What Lemmings Teach Us About Misinformation

The internet has been touted as the greatest ever revolution in information technology. The entire sum of human knowledge may one day be accessed through this portal of wonder. But what actually is “knowledge” and how reliable is it anyway?

The internet empowers anyone to publish content and share information – regardless of its accuracy. And social media has fuelled fact-sharing even further. Plus crowdsourcing is now a common tool for gathering and amassing huge volumes of information, such as with Wikipedia. But is this improving our access to knowledge or leading us astray with misinformation?

There are a few different ways that misinformation occurs. The problem is that the internet amplifies each of these errors to dangerous proportions.

Careless Misinformation

Misinformation Fact #1*

Lemmings commit suicide by jumping off cliffs, right?

Wrong.

Lemmings do fall off cliffs, though. This, however, has far more to do with incredible population explosions of lemmings crowding into a small area and falling over by weight of numbers than by any suicidal tendencies of the rodents in question.

The lemming example is a perfect illustration of how fake facts can become pervasive and enter into common knowledge.

Most of us will have believed lemmings are naturally suicidal animals for years; great hordes of lemmings racing off cliffs to commit suicide by the truckload. It is such an ingrained piece of knowledge that it is the first – and probably only – fact anyone brings to mind when discussing the furry little critters.

Lemming suicide is the butt of jokes and even the basis for that series of addictive computer games back in the ’90s. Did you know it was untrue?

The lemming myth seems to have originated from 19th Century naturalists, who grabbed the wrong end of the proverbial on studying the creatures in their native habitat in Norway. This myth was given further weight by a famous Walt Disney nature film, White Wilderness, released in 1958. To capture a mass suicide of lemmings on film, the filmmakers simply brought truckloads of lemmings to Alberta, Canada, and threw them into a river while the cameras rolled.

The filmmakers thought they were merely recreating a commonly occurring natural event. But what they in fact did was perpetuate and entrench a myth that has endured ever since.

Although the truth has been established for a long time by scientists, the myth is now so well entrenched that the concept of the suicidal lemming will probably always remain with us.

What this story illustrates is how misinformation can create a world-view just as strong and just as widely believed as the truth and can dramatically alter one’s perception of reality. After all, reality is a very individual thing. We all perceive the world around us based on the information and experiences we store in our heads.

On the internet, this sort of misinformation is rife. Fact-checking is not always common within the blogosphere, for example. Many are content to regurgitate ‘popular wisdom’ instead of checking the truth of their claims, and thereby perpetuate myths. How many times have you come across an email chain that puts forward a sensational fact which on closer inspection is distorted? How often do you come across an email or a blog post that distorts the truth by only including half the story?

Recently, I received an email chain about Joe Arpaio, a county sheriff in Arizona. The email, commonly reposted around the net so you can read it for yourself, displays some of the methods Joe uses within his prison system and is obviously aimed at that proportion of the population who believe criminals should be treated like dogs. On the chain email I got, many previous recipients had already added their comments supporting the guy. Lots of “hell yeahs” etc.

So I did some research. I didn’t have to look far: Wikipedia was able to provide a great deal more context to the information than offered by the email. Here was mention of the various court judgements against Arpaio’s office; the 2,150 law suits against him and the class action law suit currently running that claims Arpaio is violating the constitutional rights of detainees. Despite the deaths in detention, the harm caused and the $50 million in claims against his office, a recent study showed no decrease in recidivist behaviour when compared with the previous term. Changes your perception of the original information, doesn’t it.

Redundant Knowledge

Misinformation Fact #2*

The Earth has only one moon. That much is certain, surely!

Wrong again!

In fact, there are at least seven sizeable bodies orbiting the Earth. There are currently six identified Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) that also follow the Earth around the sun, although not necessarily following a strict orbit as does the moon we know. The first of these NEAs was only discovered in 1997, meaning thousands of text-books became incorrect overnight.

Sometimes, as with our knowledge of the moon, misinformation is merely caused by the progression of human knowledge. What we know to be true today can be exposed to be false tomorrow. Such is the case with the moon (although the additional moons are so inconsequential that they are unlikely to figure in anything but the most nerdish of conversations).

The march of human knowledge will never stop, and will always result in the printing of new text books and the updating of encyclopaedias. We will always trust the most recent edition of an encyclopaedia over one from twenty years ago. Trouble is, on the net the date of submission is not always so obvious in the information we process.

One of the strengths of the internet is the ability to respond incredibly fast to new information. The problem is that the old information doesn’t necessarily get deleted when the new information is uploaded.

While researching a magazine article earlier today, Google served up hundreds of responses for me to sift through. What I discovered was that the top results were actually three or four years old. When I did find more recent articles on the subject, on page 2 of the results, the newer information contradicted and updated the older information.

