Rebecca Skippage is the editor of a team of specialist anti-disinformation journalists at BBC Monitoring and spent her Journalism Fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism researching what public service media can do to tackle misinformation.
I love to think that you’re poring over every word I write. That every carefully placed comma and elegantly constructed phrase is giving you as much joy to read as it did me to write. Sadly, though, I suspect I know what you’re doing. Reading the headline, scanning the first par, heading straight to the list. And that’s if you’ve stopped to read it at all. Oo, is that a video of a baby panda falling over? Where was I? We interact with information in the same way as those we write for: in a place and way that suits us, and engage with what catches our attention.
If we want to combat misinformation by getting good quality information to our audiences, we need to clock that, and work with it. Here are my five tips for doing that.
1.Understand your audience
- Information inequality exists. Research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows even during the pandemic, less privileged parts of the UK population are less likely to turn to news media as a source than the more privileged. Age, gender, income and education are all factors. If they’re not finding us, we need to find them. We need to shift from a top-down, ‘broadcast’ mentality that requires them to come to us, and speak to people where they are and in a way that interests them. Ask: how is this “unreached” audience networked? Which spaces are they in? What platforms? What networks? How can we meet them there, and produce material they’ll find engaging?
2. Focus on storytelling
- The disinformation-spreading ‘bad guys’ are great at producing compelling content: emotive stories of outrageous injustice, dramatic visuals, images that are just too good not to share. I’m not suggesting we use the same manipulative techniques, but in looking at why we fall for disinformation, there is invaluable intel for our own content production.
- Basically, our brains are pretty lazy. The more easily we process material, the more likely we are to believe it. And we love repetition. If we’ve heard something before, we will latch onto it with greater ease the next time. Take Donald Trump’s Twitter account which repeated allegations about voter fraud more than 70 times in the run-up to the 2020 election.
- So, focus on the human impact of disinformation and how it affects individuals. Keep design simple and engaging. Speak the language of the space you’re in. And keep repeating key points.
3. Create a community
- Information ripples out in circles, not straight lines. The bad guys get this. They know and exploit an environment where status social capital is gained by sharing engaging, entertaining or apparently useful content: where (seemingly) hyper-local insights are trusted. They build like-minded communities which rally together to around disparate, emotively-expressed causes.
- Again, we can learn from this. Anti-disinformation work shouldn’t come across as top-down, “take your medicine” education; it’s about creating a community that can work together using peer-to-peer learning and crowd-sourced problem solving.
- Does your organisation have a social community that could be grown into an army of “Anti-Disinformation Warriors”? Could you collaborate with other media organisations or community groups who share your values to build one?
4. Be agile
- In approach and process. Investigations are agenda-setting, debunks hugely valuable, but simple, smart graphics can be equally as effective. Be able to code-switch between the different platforms. Have material ready to go if it’s likely that disinfo will flood a situation (elections etc) and smart evergreen “how to avoid misinfo” content if something comes out of the blue. Have the right workflows set up to allow you to respond at pace. And as much as it pains us as journalists, don’t be afraid to repeat material (have I already mentioned that?)
5. Review impact
- It’s incredibly hard to work out if something has prevented someone from believing a lie, but we must be better at seeing what gets traction. Use platform metrics and – once you’ve created your community - listen to them to see what’s cut through.
And let’s share what we’re doing. This is a global problem; no one organisation will have the answer. It’s going to take all of us, pulling in the same direction, to come up with solutions that work.
Read Rebecca Skippage’s Journalism Fellow report: Is public service media doing enough to tackle misinformation?
