Disinformation advances by degrading our background of factual awareness and the related critical response to new information. Even if we remain skeptical, a reflexive mistrust of evidence can still be an erosion in critical thinking capability; in fact, that is the lever that is used to spread political division and to prevent people from accessing meaningful facts about threats to their own future wellbeing, freedom, and security.
10 years after the political rise of the most controversial figure in American politics—a man who seems to be constantly on the wrong side of major ethical and legal questions, who was accused of and indicted for serious crimes after his first term in office—Americans’ access to factual reporting is at risk. Media consolidation, generative AI, and intentionally distorted social media feeds, have effectively distorted the information environment, leaving tens of millions of people with little direct access to factual reporting.
It is important to think carefully about what the word ‘access’ means. Too often, the average person is sidelined in discussions of press freedom, or even freedom of speech or religion, because institutions step in to claim favor. In that framing, the word ‘access’ means there is ‘opportunity’—if one knows where to look. The dominance of social media, where random and algorithmically shaped ‘feeds’ are the front page of most people’s go-to news source, means we have to examine whether that opportunity is operational.
If you do not regularly read professionally written reporting—by journalists that adhere to a code that requires they report facts without prejudice and provide analysis that is non-ideological but supports enhanced critical thinking about matters of public consequence—you can easily find yourself swamped by headlines and assertions that are not substantiated with any verified primary or secondary sources. There may not be anything that qualifies as true evidence-based reportage in your daily diet of news and information.
The result is a clear trend toward hyper-partisanship, in which skepticism is reserved for news from sources outside of one’s preferred in-group. That behavior leaves people vulnerable to dangerous disinformation from sources they trust, but which they never scrutinize or seek to verify with personal reference to unbiased outside reporting.
In that fact-free engagement, emotions move to the center, and fear-response messaging becomes a priority: people are told their neighbors are a threat to everything they value. Social media also entices all of us to make logical leaps—to judge and define the meaning of an act or a claim, without needing to provide reference to any background evidence that verifies our judgment.
That is a normal part of human information processing and insight-sharing. It becomes weaponized, however, by attention-seeking algorithms, AI bots claiming to hold and distribute knowledge, and cable TV pundits doing something similar, often commenting spontaneously on events they have not studied and which resemble nothing they have ever experienced or worked on.
How does one cut through the noise, so to speak, when all of these patterns of assertion, programmed to seek and hold our attention, include a next item and a next and a next, all following this practice of unverified summary and reference to unverified claims? How does critical thinking work in that situation?
Without the reader or viewer consciously and intentionally choosing to seek out other sources and references, to fact-check their own preferred sources, it quickly becomes unlikely that the opportunity to access factual reporting will be operational. Instead, the mind tries to do its analytical work with only emotion-triggering unverified claims. Even the best intended altruist can end up choosing only what ‘feels right’ to them.
That is the end of critical thinking. That is how we lose our ability to judge and to reason without the consent of central authorities; it is how democracy falls apart.
In the 1990s, there was a time when it seemed Russia would at long last, after centuries of tyranny and attempted revolution, experience a period of genuine open democracy. That time quickly faded, and we now live in a world where a regime menaces all opponents and uses chemical, radiological, and biological weapons to murder dissidents on foreign soil.
At this writing, residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg are experiencing an odd-feeling kind of internet blackout. Reports suggest the regime is testing a “whitelisting” system, where only specific sites and services will be available, and anyone attempting to circumvent that system will either be blocked, or identified and punished, or both.
So, we have to ask—as it seems the United States stands on a precipice, overlooking the peril of a sharp decline in fact-based reasoning and cooperative problem-solving:
- How can we make room for critical thinking in the world as it is now?
- Can we empower voters, consumers, investors, and everyday news readers, to know more than their preferred sources tell them, and to make informed judgments about how we can, all of us together, steer the ship of state toward safer waters and a brighter tomorrow?
- Can a user-centered adaptation of data systems allow for conscientious decision-making without high-cost expertise?
- What are the essential tools the average person or small business, or journalist or researcher, needs to sift out slop and distortion and get clarity about what is real?
AVTR recommends the following principles as starting points for this study of our collective effort to save and reaffirm critical thinking as a core safeguard of human rights and freedoms:
- Lawful AI enterprises must watermark their outputs, so political deep fakes and distortionary narratives are more easily identified.
- AI systems must not be allowed to make life-and-death decisions, such as ‘autonomous targeting’ or decisions to strike in combat.
- In that spirit, governments should not treat computational platforms that effectively play language games using mathematical probabilities as resources for informed decision-making.
- Profits linked to AI systems must be shared with human creators, researchers, publishers, and others, whose work informs the AI system in question.
- End users must have full administrative control over all forms of data that might be harvested by AI systems, including the ability to block any harvesting of user data and any AI infiltration of personal social networks or social media feeds.
- National and international funding sources should support unbiased, independent, locally rooted small-scale newsrooms.
- Smartphones, watches, and other mobile devices, should include tools that prioritize a variety of sources and media types.
- Insights about ecological resilience and human health should be woven into mainstream decision data, including financial metrics and macro-economic indicators.
- Pervasive hidden costs should be considered in detail, to fine-tune data relating to fiscal stability and value creation.
Fostering awareness and diversity of thinking in the general public is in the interests of any business or politician who wants to prosper by excelling in their chosen role. By that, we mean: If your goal is to be of genuine use to those who live with the impacts of your decisions, then you want a society that makes smarter choices, rewards higher quality work, and is more adept at translating evidence into cooperative solutions to thorny problems.
Beware the enterprise or political voice that wants us to lower our standards, put aside evidence, and succumb to the demands of click-bait, without ever engaging with an unbiased source. We can, we should, and given the stakes, we must think for ourselves, using real facts and evidence to make informed judgments, then work together to keep free thinking alive.
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