SAVING THE FUTURE OF NEWS — WITH MARK EISENEGGER
CAN WE RESTORE NEWS QUALITY?
Digital disinformation and the declining quality of news media is one of the most important challenges of our time. The scale of the challenge sometimes feels overwhelming, and its easy to conclude it can’t be solved. But there ARE pathways forward, and sometimes a fresh evidence-driven perspective can help illuminate them.
Enter Mark Eisenegger, Professor of Public Sphere and Society, Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich, who leads a research program which has now accumulated 15 years of solid data on media quality and consumption trends in Switzerland.
What can the Swiss context teach us? A lot, as it turns out!
Mark is a generous and engaging person, and never without a smile — an absolute pleasure to spend time with. In our recorded conversation below, he dissects the trends, discusses differences between countries and – most importantly – explores what his research suggests about practical actions we can take to preserve a healthier “news future.” He shares insights backed by evidence, and with more than a few surprises that get you “thinking differently about the problem!
Enjoy the conversation. I have a feeling it will leave you a little more hopeful about the future :-)
As always, scroll down further for personal takeaways and a full transcript of our conversation, and don’t forget you can listen to more of these conversations with leading scientists, experts and future-makers by subscribing to “FutureBites With Dr Bruce McCabe” on Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast platform.
PATHWAYS TO A BETTER FUTURE
Some key takeaways about pathways to a better future that stuck with me from our conversation:
The most important driver for loss of quality (accuracy, relevance, and diversity) in the established news media landscape is the loss of resources (money leaving the industry.)
The reduced resources/funding for journalism is compounded by a reduced willingness to pay for news.
Although willingness to pay is low, people have a much higher willingness to pay if the funding is NOT to support one source, but rather allocated across a spread of many diverse news media — what Mark calls a ‘Spotify for news’ approach.
Diversity has reduced massively. Mark is referring not to concentration of media ownership but to concentration of news topics (e.g. during the pandemic, 70% of all reporting in Switzerland, across 70 outlets, was in one way or the other about COVID!) and reduced spectrum of opinions in political debate.
Avoidance is a huge issue. In 2019, 21% of the Swiss citizens said they avoided any news. In 2025 it is 46% — a staggering increase. A similar trend applies to most countries.
An overwhelming reason given for news avoidance is “too much negativity.”
The data show news avoidance leads to lower overall levels of knowledge. News avoiders show a clearly lower knowledge of not only political and “hard news” knowledge (suggesting poor outcomes for democracy) but surprisingly also lower knowledge of “soft news” (cooking, entertainment, consumer tech etc).
A strong independent public broadcaster plays a significant role in maintaining news quality in countries that have one. Beyond the direct contribution, the public broadcaster also plays a “quality benchmark” role that lifts the standards of private news outlets.
Economic prosperity is a major factor in news quality. Scandinavian countries perform much better, for example, and in Scandinavian countries the willingness to support news media by direct state funding is much higher.
The level of polarization in a society is a crucial factor in news quality.
This was one of the strongest messages from Mark. The more polarized a society, the worse the news quality is (published news tends towards more extreme interpretations of news events, and in polarized societies people tend to live in communications silos within which they face less reputational loss for disseminating disinformation).
In other words, we should be thinking of polarization as a cause of poor quality news, more than an outcome.
This suggests that one of the most important actions we can all take (business leaders, governments, individuals) to restore news quality is by working to foster more debate with people who have opposing and contradictory opinions, and constantly challenging the notion that people with opposing views are the ‘enemy.’
Regulation is an important pathway. I raised with Mark the fact that the US has a gaping regulatory hole through which social media platforms get a free pass on content accountability while established news media organisations do not (“we are only a platform,” the excuse goes, “and therefore we should not be held accountable for the content others post on our platform”). This argument does not hold water historically, practically, morally, or from a societal harm perspective. While US regulators appear in no hurry to remove the “free pass,” Mark flagged that in a few weeks Switzerland is expected to introduce new regulations on platform responsibility for content. As a broad trend we can surely expect more of the same across EU countries, which will definitely be a good thing.
