Political Pulse

Do You Have ‘Negative Literacy’ for This Digital Era? Tolerating Uncertainty Builds Resistance to Fake Data

The Yomiuri Shimbun
Prof. Takumi Sato of Sophia University advocates the concept of “negative literacy.”

By Makoto Mitsui

8:00 JST, May 10, 2025

Don’t understand something? Look it up yourself.

In school, students are taught that it is important to gather information and think for themselves, rather than just passively learning what is taught. It is true that acquiring knowledge by thinking on one’s own is more likely to result in real learning.

However, in January 2024, a paper published in the journal Nature showed that such “common sense” may have an unexpected negative effect.

A research team from the University of Central Florida and other universities in the United States showed both fake online news items and genuine ones to research participants and asked them to judge the truth or falsity of the stories. In doing so, they created one group of participants who were recommended to look up information through internet searches and another group who were not recommended to do so, and tested the effect of the internet search recommendation.

The results were surprising. The internet search group was 19% more likely to judge fake news to be “correct.”

In the next experiment, all participants first judged the news items to be true or false without the recommendation to do an online search, and then they reevaluated the news after the online search recommendation was made. In that experiment, 17.6% of those who had initially — and properly — judged the fake news as “wrong” changed their judgment to “correct” for the same fake news after the search.

The research team uses the term “data void” to explain the mechanism by which people misjudge fake news as “correct” by searching on the internet. Data voids are situations in which reliable information on a particular subject is absent. The causes of data voids are said to include certain word combinations.

For example, consider a fake news story that states, “The urban lockdown caused by the novel coronavirus has created an engineered famine.” The phrase “engineered famine” is not usually used in the mass media. If you search for news using such a unique term, genuine news stories are unlikely to be found — but related fake news will appear at the top of the search results. This leads to the perception that “there are other news outlets” reporting the story. As a result, the story is mistaken for “trustworthy news.”

It is believed that some posts are made intentionally to increase the credibility of fake news, with full knowledge of this data void phenomenon.

Artificial intelligence is creating massive amounts of ever more sophisticated disinformation, and it will become increasingly difficult to navigate through digital space. To cope with a flood of information that is unprecedented in the experience of mankind, Takumi Sato, a professor of media history at Sophia University, advocates the concept of “negative literacy.”

Conventional literacy education requires a positive attitude by enhancing the ability to read, decipher and evaluate information. However, it is not easy for anyone to judge truth or falsity with a high level of literacy in this digital era, as society is increasingly inundated by a rising tide of information of unknown veracity.

Sato defines negative literacy as an attitude of not easily assuming that one understands the information, but rather of enduring a state of uncertainty as to whether the information is true or false and not inadvertently spreading it. By refraining from sharing uncertain posts, one can prevent the spread of information pollution.

This kind of idea has been around for a long time. In the 19th century, English poet John Keats described Shakespeare as having a “negative capability.” Keats wrote that a man with negative capability is able to exist “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The word “negative” does not conjure up a good image, and negative capability is not easy to acquire. To suspend judgment in an uncertain state is more stressful than to make a clear-cut judgment.

Therefore, we tend to simplify a problem and think we understand it, to feel relief from uncertainty.

As a strategy for approaching the facts while maintaining a stressful state of suspended judgment, Sato explains that we need to build up a tolerance for unstable situations.

“It is digital thinking, at which AI excels, that divides information into black and white. In this age of AI, what we need is the human ability to tolerate situations with ambiguous information without rushing to judgment on true or false, right or wrong, and to discern the facts without carelessly transmitting them.”

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