The upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States – and the four years of his presidency to follow – will put American democracy to the test. His return to the Oval Office has already reignited debates over the legitimacy of elections, with partisan media framing his presidency as either a triumph or a travesty. This polarization underscores a growing danger: We no longer share a common reality.
The erosion of trust in common facts and the fracturing of our nation’s ability to engage in constructive dialogue means many of us can no longer accept a shared reality. In 2023, a CNN poll found that 69% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believed President Biden’s 2020 win was not legitimate. That’s not surprising given new reporting that popular conservative pundits are frequently sharing election falsehoods on YouTube, which stopped moderating election-related content 18 months ago.
It can be tempting to point to fake news and misinformation as the culprit. For the past few years, my research has focused on revealing the hidden relationships between our digital lives and our psychology, and the facts we’re learning about fake news are alarming. Leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook users spent more time reading fake news than real news. Studies show that — more often than not — people believe the content they consume even when it is factually wrong. How is it possible to maintain a functioning democratic system that is based on the will of the people, if the people are falling for lies?
To make matters worse, fake news could have an even stronger impact in 2025 thanks to generative AI. With the ability to create millions of fake news articles, pictures and videos in a few mouse clicks, the creation and dissemination of false narratives has become easier than ever before. Deepfake images of Hurricane Helene victims last month demonstrated the potential — some politicians boosted the images on social media to reinforce another false narrative that the federal government wasn’t responding to communities in need. Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Justice struck down a Russian-led effort to distribute fake news about the upcoming election which according to FBI Director Christopher Wray relied on “cutting-edge AI to sow disinformation.”
But while we should all be concerned about the impact of fake news, it’s too simplistic to point to fake news as the only barrier to reinstating an informed populace.
As a recent study by researchers at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania suggests, the impact of news that are factually inaccurate — including fake news, misinformation and disinformation — pales in comparison to the impact of news that are factually accurate but misleading. According to researchers, for example, the impact of slanted news stories encouraging vaccine skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic was about 46-fold greater than that of content flagged as fake by fact-checkers. Similarly, decades of research on personalized persuasion highlight how appealing to a person’s psychological traits — e.g. their personality or moral values — can sway hearts and minds without the need for content that is factually inaccurate.
Placing an overly strong emphasis on flagging and eradicating fake news could inadvertently exacerbate the impact of content that is misleading and polarizing. Take the most common approach to combating misinformation, for example: The tagging of news that are considered false by fact-checkers. The approach has intuitive appeal: it’s similar to the Nutri-Score labels that help us decide whether a particular food item might be good or bad for us by summarizing nutritional information in an easy-to-digest, color-coded scale, labeling fake news aims at providing us with a helpful mental crutch.
Making people’s lives as easy as possible is often the best way for shifting their behavior in a desired direction (research in behavioral economics offers plenty of compelling examples for this assertion). And, in principle, there’s nothing easier than seeing a “fake news” label on an article and, as a result, discounting its arguments or refraining from re-posting it. The problem is that we might also start using the convenient mental crutch in cases we shouldn’t — particularly in cases where a news item isn’t labeled as “fake” (because it isn’t), but the content is still designed to lead us astray. As we outsource our critical thinking to the systems meant to support and protect us, we might become more vulnerable to believing content that hasn’t been flagged and therefore appears to be credible.
That doesn’t mean we should abandon technological solutions that aid in identifying fake news. But we need more than that. For a start, it’s time to re-establish a digital version of the town square that allows for collective human oversight. As of now, there’s no way of comparing the personalized news and search results that one person is served by Facebook’s or Google’s algorithms with those other people see. The same algorithms that help me find the content I am most likely to enjoy online (and in the process create tremendous profits for their creators), also make it almost impossible for me to determine the extent to which my news might be biased in their depiction of current events.
Granted, the problem here doesn’t just lie with algorithmic recommendations. There is a reason why promoting slanted news and keeping us in our own echo chambers is profitable: we tend to like it there. And we might not be overly excited to leave this place of comfort for a world that is foreign — and potentially hostile — to us. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the option to see what other people see. In other words, it’s important to have a way to peek into the echo chambers of people who might hold different beliefs than we do, and who are likely to see news that describe the same event in a very different light.
The bottom line is that to rekindle a sense of shared reality and establish a more unified democracy, we need solutions that tackle more than just misinformation. To counter the impact of news that is factually accurate but misleading or highly polarizing, it’s not enough to simply rely on systems of convenience that do the job of fact-checking. Instead, we need to sharpen our ability to think critically and reclaim the right to compare our version of “reality” to that of others.