Digital literacy (education on how to sensibly judge what we're reading) is an important pathway for improving news quality. Not surprising. More interestingly, however, is the need across all demographics. 15 years ago, news avoidance was a problem only for young users. Nowadays the data show it's clearly also a problem for older ones.
Other pathways:
Doing more to distinguish between reliable and non-reliable content
Labelling content produced from sources with higher journalistic integrity.
Digital mechanisms that promote more information from more reliable sources to users
“Pre-bunking” (educating users pre-emptively before they encounter disinformation). Studies show that pre-explaining manipulation techniques such as “cherry-picking” does help users identify manipulative content when they first encounter it.
More constructive, positive styles of journalism (studies that show users are willing to pay for more positive news).
Mark saved the biggest bombshell for last: our perceptions about disinformation may actually be a very significant and fundamental part of the problem. Why? Because disinformation constitutes a much smaller slice of the average media diet than we think.
e.g. In Switzerland, more than 50% say disinformation is a huge problem, and 25% of users say they regularly encounter disinformation. But detailed studies show less than 1% of the news diet of the average citizen is misinformation.
Its also less than 1% in the US. It’s also less than 1% in Germany ...
Disinformation is a problem, but it’s much smaller than we think!
And here’s the consequence: by talking up misinformation, we erode trust in even useful news media, which exacerbates behaviours such as news avoidance!
Positive pathways thus include: encouraging more realistic thinking based on actual not perceived data, talking less about misinformation and more about the problems of news avoidance and separation.
Don’t forget you can check out Mark’s research and drill into the findings in more detail!
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Please note, my transcripts are AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity and will contain minor errors. The true record of the interview is always the audio version.
Bruce McCabe: Hello and welcome again to FutureBites, where we look at the pathways to a better future. I'm your host, Bruce McCabe, the global futurist, and our topic today, which we're exploring here in Switzerland, is digital disinformation and looking at some of the lessons learned from this context, and which I have a very special guest, Professor Dr. Mark Eisenegger. Welcome to the podcast.
Mark Eisenegger: Thank you for inviting me. Exciting.
Bruce McCabe: Thank you for making time. And also to explore what I think is a really huge and challenging topic. And um, you know, I think even in the 45 minutes or so that we have here today, we probably won't cover everything. But I'm hoping to sort of dig into your research a little bit today and see what insights come out of.
Mark Eisenegger: That's great. I'm looking forward to this discussion, of course.
Bruce McCabe: but before we get into it, just a note about you personally. What what led you? Was there something or someone that inspired you to get into disinformation research? What brought you to this point?
Mark Eisenegger: Actually, my research focus is quality of the news media. So what interests me is how the quality of public communication develops over time. And we've done a lot of research on that topic. We've just publishing our yearbook quality of the media in two weeks. And of course, if you are talking about quality of public communication, then it's not far away to look at this information because this is, of course, a relevant aspect of quality of public communication and news media. And the other thing was that we observed an increased debate also in Switzerland. Of course, we had this this huge debate, this major debate in the US, driven by Trump and and his um group about the problem of disinformation. And many people in Switzerland citizens, were also concerned whether this could be, might be also a problem here. And this was the big motivation to look at it more precisely, also to to intensify the research on that topic, yeah, and that's what we have done in recent years.
Bruce McCabe: And this is a multi-year thing. So each year you you you publish this report, don't you? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and so what's the breadth of that? It's because media is a big word, it's not just the official news channels or the big corporate news channels. I'm you're digging further, I guess?
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah. So we are looking uh precisely at the 70 news outlets in Switzerland.
Bruce McCabe: 70.
Mark Eisenegger: 70. From all types we have here, from the from the public broadcaster to private TV stations, private radio to newspapers online, printed version, everything. So the the most important news outlets we are looking at and observing the the quality, how it is developing over time. And here, one major result is that the quality news quality in Switzerland is still relatively good, but it's also deteriorating over time. And the most important driver is, of course, several aspects that the resources. Journalism has to deal with ever fewer resources because, for example, advertisement is is flowing off to the tech platforms. Willingness to pay is really low, also here in Switzerland.
