Building resilient information spaces

Noz Urbina: So to give a concrete example, I remember that Elon Musk proposed the idea of basically user flagging. So community moderation rather than professional moderation. I think that professional moderation by actual fact checkers has become a polarised topic. It’s so tragic because I was inspired to come on this journey a little bit because I have people very close to me who’ve gone fully down the rabbit hole and done what I call the truth inversion.

So if you’re qualified, if you’re educated, if you’re certified, if you’re part of an institution, these are all checks, these are all marks against you. If you learned about your domains, if you’re an actual doctor, then you’ve been indoctrinated. I actually had someone who doesn’t know anything about Latin roots make that crack about, you know, that’s the reason they call it indoctrination.

So it’s this idea that the more traditionally respected the source, the less it should be trusted. Which makes fact checkers completely useless because the fact checking is an institution where experts actually look at the research and the facts, and therefore that’s how you know that they’re liars because they’re part of the conspiracy.

I have these people in my life and I don’t know how to – I still haven’t solved this one, obviously. But what bothers me about that is that you propose something like community moderation as an antidote, which sounds good on the surface. Okay? So people will point out misinformation when they see it, but it ignores, first of all, you’re putting truth up to a vote, which doesn’t work. Because the majority can be wrong and badly. We just have to look at history to look at the times that the majority has been really wrong about some deep factual and ethical questions.

Dan Brown: We don’t even have to go that far back.

Noz Urbina: No, no, like within our lifetimes. So the majority can be badly wrong. So putting truth up to a vote doesn’t work. And then also it ignores the concept of filter bubbles, which is that the community who’s gonna see my junk that I put out there is my community, which is already predisposed to think like me. So what you get then is an automatic fragmentation of truth, which is that the truths that my community believes will survive and the lies or misinformation that we believe in will also survive. So I’m using truth in air quotes there.

Dan Brown: I was just gonna respond to that. So there’s a lot of work among academics who study disinformation on how to improve media literacy. And again, this is sort of part of the impetus for my work is that’s putting a huge onus on the consumers of information, which is fair. We should be responsible for consuming and thinking critically.

One of the strategies that they talk about is called lateral reading. Right? And the idea is, I’m not just gonna read from one source. If I read something, I’m going to look across at different sources on the same topic and try to get a more complete picture, let’s say. Right? Or look at kind of all the different potential viewpoints or perspectives on this. Even if there’s not really a lot of disagreement, it’s just good practice to not rely on just one source.

So that’s lateral reading. And again, it puts a lot of onus on us. And they have shown it to be successful that folks who held a view very obstinately, when they were asked to do some lateral reading, they loosened their perspective on that view.

And information spaces are not well designed to encourage lateral reading. So I completely agree with you that community moderation can either put an onus on my community to do that stuff, can backfire and force negative reinforcement. So what are some of the other approaches that we can take? How do we design an information space that not only demands features that we come up with, but that are grounded in practices like lateral reading? And again, I don’t know that anyone’s ever done that. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but we’re at the beginning of this journey.

I don’t like the Elon Musk Twitter solution for the same reason that you do. It feels like a cop out, right? It feels like it’s a way for Twitter not to take responsibility for some of the stuff that flows through it. And I would like to change the mindset of like, what if designers of platforms, designers of these ecosystems take more responsibility? And that means raising the bar a little bit, changing the metrics, whatever it is, to understand, to encourage more resilient spaces.

Noz Urbina: So I can already picture a few things. I’ve noticed design patterns in applications I use. So for example, YouTube lets me create playlists. Instagram is horrifically bad at letting me manage what I want to keep track of. So there’s apps which encourage you to just hook up the feeding tube to your – hook up the feeding tube and just lie back and let them handle everything. Clockwork Orange style. So just turn on the screen and let it rip.

And so then there are other applications which put you in control of managing. So when I’m – I haven’t done this yet, I’m gonna probably do a whole episode about my tips. And I have tips like create playlists. Make a conscious and intentional decision about what you want to consume. Don’t let the algorithm – don’t just sit down and open your mouth and let the algorithm feed you. So there’s letting people curate and make intentional decisions about what they wanna do.

