By Joe Arney
Illustrations by Dana Heimes
Deepfakes. Distrust. Data manipulation.
Is it any wonder American democracy feels like it has reached such a dangerous tipping point?
As our public squares have emptied of reasoned discussion, and our social media feeds have filled with vitriol, viciousness and villainy, weâve found ourselves increasingly isolated and unable to escape our echo chambers. And while itâs easy to blame social media, adtech platforms or the news, itâs the way these forces overlap and feed off each other thatâs put us in this mess.
Itâs an important problem to confront as we close in on a consequential election, but the issue is bigger than just what happens this November, or whether you identify with one party or another. Fortunately, the College of Media, Communication and Information was designed for just these kinds of challenges, where a multidisciplinary approach is needed to frame, address and solve increasingly complex problems.
âDemocracy is not just about what happens in this election,â said Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies and an expert in the design and governance of the internet. âItâs a much longer story, and through all the threats weâve seen, Iâve taken hope from focusing my attention on advancing democracy, rather than just defending it.â
We spoke to Schneider and other CMCI experts in journalism, information science, media studies, advertising and communication to understand the scope of the challenges. And we asked one big question of each in order to help us make sense of this moment in history, understand how we got here andâmaybeâfind some faith in the future.
The U.S. news media has blood on its hands from 2016. It will go down as one of the worst moments in the history of American journalism.â
Mike McDevitt
Professor
Journalism
I think 2024 will be the first, and last,ÌęA.I. election.â
Brian C. Keegan
Assistant Professor
Information Science
Newsrooms have been decimated. The younger generation doesnât closely follow the news. Attention spans have withered in the TikTok age. Can we count on journalism to serve its Fourth Estate function and deliver fair, accurate coverage of the election?
Mike McDevitt, a former editorial writer and reporter, isnât convinced the press has learned its lessons from the 2016 cycle, when outlets chased ratings and the appearance of impartiality over a commitment to craft that might have painted more accurate portraits of both candidates. High-quality reporting, he said, may mean less focus on finding scoops and more time sharing resources to chase impactful stories.
ÌęHow can journalism be better?
âA lot of journalists might disagree with me, but I think news media should be less competitive among each other and find ways to collaborate, especially with the industry gutted. And the news canât lose sight of whatâs important by chasing clickable stories. Covering chaos and conflict is tempting, but journalismâs interests in this respect do not always align with the security of democracy. While threats to democracy are real, amplifying chaos is not how news media should operate during an era of democratic backsliding.â
After the 2016 election, Brian C. Keegan was searching for ways to use his interests in the computer and social sciences in service of democracy. Thatâs driven his expertise in public-interest data scienceâhow to make closed data more accessible to voters, journalists, activists and researchers. He looks at how campaigns can more effectively engage voters, understand important issues and form policies that address community needs.
ÌęYouâve called the 2012 election an âend of historyâ moment. Can you explain that in the context of whatâs happening in 2024?
âIn 2012, we were coming out of the Arab Spring, and everyone was optimistic about social media. The idea that it could be a tool for bots and state information operations to influence elections would have seemed like science fiction. Twelve years later, weâve finally learned these platforms are not neutral, have real risk and can beÌęmanipulated. And now, two years into the large language model moment, people are saying these are just neutral tools that can only be a force for good. That argument is already falling apart.
âYou could actually roll the clock back even further, to the 1960s and â70s, when people were thinking about Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed, and recognizing there are all these environmental, regulatory, economic and social things all connected through this lens of the environment. Like any computing system, when it comes to data, if you have garbage in, you get garbage out. The bias and misinformation we put into these A.I. systems are polluting our information ecosystem in ways that journalists, activists, researchers and others arenât equipped to handle.â
I canât blame the reporters who feel these moments are worth covering, because I feel as conflicted as they do.â
Angie Chuang
Associate Professor
Journalism
I do worry about our institutions. I donât like that a majority of Americans donât trust CNN.â
Chris Vargo
Associate Professor
Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design
One of Angie Chuangâs last news jobs was covering race and ethnicity for The Oregonian. In the early 2000s, it wasnât always easy to find answers to questions about race in a mostly white newsroom. Conferences like those put on by the Asian American Journalists Association âwere times of revitalization for me,â she said.