Bruce McCabe: For quality news, the willingness to pay for that for publication.
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely. So there's a really low willingness to pay, but of course, our scope, what we look at, has has also changed in a way. So we started by looking at news outlets, and nowadays our perspective is much broader. We look also at the quality on the platforms, also how AI is driving the whole landscape when it comes to quality. And yeah, it's just a beginning. It's a huge topic, of course, especially to look at AI and its consequences on quality of the public debate, but very important and interesting.
Bruce McCabe: So I'm guessing you're already seeing or measuring the consequences of AI now as hitting the quality?
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, of course. ChatGPT here and the like also a huge job here as elsewhere. And what we've done, for example, we have done a study on deep fakes. We exposed users with deep fakes and also with real videos, and uh, the result is absolutely no chance that the users nowadays are able to recognize deep fakes. Yeah, so it's a huge problem, also here.
Bruce McCabe: Is is the primary measure of quality “accuracy?” How do you measure quality?
Mark Eisenegger: It's a very very good question, also a very complex question. Accuracy is, of course, a very crucial element of our quality understanding. We also look at relevance. Everybody is talking, asking what is relevance then. We'd say we have a land, normative land, which comes very much from what is good for democracy. So, relevance in our understanding means to what extent do the news media report on politics, culture, religion, science compared to soft news, such as human touch issues or sports, which are also important issues. But of course, our society has to deal with this more hard news related topics and issues, and this is one thing we do. Then, of course, we look at the diversity. Uh, how diverse is the opinion spectrum, for example, in reporting, how concentrated or diverse is the topic spectrum news media are reporting on. And in these fields we yeah, we detect bigger problems. So diversity is clearly shrinking over time, um, it's getting it's getting worse because also of driven by a lack of resources and and many other quality indicators, but these are the most important ones.
Bruce McCabe: Yeah, it's it's interesting. There's so many more potential sources of information or or data, let's say, or whatever it is. But you're describing the diversity as shrinking dramatically. So the I guess the control of the key messages is shrinking. Is that what we're saying? Or we're getting the same sort of nonsense from many, many sources. I mean, diversity is deep. it's an interesting question because to me I see uh, for example, in the US, you look at what Fox controls as a media outlet in the US. it's not just the TV, it's the radio networks at local level, across the country. You know, it's a huge chunk which is now concentrated in the hands of really one family in terms of what's imposing their philosophy on that one network. And on the other hand, you have a million sources potentially of “something” online because there's a million websites offering you “something.” And so when we say diversity is reducing, how do we how do we measure that?
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, that are there are several aspects we can mention here, for example, this huge concentration when it comes to topics. During the pandemic in Switzerland, we measured that 70% of all reporting was in one way or the other related to COVID, the pandemic. Of course, you can say, okay, this is a huge crisis, and it's good also if news media report that extensively on the pandemic and the coronavirus. But then again, the question is okay, what is not covered enough as a consequence of this huge reporting on the COVID pandemic.
Bruce McCabe: So it's almost mimetic. I mean, basically, we've lost diversity because the crowd is following one path on whatever the issue is that gets the clicks, the audience, the eyeballs, I guess? Yeah. Commercially driven rather than social good driven?
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we also observe that the spectrum of opinions when it comes to political debate is rather limited. I think so. We don't find a broad spectrum of different opinions in the news media, especially from the - how should I say this - from the the margins of the political spectrum. And this I think is not good for our society because the people, if the people don't find their opinions reflected enough in established news media with a more or less good quality, what do they do then? They find themselves in in filter bubbles, in echo chambers, on the internet and social media, and that's what we do not want. So, in my opinion, and that's what our research also shows, that the opinion spectrum is by far too restricted, with the consequence that more and more users um go and and find their luck to to so to say in in the platforms, on the platforms.
Bruce McCabe: So, what period are we talking about? Diversity, quality has reduced quite dramatically since you started this study. diversity has reduced dramatically. Are we talking about the last four years, five years?
