When RAND Corporation published its 2018 report Truth Decay in the US, Barack Obama put it on his summer reading list. In 2022 RAND published Truth Decay in Europe. Here one of its authors, Stijn Hoorens, a keynote speaker at this week’s CILIP Conference 2024, discusses what truth decay looks like across Europe and in the UK, where he says libraries are “an essential part of the solution”.

The potential for truth decay to damage society can range from not being able to talk to neighbours or family about particular issues through to statistics agencies, universities and health agencies no longer being trusted. So, it should be useful to know how bad truth decay is at a local level.

Ahead of his keynote speech at CILIP Conference 2024 Stijn Hoorens, Office Director of RAND Europe, Netherlands and Senior Research Leader, spoke to Information Professional about the state of truth decay in Europe, the UK and the role of libraries and librarians in addressing the problem.

Exacerbated or exaggerated?

Asked if the findings of the Truth Decay in ¬Europe report, published in 2022, were affected by post pandemic financial upheaval and the war in Ukraine, Stijn said the report “concluded that truth decay is occurring, but not to the same extent as it in the US. There is evidence in Europe of an increasing disagreement about facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion over fact; and a decline in trust in traditional sources of information. But there is a lot of diversity across countries, which suggests that there is still time to slow down or counter the problem in Europe.”

He added that while “most of the research and data we considered for our report stem from before the pandemic, the information wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the hesitancy against the COVID vaccine and increasing popularity of conspiracy theories suggest the phenomenon has been exacerbated in Europe since publication of the report. Although much of this is anecdotal, there is certainly some empirical evidence supporting this.

“But we should bear in mind that what we read in the news or see on social media, is not necessarily representative of the entire population. Relatively small minorities of very active and vocal individuals often dominate online debates.”

Less danger than the US

The report suggests Europe and the UK do not suffer from the same level of the truth decay as the US and have some cultural or ¬institutional safety nets, according to Stijn: “Europe is probably equally exposed to the risks posed by (foreign) agents, changes of publishing model, and technological trends such as AI and social media. When looking at the drivers of truth decay, we find the biggest difference between the two regions are in the education system and polarisation. First, we conclude that most education systems in Europe are better utilised to prepare their students to address the challenges related to truth decay.

“With regard to polarisation, we found evidence that this phenomenon is deeper and happening faster in the US across all dimensions we analysed: economic, racial, religious, ideological and political. It’s not a surprise that political polarisation is much stronger in the US than in most parts of Europe. We have measured this by analysing election results across Europe and placing political parties on a left-right scale. On this scale the Republicans have moved to the right and democrats to the left. Whilst in Europe, we see some evidence of a hollowing out of the centrist parties, by no means is this as strong as it is in the US. The recent European elections reinforced these findings.”

Polarisation prevention system

He said polarisation was usually measured using population surveys asking about political affinity and respondent’s opinions about supporters of the opposition: “Again, partisanship in the United States has deepened over the past decades, strengthening a feeling of ‘us versus them’, whereas the trend in most European countries has gone in the opposite direction. There are various potential explanations for these differences between Europe and the US. First, compared to the first-past-the-post district system in the US, the direct representation electoral systems and multi-party systems in most of Europe require coalition formation and dialogue between political parties, which can have a mitigating effect on polarisation. The highly politicised media landscape and tradition in the US may further exacerbate these effects.”

Is the UK worse than the rest of Europe?

The report highlighted some localised problems, like the effect of Brexit in the UK, but Stijn says: “Unfortunately, we did not conduct a systematic comparison between individual European countries, although this would be a very interesting exercise. So, it is hard to say one country is more at risk than the other. Our report mentions discrepancies in public perception of benefit fraud and teenage pregnancy from a study (Hopkin and Rosamund) looking at public perceptions of phenomena compared to their official statistics. British people believed that £24 per £100 of welfare benefits are claimed fraudulently, while in fact this was only £0.70 in reality. And there are other indications that there is an increasing disagreement about facts and evidence in the UK.

“These differences may, in part, be explained by news consumption and the journalistic tradition in the UK, which follows a more liberal model that is more akin to the US than to the rest of Europe. This model is rooted in a fact-centred tradition, but it is also increasingly ¬entertainment-oriented, due to increased commercial pressures and competition from other media. In this model, with its prominent tabloid press, entertainment and left-right preferences may prevail for people when deciding what news outlets to use. And indeed, when you look at measures of news audience polarisation, the UK ranks among several eastern and southern European countries rather than west-European countries.”

