My Role in The Great Contest for Truth

I’m exploring three issue areas as I look for my next work.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been having conversations with folks about each of them, and I’m blogging 1) as a method of thinking through the issues, and 2) to share the way I see things in case that’s helpful to you.

One of the issues areas is The Information War. By this, I mean overcoming disinformation to build a shared reality. We need to challenge the incentive structures around information which are currently barriers to people accessing objective truth.

There are two arenas where I see an urgent need for progress and think I could be helpful.

The first, and most obvious part, is government regulation on the way disinformation is disseminated and amplified by advertising platforms.

Advertising platforms like Facebook can count on highly engaging content to keep people on the platform and seeing more advertisements. This amplification happens algorithmically, and Facebook is protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects them from liability for things that people post on their platform.

Legislators seem to be increasingly looking at amending section 230, so that the platforms could bear responsibility for content they amplify. They still wouldn’t be responsible for what users post, but if their algorithm then serves that content up, they could bear liability for that amplification. Basically it challenges algorithmically sorted content feeds, since there would be risk of liability to the platform there. So that highly engaging disinformation or radical content loses its advantage.

I’m impressed by the progress advocates have made on this issue. The public is motivated and cares about this issue, but the details of proposed fixes don’t seem to be widely known. I think there is likely some targeted lobbying and campaigning work needed to get this over the line, but things seem to be in a much better place than I’d imagined. So I’m not really looking to get in the game on this work.

The second arena, where I see a lot less progress, is on the influence of monied interests in subtly shaping public perception. I believe we need to challenge the financial incentives around publishing on the internet so people have greater access to truth.

To illustrate this problem, let’s take a look at affiliate marketing and the way it shapes the way people understand the world.

Affiliate marketing is responsible for all those “5 brands you should know” listicles and shallow reviews where they are linking directly to a product. What products are reviewed and how they are recommended depends on companies giving a kick back to publishers. This basically turns editorial into advertising, and it’s not disclosed as such. It warps people’s understanding of reality in a way that benefits those with the most money.

But there’s more.

Affiliate marketers who are very good at their jobs put up an air of innocence, saying their reviews are impartial. That they are blind to the money they make by recommending products.

Here’s what the popular site WireCutter says:

“And of course, the decisions we make regarding the products we feature on our site are always driven by editorial and product testing standards, not by affiliate deals or advertising relationships.”

This doesn’t hold up though. For example, let’s look at how they talk about stoves to see how what they publish is primarily in advertisers interest.

The fossil fuel industry has been running a focused on campaigning promoting gas ranges over the past few years. Here’s a look at the campaign from Mother Jones, 17 June 2021,

“the gas industry has identified a clever way to capture the public imagination. Surveys showed that most people had no preference for gas water heaters and furnaces over electric ones. So the gas companies found a different appliance to focus on. For decades, sleek industry campaigns have portrayed gas stoves — like granite countertops, farm sinks, and stainless-steel refrigerators — as a coveted symbol of class and sophistication, not to mention a selling point for builders and real estate agents.

The strategy has been remarkably successful in boosting sales of natural gas, but as the tides turn against fossil fuels, defending gas stoves has become a rear guard action. While stoves were once crucial to expanding the industry’s empire, now they are a last-ditch attempt to defend its shrinking borders.”

In the midst of that campaign by gas companies, on WireCutter, all their top recommended ranges are gas. Okay, maybe they tested them and like the gas ranges more though?

Actually, they didn’t really test them. As they disclose on their page, they mainly asked industry representatives

But they don’t stop at reviews. The same week that Mother Jones was pointing out that the fossil fuel industry was in a massive campaign promoting gas WireCutter published two articles backing up the fossil fuel industry’s narrative: 25 June 2021 “If Induction Cooktops Are So Great, Why Does Hardly Anyone Use Them?”

The article isn’t that bad, but a headline like that leaves the casual reader feeling there must be something wrong with this excellent tech.

Then they went further and on 29 June 2021 put out “Why You Don’t Need to Ditch Your Gas Stove (yet)”

To be clear: you do need to ditch your gas stove. We need an all out global mobilization on climate change, and if you can replace appliances with electric and turn off gas in your house, you absolutely should do it with all haste possible.

If you follow the money, it’s clear what WireCutter is doing. They are publishing the content in the interests of the people who pay them: the companies who pay them a commission.

Also, it’s really fishy timing that they put out those articles defending gas ranges right in the middle of the fossil fuel companies campaign defending gas ranges.

In the meantime, Consumer Reports, which is a subscriber model, says, “Induction cooktops come as close to perfection as any product Consumer Reports tests. As rare as it is for any product to receive a perfect score in CR’s tests, one induction cooktop in our ratings hits that bar with a score of 100. And four models earn scores of 95 or higher.”

So it just doesn’t compute that WireCutter says all the best ranges are gas. The competition “come as close to perfection as any product Consumer Reports tests”. They publish what is profitable. If you’re not paying for information, your attention is the product they are monetizing. In this case, the most profitable way for them to use your attention is to sell gas stoves.

If you pay for information, rather than having marketers pay for information, you get the truth. Induction stoves are better. I don’t for a second buy that WireCutter, nor any affiliate marketer, is impartial. They are businesses and publish the content that makes them money. So they churn out huge volumes of content and influence public perception and narratives in ways that benefit companies with the biggest marketing budgets.

This sort of distortion happens across all information we consume and it shapes how people think about climate change, food, health, society, governments, education, our bodies, and, well, everything.

We need to shift the way we consume information online to have a greater abundance of information that is driven by the public interest. The folks at New_ Public have been thinking about this issue in depth. This intro video from them is well worth a watch:

They use the analogy of the bookstore and library. In some ways, these two institutions serve the same purpose. But one is public, and the other private. Right now on the internet we have a proliferation of private information spaces, and we need to create public spaces for information and discourse.

I agree with that assessment, and I’m looking for ways I can work at one of the existing public institutions or help build new ones.