Let’s talk about the frustrating battle against fake news, especially here in the Philippines. It feels like every few months, a fresh wave crashes over our social media feeds, and we respond with the usual arsenal: fact-checkers spring into action, media literacy campaigns dust off their presentations, and editors pen serious pieces urging us to be more discerning. We’ve been at this for years, and yet, it often feels like we’re not making headway. What if the real problem isn’t the “enemy,” but our very strategy? What if the whole way we conceptualize and fight misinformation is fundamentally flawed?
A recent study by Dr. Sacha Altay, a behavioral scientist from the University of Zurich, published in New Media & Society, offers a stark and uncomfortable truth that should resonate deeply within newsrooms, government communication offices, and civil society organizations across our nation. After reviewing a vast body of research on misinformation and the interventions designed to combat it, Altay’s conclusion is quite challenging: almost everything we thought we knew about this problem might actually be wrong. It turns out, that most basic assumption we have—that misinformation is absolutely everywhere, engulfing our digital lives—isn’t quite accurate. In Western countries, for example, unreliable news makes up a surprisingly small portion, roughly 0.7% to 6%, of people’s online news consumption. And when you consider that most of us spend only about 5% of our online time reading news at all, the actual exposure to misinformation drops even further, to about 0.15% of an average person’s total media diet. The “infodemic,” as we’ve come to call it, was real in how much fear it generated, but the panic, recent research now suggests, was disproportionate to the actual amount of exposure people had to fake content.
The implications of this finding for our fight against misinformation are nothing short of enormous, and they apply to us here in the Philippines with particular urgency. We are not a Western democracy. Our institutional trust has been corroded not just by partisan media, but by decades of deeply entrenched corruption, extrajudicial violence, and a system where the state frequently captures and controls information ecosystems. It’s not just a passing note when Altay observes that conspiracy theorizing is more prevalent in countries with higher corruption and lower press freedom; for us, this isn’t a footnote about some distant place, but a precise and grim description of our very real lived condition. This context matters profoundly because our most commonly deployed anti-misinformation tools—things like fact-checking, subtle prompts to make us think before sharing, and media literacy training—are all built on a seemingly logical but often flawed assumption: that people believe misinformation because they simply lack critical thinking skills or access to accurate information. However, Altay’s synthesis of the evidence points to a much more complex reality, often the opposite: people are already skeptical, sometimes even pathologically so. They are, in fact, more likely to reject a true headline as false than they are to blindly accept a false one as true. The deeply unsettling truth is that teaching people to be more skeptical, as much of our current strategy does, actually risks making them distrust reliable, credible journalism even faster than they already do.
This is the insidious trap we keep falling into. Every “spot fake news” campaign, every browser warning that pops up, every friction-adding prompt that asks you to pause before sharing an article—these interventions often suppress the sharing of reliable, accurate information just as much as they suppress misinformation. And since people naturally encounter real news far more frequently than they encounter fake news, the collateral damage to credible, honest journalism is, by definition, far greater. What’s even more crucial, and often overlooked in our current approach, is Altay’s most actionable finding: the truly consequential misinformation, the kind that reshapes public discourse and has real-world impact, doesn’t primarily originate from ordinary Facebook users. It consistently comes from the top. A small, concentrated group of politicians, influential figures, and prominent public personalities are responsible for giving misinformation most of its visibility and a dangerous veneer of social legitimacy. Consider the math: preventing one account with a million followers from spreading a false claim is mathematically equivalent to stopping 5,000 ordinary users, each with 200 followers, from doing the same. Yet, almost all of our current interventions are aimed squarely at these ordinary users, while the powerful “super-spreaders” walk free, their influence largely unchecked.
Of course, there’s a credible counter-argument to Altay’s framework, and it’s one we must take seriously. His evidence base is predominantly drawn from studies conducted in North America and Europe. It’s entirely possible that misinformation is genuinely more prevalent in the Global South, especially in countries like ours where high-quality, independent journalism is scarce, suppressed, or struggling. In such contexts, the easy prescription to simply “trust reliable sources” utterly collapses if those sources barely exist, are heavily state-controlled, or are constantly under attack. Altay himself acknowledges this critical caveat, and it truly is worth considering. The solution cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach across wildly diverse media ecosystems. However, this very caveat actually strengthens the argument for a radical, structural rethink here in the Philippines. If the standard anti-misinformation toolkit struggles even under the “ideal” conditions of Western democracies, it will perform even more poorly in a country like ours, where institutional distrust is often rational, where press freedom rankings are alarmingly falling, and where the business model of truly independent, regional journalism is in a chronic, existential crisis.
The truly harder, and yet far more important, work is not about perpetually teaching readers to “spot fake news.” It’s about fundamentally rebuilding the underlying conditions under which reliable, high-quality journalism is produced, becomes trusted by the public, and is actively sought out. This means fiercely defending independent media from relentless legal intimidation and crippling economic pressure. It means holding the political super-spreaders of misinformation publicly and unequivocally accountable for the harm they cause. And perhaps most critically, it means asking ourselves the deeper, more uncomfortable question: why have so many people in our society come to the conclusion that established institutions are simply not worth trusting? That last question isn’t merely a “media literacy problem”; it is, at its core, a profound governance problem. Yes, fact-checking absolutely has its place. And yes, media literacy is important. But neither is sufficient on its own, and neither truly addresses the systemic demand for misinformation that fuels its persistence. As long as deep-seated political polarization, institutional dysfunction, and widespread economic insecurity give people legitimate reasons to distrust everything except the voices that validate their grievances, continuously debunking individual false claims is the disheartening equivalent of trying to bail out a rapidly flooding boat with nothing more than a teaspoon. The time has come for newsrooms, civil society groups, and government agencies to seriously question whether the significant resources they are pouring into the standard anti-misinformation toolkit are actually solving the problem, or merely managing the symptoms while the underlying, dangerous disease silently advances. The answer, increasingly, is becoming painfully clear.