But to what extent this can be blamed on social media is still an open question. “Polarization,” once painted as a global crisis stemming from online platforms, now looks more like a product of the highly idiosyncratic political and media culture in the U.S. One recent study found that polarization stayed the same or decreased in almost every other country from 1980 to 2020.
Teasing out the impact of misinformation on electoral outcomes has proved so challenging that the authors of the Misinformation Review piece suggested it “sets up an impossible task for researchers.”
“Lots of people would tell you that it can be done if we had access to the right data or resources,” said one of the authors, Irene Pasquettto, assistant professor at the College of Information, University of Maryland. “I personally believe that this is something that cannot be quantified, not ‘scientifically.’”
Those consulted for this article predicted the field would adapt to encompass emerging findings, possibly with an increasing focus on disinfo campaigns conducted in the global south. At least one faction of researchers has already returned to “foundational frameworks” that predated 2016 in the face of growing criticism.
‘The frame of disinformation has failed us’
At the societal level, the overwhelming focus on whether information is true as the baseline for political analysis is beginning to feel increasingly blinkered.
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately … about how the frame of disinformation has failed us and what we can do differently,” Marwick said. “The problem is less about ‘units of facts,’ right? The problem is with these big, sticky stories, and a lot of these stories are hundreds of years old.”
