Person:

Sullivan, Matthew

In the wake of the panic over fake news that followed the 2016 US presidential election, librarians and other information professionals are being urged to “take leadership in the current crisis” (Jacobson, 2017: 24). The response from the profession has been to reaffirm the core values of librarianship and to hold up traditional services as a means for combating misinformation. The problem is that these solutions are offered in the absence of a full understanding of the real danger of misinformation, which is “not just [that] misinformation is ‘out there,’” but “what misinformation does to our mind” (Ecker, 2015: 22). Misinformation research in other fields directly challenges the solutions proposed by library professionals and casts doubts on their underlying assumptions. This article provides an overview of the library and information science approach to misinformation in the United States, discusses the shortcomings of that approach, and points to possible next steps for remedying the problem.

This article surveys the library and information science (LIS) response to the problems of fake news and misinformation from the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the end of 2018, focusing on how librarians and other information professionals in the United States have articulated the problems and the paths forward for combating them. Additionally, the article attempts to locate the LIS response in a larger interdisciplinary misinformation research program, provide commentary on the response in view of that research program, and lay out both a possible research agenda for the field and practical next steps for educators ahead of the 2020 election.

In the wake of the panic over fake news that followed the 2016 US presidential election, librarians and other information professionals are being urged to “take leadership in the current crisis” (Jacobson, 2017: 24). The response from the profession has been to reaffirm the core values of librarianship and to hold up traditional services as a means for combating misinformation. The problem is that these solutions are offered in the absence of a full understanding of the real danger of misinformation, which is “not just [that] misinformation is ‘out there,’” but “what misinformation does to our mind” (Ecker, 2015: 22). Misinformation research in other fields directly challenges the solutions proposed by library professionals and casts doubts on their underlying assumptions. This article provides an overview of the library and information science approach to misinformation in the United States, discusses the shortcomings of that approach, and points to possible next steps for remedying the problem.

One reason librarians are confident they have a role to play in fighting misinformation is the level of trust in libraries as institutions. Exactly how they might leverage that trust remains unclear and untested. Building on recent work in correcting health misperceptions on social media, this study tests whether libraries can leverage trust to combat misinformation online. Using a misperception about the influenza vaccine as a test case, an experiment (n = 625) was conducted in fall 2018 using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that the misperception can be reduced, but not by library institutions. An unsuccessful follow-up (n = 600) suggests that the effectiveness of the correction is season dependent and opens the possibility that libraries may yet play a role, but not necessarily because they are trusted. Future library proposals for combating misinformation need to be developed and tested within a broader contemporary misinformation research program.