New Voices RGU Student Series – David Rinehart

Category: New Voices, New Voices, RGU Student Series

In the Robert Gordon University Student Series blog, we share the views of RGU students from the MSc in Information and Library Studies course.

Today, we hear from David Rinehart, who moved to Ireland in August 2018 from Florida and has an M.A. in Latin American Studies. David is currently studying for his MSc in Information and Library Studies at RGU, and works as a Library Assistant in the Special Collections and Archives department at Maynooth University. In this blog, David shares his take on the threat posed by disinformation, and what he thinks libraries must do to win the fight in favour of facts and hard evidence.

David discusses the infodemic and the integral role that libraries play in standing up for the truth.

The Information Specialist’s Post-Coronavirus Calling: (Dis)Information Literacy

Disinformation has been a storm out at sea for many years now. Under the Trump presidency, we began to recognize its form as it approached our shores. Orwellian doublethink is now mainstream in which legitimate news sources and science are referred to as fake. Simultaneously, illegitimate disinformation hubs are spewing what could actually be defined as fake news and are trusted sources for a significant chunk of our society. The disinformation machines use the classic childhood rhetoric of “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” but in an adult and globally consequential context. While this disinformation storm was indeed brewing, it wasn’t until the pandemic that it broke loose and we saw what we will likely remember as the infodemic (Bernard et al. 2020).

The infodemic was aptly named for the violent and deadly spread of dis and misinformation – disinformation being misinformation specifically created and spread with malicious intent – at such a vast and rapid scale across social media and, more broadly, the internet; a feat that has not been experienced in human history (Buchanan 2020). This catastrophe has had specialists of various backgrounds such as information, media, health, and politics scrambling to figure out what we can do to cauterize this information wound and stop the flow of disinformation. Some experimental measures have been taken. For example, Twitter has admirably thrown up warning labels and encouraged users to read the content they are amplifying, which has been shown to help slow the spread of misinformation. What more can be done? Specifically, what can be done from the library’s point of view?

I have identified three important goals for society, the last of which I will focus on as it is library specific. First, we need to put pressure on our governments to implement legislation that helps inform users about the information they are coming across. This would be like the content warnings we see on Twitter but in many more places such as browser search results, YouTube videos, and Facebook to name a few. Second, more content needs to be created dispelling disinformation in a way that is entertaining and engaging to reach a larger audience. We can even take a cue from the disinformation specialists on how to package our content in a way that entices audiences. Third, and most importantly for academic librarians, we academic libraries need to allocate resources to develop well-researched Information AND Disinformation literacy programmes (De Paor and Heravi 2020). These programmes should be available to the community. More importantly, these courses should be taught to and implemented in public and school libraries, and, I believe, should become part of the compulsory education of young people and university students alike.

While any information specialist working in an academic library will likely have been at least adjacent to an information literacy course, we are going to have to rethink these courses taking into consideration the infodemic. While disinformation literacy may be implied in an information literacy course, it is so rampant and widespread that we must now emphasize it within these courses. In developing these courses, we are going to have to work with educators, people of the community – especially marginalized communities which have been the most impacted by the infodemic, students – and academics to create a thorough and captivating course.

Creators and super-spreaders of disinformation have done their research, they have targeted individuals and communities, and they have stoked social division. We must meet them with the same vigour and put in the same amount of effort to help heal our world of both the pandemic and infodemic. Tackling the infodemic is our role in this battle and we must stand together and strong.

References

BERNARD, R. et al., 2020. Disinformation and Epidemics: Anticipating the Next Phase of Biowarfare. Health Security. [online]. In press. Available from: https://www-liebertpub-com.ezproxy.rgu.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1089/hs.2020.0038 [Accessed 24 November 2020].

BUCHANAN, T., 2020. Why do people spread false information online? The effects of message and viewer characteristics on self-reported likelihood of sharing social media disinformation. PLoS ONE, 15(10 October), pp. 1–33. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239666 [Accessed 24 November 2020].

DE PAOR, S. and HERAVI, B., 2020. Information literacy and fake news: How the field of librarianship can help combat the epidemic of fake news. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 46(5), p. N.PAG-N.PAG. Available from: http://10.0.3.248/j.acalib.2020.102218 [Accessed 24 November 2020].

PEREZ, S., 2020. Twitter may slow down users’ ability to ‘like’ tweets containing misinformation. [online]. Tech Crunch. Available from: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/09/twitter-may-slow-down-users-ability-to-like-tweets-containing-misinformation/ [Accessed 24 Nov 2020].

WELLS, G., 2020. Twitter Says Labels and Warnings Slowed Spread of False Election Claims. [online]. Wallstreet Journal. Available from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-says-labels-and-warnings-slowed-spread-of-false-election-claims-11605214925 [Accessed 23 Nov 2020].