Mark Eisenegger: We're talking about the last 15 years.
Bruce McCabe: And this is the Swiss context. so let's well let's complete the context a little bit, and then let's just maybe do some comparisons more broadly. But what other trends have you seen apart from that? Or are they just so dominant? Are there other small trends or micro trends that we should also add to the mix? What's happened in 15 years?
Mark Eisenegger: The quality, as I said, is deteriorating over time slightly. But another big major trend is that we are observing huge differences when it comes to comparing different countries. Okay. So we did also studies comparing Switzerland with Austria, with Germany, with other countries, and then we observed huge huge differences. So the situation in Switzerland is still relatively good, as I said. although the trend is also showing downwards, but still the situation is relatively comfortable in comparison to other countries. But I would say the most important driver for the quality losses if you if you look at the established legacy news media landscape is the loss of resources. And this is something the money leaving the industry. And this is something we observe not only in Switzerland but go but of course also elsewhere. Another major trend, now we we talked a lot about what the quality of news media is. We of course look also at the news consumption, news usage, and there another big issue is news avoidance. This is also very interesting. And also for Switzerland, we have now a number for 46% of the Swiss citizens almost consuming no news anymore.
Bruce McCabe: So as a deliberate personal choice.
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, yeah. And when we started with this with this kind of research, this was in back in 2019. Back then we were at a level of 21% of people saying I do not use any use, so almost no news. And this numbers in stunningly increased over time.
Bruce McCabe: That's huge.
Mark Eisenegger: And and this is not all not only in Switzerland the case, also elsewhere. For example, backed up with Reuters study on digital news. so we have a big trend in other countries, Germany, the US, UK, showing that news avoidance is going up in in many countries.
Bruce McCabe: 12:41
But but but from 15 years, from 21% choosing to avoid, to 46%. That is a huge societal outcome in the world.
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely. This is what we investigated for this year's yearbook. We looked at the the consequences of this news deprivation, as we call it. Not news avoidance, we call it news deprivation. We looked how it how how much it correlates with the knowledge the people, the users have. And we have we can show a clear correlation between news avoidance and the level of knowledge, political knowledge, meaning that the the news avoiders, the news deprived, have clearly show clearly a lower knowledge when it comes to political knowledge, and which was for me even more surprising that these same users know even less or do also know less when it comes to soft news. So not did they do not only know less about political issues but also about soft news issues, and this was for me completely surprising. Yeah, that's true because social media that these users are often on social media platforms. Yeah, and on social media you find everything, entertainment stuff and emotionally driven. Cooking, well-being, everything. And they they know even less when it comes to soft news. This was completely surprising to me.
Bruce McCabe: That that is yeah, utterly surprising. Tell me. Well, let's do some comparisons. I've got a question about … Switzerland's performing relatively well. maybe it's lagging the rest, and maybe it's following. But well let's let's start there. Why? Is it fundamentally that the education level is higher in Switzerland than average? What's the factor do you think why Switzerland is doing a little bit better or a little bit behind other countries in this “slide?”
Mark Eisenegger: It's a very good question, and for me, very hard to answer. We do not know all the answers. I would say one answer is that Switzerland is a very small and very complex society with four language regions, and here still, the sensitivity that we need for the well-being of our society, also a well-established media system. Here, the sensitivity is still relatively high and good in Switzerland. This I would say is is one reason, then always what you see also in in other countries that the position of the public broadcaster is really absolutely crucial, too. If you have in a country an independent public broadcaster, such as we have it here in Switzerland by the SRG SSR, this is absolutely crucial, too, because it helps to uphold a certain level of quality in a country. Of course, if you look at the situation in Hungary or Poland, where the public broadcaster has a completely other position, there the situation is different than compared to Switzerland. But the strong position of a public broadcaster which serves so to say as a quality benchmark also for the private news outlets, I would say is a crucial and important factor.