We have the problem that we’re fighting. You’re offering nutritious, balanced meals that might have to be home prepped and the other people are offering fast food straight into the car window. So it’s hard. There has to be a balance of market desire. Like I think there is now. Like people are being more conscious. Like I don’t want to eat McDonald’s hamburgers all day, every day as my information diet.

But what I was picturing when you were talking was – I don’t wanna get too nerdy, but the use of tagging. So if I have a thing, a tweet, an article, whatever, in an environment, we have the ability today to automatically tag that and say, what is this talking about? Is it talking about the war in the Middle East? Is it talking about Ukraine? Is it talking about the survival of the species? What are the key topics here and offering – facilitating that lateral reading. Saying, do you want to explore this topic laterally?

We don’t do that today. We don’t give you the out. We give you the feed, which just kind of rolls by your eyes or dead ends. Here’s a post. Aren’t you outraged? Like, or reshare? Those are your options. But explore is not there. And so that seems like an obvious, easy way to do that. Have you heard of an app called Ground News?

Dan Brown: I keep hearing about it. Yes.

Noz Urbina: Okay. So I haven’t pumped it enough on the pod yet. I’m obsessed with it because what it does is it algorithmically curates a newsfeed for you, but every item in that feed is a summary of the topic being discussed. Then you have a whole menu, and it literally gives you a spectrum. It buys into the very American-centric left-right binary, but it gives you a left-right-center spectrum, and you can see which outlets are reporting this, which are not, how do they report it differently?

And it gives you things like it tells you: Do you wanna check your own blind spots? Do you know that you haven’t been checking about this story? Did you know that you haven’t been checking these sources? Did you know who owns these sources? So it actually tells you about the ethical sourcing of the ingredients of your information diet. And I think that kind of app, once you’ve gone there, it’s so hard to go back. It’s such a – I still get tons of my news off YouTube, but when I want to actually learn about something, that’s such a better way for me to feel comfortable that I am getting a more balanced picture, or I’m aware of the context.

That’s it. I’m aware of the context around what I’m consuming. And the modern web, as we know it, it feels like it’s been on a mission to destroy context.

Dan Brown: I love that observation. We talk a lot about framing on Unchecked and how sometimes the information itself is true, but the way it’s framed makes it – reading a lot about the role of the mainstream media and media manipulation in the distribution of disinformation has made me very critical and sensitive to how a lot of media presents information.

So I like what you’re saying about if the goal is to sort of disarm a news source’s ability to convey bias and to ground anything that I’m reading in this kind of larger context, even if I don’t go to any of those other sources, there’s a seed that’s been planted that there’s more to this than just what I get in your single source.

Noz Urbina: Yeah. I love it and there’s something magical about just scrolling by horizontally and seeing all the ways that the headlines are written about the same story.

Dan Brown: That’s incredible. Yeah.

Noz Urbina: So I don’t wanna turn this into an ad for Ground News, but the idea is that there are ways to try to recontextualise and restore context to information.

Dan Brown: You mentioned tagging. I mean, as an information architect, tags are a huge, important tool for me in the work that I do because it establishes context. We had on the show Dr. Adam Ratner. He’s a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York City. He has a book out called “The Booster” where he goes into measles epidemics and kind of what caused them in vaccine hesitancy and all the rest of that.

He gave us an example that I was not aware of – that if you go look in the vaccine tag or category on Amazon, you’ll see many, many books about the dangers of vaccines. And that’s probably most of them. And that’s because the tag is essentially being misused. Or is it? Right? I mean, arguably they are about vaccines.

Noz Urbina: Right.

Dan Brown: But the assumption is that when you click on the vaccines tag, you’ll see stuff about how vaccines work. But now it’s filled with these self-published books that are misleading or that are exclusively misinformation. We called that out on the podcast as double tagging, right? This idea that I’m using doublespeak, double tagging – using a tag in a way that it means one thing but I’m using it to further my agenda or whatever that is.

So I think it’s really interesting to think about how even existing information systems that we have created also are ripe for abuse.

Noz Urbina: Oh, God, yeah. So there’s – I can think of two other examples that jump to mind. One is the NotAllMen hashtag. I remember talking to women at the time who said that it was so quickly co-opted. The idea was for victims to share their stories. Obviously, not all victims are women, but the idea was for victims to share their stories and it very quickly became a way for people who wanted to shut down the discussion to just say, well, not all men, and then just close the dialogue.

