“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these, we have no shared space, and democracy is a dream.”
These are the words of Maria Ressa, the Filipina journalist and bold tech critic who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. This sentiment is more pertinent than ever today, given the recent violence and injustices caused by the spreading of misinformation and disinformation online.
The violent riots in Dublin last November, which resulted from misinformation online, may have initially been perceived as an isolated incident. Still, the recent riots in the UK suggest a more troubling pattern. The similarities between these occurrences highlight a more profound, more pervasive unrest within Western society, suggesting that these acts of violence are not sporadic but indicative of broader issues.
The horrifying violence following the recent tragic events in Southport, England, is believed to have arisen from one single tweet, which has now been traced back to a 55-year-old Cheshire woman named Bernadette Spofforth. The accused falsely claimed on the social media platform X that the Southport attacker was a man named “Ali Al-Shakati”, an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year. The baseless tweet gained an estimated 27 million impressions in a single day.
It did not take long for this rumour to have real-life consequences, as news footage soon showed rioters attacking mosques, ambushing riot police and setting fire to a hotel housing migrants. Ethnic minorities spoke of their fear of being attacked on the street.
This baseless tweet, which had catastrophic repercussions, is not the only misinformation on social media to have had implications in the real world in recent months. For Imane Khelif, the Olympic boxing gold medalist from Algeria, it took only a few false and misleading tweets for her character and reputation to be shattered worldwide.
Despite Khelif having always competed in the women’s boxing category and identifying as a female on her passport, controversy arose over her gender eligibility. Following her fight with Angela Carini, misinformation regarding her gender spread rampantly across social media.
Famous figures, such as JK Rowling, accused the boxer of having the “smirk of a male . . . enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.” Rowling and X owner and billionaire Elon Musk also re-tweeted the swimmer Riley Gaines’s posts, including the misleading statement that “men don’t belong in women’s sports.”
Some even erroneously linked Khelif to the broader debate on transgender athletes in sports. Donald Trump took to the stage at a rally in Montana to ask his audience, “Who wants men playing in women’s sports?” and continued by stating, “he would like to congratulate the young woman who transitioned from a man into a boxer.”
Beyond these reckless comments from ill-intending people, the Boston Globe mistakenly labelled Khelif as transgender in a headline that read, “Transgender Boxer Advances.” While the headline was quickly retracted, and the newspaper outlet apologised, the real-world damage of spreading such misinformation for Khelif is evident.
It can be argued that using the term “real world” in today’s environment is contradictory. As Ressa has repeatedly emphasised, there is no longer a ‘real world’ as opposed to an ‘online world’. There is only one world because we live in both worlds. Both realms, which we once believed to be safely separated by the screens of our phones, have melded into one with devastating consequences.
The Southport riots and the controversy surrounding Khelif have served as a wake-up call and a worrying reminder of the future that lies ahead.
These two cases highlight that it is often problems such as racism and transphobia which are fueling the misinformation. These events are being used and manipulated as platforms for individuals to express their prejudices under the guise of addressing real concerns. In critical thinking terms, this is coined as “motivated reasoning.”
For example, when Bernadette Spofforth and many others falsely identified the Southport suspect as an asylum seeker, it likely reflected their desire to blame asylum seekers for societal problems. Similarly, figures like Trump were quick to believe and spread the false claim that Khelif was a man, as it served their transphobic agendas.
People will always have biased opinions on issues. The problem is that people who possess false or misleading information on issues can—with the affordances of the social media age—share it with millions of others in a few minutes. Isolated lies are becoming collective lies, where accountability is scarce, and fact-checking is outpaced.
Moreover, tech companies profit by reinforcing our existing views and incentivising poor journalism, which fuels confirmation bias and leads us to ignore opposing evidence. As the historian Timothy Snyder advises us in his book On Tyranny, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom…If nothing is true, then all is a spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
In this context, critical thinking skills have become more essential than ever before.
Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel Deasy teaches the popular elective Critical Thinking class at UCD. He tells students he “fears things will get worse before they get better.”
When asked about the dangers of social media platforms such as X, he stated they were “a genuine threat to democracy and society […] people need to have a better understanding of what social media is, and what it’s designed to do.”
He explains that social media platforms “are a form of online advertising, and they’re designed to maximise the attention we give them. They’re designed to be addictive, aiming to get as much of your attention as possible so they can sell space to advertisers.”
“A great way to do this is to generate strong emotional responses, especially to make people angry or frightened. A good way to make people angry and frightened is to get them to believe that they or their families are in danger, that they are being lied to, that they aren’t allowed to say or think certain things, or that people in power despise them and their lifestyles… Whether these things are true doesn’t matter to the companies.”
How can we protect ourselves?
Students can protect themselves by taking the Critical Thinking (PHIL10160) module. To Deasy, thinking critically is as “important as knowing how to read and write.” Deasy’s module aims to teach students how to reason well, recognise when a statement genuinely supports another, understand common flaws in human reasoning, and cultivate habits that counteract these inclinations.
“My top tip for students when evaluating claims online is to approach them as if you are a good journalist or a detective”, says Deasy.
“Ask yourself: who is telling me this, and what is their motivation for saying it? What’s their evidence? What’s the full context, and is there more evidence I’m missing? Do other people disagree with them, and why? Are other reliable sources saying the same thing?”
“It’s the approach we should take to things we care about, including, maybe especially, things we agree with or that align with our prejudices,” Deasy explains.
The way forward
The pressing question we now face is: how can democracy survive when we can no longer distinguish between real and fake? Returning to Maria Ressa, she cautions that “we are all being manipulated the same way.” Social media has become a polarisation machine, eroding truth and civil discourse.
The future is worrying and uncertain. However, with the proper constraints and a societal focus on cultivating critical thinking skills to combat misinformation, we may one day restore a clear separation between the virtual world on our screens and the real world.
By Beatrice Drummond — Features Contributor