Bruce McCabe: Which is a little a little taste when we move on to solutions. I think that's clearly something we need to come back to. That's one of the things. You remind me you know, with the languages discussion, the four languages. I had a discussion with a professor John Helliwell. He edits the global happiness report. And one of the things he found in the last couple of years was people are more unhappy when they have more access specifically to the social media content coming out of the United States. And the United States is almost “exporting unhappiness” through their social media. Now, and he could show data behind that, because in Canada they had looked at French speakers and English speakers and their social media use, and the French speakers were were far less affected because they had far less US content hitting their feeds. Anyway, perhaps there's some stabilizing effect in having not being not being consuming too much US social media content.
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely. In some cases, news avoidance is a good strategy. I would say sometimes you have to avoid certain news, even especially when it is of poorer quality, of course, than news avoidance is a good strategy. But as you as you mentioned, happiness. This is interesting also because we of course ask and interview the users who are on the side of the news deprived, the news avoiders. And when you ask them why are you actually avoiding the news, then they say it's for me by far too negative. Yeah, I don't want to have my mood teared down by all these catastrophes and wars and everything. I don't want to see and hear and watch it anymore. This is an important reason they give. The other thing that a lot of people, a lot of news avoiders are saying is it's by far too complex, too many sources. I'm overwhelmed by all these millions of sources, and therefore I am go l this way of retreating myself and not consuming news anymore. But yeah.
Bruce McCabe: I hear it a lot in different countries, exactly this conversation: people choosing not to, choosing to opt out of news, or even as a personal strategy, I have to dig deep into science news and and other news developments, but when it comes to the news, political news, I tend to read headlines, and then choose what I read in depth more carefully, because of the same effect. I feel like it starts my day with a huge amount of negativity I don't need. So yeah. So we're living the same effect. And so let's just quickly go into the the global picture and the Swiss comparison. You said there are big differences. Can can we get more specific about that? I mean the US situation I think is perhaps best understood out there, but the Switzerland versus Germany and Europe, and have you got any broad comparisons or reasons as to why they're different?
Mark Eisenegger: Um, you mean when it comes to the news media quality, the differences?
Bruce McCabe: Yeah.
Mark Eisenegger: Um the economic situation, of course, is very crucial.
Bruce McCabe: Okay.
Mark Eisenegger: So we see that, for example, Scandinavian countries perform much better when it comes when we look at the economic situation, and here also in Scandinavian countries, the quality level is really high. Also, the the willingness to, for example, to support the news media by means of direct funding by state funding is much higher. Here in Switzerland, it's really hard. I would not say impossible, but it's really hard because a lot of people, especially from the the right-wing spectrum of the political landscape, say this is not good if you go down that road, then the dependence on the state will increase. This is not good for quality. Really hard to do something in that direction. Here, the Scandinavian people are much more open to go that that avenue. then I would say that the the overall culture is of course also very crucial. So, how much importance we address into journalism, for example, how important is this for a society? Yeah, there we show see um big differences, and then just societal factors. for example, the polarization level is absolutely crucial for the quality of the public communication, also for the level of disinformation we find, for example.
Bruce McCabe: So the more polarized a society is, the worse it is. Is that where I'm hearing? I I would say so, yeah. when we look at the work the it's sorry to interrupt, but it tends towards extreme extreme news or extreme interpretations of the news rather than more accurate …?
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely. And also in polarized societies, people live in their communication silos. And in your communication silos, you are not facing to the same extent to face reputation loss if you disseminate, for example, this disinformation.
Bruce McCabe: Yeah.
Mark Eisenegger: So this is the other reason.
Bruce McCabe: Yes, they silo themselves into their own bubbles, as we say. Absolutely. And they stay there. Okay. Well, let's get on to the positive side. I mean it's hard, but positive. But on the solutioning side of this, we've okay, the idea of having a public broadcaster is really important -- and protecting one if you have one. We have this problem in Australia, where I'm based when I'm at home, um, where we have a very good public broadcaster. We have a couple, but they're always under attack for the amount of public money [they require]. And so there's a constant struggle between let's call it left-wing, right-wing, but I don't know, it's probably not correct. But people who are financially conservative who wish that we don't spend taxpayers' money on it, and the rest of us who are much wiser – [laughter] no, no, that's very pejorative – but you know, we desperately need some sort of stabilizing effect. you mentioned money. I don't know whether you've come to any conclusions about mechanisms to keep money within the journalistic system. This is so hard. Have you have you come across anyone or any ideas there? Because I'm constantly talking to really good investigative journalists who are leaving. When they retire, there's no one replacing them. Because who would do their job without good money? You need good money to support good journalism. Are there any any any ideas you've come across there?
