Democracy is under threat, but not necessarily because of disinformation, says the researcher

Net is full of disinformation that people read. It undermines their trust in traditional institutions. As a result, democracy is under threat.

Such a view of the current social situation is often presented.

Doctor of research Salla Tuomolan according to me, however, it is too one-sided picture. According to his research, the causes and consequences seem to go a bit the other way around in the situation.

“A person can first lose their trust in democracy and traditional information transmission. After that, he might also become suitable ground for disinformation.”

Disinformation is actually not as big a problem as it sounds. “According to international studies, the amount of actual disinformation is very little or small. Still, there is a lot of concern that there is a huge amount of disinformation that should be protected from.

Roskilden Tuomola, who now works at the university, interviewed in the University of Tampere’s DECA project 25 Finns who had lost their trust in the media. A large number of them are “alternative informed authorities”, some of whom have thousands of followers on social media.

The results were surprising. In the interviews, there was concern that democracy is not working.

“Most of them expressed that they were worried about the state of democracy

For them, democracy means people’s power, that everyone’s voice is heard. “It’s not going to happen the way they’d like.”

So society is dividing because of the changing concept of democracy.

News media does not convey incorrect information in the opinion of the interviewees. The problem is that not all perspectives are heard.

“Voting is not enough influencing”, Tuomola sums up the thoughts of some of his interviewees. It is essential that the voice is heard in the media.

However, Finns’ relationship with the media has fundamentally changed. In the age of the Internet, anyone can post almost anything. Numerous big events have changed the way we read the media. These have been especially the corona pandemic, the Russian attack and the NATO vote.

“They changed the way we follow basic news. The basic tasks of journalism are the transmission of information, enabling civil debate and critical action as a watchdog of power. With these happenings, the emphasis in the media has changed, and not everyone has been happy with this.”

During the corona pandemic, the public health point of view was supported to some extent in the media, and as a result, there was less criticism of the authorities’ measures. “Journalism’s mission of conveying information is felt to have decreased due to influence on opinion.”

After Corona, all communication has been read through the same suspicion.

Confidence it may be starting to wear out over small things. It is a slow process in which a person begins to perceive the environment in a different way.

Even a partial lack of trust creates a fertile ground for information influencers. Their purpose, in turn, may be to undermine trust in democracy.

According to Tuomola, the idea of ​​perspectives that remain out of the public raises an essential question. “In this democracy, is there room for the voices of all citizens, and how could it be filtered so that the conversation does not become, for example, racist?

According to him, the solution would be to discuss what kind of world one wants to live in.

Trust the reason behind the crumbling is information-related problems.

Democracy is threatened above all by a change, which Tuomola calls “a change in the basis of epistemic consensus”.

Epistemic means related to knowledge. To put it in Finnish, we no longer agree on what makes information reliable information. Institutions are no longer trusted as guarantors of certainty.

For example, during the corona crisis, people compared what was said in the media to their own experience of their close circle. They did not necessarily correspond to each other. “People start thinking about what to trust.”

This is exactly what leads to polarization. When information is trusted for different reasons, and there are no longer common rules for verifying information, the public debate becomes polarized. “Then different knowledge environments are created.”

After that, people seek an environment that suits them, one that corresponds to their own experience or worldview.

What what does all this ultimately mean for democracy, our understanding and ways of talking about it?

“Digitalization, information influence and other phenomena of our time are real threats to democracy. However, they should not be talked about in one-way lines, that disinformation increases mistrust and democracy collapses with it.”

Democracy has never been perfect.

“Democracy has always been a compromise that has been negotiated.”

Salla Tuomola today 9.1. At the Science Night event Three perspectives on polarization in everyday Finnish mediaPorthania, Yliopistonkatu 3, at 5-6 p.m.