Snowballing data and the misinformation avalanche

It's 1999. Our personal computer at home at the time, a Pentium III has just been upgraded to Windows 98. Its startup sound feels like the kind of music that would greet you at the pearly gates of Heaven. Dave and Doom consume a bulk of my rationed play time and the browser to which Firefox traces its roots, is my browser of choice.

Right now however, statistically, there's a fairly high chance that you're reading this on Chrome, a web browser developed by Google. Since its inception almost 11 years ago, it has come to dominate the web browsing space with an almost monopolistic hold over the market. As of February, out of every 100 connected devices, 62 are purported to be running Chrome. A plethora of factors have contributed to its meteoric rise, some controversial but that is perhaps a story for another day.

When we took a look back at the 90s, we begin to realize how much simpler things were. What would retroactively be known as the dot-com bubble had not yet exploded. Social media as we know it today wouldn't appear on the scene for at least another 6 years; smartphones, for 9. It is hard to imagine a life today without our connected devices, isn't it? The last two decades have seen a massive shift in the way information is propagated and consumed. Today, we have been forced to wage a war on misinformation, something that seems to have become fairly common in the last few years. So what has changed? And why do we find ourselves in this position? We can trace the roots of the problem back to at least 3 key events, all occurring within the space of a few years.

I. Miniaturization of hardware

While the first Pentium IIIs to be released in early 1999 would pack a little under 10 million transistors, and run on average at a clock speed slower than what can be found on a mid range smartphone today, a bulk of the early major advancements in computing can be found in its successor: the Pentium 4. Apart from enjoying a production run that was twice as long as its predecessor, when Intel finally decided to end production in mid 2008, it was cramming almost 20 times the number of transistors in a die that was almost 4 times smaller. It was no coincidence that Web 2.0 was beginning to take shape around the same time. More robust hardware meant the ability to design more sophisticated websites. The average Joe was still tethered to his monolithic desktop for the most part. This is because the smartphone revolution starting with the now legendary iPhone (although not the first to use a capacitive touchscreen) was still more than half a decade away. While touchscreen phones had started becoming mainstream in the early 2000s, they relied on resistive rather than capacitive technologies thereby requiring end-users to carry and use styluses instead of their fingers. This, of course, completely changed after 2007. 

II. Proliferation of broadband internet

While India was about a decade late to the party, megabit speeds were already a reality in the United States in the late 1990s. By the time smartphones became popular towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the ITU had already finalized standards for its fourth generation of telecommunications technology, colloquially known as 4G. Suddenly, one didn't need to be tethered to a hulking PC tower or an Apple computer in order to experience the new World Wide Web. Accessibility improved leaps and bounds globally, enabling more people to generate, share and consume content.    

III. Emergence of online mobile platforms

The third and final piece of the puzzle is self explanatory and one that almost everyone today is far too familiar with. With capable hardware and ever increasing bandwidth, it was only a matter of time that we saw new platforms emerging and providing consumers with new ways of interacting with each other. While on the one hand, where this overarching proliferation has given millions of people a voice and some even entire careers, it has also brought its fair share of problems. In a recent interview on a very popular podcast, top management at Twitter agreed that moderating content online is not only a monumental exercise, it's exceedingly difficult to get right. We have generated more data online in the last few years than we have ever generated in the entire history of humankind. This exponential rise in the generation and subsequent consumption of data has left a lot of untruths unchecked, which has led to us finding ourselves in a rather peculiar situation.

Where do we go from here?

When we went back two decades to 1999, a little over 4% of the world had access to the internet; today, more than half the world does. While one could say this is a testament to the immense scalability of the underlying technology and a boon to all those who rely on it, not everything is rosy. For one, we are more exposed to cyber attacks than we were in 1999. This has immense implications, now that everyday devices are becoming smarter with the rise of IoT. However, it is still relatively easy to identify a rogue element in this context. Not so with misinformation. Because of the nature of general truths, how it spreads, and depending on where it's coming from, it can be be extremely challenging to identify a piece of information as being factually incorrect. Technologically, we haven't reached a stage where this process can be delegated to a machine unlike with rogue pieces of code. One could even argue we're quite a long ways from it.

When Elon Musk proposed the creation of Pravda, two things happened. As with almost everything these days, reactions to it were extremely polarized. However, people began to realize that crowd-sourcing the truth is nigh impossible. Why is it that crowd-sourcing has worked so well for the continual improvement of software and to fund projects we'd like to see but fails so spectacularly in this instance? A part of it can be attributed to the way the human mind works. 

An unintended consequence of our hyper-developed brain is its prodigious appetite for denial. Where crowd-sourcing works best for a bunch of people who see a singular common goal, the truth is more often than not, as subjective as it is contentious. Nietzsche famously said "there are no internal facts, as there are no absolute truths". A lot of factors contribute to subjective realities, like one's social or economic status among a host of other things. Therefore solving this problem will need a lot of care and effort an individual level. Assuming a universal truth indeed exist, there are three primary questions we ought to ask ourselves in order to equip ourselves to tackle this problem:

1) Am I really interested in learning the truth?

2) Am I willing to question my own beliefs? 

3) Am I willing to make an effort to unearth the truth?

We are off to a good start if the answer at least two of those is in the affirmative. 

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