MANITOBA CO-OPERATOR — Agriculture needs to start taking misinformation and disinformation in the digital age more seriously, experts who study the subject warn.
“I just think that this is kind of an industry-wide thing where I think we could work harder at anticipating (problems),” said Cami Ryan, an advocate for awareness of the twin phenomena and their threat to the ag space.
It’s not realistic to expect the flow of false claims masquerading as fact to stop, Ryan said. However, gaining digital literacy, paired with a dose of critical thinking, can go a long way towards being able to identify them.
“I just think that this is kind of an industry-wide thing where I think we could work harder at anticipating (problems),” said Ryan, who holds a day job as social sciences lead for Bayer Global’s North America regulatory science division.
An associate professor with the University of Guelph’s agrees that false claims are a challenge the ag industry can’t afford to ignore.
“I think it’s very important, given that we have really moved to an advanced digitalized world,” said Ataharul Chowdhury of the school’s environmental design and rural development department.
Chowdhury has made misinformation and disinformation in agriculture the subject of his academic research.
“There’s so much information available, but what is right and applicable?” he said. “That’s very difficult to decide, given that so much information is there.”
Misinformed or disinformed?
Although often used interchangeably, misinformation and disinformation have separate definitions, with shades of grey in between, said Ryan. The fundamental difference is intent.
“Misinformation is information that is shared through neglect, through unconscious bias, not knowing that it’s incorrect or inaccurate,” she said.
Disinformation is intentionally deceptive messaging from which the source stands to benefit.
“Disinformation is a product with a market — that’s kind of how I look at it,” said Ryan.
“People are making money or getting value from disinformation,” she added. “That’s 100 per cent how it is.”
Cami Ryan has studied misinformation and disinformation and how they apply to the world of agriculture. | Photo by Kate Colton Studios
Mis- and disinformation are often intertwined in complex ways, said Ryan, who previously served as social and behavioural sciences lead at Bayer CropScience’s St. Louis, Missouri, location.
“Misinformation can be used as disinformation to intentionally misinform and sometimes — from a misinformation standpoint — someone might share disinformation without understanding or knowing that it’s inaccurate.”
Consumers themselves can play a large role in the misinformation industry — either in real life or over social media, she noted:
“At the end of the day, I think sometimes the misinformation piece becomes the consumer in the middle that doesn’t necessarily understand all these things, but is very drawn into the sensationalist stories that the disinformation campaign can share. And they can do that, right? They don’t have to back up their information.”
Disinformation is often embedded in ideology, be it political or cultural, noted Chowdhury.
Undermining of science
There’s another complication indirectly feeding into how prone people are to take the bait on mis- and disinformation, the Ontario researcher argued.
People don’t have the same trust in sources like researchers, voices that in past decades might have been considered authority figures on a subject.
Part of that may be the sheer difficulty in determining what is real as artificial intelligence improves. Warnings of AI-generated, low-quality, but real-looking research papers have emerged from the scientific community in recent years.
Chowdhury, though, also connects the public’s degrading trust to growing corporate oversight of scientific research, which he says comes at the expense of publicly funded work.
Agriculture research has become increasingly privatized and aimed towards corporate goals, he said, moving away from government and farm industry-driven efforts.
“So as a researcher, you get funding from a company and the company definitely has a vested interest. It is not rocket science to understand (the issue), whatever the ethics you follow,” he said.
All of this has led to a world where expertise is often mistrusted while unaccountable media influencers are increasingly looked to for answers, Ryan argued.
‘Attention economy’
Ryan also pointed to “the attention economy” — the competition and monetitization of attracting eyes, of views, of claiming consumer time.
“Agriculture becomes very easy to problematize, so the disinformation vendors or actors can derive value,” she said.
“They don’t care about public health; they don’t care about the environment; they don’t care about anything other than keeping that machinery of disinformation going. So they will feed that machinery with whatever is easy to access and easy to problematize.”
Reliable sources and technology
Although Ryan believes farmers are less likely to fall victim — They’re generally pragmatic, she notes. They have to be to keep their business decisions practical but adaptable — they also exist in the same world, and the same digital spaces, as everyone else exposed to mis- and disinformation.
They’re consumers of everything from food to expensive farm machinery, and therefore, targets.
There is probably no single playbook anyone can follow to avoid being fooled, says Chowdhury, but one multi-tiered strategy encompassing media and digital literacy can help. He calls it critical digital literacy.
“Media literacy is about how media works and how you have to access or understand the media,” he said.
“Digital literacy comes with use of different digital technologies … Especially these days, with the AI era, we have to understand what we see in the digital space and how we can critically think about that to understand what is applicable in real life.”
Consumers can also help reduce the spread of false or misleading information by self-regulating what they share or engage with, said Ryan, using herself in an object lesson:
“Cami goes on to Twitter (X) and sees something that (makes me say) ‘Wow — I need to weigh in on this.’ Do you really, Cami? Do you have to?
“These are things that I think are part of the process of building a relationship with an information ecosystem that we use all the time but we don’t really know and understand. And I think setting those boundaries becomes the most important (part) of critical thinking.”
Producers should seek farming advice from established experts, says Chowdhury.
Farmers often reach out to fellow farmers. He doesn’t discount that kind of peer-to-peer information sharing. Farmers are the ones putting academic concepts into practice in the real world, after all.
At the same time though, he cautioned that mis- and disinformation can piggyback through those peer networks, just as they do via peer networks on social media.
Professional advisors are there to provide that kind of expert advice, he said, but noted that the extension and advisory spaces in agriculture are shrinking and becoming privatized.
“In our research, we found that farmers and other professionals and stakeholders in agriculture still consider that there should be some public support for minimizing controversial issues or minimizing false news,” he said.
When making operational decisions such as a high-investment practice change, Chowdhury advises growers to turn to multiple scientific sources rather than base their strategies on a single academic paper.
Ataharul Chowdhury, an associate professor with the University of Guelph, says producers should turn to a number of trusted scientific experts before making expensive changes on their farms. Photo: Screen capture/Jeff Melchior
Somewhat ironically — given the amount of false claims it’s capable of circulating — he also recommends artificial intelligence as a key tool in the fight against mis- and disinformation.
“There are so many AI tools which can also help detect misinformation, although AI could be also a source of misinformation,” he says.
Ryan, meanwhile believes AI is likely going to make the fight against false claims more complicated, although she also says the ag industry needs to embrace it for its own purposes.
“It’s a great tool we can use many different ways that can benefit us socially and economically,” she said.
“But I think these are the things that we really have to stay attuned to in our industry (by) at least paying attention to what’s going on out there and moving away from a place where we just sort of think it’s going to go away. It’s not going to go away. This is a part of our our world now. It’s a part of the information ecosystem and we have to learn to understand it and try to find ways to mitigate and manage it.”
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