Last year, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a warning about the dangers of misinformation. Social media platforms are now rife with scientific falsehoods — that the earth is flat, that climate change is a hoax. Misinformation can lead to large-scale harm, undermining public health and the well-being of the planet, the authors of the report said.
“The stakes in understanding the origins, spread and the impact of misinformation about science are high,” they warned.
For some fresh inspiration, misinformation experts can look beyond our species. That’s the advice from Cornell researchers writing last month in the journal Interface. It’s not just humans who suffer from misinformation. So do fish, flies and even bacteria.
“I hope we can learn something from these natural systems,” said Andrew Hein, a computational biologist and an author of the new study.
Hein was drawn to the natural history of misinformation through his research on fish. He and his colleagues observed the movements of schools swimming around the coral reefs off the French Polynesian island of Mo’orea.
By staying in large groups, the fish enjoyed advantages. For instance, they could collectively stay alert for predators. When one fish noticed a threat, it darted in a new direction. That information quickly spread through the whole school, which then escaped.
But Hein was struck by how often a fish got things wrong. “It’s safe, there’s nothing going on,” he said. “But all of a sudden, it will just flee for its life.”
He then observed how other fish noticed the fish fleeing for no reason, and fled as well. Soon numerous animals were trying to escape together, from nothing.
The observation made Hein think about all the research on the ways misinformation spreads over the Internet. “That’s what we’re seeing here,” he said. “We’re seeing misinformation cascades happening.”
Hein and his colleagues went on to survey misinformation cascades among other species. Animals that live in big groups, from baboons to termites, are constantly communicating with one another — creating the potential for misinformation to creep in.
The researchers developed mathematical models for investigating misinformation in any species. They could be used to estimate the accuracy of an organism’s beliefs and the extent to which information from other organisms changes their beliefs.
Exploring these models, Hein came to the conclusion that misinformation is probably fundamental to all communication systems in the natural world. And it’s a potent threat to their survival.
Previously, some biologists looked at misinformation as a minor nuisance. If a fish darts away for no reason, it loses some time it could have spent eating. But that’s a small cost, outweighed by the benefit of being able to escape predators.
But Hein argues that overly skittish fish, reacting to too many false alarms, can risk their survival. “The cost isn’t missing one lunch,” he said. “It’s missing all lunches.”
Walter Quattrociocchi, a data scientist at Sapienza University of Rome, who was not involved in the study, agreed.
“It shows that misinformation is not an anomaly or a moral failure, but a structural consequence of communication systems operating under noise, limited context and imperfect decoding,” he said.
The threat of misinformation has led to the evolution of defences against it. Those defences may be so effective that they mask the true threat that misinformation poses in the natural world.
In his own research on fish, Hein found one strategy for stopping misinformation. When the animals swim in small groups, they are keenly sensitive to the movements of the fish around them. But in bigger groups, their brains dial back that sensitivity. It takes the movement of many more fish to get them moving.
This strategy doesn’t eliminate false alarms, Hein observed. But it does limit their size; the false alarms die out before they can take over an entire school.
“I suspect that there have to be lots of mechanisms for dealing with misinformation in these social systems,” Hein said.
NYTNS