Ask the average British voter this year where the problems with political news lie and you might hear a few familiar claims — fake news, Russian interference and a biased BBC.
However, take a look at their smartphones and you might discover a different, more chaotic world — in which news is being shaped less by publishers or foreign agents, but by social media algorithms and friendship groups.
Now, in a first-of-its-kind election monitoring project conducted by the Guardian and agency Revealing Reality, a group of voters have allowed their smartphone use to be recorded for three days — and the results from each individual’s phone show how the traditional media ecosystem is changing and disintegrating.
Illustration: Yusha
Charlie in Sunderland, England, consumed much of his election news through memes on lad humor Facebook pages, spending more time looking at posts of Boris Johnson using the word “boobies” than reading traditional news stories.
Fiona in Bolton, England, checked out claims about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s wealth by going to a Web site called Jihadi Watch, before sharing the far-right material in a deliberate bid to anger her left-wing friends.
Shazi in Sheffield, England, followed the BBC leaders’ interviews purely by watching videos of party supporters chanting the Labour leader’s name outside the venue.
The six volunteers who took part in the project should be seen as a snapshot rather than a statistically representative sample of the population, but the behavior chimes with previous research to illustrate a pattern of behavior across the political spectrum — a result with huge implications for the role of responsible journalism and reliable sources.
“News is becoming intermingled with entertainment,” said Damon De Ionno of Revealing Reality, who ran the project after pioneering the screen-recording approach to market research in the UK. “You’re no longer asking: what’s going on in the world today? It’s very different — you want to be entertained.”
The analysts who studied the volunteers — recruited under pseudonyms to reflect a spread of demographics, politics and geography — saw broad patterns in the way they used their phones.
Some were expected, with people increasingly consuming news passively by scrolling through headlines rather than actively seeking out information — one woman in London read 29 headlines, but clicked on just six and only read three articles to the end.
Several participants were observed sharing articles on Facebook without clicking the links and excitedly diving into comment sections for an argument before looking at the articles.
Most showed a tendency to read news that confirmed their existing views.
Some behaviors were more surprising, hinting that the UK might be becoming a land of trolls.
One 22-year-old Conservative-voting woman was observed going out of her way to read reputable mainstream news sources so she had a balanced understanding of Labour policies, but she would then seek out provocative far-right blog posts to share on Facebook because their headlines would anger her left-wing friends and create online drama.
In this snapshot of online voter behavior, news is often consumed through user-generated memes, posts by celebrity influencers and politicians’ own social media accounts.
Despite the large focus on paid-for Facebook adverts ahead of Thursday’s election, such material appeared rarely in users’ news feeds during the time that data was being collected, and while mainstream news Web sites still played a key role in news consumption — collectively reaching tens of millions of readers every day and helping to set the tone of the coverage — professional journalism outlets are only one small part of where the public are getting their online information about Thursday’s election.
“It’s total anarchy,” De Ionno said. “The idea of fake news and fake ads, with Russians manipulating people, is a really easy bogeyman. The reality is there’s many more shades of gray and it’s hard to unpick.”
It is political parties who understand how to cut through this cacophony of information who stand a better chance of success of winning Thursday’s general election.
At Revealing Reality’s headquarters in a converted ballroom in south London, a group of analysts working for De Ionno are attempting to piece together how Britons are consuming news in this election campaign with the aid of a wall of photographs of each volunteer in their home, pages of data and transcripts of interviews.
Although there were some changes in behavior during the study — one person complained they had had to restrict their viewing of online porn while the study was taking place — the researchers believe most people largely forgot their phones were being recorded.
Analysts then studied the recordings of each volunteer’s screen activity using a coding system adapted from software originally built for the study of animal behavior, before comparing notes following a three-hour interview with each participant.
“A lot of the content has been taken out of context,” said one analyst, looking at Charlie’s online reading habits.
“They’re disengaging with mainstream sources,” another said.
A third analyst said Shazi did not really understand that social media algorithms shaped what news she was seeing on Twitter.
“She wasn’t aware that other people would be seeing different things,” the analyst said.
The researchers came across very little completely false material.
Ruby Wootton, one of the researchers on the project, said that rather than outright fake news there was instead a glut of heavily-slanted news with a kernel of fact.
Instead, she saw “a lot of content that is quite exaggerated or deliberately presented to influence you in a way that’s not connected to the full picture.”
Regardless of their place on the political spectrum, the analysts found people are drifting into the same habits, sometimes knowingly embracing the “indulgence” of a reassuring social media bubble of news that reinforced their existing viewpoints in a troubled world.
Participants also appeared to have little idea why they were seeing certain news stories, being guided by news aggregation services already built into their phones or the whims of social media algorithms serving up material from friends. They also often failed to distinguish between material posted by established news outlets and obscure Facebook groups.
“If social media content is playing such a central role in shaping people’s views on the election what are the implications for high-quality journalism, reputable sources, and well constructed and evidenced articles?” the researchers said.
The individuals who took part in the study were all aged under 60 and very rarely watched TV news, reflecting the shift away from the medium for that age group, but many were aware of claims of BBC bias during the election and had seen viral video clips of political interviews culled from mainstream programs.
Even though they were rarely watching it, some cared very deeply about what the BBC was broadcasting on the basis that it was influencing other voters, perhaps explaining why viral video clips of the BBC’s mistakes are sometimes reaching more viewers than the original TV audiences.
However, the screen recording data suggest that traditional media are now just a sliver of how the British public are learning about politics, with a growing role for political activists with large followings — with posts by the likes of comedian Jason Manford as likely to decide what people see online about the election as stories from traditional news outlets.
While political journalism during the election has often focused on official online campaign material put out by political parties themselves — or the specter of under-the-radar paid-for Facebook ad campaigns — the case studies suggest that real story of this year’s online general election campaign could be in the general chaos of users’ smartphones and social media, where memes compete with rolling arguments in local Facebook groups and content from traditional outlets.
This constant passive consumption of the news — as opposed to relying on a single news bulletin or reading a particular print newspaper once a day — meant bombshell articles failed to get heard over the general online cacophony.
De Ionno said he had noticed people struggled to remember individual stories.
“News doesn’t stick as well. There’s a new drama every day and cliffhangers on a daily basis. A lot of the respondents didn’t have a good memory of what happened a week ago,” he said.
While previously the public’s news consumption was shaped by powerful gatekeepers such as newspaper editors or the bosses of heavily regulated broadcast news channels, on their phones it is shaped more by the hands-off approach of companies such as Facebook.
The social network has decided against taking a patrician approach of pushing straightforward reporting into news feeds alongside user-generated memes asking “Was Enoch Powell Right?” or partisan posts spreading distorted information about Corbyn.
With limited human involvement in choosing the news stories people are seeing, the researchers said the public were being asked to take responsibility for their own news diet with the hope that they seek out accurate information without any intervention.
“If everything that people are seeing is via social media — who is accountable? There is very little human intelligence or decisionmaking behind it, no attempt to give a balanced view. That seems to leave all responsibility on the reader,” Revealing Reality’s analysis of the volunteers’ election news consumption concluded.
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