What Google is unable to do is check the factual context of the results delivered. There isn’t an algorithm available that can track whether the facts are still understood to be true.

As such, we need to be continually vigilant that when we use the internet for a source of information, and where possible, restrict ourselves to the most recent data.

The Mythologising of Celebrity

Misinformation Fact #3*

Walter Raleigh is famous for many things, including the discovery and introduction to England of tobacco and potatoes.

Except, he didn’t!

Tobacco was first recorded in England in 1556, four years before Raleigh was born, and found its way to England via France thanks to the French explorer Jean Nicot.

Similarly, potatoes were introduced to Spain around the same period and no doubt spread to England from there.

As the above example shows, information around famous figures seems particularly susceptible to misinformation. Raleigh is a far more familiar historical figure than an obscure French explorer and is therefore brought more immediately to mind when discussing the period. Plus, rumour sticks when celebrity is involved. Raleigh obviously had better PR than Nicot.

And no place demonstrates the problems of celebrity rumour more so than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is touted as a complete comprehensive database, with accuracy maintained through democracy. Anyone can edit and update information on Wikipedia, correcting mistakes and publishing knowledge based on consensus. As Mashable recently pointed out, what seems like online democracy at its best can lead to distorted misinformation.

Mike Scott of The Waterboys wrote in The Guardian about his experiences with Wikipedia. He had discovered his biography on the site was full of factual inaccuracies. So, naturally, he edited and corrected the entry – probably the most qualified person to do so.

Yet, within hours, Mike’s corrections were removed and the inaccuracies restored. The fictional crowdsourced version of Mike Scott was proving more resilient than the real person.

Mike eventually proved the truth in his words by blogging about the experience elsewhere – alerting the Wikipedia editors to his ultimate authority on the matter – and his listing is now accurate. But it is this ability for people to hang onto misinformation, even when faced with the truth, that makes crowdsourced information a risky proposition.

This cloud of misinformation is even more apparent in politics. With a presidential election happening a few months from now in the US, we can expect more media manipulation and the careful drip-feeding of information to build a manufactured perception of the characters in our minds. As each side releases each new factoid, our perceptions of the candidates and their parties are challenged and adjusted. But our perceptions may never actually be accurate.

We are presented with carefully curated rhetoric and judiciously worded statements instead of the complete and uncontested truth about either candidate. We are used to this phenomenon and can usually engage our critical faculties to make a judgement, but the internet dramatically increases the ability to mould perception through misinformation.

Just Give Me the Facts, Ma’am

The power of the internet is such that inaccuracies and myths can be spread far wider and far more pervasively than ever before in human history. Accepted knowledge becomes the knowledge most commonly believed to be true, instead of what is actually true. The group consensus becomes truth and reality becomes transient and changeable.

Sometimes the small voice of authority pointing out the truth can be lost underneath the blogs and forums and bulletin boards and websites and social media services continuing to project the falsehood. Even worse, there are those times when information is deliberately falsified for some other gain – usually commercial or political.

These deliberate falsehoods add further mud into the pool of knowledge, continuing the dilution of the reliability and usefulness of the internet.

It has long been said that history is written by the victors. We have known of this bias in information for centuries. But never before has history, and all human knowledge, been recorded by such a large – and often misinformed – committee.

The biggest global repository for human knowledge we have ever known needs to be treated with respect. Adding to this huge database of facts should be a huge responsibility, but is virtually unregulated when compared to traditional forms of information.

Recently, there has been talk of creating a code of conduct for bloggers to bring a sense of community responsibility to one of the most powerful communication tools available. Bloggers have as much influence as journalists in creating the cloud of information we are faced with every day. But how many blogs have perpetuated falsehoods, or spin or outright lies in the serving of personal agendas? And how does this distort the greater sum of online knowledge?

In a sense, the internet is becoming our “hive-mind”, but one that has an unparalleled ability to shape the way we see the world and behave within it.

The Matrix may not be such an unreal idea after all, as the internet grows in influence over our daily lives. Sure, we won’t be living within a computer construct, but if the world I experience is filtered through the knowledge and information that forms my opinions and behaviour, how real can that world ever be? How much of what I believe is based on falsehood or careless omission or bias? And will that trend continue to increase?

If we continue to allow truth to fight an unfair fight with inaccuracy online, we risk promoting myth and spin. With our perception of the world and everything within it distorted and biased, we could find ourselves, like lemmings, led by misinformation over the cliff of ignorance.

* The Misinformation Facts quoted in this article are taken from The QI Book of General Ignorance, based on the brilliant BBC TV panel show.