And the other one that I think about is Save the Children. So Save the Children was about saving children. And now it’s a dog whistle for Q Anon. It’s now saving the children from the pedophile conspiracy run by the vaccine manufacturers and big tech. So it’s very hard to control that.

Dan Brown: Yes.

Noz Urbina: And so I’m – I don’t know what useful or constructive I’m adding, but I’m just pointing out. I think understanding the failure modes is important.

Dan Brown: Yes, exactly. When hashtags were invented, right? Maybe someone thought, oh, these could be abused. Right? But I mean, I think it’s also the evolution of this ecosystem, right? Sort of like user-invented tool for tagging content and then it started to build product features around the use of tags, never thinking about the potential for abuse of those tags.

Is it because it evolved gradually? Is it because it evolved out of users? Is it because the field is dominated by a certain demographic and they don’t think about abuse? Any number of reasons why it evolved that way. But now we are in an information space where we have created these mechanisms that not only allow, but in some ways encourage abuse.

And so, I mean, I think about these examples anytime a designer says, well, what can we do? What role do we have? You know, if this is how they want to use it, this is how they want to use it. I think we can be more deliberate about how we shape spaces so that we can prevent this kind of co-opting, for example. I don’t know what that looks like, but no one’s experimenting with it. Like, let’s get out there and experiment with it.

Noz Urbina: I have something on my mind, which I want to get out. I don’t know if it’s in context or not, but I feel like I can’t move on to the next topic because it keeps coming back in my mind because we’re talking about like, we didn’t know. And I feel very guilty on this whole truth collapse thing that I waited so long to speak up because I remember in 2015 – and I try to stay very strictly apolitical. So whether you think this is about Trump or Obama or Biden or Stephen Miller, you pick your poison.

But around – it’s now the 10th anniversary of when I was talking with my friends about the rise of authoritarianism in the US, which was a super hot take five years ago. I was a nutball. And 10 years ago people thought it was totally insane for even mentioning the topic.

And my point here is that if you’re interested in this, if you’re worried about this, getting aware of the mechanisms – how this works and how it’s been done, and how it’s been done intentionally, how it’s been done by some of the best in the business, how it’s been done by the KGB during the Cold War and the CIA during the Cold War. Learning about how information and narratives can be weaponised and manipulated is just useful.

I’m from Latin America. You know, my family’s Peruvian. We’re familiar with dictators and autocracies. So what was happening for me in the US is that everyone just kind of believed we can take all the ingredients of a cake, mix them up in a bowl, put them in the oven, wait, and we won’t get a cake. And I’m going, no, you’re gonna get a cake. It doesn’t matter if you’re the richest country in the world or whatever, that if you go down this path, it only leads in one direction.

And when I come back to the design concept, I say that the internet or the digital kills context, and it also destroys space and time. We live in a constant now. Like Justin Timberlake gets beaten up for stuff he did literally 20 years ago. On Google when I hit enter, what happened 20 years ago and what happened yesterday are presented in the same way. It doesn’t matter.

And I guess it’s a bit of a call to action about – this is a pressing issue that affects all of us. And I guess if you’re listening to this podcast, you kind of already know that. But I have found it so useful to get out of the North American or Western bubble and see how do people form opinions and how have they formed opinions in other environments. Because I think we had an illusion of immunity in the industrialised world. That couldn’t happen here philosophy.

I was in London for Brexit. And the British were telling me, not gonna happen. Couldn’t happen. Impossible. Just absurd. And then I was there for the beginning of the shift in American politics, to put it politely. And in both cases, I remember being on a WhatsApp group with my friends and them going like, how bad could this get? Like are you talking about boots on the ground? And me lifting my finger and wanting to type and scream – yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m talking about secret police. I’m talking about unmarked cars and I’m talking about boots on the ground.

And even me being unwilling to put that in writing at the time, just to say that we are in a place where we all have to be open to thinking about what are the externalities, what are the long-term outcomes, what are the unintended outcomes of what we’re participating in?

