Op-Ed: Disinformation is Our Problem, And We Are The Solution

Written by Melanie Springer Mock, PhD, Professor of English at George Fox University.

For about a minute in 1990, I worked as a sports reporter for The Newberg Graphic. Back then, the local weekly had a building, a substantial staff, its own printing press, and enough funds to hire one person–albeit a rookie–to cover Newberg sports. Although I surely made many reporting mistakes, I only remember one: I misspelled a name for an article, and received calls at my desk telephone, demanding a correction.

We definitely live in a different media landscape now. Across the country, support for local journalism has faltered, making it much harder to get accurate information about our community, its issues and institutions. Social media has stepped in to fill the void, but too often, what is shared on Facebook and other sites can be rife with disinformation, intended to cause rancor and division rather than inform. Sometimes, local news isn’t generated by people from our home community–or generated by people at all. 

Editor’s Note: Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation all have different definitions.
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that’s spread unintentionally due to a minunderstanding.
Disinformation is false or inaccurate information that is deliberately created and spread with the intention to deceive, mislead, and potentially cause harm.
Malinformation is information based on facts, but taken out of context or exaggerated with the intent to harm an individual, organization, or country.
The words are often used interchangably, but it’s important to understand the distinction for this op-ed.

The resulting media environment has deepened our community’s ideological differences over the last few years, making it harder to trust our neighbors. Rather than coalescing around issues about which we might all agree–like assuring that Newberg’s children can thrive–we take sides by choosing information that supports our biases. Often, we blast that information onto social media without taking time to fact check, then resort to name-calling and clever retorts, rather than verifying what we’ve read, weighing our worldviews, and moderating our responses.

In first-year writing classes at George Fox University, we are trying to teach students a different way of processing information. Good writing takes good thinking, after all, and good thinking requires that we know what disinformation looks like, how it has been used by bad actors to weaken democracies, and how it dehumanizes our neighbors. 

Using material from Michael Caufield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, an open source textbook, I shepherd students through a multi-step process of considering what they’ve read by taking time to investigate the source of the information; finding better coverage in other, credible outlets; and tracing claims, quotes, and media to their original contexts. (You can read more about Caufield’s process, called SIFT, here.)

This process takes time, a resource few of us feel we have right now, even as adults currently averages 2.5 hours/day on social media alone. Being willing to interrogate information also requires patience, a character virtue we study in our first-year writing classes as part of GFU’s Cornerstone Curriculum. Learning to patiently consider what we’ve read and stewarding truth in what we write is central to our outcomes for first-year composition at GFU, one small step we are taking to counter what feels like an overwhelming tsunami of disinformation we face every day. 

As a community, we can all play our part in combatting the spread of disinformation. Taking time to patiently SIFT through news is important, as is acknowledging that our worldviews influence what we read. Refraining from sharing disinformation on social media can help limit its spread; resisting the temptation to respond to rage bait–or respond to other responses–might also mean less oxygen for disinformation to proliferate. 

Better yet, stepping off social media and meeting your neighbors in real life can help counter disinformation’s corrosive dehumanization of others. Joining an organization like United as Neighbors of Newberg and Dundee can give you opportunities to dialogue with folks about important local issues in a structured environment. Local media outlets, like Newsberg, report each week on community events where those personal, real-life connections are taking place, one of many reasons it’s important to continue supporting local news. 

These are recommendations I’ve tried to institute in my own life and my own media diet. Several years ago, in the midst of Newberg’s bitter school board conflicts, I consistently tangled with others on social media community groups, which ultimately eroded my emotional health, and resulted in a fair bit of disinformation being spread about me and my employer. Choosing to step away from social media comments, closing my Twitter account, and finding ways to engage personally with my community–along with fact-checking information I receive–has made me a far healthier citizen.

Of course I still have my deeply-held convictions about politics and faith, but have found other outlets for that expression (including writing a column for Patheos about faith in local contexts). But I’m far less enraptured by the lure of disinformation, and more clear-eyed about its ability to damage communities like Newberg, a place I’ve called home for nearly 30 years. Everyone in Newberg deserves to also feel at home here, and fighting disinformation in our community is one way we can assure that we all have the opportunity to thrive. 

Editor’s Note: Melanie Springer Mock first presented about this topic at the Newberg City Club on June 3.