How People Get Sucked into Misinformation Rabbit Holes – and How to Get Them Out
In their recounting of their experiences at these high levels of intensity, individuals spoke of choosing to break ties with loved ones, participating in public acts of disruption and, in some cases, engaging in violence against other people in the name of their cause.
Once people reached this stage, it took pretty strong interventions to get them out of it. The challenge, then, is how to intervene safely and effectively when people are in the earlier stages of being drawn into a fringe community.
Respond with Empathy, Not Shame
We have a few suggestions. For people who are still in the earlier stages, friends and trusted advisers, like a doctor or a nurse, can have a big impact by simply responding with empathy.
If a loved one starts voicing possible fringe views, like a fear of vaccines, or animosity against women or other marginalized groups, a calm response that seeks to understand the person’s underlying concern can go a long way.
The worst response is one that might leave them feeling ashamed or upset. It may drive them back to their fringe community and accelerate their radicalization.
Even if the person’s views intensify, maintaining your connection with them can turn you into a lifeline that will see them get out sooner rather than later.
Once people reached the middle stages, we found third-party online content – not produced by government, but regular users – could reach people without backfiring. Considering that many people in our research sample had their radicalization instigated by social media, we also suggest the private companies behind such platforms should be held responsible for the effects of their automated tools on society.
By the middle stages, arguments on the basis of logic or fact are ineffective. It doesn’t matter whether they are delivered by a friend, a news anchor, or a platform-affiliated fact-checking tool.
At the most extreme final stages, we found that only heavy-handed interventions worked, such as family members forcibly hospitalizing their radicalized relative, or individuals undergoing government-supported deradicalization programs.
How Not to Be Radicalized
After all this, you might be wondering: how do you protect yourself from being radicalized?
As much of society becomes more dependent on digital technologies, we’re going to get exposed to even more misinformation, and our world is likely going to get smaller through online echo chambers.
One strategy is to foster your critical thinking skills by reading long-form texts from paper books.
Another is to protect yourself from the emotional manipulation of platform algorithms by limiting your social media use to small, infrequent, purposefully-directed pockets of time.
And a third is to sustain connections with other humans, and lead a more analogue life – which has other benefits as well.
So in short: log off, read a book, and spend time with people you care about.
Emily BoothResearch assistant, University of Technology Sydney. Marian-Andrei Rizoiu is Associate Professor in Behavioral Data Science, University of Technology Sydney. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.
