Misinformation is not peculiar to human beings. A team of Cornell University researchers has found that misinformation can occur among fish, flies and even bacteria. This amazing finding has been supported by experts outside the team, with the general conclusion that creatures communicating in large social networks can all become subject to misinformation because all communication has the potential for it. It is the structural consequence of communication under noise, a limited context, and imperfect decoding. Also, as in the game of ‘whispers’, a message may get distorted while travelling through the network. Apparently, the most obvious example of the reaction to fake news in the non-human world is the fish. One individual among a school of fish feeding together may suddenly dart away as though from a predator because it misreads the stimulus or the lack of it. This alerts the other fish, which follow in a hurry, losing their lunch for nothing at all. An especially nervous fish may do this repeatedly, thus causing its poor hungry peers to lose many lunches. This misinformation cascade may threaten the fish’s existence, unless the schools are so large that the misinformation dies out before reaching the whole school.
It is a good thing that Nemo’s father in the film, Finding Nemo, was not prey to misinformation because his adventures were terrifying enough without fake news. It seems that flies are subject to fake news, too, but what about bees? Can their dances indicating the direction for a rich field of flowers be misconstrued? Bees and ants appear to be sober, serious creatures; surely ants with their busy touching of antennae could not be conveying fake news? It is difficult to say that about chimpanzees though. Researchers have found that they are quite capable of lying. Meanwhile, bacteria get ready to defend the body by communicating through their network. They may be misled. Cells responding to a threat to the body can apparently make mistakes — is that what happens in autoimmune diseases?
Coming to the ‘crown of creation’, though, misinformation becomes both unintentional and mischievously or destructively intentional. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warned that social media were full of scientific misinformation, that the earth is flat, for example, or that climate change is a hoax. Such lies can affect public health and the health of the planet. But India has become used to a different kind of dangerous fake news. Statements taken out of context, images presented with wrong locations and times and so on can all incite prejudice, hatred, even violence. Misinformation experts warn of the dangers of fake news and hope that the origin and manner of its spread among non-human beings would help them understand how to address it among human beings. But it is difficult, they say. After all, it is not possible to ask a bacterium whether it believes what another bacterium said, is it?