Mark Eisenegger: It’s a very good question, also difficult to answer. But what we see if we if you ask the people, the ones who do not pay for journalism, what could we do? What could our society do? Then they say, what I want, what I do not want is to spend money for a specific outlet. What I want is something like Spotify for journalism. A platform where I find dozens of different outlets from different political spectrums, for example, some specialized on sports and science, some on general interest issues. If I would have such a Spotify for journalism, then I would be willing to pay something, but not the huge sums, of course.
Bruce McCabe: Interesting.
Mark Eisenegger: So the willingness to pay bigger sums is not there, even if you look at this specific group, but nevertheless, they say something like a platform for journalism where you don't have to pay for a specific outlet that that would help.
Bruce McCabe: That is fascinating, actually. So maybe there's something there we can we can work on and then tease out a little bit more. What other things have come out of your research that would suggest better ways of preserving quality and combating disinformation? You know, what what other ideas?
Mark Eisenegger: Uh the ideas to combating disinformation. Of course, media literacy is absolutely crucial.
Bruce McCabe: What's that, sorry?
Mark Eisenegger: Media or digital literacy.
Bruce McCabe: Literacy, yes, of course. Sorry.
Mark Eisenegger: My pronounciation, sorry.
[laughter]
Bruce McCabe: Yeah, so our broader education about how to handle, what to read, how to judge what we're reading.
Mark Eisenegger: Exactly, exactly. Because, for example, what we also know from research, our studies that political interest is absolutely a crucial driver for the overall news consumption, so we should more invest also in raising the political interest of the users. This clearly correlates the ones with bigger political interest or the ones consuming more news. This is of course an important factor. And then when it comes to news avoidance, news deprivation, I would say we should clearly look at this problem more in depth. Because, of course, when it comes to combating disinformation, we have, in my opinion, too strongly the view of the individual users. Why are they disseminating this information? Why are they falling for disinformation? But we know for studies from studies to if we have the goal to increase the overall quality level of our information environment, then we really must look that more information from reliable sources reaches the users. And then we are exactly talking about this problem of news separation, news avoidance. And as I said, for example, political interest is important. Also, constructive journalism is important. if people say they don't want to hear the whole day negative reports about wars and anything, then okay, journalism has to do something.
Bruce McCabe: Yeah, and presumably there's a commercial incentive to produce some more positive news. I mean, if people are clamoring for it and saying I need that if I'm gonna engage.
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, there are also studies out there showing that there is a willingness to pay for for more positive news also. So there seems to be yeah, willingness to pay out there when it comes to the user to pay for that kind of coverage.
Bruce McCabe: Who needs to be providing the media literacy? Is that is that a high school or even before high school type process?
Mark Eisenegger: The whole educational system I would say. Because if you look at the news awarders, then this starts at the age of 18. When we started back 15 years ago, this was clearly a problem only for of the young users. Yeah, but nowadays it's clearly also a problem a problem of the older ones.
Bruce McCabe: So you've seen it move up through the demographic.
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely. Absolutely. And therefore, I would say the whole educational system has to concentrate concentrate more on that problem and see what we can do against it.
Bruce McCabe: I'm not familiar with the regulatory responses in Europe, you know. I mean one of the big gaping holes in this in the US is the way they treat social media platforms with different rules to media platforms. You know, so if you're a big media company, you are held to account for defamation and this sort of thing. If you are Facebook, you are “just a platform,” “we didn't write the content,” and you completely escape any accountability for that content, unless it's social accountability, unless it's users refusing to stay. and that seems to be a just a huge regulatory gap in the US. Are there things like that in the EU that you see, or in Switzerland, where you see lawmakers have a have a role?