Essential libraries

Asked if libraries play a role he says: “Definitely, libraries are an essential part of the solution to stop the trend of an eroding role for facts and evidence in society.” Stijn points to a number of ways in which this can happen:

• libraries have a crucial role in ensuring that people have access to objective facts and evidence, whether it is academic research or objective news reporting. Moreover, they are indispensable in ensuring that this access extends into perpetuity;
• secondly, libraries are important knowledge brokers. In a world with an unprecedented and still increasing pace and volume of information, the media landscape has become inundated with content from millions of sources. Libraries have an important role in helping citizens to see the wood from the trees, for instance by distinguishing fact from opinion;
• and do not underestimate the potential importance of physical libraries as locations where people can get out of their bubble and encounter people with different sets of beliefs, opinions or backgrounds. A healthy democracy is helped by an open exchange of views;
• but also libraries could become agents of truth decay if they do not fulfil these roles – willingly or unwillingly. I am thinking of the “anti-woke” movement in some US states, where libraries were forced to censor their catalogues.

“I think libraries have three important assets that can be helpful in tackling truth decay, each of which are useful in strategies to mitigate truth decay, such as media literacy interventions: their content, as training material; their community-based locations as physical space for education and training; and their staff, who are experts and can help citizens to train their media literacy skills and become aware of their cognitive biases.”

Right-wing suspicion of libraries?

Asked if libraries may be less effective in combatting right wing truth decay ¬because they are seen as left-leaning institutions, Stijn said: “In principle, truth decay is agnostic to political orientation. Both sides of the political spectrum are vulnerable to risks of truth decay, and there are plenty of examples where movements or individuals from the left and the right have acted as agents of truth decay. And populism has also manifested itself on both sides of the political spectrum. But it is hard to deny that we are experiencing a gaining popularity of populist right-wing movements, for whom libraries are clearly a lower priority. And I can follow the suggestion that their electorate is particularly vulnerable to truth decay, partly because of the limited access to tools that help mitigate truth decay, such as quality education, quality journalism, etc.”

He adds: “At RAND, we have been very careful not to politicise this topic, as we do not think it helps the debate or tackling the problem itself. Truth decay is not right-wing or left-wing, it is a problem for the functioning of democracies and societies as a whole.”

Academia

Truth Decay in Europe also looks at academia and discusses the publishing model as one of the drivers. The report cites research showing 1.97 per cent of scientists admitted fabricated, falsified or modified data and 33.7 per cent admitted other questionable research practices. Stijn said: “Of course academic libraries can help mitigate this trend. Although the academic funding model is probably the main driver behind the ‘publish or perish’ culture, libraries may play a role in facilitating alternatives to this model. For example, by encouraging alternatives to traditional journal publications in disseminating scholarly results.”

Trust trap

He said: “I think librarians are particularly skilled and well-trained to help tackle truth decay, particularly in distinguishing between fact and opinion, assessing reliability of sources, navigating the knowledge landscape, identifying potential sources of objective information, and not unimportantly offering a historical perspective.”

However, he warned against librarians gatekeeping access for their communities: “It may be attractive to believe that trusted knowledge brokers can help tackle truth decay by blocking access to unreliable, false or misleading information. But in a world where trust in institutions formerly respected as sources of factual information, data and analysis is under pressure, it may be better to call out such information, and explain why it is not reliable, than to censor it.”

Even when the volume of information is overwhelming he said librarians run the risk of being accused of censorship “if filtering means blocking access” but not “if it means highlighting sources that can be considered objective, fact-based, reliable, etc. whilst being transparent about that process and its rationale.”

Elections

With elections in the UK and US in 2024, what are the danger areas and possible solutions? Stijn suggests fast fact-checking is one way to combat truth decay. He says: “There are plenty of examples of misleading claims by politicians during election campaigns. As such, they are in danger of becoming agents of truth decay. Boris’s £350 million to the NHS claim was one of the most famous ones.

“But let me give you an example from the Netherlands. Last summer, the government collapsed after the minister of Home Affairs (equivalent to Home Secretary), and member of Mark Rutte’s centre right party VVD, falsely claimed that thousands of immigrants settled in the Netherlands after their family, or “family of family” had successfully claimed asylum. The consequences were significant as it blew up the coalition government. The national elections that followed were dominated by the perceived migration crisis and the right-wing anti-migration party of Geert Wilders won the elections. Later, instead of thousands, the actual figure turned out to be 40 family of family members in 2021 and 130 in 2022.

“Had this claim been debunked ¬immediately, would things have gone differently? I don’t know. But I do ¬believe that political debates, party manifestos and election claims are helped by being scrutinised by quality journalism, fact checkers and objective researchers as an effective accountability mechanism in the democratic system.

“Also in the Netherlands, there is a tradition of having the economic impacts of election manifestos for the economy and for households calculated by the Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), an independent govern¬ment body. This has always served as a safety valve to unrealistic proposals and unsubstantiated claims. In recent years, however, more and more political parties refuse to send their manifestos to the CPB, which is another token of the eroding role of facts and evidence in the political debate.”