Critical ignoring: how to deal with the new reality of the internet

Social media posts appeared last month calling for “red v blue” wars between schools, but instead of provoking fights between students, the posts appear to have made a deeper impact on their worried parents, leading experts to suggest practising an online strategy known as critical ignoring.

It’s a concept that experts are “increasingly teaching”, Sander Van Der Linden, a professor of social psychology, told the BBC, and it “will become more important in the face of AI-generated slop, where sometimes it’s better to just ignore low-quality stuff”.

What is critical ignoring?

It’s a behavioural strategy for managing information overload by consciously choosing to filter out low-quality, distracting, or manipulative content. People look for clues that allow them to ignore a post. While critical thinking analyses information, critical ignoring decides what to analyse in the first place, serving as a crucial filter. Critical thinking is not enough “in a world of information overabundance and gushing sources of disinformation”, wrote Ralph Hertwig, Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg and Stephan Lewandowsky on The Conversation. The digital world “contains more information than the world’s libraries combined”, so “critically thinking through all information and sources we come across” would “utterly paralyse us”.

Also, “investing critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place” results in “attention merchants and malicious actors” getting what they wanted: “our attention”.

Doesn’t AI help with this?

To an extent. AI chatbots can help people understand what’s true and untrue on the internet, but they are tools, rather than perfect judges of truth.

ChatGPT has “introduced a new temptation” – the “feeling that I can get a clean answer to everything, instantly”, said Tom’s Guide. But this is where things “get tricky” because ChatGPT is “so fluent, so confident, so fast, it can make ‘done’ feel like ‘true’”, and “‘sounds right’ feel like ‘verified’ – even when it’s not”.So it’s “up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit”, said The Wall Street Journal. Critical ignoring is a widely recommended strategy for this.

But how do I do it?

The “key word” is “critical”, said Psychology Today, because it doesn’t mean “just ignoring everything”. Rather you should look quickly for clues that suggest the types of information most likely to be misinformation or disinformation.The clues include signs that it’s polarising content, that it “appeals to intuition or common sense”, instead of “including facts or evidence”. Another red flag is if it doesn’t include sources, or those it does don’t seem credible. Does it seem to have been released “as a distraction”, or does it promote “the threat of a bogeyman or a scapegoat”?Then there’s “lateral reading”, a more time-consuming strategy which “involves opening up new browser tabs to search for information” about the “organisation or individual behind a site” before “diving into its contents”, said The Conversation. Also, it’s always a good idea to not “feed the trolls”.“Remember that your attention is a scarce resource”, said The Wall Street Journal, and “decide how much time you want to spend on screens in advance, then set a timer.” A practice called “self-nudging” includes removing “distracting and irresistible notifications”, or setting “specific times in which messages can be received”, thus “creating pockets of time for concentrated work or socialising”, said The Conversation.Or you can just “ask one question“ before engaging, said Tom’s Guide. “Would I care about this tomorrow?” If not, you can simply “move on”.