When this yearâs conference of the National Association of Black Journalists was disrupted by racist attacks against Kamala Harris, Chuangâs first thoughts were for the attendees who lost the opportunity to learn from one another and find the support she did as a cub reporter.
âWhatâs lost in this discussion is the entire event shifted to this focus on Donald Trump and the internal conflict in the organization, and Iâm certain that as a result, journalists and students who went lost out on some of that solidarity,â she said. And it fits a larger pattern of outspoken newsmakers inserting themselves into the news to claim the spotlight.
ÌęHow can journalism avoid being hijacked by the people it covers?
âIt comes down to context. We need to train reporters to take a breath and not just focus on being the first out there. And I know thatâs really hard, because the rewards for being first and getting those clicks ahead of the crowd are well established.â
Agenda settingâthe concept that we take our cues of whatâs important from the newsâis as old an idea as mass media itself, but Chris Vargo is drawing interesting conclusions from studying the practice in the digital age. Worth watching, he and other CMCI researchers said, are countermedia entities, which undermine the depictions of reality found in the mainstream press through hyper-partisan content and the use of mis- and disinformation.
ÌęHow did we get into these silos, and how do we get out?
âThe absence of traditional gatekeepers has helped people create identities around the issues they choose to believe in. Real-world cues do tell us a little about what we find importantâa lot of people had to get COVID to know it was badâbut we now choose media in order to form a community. The ability to self-select what you want to listen to and believe in is a terrifying story, because selecting media based on what makes us feel most comfortable, that tells us what we want to hear, flies in the face of actual news reporting and journalistic integrity.â
Images have always required us to be more engaged. Now, with the speed of disinformation, we need to do a little more work.â
Sandra Ristovska
Assistant Professor
Media Studies
When you start a Facebook group, thereâs no option to say, âI want the democratic version.ââÌę
Nathan Schneider
Assistant Professor, Media Studies;
Director, Media Economies Design Lab
Her research into deepfakes has validated what Sandra Ristovska has known for a long time: For as long as weâve had visual technologies, weâve had the ability to manipulate them.
Seeing pornographic images of Taylor Swift on social media or getting robocalls from Joe Biden telling voters to stay homeâcontent created by generative artificial intelligenceâis a reminder that the scale of the problem is unprecedented. But Ristovskaâs work has found examples of fake photos from the dawn of the 20th century supposedly showing, for example, damage from catastrophic tornadoes that never happened.
Ristovska grew up amid the Yugoslav Wars; her interest in becoming a documentary filmmaker was in part shaped by seeing how photos and videos from the brutal fighting and genocide were manipulated for political and legal means. It taught her to be a skeptic when it comes to what she sees shared online.
âSo, you see the Taylor Swift videoâit seems out of character for her public persona. Or the presidentâwhy would he say something like that?â she said. âInstead of just hitting the share button, we should train ourselves to go online and fact check itâto be more engaged.â
ÌęEven when we believe something is fake, if it aligns with our worldview, we are likely to accept it as reality. Knowing that, how do we combat deepfakes?
âWe need to go old school. Weâve lost sight of the collective good, and you solve that by building opportunities to come together as communities and have discussions. Weâre gentler and more tolerant of each other when weâre face-to-face. This has always been true, but itâs becoming even more true today, because we have more incentives to be isolated than ever.â
Early scholarly works waxed poetic on the internetâs potential, through its ability to connect people and share information, to defeat autocracy. But, Nathan Schneider has argued, the internet is actually organized as a series of little autocraciesâwhere users are subject to the whims of moderators and whoever owns the serversâeffectively meaning you must work against the defaults to be truly democratic. He suggests living with these systems is contributing to the global rise of authoritarianism. In a new book, Governable Spaces, Schneider calls for redesigning social media with everyday democracy in mind.
