*per Shraddha Chakradhar
You are in a WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger group with people you know and interact with regularly. Maybe it’s a family group that also includes an extended family, not so family. Maybe it’s a local group for parents of children who attend the same school. And because the Covid pandemic is still alive and well, conversations turn to Covid vaccines and someone – not someone close to you – shares information that is not quite accurate. You answer? Why not?
These are the questions behind a recently released report by researchers associated with the Everyday Misinformation Project at Loughborough University in the UK.
What the researchers found, based on in-depth interviews with 102 people in the UK, is that conflict prevention was a major topic that emerged as people chose, or not, to engage with disinformation in message boards. personal.
“If you disagreed with a close friend on an important issue, what we found is that these personal messaging environments mean that people spend a lot of time getting very anxious to avoid conflict and not provoke conflict in ways that could degrade their social relationships with their family. family and friends”he said Andrew Chadwickprofessor of political communication at Loughborough University (UK) and one of the authors of the report. “The extent to which we saw this was actually quite surprising for us”.
Chadwick shared that he hoped more people in the study would share that they had enthusiastically intervened when they found misinformation on these personal messaging platforms. “Instead, what we found was a lot of people who were reluctant to really get involved at that level.”.
A retired North London woman, Jenny, shared that she used WhatsApp all the time to keep in touch with her family. She said her nieces and nephews posted conspiracy theories (like the covid 5G conspiracy theory) and other wrong information in the same WhatsApp family group. While she knows the content posted by some family members isn’t accurate, she doesn’t get involved, in part because of the sheer number of posts from them. “To be honest, I’ve now reached the stage where I can’t, because I just think ‘oh’. I stopped reading a lot of it.”she said.
One of the main reasons people gave for wanting to avoid conflict was that they thought that talking about possible misinformation would harm “group cohesion by provoking conflict”according to the study.
People were also concerned that they didn’t fully understand the facts about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccine and often went to smaller groups to double-check their opinion with the people they felt most comfortable with. a trend that researchers call the “Scouting and Climbing”.
One participant, Bella, said she measures risk by voicing her opinions about COVID-19 vaccination not in the school’s larger WhatsApp group, but in smaller WhatsApp groups or in one-on-one conversations. “It’s really complicated because there are, like, 30 other parents in the [grupo escolar maior]… what I actually did was message my other friend from that group in a separate group chat to say ‘Hey, that’s not right!…’ and then I would message the few people I felt comfortable with, and maybe say something about it, but I was too much of a coward to speak up in front of 30 other parents at school.”.
Here’s what else the study found:
“Some people draw boundaries between what they see as the world of public and political communication, where they think there is a norm that it is legitimate to challenge disinformation, and the interpersonal world of personal messaging, where the norm is that disinformation should not be challenged. because it is not appropriate to confront it.
“Seeing the misinformation leads some people to disconnect from the vaccine conversation in personal messages. This presents an additional paradox: they know the content of disinformation posts, but they don’t speak out, even if they disagree with it. These signs of tacit acceptance in a family, friends or school group can increase the legitimacy of disinformation and contribute to its further dissemination.
The study is especially interesting in light of the recent announcement from WhatsApp Communities. Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, said that “admins will be able to remove wrong or problematic messages from everyone’s chats”. (WhatsApp is also testing make it more difficult to forward messages more than once).
“This can be used in some groups as a form of content moderation that was previously absent on the platform”said Chadwick, and added: “That said, these resources should not be used extensively in the less formal groups that are popular with school parents, larger families and friends. The conflict avoidance policy will restrict ‘administrators’ of family or friends groups considering deleting posts containing misinformation.”.
What does this mean for those looking to combat disinformation on personal messaging platforms? Chadwick and his team are carrying out a 2nd part of the study, in an attempt to discover the types of interventions that could help tackle the conflict prevention people seem to be faced with.
Nonetheless, “We need to find ways to empower people not only with good quality information, but also to instill in them a sense of trust and effectiveness in a way that allows them to say something in these environments”says Chadwick. “It is not simple media literacy. It’s a tough nut to crack.”.
“What we are asking with this report is more attention to qualitative, dialogic and empathic guidance”said Chadwick. “It’s more of a conversational style than just presenting people with information and hoping they understand the issue.”
Shraddha Chakradhar is deputy editor at Nieman Lab. A science journalist by training, Shraddha most recently worked at the health news website Stat, where she wrote her award-winning daily newsletter, Morning Rounds. She has served as a news editor for Nature Medicine, and as a researcher for PBS’s documentary science program NOVA.
Text translated by Bruna Rossi. Read the original at English.
THE Power 360 has a partnership with two divisions of Nieman Foundationin Harvard: The Nieman Journalism Lab it’s the Nieman Reports. The agreement consists of translating into Portuguese the texts that the Nieman Journalism Labit’s the Nieman Reports and publish this material on Power 360. To access all published translations, click here.
#Anxiety #prevents #confrontation #wrong #information #groups