Professor Ed Carter Works With Two Undergraduate Students to Conduct Research on Misinformation in the Media
With the overwhelming amount of information on the internet today, it is crucial to hone the skill of deciphering what we read. Brigham Young University professor Ed Carter collaborated with two undergraduate students to publish a research article that brings to light important information about media consumption. Learn about the inspiration behind the research and the research itself below.
Q: Could you describe the research you conducted and where the idea came from?
Carter: This research topic relates to one of the key focus areas for BYU scholarship: “constitutional government.” Our form of government, a representative or republican democracy, depends on an informed and engaged citizenry. Traditionally most citizens get information about the functioning of their government through journalists. In today’s fast-moving communication technology, and given intentional and unintentional falsehoods by government officials and other speakers, it is critical that people become — and work to stay — news-literate.
I had the idea to research where the right to news literacy comes from and in the end, the article makes an important contribution to understanding that social media platforms are not ideal marketplaces of ideas because their algorithms are set up to maximize attention rather than to maximize truth.
Q: What was your experience like working with undergraduate students on this research?
Carter: BYU undergraduates are extraordinarily capable of participating in high-level academic research, which is uncommon among universities, in my experience. I enjoyed working with Alyssa Larsen and Emily Lambert. They are both bright, committed researchers who made strong contributions to the work. My mentoring came in during the legal research, analysis and writing. They each traveled with me to a conference relating to this research project. Those were positive learning experiences.
Q: What was a compelling and/or surprising finding from this research?
Carter: One of the innovations of our research was to apply the economic history and theory contributions of Braudel to the marketplace of ideas rather than just to the economic marketplace. Braudel said the economic anti-marketplace happens when economic transactions are not transparent and local. In other words, complex elements of global trade do not allow consumers to judge for themselves the origin and value of goods and services. Similarly, citizens cannot judge for themselves the origin and value of ideas shared through non-transparent and non-local means such as social media platforms.
Q: What do you hope the impact of this research might be?
Carter: We hope consumers of news and information (which is all of us) will be skeptical but not cynical. Skepticism is in order because finding societal truth today is complicated, but nobody gains by becoming cynical. We should verify our sources of information before repeating and sharing things on social media or elsewhere.
The phenomenon of confirmation bias affects us all because we tend to gravitate to information that reinforces what we think is, or want to be, the case. We need to expose ourselves to a variety of high-quality sources of information and be open to learning new things and changing our perspectives as we do so. The imperative is to learn and act on truth, not just to live in social media echo chambers where we contribute to division by disagreeing loudly with someone in a different echo chamber. The future depends on citizens becoming and staying more news-literate than we collectively are now.
Q: Do you have any other thoughts to share on the experience that we have not covered in this interview?
Carter: Our research focused on the news literacy of citizens but we also believe in a concept of revealed-truth-literacy as disciples of Jesus Christ. We all should stay focused on how we hear God speaking to us, and then do all in our power to follow that guidance.
Read the entire research article here: The Anti-Marketplace of Ideas and the Right to News Literacy