Building Back Truth in an Age of Misinformation

by Leslie F. Stebbins, Ethan Zuckerman (Foreword)

How can we build back truth online? Here’s how. How can we build back truth online? In this book, researcher Leslie F. Stebbins provides solutions for repairing our existing social media platforms and building better ones that prioritize value over profit, strengthen community ties, and promote access to trustworthy information. Stebbins provides a road map with six paths forward to understand how platforms are designed to exploit us, how we can learn to embrace agency in our interactions with digital spaces, how to build tools to reduce harmful practices, how platform companies can prioritize the public good, how we can repair journalism, and how to strengthen curation to promote trusted content and create new, healthier digital public squares. New, experimental models that are ethically designed to build community and promote trustworthy content are having some early successes. We know that human social networks—online and off—magnify whatever they are seeded with. They are not neutral. We also know that to repair our systems we need to repair their design. We are being joined in the fight by some of the best and brightest minds of our current generation as they flee big tech companies in search of vocations that value integrity and public values. The problem of misinformation is not insurmountable. We can fix this.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2023

About the author

Leslie F. Stebbins is an independent researcher and the director of Research4Ed, where her clients include Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Education, Tufts University, and the Gates Foundation. She has more than thirty years of experience in higher education with a background in library and information science, instructional design, research, and teaching. Leslie lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Zed Lambrecht · Rating 5 out of 5]

BUILDING BACK TRUTH IN AN AGE OF MISINFORMATION expertly addresses misinformation, disinformation, loss of privacy, and the forces behind this phenomenon. Stebbins also reviews the decline of journalism, fact checking, editorial inaction, and the changes of how advertising revenue effects the current presentation of material to the public.

Stebbins is a recognized expert in the field of media literacy with respectable credentials. Building Back reminds me of Lanier's book You Are Not A Gadget. Lanier is a computer scientist aware and concerned about technology's effects on the public. However, his book is out of date, poorly organized, and full of hope. Stebbins' book was published in 2023, twelve years after Lanier's.

Stebbins book reads like a textbook. The author organized the material in a coherent manner, shows critical analyses, and discusses various means of possible reforms. It isn't entertaining or falsely optimistic; it is educational. This is a book you should buy and lend to friends.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Former academic librarian and current researcher, Leslie Stebbins offers a hopeful note on the crises in social media – it won’t be easy to counter misinformation, but it is possible. There is hope.

Mis- and disinformation are destabilizing to the individual and to society. ‘Alternate’ facts are myth and belief, not truth. Confronting misinformation requires changing how we think and how systems function. We have left the design of our online world in the hands of technical experts. Platform companies have focused too much on growth at all costs. Misinformation is incentivized because it promotes controversy and more screen time. The misinformation crisis is containable.

Building Back Truth… is about making strong links between different academic disciplines working on the problem of disinformation. It is about translating potential solutions into a plan of attack. It is about understanding the mechanisms that create and incentivize misinformation and containing and addressing them.

Building Back Truth… is an excellent companion to Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine. Whereas, Chaos is investigative journalism with extensive background and information in a easy to follow narrative, Truth… is a concise outline of similar points with paragraph or two bullet points under paths to restoring truth in a factual (real ones) basis and demanding social media platforms emphasize public value over growth. Recommended as a very helpful guide to restoring public good, rebuilding the tools of reason based information, and understanding why others accept misinformation and protecting ourselves from believing it or passing it along.

Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Readalikes:
Max Fisher – The Chaos Machine; Tobias Rose-Stockwell – Outrage machine; Christopher Bail – Breaking the Social Media Prism; Nicole Marie Aschoff – The Smartphone Society; Sander van der Linden – Foolproof; Guy P. Harrison – Think Before You Like; An Xiao Mina – Memes to Movements; Gaia Bernstein – Unwired.

Storyline: Issue-oriented
Writing style: Well-researched
Tone: Hopeful; Thought-provoking