Are Smartphones Making "Fake News" And Disinformation Worse?

Smartphones have revolutionized how we produce and consume information on the go. They allow us to photograph the unexpected as it unfolds and livestream our lives and the world around us. Most importantly, they allow us to consume the world no matter where we are, from skimming emails on the bus to work to streaming a video during our lunchbreak to catching up on the news on the ride home to reading an ebook while at a child’s sports practice. Our phones are never far from our sides, granting us instant access to the web at large. Yet, their tiny screens and on-the-go usage promotes the very behaviors that help “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation and foreign influence spread, by discouraging us from researching the things we read.

The smartphone has become the dominate modality through which we access the internet. In fact, the modern web has become so synonymous with mobile access that websites are now increasingly designed mobile-first, with desktop accessibility an afterthought.

Responsive design, hidden navigation bars, minimized headers and footers and the myriad other flourishes that make mobile web consumption work with a smartphone’s tiny screen are also precisely those characteristics that make it so dangerous from the standpoint of helping to propagate false information.

Browse a typical responsive website on a mobile phone and the URL bar is quickly hidden to make more room for reading. Even while visible, the URL is typically displayed in such a small font that the subtle typographical errors used in phishing websites can be nearly impossible to spot.

Making matters worse, all of the visual branding, logos and other visual elements that make desktop sites so distinctive are frequently minimized or entirely eliminated on mobile sites to make more room for content. A “fake news” website merely has to adopt a red and black color schema and a stock WordPress template to almost perfectly resemble the real mobile CNN website, with few readers likely even noticing the missing CNN logo as they follow a link to what they think is a CNN article but is in reality a “fake news” site.

As our news consumption habits are increasingly mediated by social media, the situation becomes even more dire. A screen capture purporting to be from CNN’s Twitter account announcing the Pope has endorsed Trump is likely to be treated at face value and shared widely. Few are likely to spend the time switching over to CNN’s real Twitter account and scrolling through its feed to try and find the tweet in question to verify that it is real. Even when they discover that the tweet doesn’t seem to appear in CNN’s official Twitter account, they are likely to simply think it is either a network hiccup that prevented them from loading all of the tweets or perhaps an algorithm that is filtering the list of tweets they see, rather than recognizing that this means the tweet is likely fake.

Imagine if instead, all of the major social platforms scanned for posted images that appear to be screen captures of posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms and automatically verified whether the image in question was indeed an unmodified capture of a real post. Verified captures would have a link to the original post automatically appended to the post, while captures that cannot be verified would have a notice beside them that the capture is unverified and thus questionable.

Even something this simple would go a long way towards helping reduce a large swath of mindless sharing of falsified information.

Most importantly, however, the small screens, limited bandwidth and constrained interfaces of mobile browsers, as well as the time-constrained nature in which we use them, means we rarely conduct extensive research about an article or post before sharing it.

A user reading a social media post claiming the Pope endorsed Trump isn’t typically going to open a mobile browser window and start searching the web for information to see if the claim is true or not. At best they are going to share the post with a “not sure if this is true” disclaimer, which will still continue its spread.

Social media collaborations with fact checking organizations can help counter the most viral falsehoods, but the sheer magnitude of false information that spreads across social each day is simply beyond any human or technological ability today to counter on an individualized basis.

Instead, teaching the public “information literacy” is the best way to counter mindless consumption and sharing of false information, teaching citizens to think critically about the information they encounter.

However, information literacy is difficult to maintain in our mobile-first world. A person with 30 seconds to spare while waiting for the elevator might encounter a “Pope endorses Trump” post and have just a few seconds to decide whether to share it with all their followers or spend the next five minutes deeply researching the topic. Worse, a nascent rumor that hasn’t gone viral yet might not have enough informational traces on the web to make verifying it an easy task. Faced with the prospect of sitting down at a desktop, opening a number of browser tabs and conducting original research to verify the claim or merely sharing it and letting someone else on the web sort out its veracity, the vast majority of web users are likely to fall into the latter category.

The simple fact is that our smartphone-mediated mobile web encourages all of the behaviors that are absolutely antithetical to information literate consumption. Their tiny screens and constrained interfaces mean we are unlikely to open large numbers of tabs and conduct extensive original research on a topic. The on-the-go irregular blips of time in which we turn to our phones means we don’t even typically have the time to properly contemplate whether the post in question even seems reasonable, let alone actually research it. We merely forward on and let others figure things out.

There is no shared responsibility or consequences on the web. The only incentives are to be the first. Being wrong has no penalty.

Could we help fix some of this by using machine learning to lend context back to the things we consume? Perhaps AI tools that help link the content we are currently consuming back to the results from web searches for its key premises to yield additional background details and perspectives? While this can go wrong, it can be quite helpful if executed correctly.

Putting this all together, as society’s access to the web becomes increasingly mobile, mediated by short bursts of attention and constrained interfaces, we must recognize the impact of those characteristics on how we evaluate the information we consume and their devastating impact on information literacy.

Automatic verification of social media post screen captures and automated context for at-large content would go a long way towards helping us better navigate the treacherous and uncharted waters of the online realm.

In the end, rather than quick fixes and a fixation on social media platforms, we need to step back and consider how our mobile-first web itself is changing how we consume information and how interfaces of the future might help make up for those limitations before it is too late.

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