How a loss of trust has fed the divisions in society

Tuesday, 22 March 2022

Confirmation bias: a hardwired part of human psychology, which can make us particularly vulnerable to online misinformation and disinformation.

Marianne Elliott is a co-director at The Workshop, a research, training and consultancy organisation. She has a background in law and human rights research and advocacy.

OPINION: In the past few weeks I’ve been approached by people interested in research we did back in 2019.

In response to concerns about the role of digital media in the US elections and Brexit referendum, we wanted to find out whether we should be worried about the impact of digital media on democracy here in New Zealand. If so, what could be done about it?

People are obviously interested in this research now because of the role that digital media generally, and disinformation in particular, has played in the growth of anti-vaccine and anti-mandate movements in New Zealand.

What we found was that misinformation and disinformation were undermining not only informed debate, but also public trust in all forms of information.

* Disinformation Dozen launch 65pc of anti-vax messages

Misinformation and disinformation in New Zealand are undermining not only informed debate, but public trust in all forms of information.

* Social media influences New Zealanders' opinions on politics and hurts democracy, study says

Information overload was eroding people’s capacity to focus on important and complex issues and make the informed judgements required in a healthy democracy.

Active citizenship was being undermined by online abuse, harassment and hate – particularly of women, people of colour, queer people, people with disabilities and people from minority religions. By late 2018, the overall trend was already concerning.

Marianne Elliott’s past research concluded that governments needed to act together to regulate the handful of corporations controlling the means for distributing content and communication.

We didn’t find many solutions had been empirically tested, partly because the problems were still relatively new.

But it was clear governments needed to act together to regulate the handful of corporations controlling our means of communication and content being distributed – both core aspects of our democracy.

It was equally clear that a vibrant and diverse media was crucial to democracy. It was in the public interest that public and philanthropic funding played a part in ensuring the survival of the organisations producing the news and current affairs reporting that is essential to a functioning democracy.

None of this is easy to solve. Over the past few years regulators, advocates and experts have grappled with the challenge of regulating companies with legal teams bigger than any government’s.

The “freedom” protest at Parliament left many wondering how objections to vaccines could lead to the violence and conspiracies unleashed there.

People in the media have experimented with funding models that will enable them to survive and keep telling the kind of stories that help us all understand what’s going on in our country.

But some solutions to these problems have little to do with digital media.

One of the most powerful strategies for strengthening democracy in Aotearoa is as simple, and as hard, as rebuilding trust.

Many of us are trying to understand how friends and family who started with concerns about vaccines ended up at the same protest as people who maintain a “hanging list” of public figures, believe they are exempt from the legal system and claim that trafficked children are incarcerated in a dungeon under parliament.

We want to know what we can do – individually and collectively – to combat disinformation, rebuild social cohesion and heal painful divisions in our families and communities.

To be able to talk usefully about solutions, we need to understand the problem we are trying to solve, and what caused it in the first place. Which is where things get tricky, because there are so many problems at play here, each with their own set of causes.

One way of simplifying this puzzle is to look at the upstream causes that are contributing to a number of the harms and problems we can all see downstream.

As well as helping to simplify, this approach has the advantage of being effective. Research shows that these upstream changes have the most potential to make things better for the most people in a sustained way.

So what are the upstream causes that we could work together to change?

Trust in the justice system has been undermined among Māori by how the system uses data against them.

Research into people’s susceptibility to disinformation, polarisation and radicalisation shows that people who distrust official institutions like the government, the media and the medical profession, are more likely to be persuaded by disinformation. And there are many reasons for many people to distrust these institutions.

Racism, sexism and ableism were built into the bones of the colonial institutions that are central to democracy in this country.

The people who designed our government, legislature, judiciary, media and academia did not reflect the range of people they were supposed to serve. Many of them didn’t even think it was their job to represent or serve all of us.

Their legacy is institutions which have not earned the trust of some people.

When I joined the Digital Council in 2019, we were asked to consider the role of “social licence” in the use of digital and data-driven technology across society, and particularly in government.

Instead, we spent a year asking people whose lives were directly impacted by the use of that technology whether they trusted it, if not why not, and what would need to change to make it more trustworthy.

The message that came back was clear – the trustworthiness of a specific technology, like the trustworthiness of any kind of data, was dependent on the wider social, historical and cultural systems that inform and shaped that technology or data, including through bias and discrimination.

One young participant said that seeing how data about Māori was being used in decisions in the criminal justice system “just confirms my fears about the system being built for us to lose, and when I say us, I mean Māori”.

Many of the participants in this research had very low trust in scenarios where government agencies were using data in high-stakes decision-making.

This came through particularly in workshops with Māori, Pacific and disabled participants. The level of trust in the data or technology was strongly linked to the trust in the wider organisation.

Participants were clear that to be trustworthy and trusted, decision-making systems and the interventions that result from them needed to be built for – and with – the people who are impacted. As one participant said, “the Crown must share decision-making power and resources equitably with Māori”.

There is nothing new here. Māori have been saying this forever. So have disabled people.

What might be new, at least for some people, is the connection between the failure of public institutions to diversify their leadership and share power and resources with the people they are supposed to serve, the untrustworthiness of those public institutions and the growth in the influence of disinformation.

Public institutions need to earn people’s trust.

In the long term that will look like fundamental shifts in who holds power in those institutions.

In the shorter term, it might look like passing the microphone – and the resources that go with it – to people who are trusted to generate good information in forms that are accessible, useful and effective.

The good news is that awareness of the importance of this work is growing.

I’m optimistic about social cohesion in Aotearoa, despite significant levels of division and inequity in our country.

I’m optimistic because I see signs that more and more people here are willing to acknowledge those inequities and grapple with what it will take to overcome them.