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, that there will be in a few weeks announced regulations in Switzerland exactly on that, on how we should regulate the platforms in Switzerland and to what extent we should make them responsible for what they are disseminating on their platforms. So I I see there a rather big and even yeah, bigger uh gap between the US and Europe, Europe and Switzerland. Here, the tendency, the trend is clearly to make more, to hold them accountable, the platforms, to do something. That they cannot say, look, it's simply that we are simply providing the platform, but what is going on? On our platform is not our business. This is not the European way and most probably not the Swiss way we want to go.
Bruce McCabe: I suspect in the long term it's not the human way. I mean, the the pure capitalist way at the moment is is blinding people to to to it in the in the US, particularly, I think. There's a big community that says freedom for everything and they're making a lot of money off it! And so that sort of blinds people. But to me, yeah, there's never been such a thing as “no accountability” for hosting you know bad faith speech or or violence and that sort of thing. That accountability to me has to come as well.
What else? Is there anything else that we've missed in terms of solutions, technical solutions? You know, I know people talk, for example, or social solutions like labeling and trusted sources, and there are lots of things in the mix, it's so complex. Have you landed on anything else that you would say? I wish people would look at this more.
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, this is also something we are suggesting, because we see that a lot of users are struggling to being able to distinguish between reliable and non-reliable content. Yeah, and therefore, I think really we should make it easier for them to distinguish between these two types of different quality-driven content. So, also journalistic content should be labeled more, I think, on the platforms. If also, even if I look at my daughters and my daughters are in the age of 22 and 24, they really are struggling extensively to be able to distinguish journalistic content from any other content, for example, distributed spread by influencers, for example.
Bruce McCabe: Yeah.
Mark Eisenegger: So labeling reliable, trustworthy content, in my opinion, is a very important thing.
Bruce McCabe: Yeah, the provenance, the provenance of the content, where does it come from? There's technical ways of helping that because we can cross-reference. So if something's come from one unreliable source and gone viral across the world, that has a certain pattern in the data. Yeah. And then there's things that have come through multiple very reliable journalists attending and from multiple sources. You know, there are different patterns in the data. There are even technical ways, I think, of assisting the more validated, multiple validated information and slowing or putting the brakes on the that information which is not validated, you know, as it seems to me.
What about you know, there's a couple I've got on my little list here. One one that I came across was this idea of “pre-bunking.” I like the word. The idea that you come in early, even before something develops as false information and news. And we have reliable places for people to see or check. You know, like Snopes was a very famous one for a long time. You could check that something was a complete fabrication, um, if it was a very often repeated mythology. I don't know if you've come across any mechanisms like that or …
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah, of course, pre-bunking is something we are discussing also extensively in research. And there are also some papers out analyzing just the effects of pre-banking. Is it helpful? These are mainly experimental studies, but clearly showing yes, pre-banking can help to expose the users before they actually encounter this or misinformation online on their platforms. How misinformation is presented online, for example, “cherry-picking” is a manipulative technique we often see that people say users say look if we look at the year of 2018 to 2019, then the numbers of global warming is going down, but they they neglect the overall picture over the last 150 years, which shows a clearly increase when it comes to global warming. This is just one example, of course.
Bruce McCabe: I encounter it all the time, that particular one! So go on, go on …
Mark Eisenegger: If we explain such techniques of manipulation to the users so that they can understand, this is of course a very effective means to prevent that they will fall for misinformation if you encounter it later online.
Bruce McCabe: It seems very effective in or become increasingly effective in scams as well. When banks and financial institutions broadcast an alert that there's this type of scam right now escalating. People pay attention to that. It does get shared and it does work. I think it reduces the impact of financial scams. So why wouldn't it work in this context?
Mark Eisenegger: Yeah.
Bruce McCabe: I'd be interested in the research. So you're testing ideas now and you're you're looking into that. I'd be very interested as that research develops.
