Amplification

When editors decide which stories to assign, publish, and promote, that editorial judgment is a decision about what content to amplify on their broadcasts, digital platforms, or print pages. While news judgment has always driven these decisions, the concept of amplification has taken on new meaning and urgency in recent years as the information ecosystem has become increasingly digital, user-driven, and saturated with misinformation, disinformation, and polarizing content. This entry discusses the risk of amplifying misinformation or polarizing content, even when the purpose is to correct misinformation, and possible ways to avoid this amplification or to minimize harm. The entry also looks at the journalistic practices that lead to amplification and the role of social media.

In today’s media context, amplification is often used to describe a negative phenomenon. Sometimes unintentionally, editors and reporters can amplify misinformation, divisive narratives from politicians, or even hate speech from fringe players or nefarious actors domestic and abroad. There are several ways this can happen. Efforts to correct misinformation can have the unintended effect of amplifying it. Journalists can uncritically report false or divisive statements from politicians or officials by simply reporting what they said without providing any context. They also might give equal weight or emphasis to both sides of a public debate even when it is clear that one side is more accurate or morally grounded.

As journalists began to better understand this phenomenon and the interplay between mainstream and social media in the 2010s and into the 2020s, scholars and media critics alike pointed to the potentially negative effects on democracy and society of the amplification of false and polarizing content. Media and misinformation experts then started to identify new techniques for journalists to avoid amplification of negative content.

Important scholarship in this field was produced by Whitney M. Phillips while she served as an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University. In her 2019 report, “The Oxygen of Amplification,” for the nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute, Phillips explored how journalists view their role in amplifying the misinformation and manipulations that have found their way into the online world during and after the 2016 election. In talking with the journalists, Phillips discovered that they were ambivalent when it came to making decisions about amplifying problematic messages like misinformation, aware of the potential harms to public discourse but also aware of the dangers of not exposing them.

Among the challenges that Phillips and other scholars have illuminated are the methods that media manipulators often use to get news organizations to publish or air falsehoods, hoaxes, and divisive narratives in order to amplify them. These bad actors often prey on mainstream media during breaking news situations, when journalists and their audiences alike are hungry for new information and when getting that information out is paramount. Sadly, mass shootings or disasters that capture the public’s attention are often cases in which media manipulators seek to plant misinformation about causes or responses in mainstream media outlets.