Dan Brown: Yes. Yeah, I think you’re right. And I’m a natural optimist. I can’t help but think things are gonna be okay. And it’s gonna be a rough road. But I may not see it, but I have kids and I want to leave the world – I want to believe for their sake that the world that they will have in their adulthood and when they hopefully have children of their own will have learned a little bit.

The one thing in the here and now that keeps me optimistic – and this may be naive – is as devastating and as harmful as the technologies that we work on have been in how they’re being used, there’s never been in human history a more powerful, a higher resolution mirror for civilisation. And nothing makes people aware of their own failings, nothing raises self-awareness like staring at themselves. And now we have this reflective surface in the form of the internet.

And I don’t think – it is, at this point in time, beyond any one person or one entity’s control. One of the things that earlier authoritarians had was control over every aspect of communication. And now we have a media ecosystem that is literally bigger than anything else in the world and cannot be controlled. So now we have this thing that’s uncontrollable and it’s a mirror that helps us look at ourselves.

And I think that it will take some time, but in the long run that self-awareness that it will raise will compel us to – how did Obama put it? – continue to bend the arc of the universe towards justice.

Noz Urbina: I agree. I do feel that, and I know that we will figure it out. I do think that the self-awareness and the maturity of societies kind of goes up into the right. I agree. Well said. We will figure this out in time. I’m not gonna say it’s gonna get better before it gets worse, but I think we will figure this out.

Dan Brown: It gets worse before it gets better.

Noz Urbina: Yeah. But also a good thing that I’ll add to that is that secrecy was an asset, but – so you’re kind of alluding to, or maybe putting what you just said in different words. When you control the information space, one of the things is that you’re depending on what you don’t want to be known just being kept from being known.

But what is kind of good about this is that everyone’s sort of addicted to the clicks on all sides. And so people are doing things much more publicly than they were ever done before. And so your action-reaction time becomes shorter. So you do something and then people can react to it immediately. So they’re high resolution real time – as all mirrors are – real-time mirror. So your ability to know what’s going on, have a public reaction, motivate, organise, do something about it is enhanced.

And also when you have a bunch of people who are motivated to share all of their actions, then it’s just harder for them. It’s not the kind of people who could actually stay in the shadows because we promote those who want to be in the spotlight.

Dan Brown: Yeah.

Noz Urbina: And it’s a contradiction in terms. You can’t have somebody who’s simultaneously addicted to the spotlight yet good at lurking in the shadows. So that kinda helps.

Dan Brown: Yes.

Noz Urbina: Alright, so Dan, thank you so much for joining us. I gotta say that these episodes with you have gone by faster than ever. Than many I’ve ever done. It’s been a pleasure, I think.

Dan Brown: I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk because we haven’t taken a step back. We’ve just been heads down producing episodes, doing interviews. So this was really helpful to take a step back and take stock of how far we’ve come and what we’ve thought about. So thank you.

Noz Urbina: My pleasure. So is there – if we’re gonna end on anything, do you have like a favourite lesson that jumps out at you that you’ve learned from doing Unchecked?

Dan Brown: Rachel and I do this segment at the very beginning of every episode where we look at a story about misinformation and disinformation. And I’ve really enjoyed doing that – looking back at history. It’s kind of amazing just to see how far back it goes and the different ways people have used it.

But I don’t know that I’ve got a lesson so much as one of the takeaways is, yes, a lot of this feels new, a lot of it feels unprecedented, but we are just seeing the same human behaviours again. And in some ways it’s stuff that we’ve dealt with before. And you can go to any moment in history and see how people used disinformation to further their agenda and see how people dealt with it back then. And I think there’s something to be said for that.

I have a little book recommendation if that’s okay. Annalee Newitz has got “Stories as Weapons”. There’s lots of books out there on disinformation, but I really like this one – very accessible. And they talk about all aspects of disinformation and propaganda and stuff like that. So it’s a great overview.

Noz Urbina: Fantastic. Alright. Dan Brown hosts the Unchecked Podcast – check that out where you get your podcasts. Please let your friends know about this one. We do a little bit of marketing, but we are trying to live our truth by not hammering people to death about this. So we do rely on word of mouth. Let your friends know and please let us know. This is a hard topic and it’s hard work, and your feedback really fuels us. So thank you so much, everybody who was listening. Thank you, Dan, and see y’all next time.