What have we missed? Is there anything on your list of things that people should know about with with ideas and solutions that we can get them? It's only a starting point, this conversation, but you know, to get them thinking and researching. And I can maybe add some links.
Mark Eisenegger: One very surprising finding for me is the gap that we if we ask the people how big they perceive the problem of disinformation. in Switzerland, more than 50% say this is a huge problem. Also, here it's even an increasing problem. 25% of the users say they encounter regularly mis and disinformation, also here in Switzerland, although we know that Switzerland is compared to other countries relatively resilient. But if we then look at the methodologies with stricter methodological approaches, such as tracking, for example, that there are several really very interesting but also very surprising papers out which show that, for example, for the US, less than 1% of misinformation is in part of the overall media diet of the users. So less than 1% of misinformation or disinformation is part of the media diet of the American users. For Germany, we have numbers around 1% also of the of the news diet.
Bruce McCabe: let me understand that. So less than 1% of the news diet of the average citizen is misinformation.
Mark Eisenegger: Is misinformation, is what the users see as misinformation. In France, the number is around, if I recall it correctly, 4 to 5 percent. But the overall picture, if we look at these different numbers, is that if we ask people, disinformation is a huge problem. If we look at the more stricter methodologies, then the problem might be smaller than we thought. And this was for me really interesting. Interesting to see.
I would never say or never have an attitude to downplay the problem of disinformation. But perhaps we should also think of reflect whether we do not talk too often about mis and disinformation, because we also know from this from studies that this might be also a driver that reduces the trust people have, users have in the media system, for example.
So it's of course good, a good idea to observe the problem, to look how it evolves over time, but perhaps we are just now too often talking about the problem of misinformation, and not often enough talking about other problems such as news avoidance or news separation.
Bruce McCabe: Yes, the avoidance being the big surprise for me. That's really interesting. Yeah, by talking about it. We might by talking it up too much, we might be destroying our trust in in the actual useful information.
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely.
Bruce McCabe: Wow. That's a big surprise, actually, for me. Yeah. and no doubt you're drilling into that with your research as you go forward. Yeah, you're looking further into that.
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely.
Bruce McCabe: Wow. Well, as we bring this to an end, is there anything else we you know that you wanted in terms of messages you wish leaders knew about this topic that they don't know? You know, I'd like to capture everything that you you really want to get out there.
Mark Eisenegger: For me, the the most important drivers for, and that not only for me, that it's what research is is showing that societal factors, context factors are really crucial when we want to explain the overall level of problem we are facing when it comes to misinformation. And polarization is really very crucial. We see in in all countries with high polarization levels more disinformation circulating in the system, that more users fall for disinformation and misinformation. And I would say, of course, what does this mean for leaders? They should help fostering a debate with people with completely opposing opinions, for example, and we should come away from a tendency to always perceive people's views with opposing opinions as my enemy. So we are clearly caught in this friend/enemy thinking, especially in the US, but also elsewhere. And I would say also leaders do good or to should do more to help fostering a debate between people and users with opposing and contradictory opinions.
Bruce McCabe: Wow, yeah. I like that very much. And you know, my last question was going to be what's the one thing you would have leaders doing. Is that one thing?
Mark Eisenegger: That’s it. [laughter]
Bruce McCabe: That's huge. And it makes sense to me. It makes a lot of sense in the broader context. So the polarization is a magnifier and an accelerator of the problem …
Mark Eisenegger: Absolutely.
Bruce McCabe: … and um, all we have to do, it really suggests at a personal level we should all be behaving a little bit differently if we can, to challenge ourselves to engage with some of the opposing viewpoints more, to mix it more. Absolutely. Yeah, because otherwise we're in a trap, we're in our own little bubble trap and magnifying it. But leaders definitely could play a role.
I think that's that that concludes it for for today. Professor Mark Eisenegger, thank you so much.
Mark Eisenegger: You're very welcome. This was extremely interesting.
Bruce McCabe: An absolute pleasure for me. Thank you.
Mark Eisenegger: Thank you.