Pitt professors, students discuss combatting disinformation this election cycle

With the upcoming election on Tuesday, Calum Matheson said “We’re more disposed to believe [disinformation] than we probably ever were.”

“It’s not just Republicans — there’s just disinformation and propaganda all over the place,” Matheson, associate professor and chair for the Department of Communications, said. “It’s an extremely common sort of condition of information today.”

Disinformation has come to the forefront of concerns regarding election media this November.  

“The idea is that disinformation is intentional,” Michael Colaresi, director of the Disinformation Lab at Pitt, said.

“So someone knows better, and they’re intentionally misleading you,” Colaresi said. “Misinformation can be misleading information, but the person who’s sending it doesn’t necessarily know it, so they can’t intend to mislead.”

Matheson referenced the disinformation surrounding Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, where disinformation was said by former President Trump. Matheson believes this story was “deliberately used as propaganda.”

“It started somewhere else and was amplified by someone — we don’t know exactly how that happened — but now that it’s repeated, a lot of people probably do believe it,” Matheson said. “Some people say it and don’t believe it because it’s useful for them to say it, but a lot of people probably actually think that’s the case.”

Another factor Colaresi cited as why disinformation works is missing context when information is presented. 

“So showing you a document out of context, the document is real, but someone is presenting it to you in a particular way because it’ll mislead you,” Colaresi said. “If you had the fuller context, you wouldn’t be led to those conclusions or inferences.” 

Colaresi described the concept of providence, or knowing where information came from, as a key factor in identifying disinformation.

“We’re seeing all sorts of problems with generated AI, deepfakes, persuasive messages that aren’t real, they don’t take work to create, really,” Colaresi said. “You want to know where these things came from in particular.” 

Matheson also went into the rise of social media and the role it has had in the spread of disinformation. 

“People get news from social media — that’s where disinformation now is most effective,” Matheson said. “All that stuff works because Americans create the condition where it can succeed … [it’s] the weakness of a free society and not censoring information.” 

Sarayu Cheemalapati, a junior political science major, raised concerns about disinformation coming from election campaigns. 

“I feel that [disinformation has] been seen in this election, especially with the rise of social media and other platforms and campaigns really using that to their advantage,” Cheemalapati said. “I feel like there’s been a large spread of misinformation, not only just through news outlets but also through campaigns.”

Cheemalapati stressed the importance of having fact-checkers to combat disinformation during this election season. 

“I think having a place where fact-checking everything that goes through it, whether it be news outlets, social media posts, things like that, is very helpful,” Cheemalapati said.

Matheson remarked that young people are more aware of the exaggeration that occurs on social media, which provides a measure of resistance to persuasion. 

“Students now have been raised in an environment that was already polarized. They are more savvy in some ways about attempts to manipulate them,” Matheson said. “On the other hand, they’re also exposed to a huge amount of disinformation.”

Matheson emphasized the importance of understanding argumentation and developing the ability to critically think.

One of the most valuable things students can do is “to develop a good sense of how to quickly determine what is likely to be true and what is unlikely to be true and to apply that lens to everything that you read,” Matheson said.

Kamal Imaya, a junior biology pre-med major, said he believes disinformation is “pretty much everywhere.”

“I’ve been noticing various sources, not only just accounts but even various news sites posting things that either are so biased to the point where that information is warped or just completely false,” Imaya said. 

Imaya highlighted how he defends himself against disinformation online. 

“As one that goes on social media pretty heavily, I can see disinformation pretty well, I can say I’m pretty familiar with it,” Imaya said. “I’ve gotten more into looking at bias in news sources. There’s an account on social media called Ground News, and it pretty much analyze[s] all these different news outlets.”

As students navigate the internet, Matheson emphasized the importance of thinking critically about the media they’re consuming.

“When you learn how to process information well, it means that you can benefit from this historically unique situation that we’re in with an enormous amount of information that would never have been accessible to people hundreds of years ago is immediately accessible to you right now,” Matheson said. “It’s easy to think too negatively about this situation, but it’s only negative because it has such an incredible promise attached to it.”