ÌęIf the internet enables autocracy, what can we do to fix it?
âWe could design our networks for collective ownership, rather than the assumption that every service is a top-down fiefdom. And we could think about democracy as a tool for solving problems, like conflict among users. Polarizing outcomes, like so-called cancel culture, emerge because people donât have better options for addressing harm. A democratic society needs public squares designed for democratic processes and practices.â
I think in these times, real disagreement is a sign of civic trust, not the opposite.â
Leah Sprain
Associate Professor, Communication;
Director, Center for Communication
and Democratic Engagement
Unless social media platforms dramatically revisit the aspects of their operational and market models, thereâs not much change thatâs possible.â
Toby Hopp
Associate Dean; Associate Professor,
Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design
It may be derided as dull, but the public meeting is a bedrock of American democracy. It has also changed drastically as fringe groups have seized these spaces to give misinformation a megaphone, ban books and take up other undemocratic causes. Leah Sprain researches how specific communication practices facilitate and inhibit democratic action. She works as a facilitator with several groups, including the League of Women Voters and Restore the Balance, to ensure events like candidate forums embrace difficult issues while remaining nonpartisan.
ÌęWhatâs a story weâre not telling about voters ahead of the election?
âWe should be looking more at college towns, because town-gown divides are real and long-standing. Thereâs a politics of resentment even in a place like Boulder, where you have people who say, âWe know so much about these issues, we shouldnât let students vote on themââto the point where providing pizza to encourage voter turnout becomes this major controversy. Giving young people access to be involved, making them feel empowered to make a difference and be heardâthese are good things.â
Toby Hopp studies the news media and digital content providers with an eye to how our interactions with media shape conversations in the public sphere. Much of that is changing as trust and engagement with mainstream news sources declines. Heâs studied whether showing critical-thinking prompts alongside shared postsârequiring users to consider the messages as well as the structure of the platform itselfâmay be better than relying on top-down content moderation from tech companies.
Ultimately, the existing business model of the big social media companiesâpackaging users to be sold to advertisersâmay be the most limiting feature when it comes to reform. Hopp said he doubts a business the size of Meta can pivot from its model.
ÌęHow does social media rehabilitate itself to become more trusted? Can it?
âSocial media platforms are driven by monopolistic impulses, and thereâs not a lot of effort put into changing established strategies when youâre the only business in town. The development of new platforms might offer a wider breadth of platform choiceâwhich might limit the spread of misinformation on a Facebook or Twitter due to the diminished reach of any single platform.â
Why just chase the daily news when you can try to change hearts and minds around critically important issues?â
Chuck Plunkett
Director, ¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” News Corps
¶¶Òő¶ÌÊÓÆ” News Corps was created to simulate a real-world newsroom that allows journalism students to do the kind of long-form, investigative pieces that are in such short supply at a time of social media hot takes and pundits trading talking points.
âI thought we should design the course youâd most want to take if you were a journalism major,â said Chuck Plunkett, director of the capstone course and an experienced reporter. Having a mandate to do investigative journalism âmeans we can challenge our students to dig in and do meaningful work, to expose them to other kinds of people or ideas that arenât on their radar.â
Over the course of a semester, the students work under the guidance of reporters and editors at partner media companies to produce long-form multimedia stories that are shared on the News Corps website and, often, are picked up by those same publications, giving the students invaluable clips for their job searches while supporting resource-strapped newsrooms.
ÌęWith the news business facing such a challenging future, both economically and politically, why should students study journalism?
âEven before the great contraction of news, the figure I had in my mind was five years after students graduate, maybe 25 percent of them were still in professional newsrooms. But journalism is a tremendous major because you learn to think critically, research deeply and efficiently, interact with other people, process enormous amounts of information, and have excellent communication skills. Every profession needs people with those skills.â
