind of phenomenon of people describing the New York Times as fake news. A lot of what is driving that, I think is cynical actors who are trying to erode public trust in science, and especially you see this in the US among right wing politicians and especially populist type politicians, because of course populism is associated with this kind of rejection of authority or expertise. But there's often a reason people are doing it, which is that if you can get people not to trust the real scientists, not to trust the real journalists, not to trust these good sources of information, then they're easier to control.

Just backing up, we've got bad actors who are trying to influence public opinion so that those people don't say, stop protesting in the streets about the government's inact on the climate crisis, and these bad actors are putting a share ton of money into advertising and propaganda campaigns, but they're also influencing our politics through lobbying and funding the campaigns of politicians who side with their bogus narrative. This might seem pretty bleak that there is a solution.

Thing.

Number One, campaign finance reform.

That's a depressing topic because the people who are financed are the ones who have to implement campaign finance reform. But without it, it's pretty hard to see how we'll get effective climate action because there are just so many politicians who are funded by oil gas call these massively wealthy corporations that can afford to give a lot of money to politicians. Another thing has to do with regulation of online content, so free speech.

We don't want to impinge on free speech.

We do want it to be the case that all of us can be in informational environments that allow us to form good beliefs, that give us the freedom to think effectively about what's happening around us, to learn about the world, that give us the freedom to make good choices for our own lives and protect our own interests. So you know, there are ways in which we can think about us as having rights to be in good informational environments as well as other people having rights to share bad information.

One thing a lot of philosophers have talked about.

Is the difference between stopping speech and deplatforming. So we don't think of people as having a right to have any platform for their false beliefs or bad ideas, Like nobody is entitled to come to a university and get of talks on their flat earth theories.

In the same way people.

Aren't entitled to have the algorithm on Instagram promote their content for them.

To a lot of people, that's not an entitlement.

So we can have regulations where people can say what they want, but where we don't have to platform spread what they're seeing. And you know, it's not as if people have an entitlement to even be on social media platform that's up to social media platforms, and if you know, they were to take that more seriously, I would think a good model is something like, when you get onto a platform like this, you sign a user agreement or a contract that says if I promote too much misleading or harmful.

Content, then the platform can.

Kick me off because the platform has a standard for the kind of content you can share.

Of course, that gets into very difficult about who's.

Going to decide what kind of content is misleading and harmful.

And that is legitimately tricky, but sort of in.

The extremes, there's a lot of content that we can you know, it's just not controversial that it's misleading, that it's interfering with people's abilities to function and make decisions, and that's the kind of stuff that could be a gimme to say if people are sharing too much of that, then they don't get platformed on this.

I think the.

Sort of most promising model for how to regulate niche online is to have something analogous like to the EPA or the FDA, a regulatory agency where we're not thinking about like passing laws in Congress that say this is what you can do on Instagram, but rather we have a set of guidelines that social media platforms have to comply to, and then these regulatory agencies can work flexibly with those media companies to comply with those guidelines.

Okay, that's big honors, maybe not up your alley, but there are a ton of ways we can protect ourselves from missing disinformation.

We're fucking the future, We're un fucking the future.

If you like me, you might feel totally equipped to recognize miss and disinformation, and yet most of us have fallen for it. I definitely have. So what can we actually do here?

What fuck can I do?

I'm joined again by the brilliant Maggie bed Maggie. How's it going, Hey.

Chris, I'm doing really well.

But honestly, some of the steph you and kill just talked about it's pretty fucking depressing. I mean, even those of us who think of ourselves as savvy can be easily duped by misinformation.

Because the people who put that shit out do a really good job of it.

And some of it is disinformation. They really are trying to make us believe something that's not true. I don't know about you, but I think of times when I've been fooled but like a visual image and I believe it because I see it with my own eyes and then I realized it was manipulated.

Well, that's the same thing that happens with facts.

Totally me too, I mean, Kaitlin had one tip I wanted to share about how we can steal clear misinformation. I mean, she says one of the easiest ways to spot misinformation relate to the climate change is to look out for news of articles where climate disansers are being blamed on something other than the climate crisis.

When you see these kind of social consequences of climate change, like, for example, conflicts related to climate crises or refugees, lines that are casting doubt about the real causes, like oh, this would have happened even without rising heat, or it wasn't actually the climate that caused this, lines about I'm meant being a conspiracy. And then I talked about these kinds of distracting claims where they're talking about harms from climate mitigation or green energy, and those harms might be real, but they're distracting from the much much more serious harms of continuing to use fossil fuels.

Oh, I think that is such a good point. Misinformation isn't just incorrect information. It's also information that doesn't include the full picture. Maybe it's facts cherry picked from a larger study that paint a picture that is very misleading. So if you're wondering if what you're reading is misinformation or disinformation. Here are some red flags to look out for. First of all, I am very skeptical of emotional reactions. Content that uses really emotional or charge language, it just should be checked. You just want to make sure all the facts are straight before retweeting or sharing it. It's so tempting because you're like, oh my gosh, that's shocking. I'm gonna share it, and then you know, just take a breath, check it out. And when something sounds too good or too bad, or or maybe too shocking to be true, well it just might not be true. Also, always make sure you check the source of the information. Who funded the study that is being cited. Is it a reputable academic resource or a corporation that stands to gain financially? And if it's the latter, maybe take that information with a grain of salt.

Oh, that last one is good. Always check out the source of the information and that you're conveying the full picture. And that's what the fuck you can do?

What the fuck can I do? Oh?

Fucked?

That's all for this episode. Next time, I'm fucking the future Bill neither science guy.

A question I have for conservative me is why are you doing this? Why are you ignoring the facts. What is it and to think, well, they're doing it for the money.

What money?

We're all gonna die if you keep this up.

I think you're really going to enjoy it until then. I'm Chris Turney signing off from Sydney, Australia. Thanks for joining me in I'm Fucking the Future.

Weird Fucking the Future.

I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meredith Brian. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen and Renee Colvert. Ron Howard, Brian, Carral Welker and Nathan Chloke are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice. Sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by Lillly Hayden and producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking the Future on Apple Podcasts or whether you get your podcasts

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