35 GENIUS INTERVIEW Francesca Tripodi
GOOGLING FOR TRUTH The way people look to Google to fact-check worries sociologist and media scholar Dr Francesca Tripodi.
FEED: Are there healthier ways we could be consuming and delivering news? Ways we could be getting a broader and deeper perspective? FT: I think the model the US media uses to operate is deeply problematic. When it’s based on how many eyeballs you can get, you get things like the election of Donald Trump, because that’s all they were covering all the time. People were reading it and they were getting the clicks. And that’s what their bottom line is based on. People could counter that and say, ‘Well, during the Brexit vote, you had the BBC, so explain that’. But how we get information is very flawed. One thing that does concern me is how polarised our news consumption is right now. That does seem unique to me. I was really surprised, in doing this research, how many stories I read on conservative news sites that I never saw any mention of in mainstream media – and vice versa. Fox is mainstream media, but it is kind of a place on its own. When you watch some of these different outlets, it’s an entirely different conversation happening with a completely different sets of facts. It’s a completely different story. And, though their slant may be something I don’t agree with, I don’t think conservative new sites are selling untruthful stories. What I wish would happen – what I think would be really incredible – is if we heard a little bit more from people we don’t agree with and had a way to get information to people we don’t agree with. It scares me how closed off we seem to be from any opinion that differs from our own.
a cloaked white supremacist website. So what you search for and when you search for it can have unintended consequences. Or intended consequences – I’m not sure what Dylan Roof was really looking for when he searched that in the first place. I observed in my research people turning to Google as a way of fact-checking, or as a way even to challenge their existing beliefs, but what they typed in might end up reaffirming what they already believe, even if they went in trying to push their boundaries. FEED: Is there something inherent in the technology we now use to get our news and information that has a radicalising effect? FT: There is a way of thinking about news broadcasts of the past as if it was a golden era of news and information. But
historically if you look at under-represented groups, they’ve never been represented in the news. When you had missing black women, that never made the nightly news. Many of the great media historians have described how the gatekeepers of news kept out a lot of news that mattered to under-represented people. Even in the era of print news, when we had these vibrant newspapers, there was still a pretty intense gatekeeping process in terms of what stories got covered. I think there has always been ‘counter- news’, trying to galvanise or reach people who don’t feel represented by the mainstream narrative. And I think equally there are ways to try and manipulate those efforts into concerted disinformation. I’m sceptical that these are just brand-new problems. There have always been sections of the newspaper that people have pulled out and focused on and ignored the rest.
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