Suzanne Nossel headshot

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Every Friday, we discuss tricky questions about free speech and expression with our CEO Suzanne Nossel, author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, in our weekly PEN Pod segment “Tough Questions.” In this week’s episode, we talk about the recent sweeping disinformation and the online networks’ efforts to prevent it, the collapse of trust in the institutions and news outlets, and the media’s measured coverage of the presidential election. Listen below for our full conversation (our interview with Suzanne is up until the 11:17 mark).

We are recording late Thursday—things may have changed by the time we go to air—but let me just start with a retrospective question. Regardless of how this election plays out, what role have disinformation and misinformation played in this campaign season, and have we learned anything or made any progress as a result?
 It’s been really fascinating. There has been a flood of disinformation. Researchers have pinpointed that the primary spreader of disinformation has been—surprise, surprise—the president of the United States, who, as we know, has sown doubt throughout about the mail-in ballots. He was doing that to lay groundwork for exactly what’s going on now: an effort to discredit this late counting, which in many states is of absentee and by-mail ballots. By casting a cloud over them and suggesting that they were more subject to fraud, his effort has been to suggest that this count, and this extra vote that is now coming in, is somehow suspect. That was his main message.

“Researchers have pinpointed that the primary spreader of disinformation has been—surprise, surprise—the president of the United States, who, as we know, has sown doubt throughout about the mail-in ballots. He was doing that to lay groundwork for exactly what’s going on now: an effort to discredit this late counting, which in many states is of absentee and by-mail ballots. By casting a cloud over them and suggesting that they were more subject to fraud, his effort has been to suggest that this count, and this extra vote that is now coming in, is somehow suspect.”

There were also—and I’m sure we’ll learn more about this in the weeks and months to come—targeted messages that were much more insidious, that were pinpointing different communities trying to suppress the vote. There were messages that you could vote on Wednesday if you couldn’t make it through the line on Tuesday, messages about voting online, and other efforts to suppress the vote, confuse people, tell people they needed multiple forms of ID to turn up at the polling station. And there was that widely publicized incident of people receiving threatening letters from somebody purporting to be the Proud Boys—apparently an Iranian disinformation operation.

We had the Hunter Biden disclosures, those emails of uncertain provenance and authenticity that were dumped and picked up by the New York Post several weeks ago, in an effort that had clear earmarks of a disinformation operation, but we don’t know whether it was that. In fact, the Biden campaign never denied the authenticity of the emails, and we may never know exactly where that came from or who was behind it or what their motives were. I think we also have seen, though, a really concerted effort by both the online platforms and the networks to clamp down—whether it’s Twitter blocking and fact-checking just about every tweet in President Trump’s feed right now, or Facebook taking steps to elevate credible information about the election. Anytime someone posted about polls or voting, their election information center would pop up with data from the Secretary of State’s offices and other reliable guidance. So, we’ve seen an enormous mobilization, both to pervade disinformation and to fight back against it, and I think it’s going to be a little time before we can really judge who’s on the winning side of this battle, in this go-around.

“The currency of truth has been degraded in this country—particularly in relation to certain pockets of the population who’ve really put themselves beyond the reach of credible journalism, or information coming from government officials like scientists. That’s really dangerous, because next time it could be a hurricane, and people don’t believe the advice they’re getting on how we need to be prepared. So, I think our strength as a country is really undercut when we have so little trust in our officials and institutions, and that’s something that’s going to have to be systematically rebuilt.”

Again, no matter the outcome, you’ve said that you think our information ecosystem is broken and needs repair, or even transformation. What does that exactly mean, and what do you think we need to do?
 Look, I think what we’ve seen is a series of vulnerabilities in this system. Disinformation is part of it. It’s the degradation of the truth and, to me, the most striking example of that is in relation to COVID-19 and the fact that a substantial swath of the population doesn’t believe that masks work, or are worth using, that they have doubts about whether they would ever take a vaccine. So, the currency of truth has been degraded in this country—particularly in relation to certain pockets of the population who’ve really put themselves beyond the reach of credible journalism, or information coming from government officials like scientists. That’s really dangerous, because next time it could be a hurricane, and people don’t believe the advice they’re getting on how we need to be prepared. So, I think our strength as a country is really undercut when we have so little trust in our officials and institutions, and that’s something that’s going to have to be systematically rebuilt.

Feeding into it is the crisis in local news, which we have documented extensively in our Losing the News report about the decimation of local news, shutting down 25 percent of local news outlets at the community level, shriveling of newsroom staff, and particularly investigative reporting. I think that has fanned the trust—people don’t know where to go in order to get the facts. Local news is the most trusted set of news outlets, so the collapse of the revenue model there—which is not deliberate, it’s just a function of the transformation to digital—has left this gaping hole that has fed into this sense that you don’t know where to go to get reliable data.

There’s also great mistrust and major questions in terms of online content moderation—how far we want these platforms to go in mediating and policing the speech that courses through them at this ferocious pace all day long. So, we have a lot of big questions and issues to come to grips with in order to get to a point where we can have a national debate over issues as important as what we’re dealing with right now—whether it’s the pandemic or the economy, or the U.S.-China relationship, America’s role in the world—that is actually fact-based, civilized give and take, and a conversation. We have really gotten away from that, and it’s going to be a steep climb to rebuild.

“People like Arnon Mishkin at the Fox News decision desk are calling it like they see it. They do not seem to be swayed by reports of a phone call from President Trump angry that Arizona had been called for Joe Biden. So, I think that’s something we can take some solace in—the news media, for the most part, seems to be very careful about it.”

One of the dimensions you mentioned there was the press and the media, and I want to go to something that happened the other night. Hours before the polls closed on Election Day, we shared a short clip of Arnon Mishkin, who is the head of Fox News’s decision desk. He was part of an event that we did, and we shared a little video clip of him saying that election night is a TV show about math. Hours later, he then called Arizona before a number of other news outlets did—to the ire of the president—but it also raised this idea of truth and facts prevailing, even on, potentially, Fox News. What do you make of the media coverage of election night and the days that have followed? What do you think it suggests for the future?
 We put an enormous amount of energy, as PEN America, into engagement with news outlets—both the major national news outlets—like The Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, NPR, and the local outlets from across the country. We’re trying to raise the alarm bell to say, “Look, this is going to be an election like no other, there’s such heavy reliance on mail-in ballots, it is going to take time, and your role is going to be crucial because you call things prematurely or suggest that the ballots cast on Election Day tell the final story when the ballots that are outstanding may reveal a different picture.” If you don’t set up the American public to understand that we may not know the results on election night, all of that could feed into an atmosphere of panic and crisis in which disinformation would run rampant, and people would be prone to believing conspiracy theories.

So, we really underscored it—we brought people together for convenings and discussions about how to prepare for this and how the news media could do their work responsibly. Their reaction was, I think, very professional and exactly what you would hope for, which is they absolutely wanted to rise to the challenge and make sure they were fully prepared. There were enormous efforts, drills, training, forethought, and scenario planning that went on within the news outlets to get ready for Election Day. I think we’ve so far seen the results of this. It’s been very measured. People like Arnon Mishkin at the Fox News decision desk are calling it like they see it. They do not seem to be swayed by reports of a phone call from President Trump angry that Arizona had been called for Joe Biden. So, I think that’s something we can take some solace in—the news media, for the most part, seems to be very careful about it. We’ve still got about five states where the results haven’t been called by most networks, and we’re all sitting with that. It’s uncomfortable, we’re anxious, but we’ve been told and had it drummed in that this is how the process works. So, we need to be patient and, I think, for the most part, people are holding on.