Emma Sheppard is a journalist specialising in business, technology, family and social affairs. As well as Canvas8, her work has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, BBC Worldwide, The Independent and more.

Today, audiences are shaping the cultural agenda. Empowered to speak up for the causes they believe in, people are actively calling out brands they see as inauthentic. What are the main drivers of this behavioural shift? And how can brands win the trust of these outspoken advocates?

Assertive Audiences

As the new post-pandemic normal settles in and people adapt to a context of uncertainty, constant adversities, and pessimism, we are moving away from a moment in which consumers expected brands to rise up to society's challenges and into one when they’re demanding genuine allyship from businesses.

Shared Values

 went viral on social media in July 2022, the response was swift. “Dark times. A child can never recover from that dust,” replied one user. “Even for the ‘30s, this is bad. Thought this went out in Victorian times,” wrote another. Although several others pointed out that the footage was from a staged photoshoot for a magazine, it continued to be shared from multiple accounts. 

Fake History Hunter

Public historian and author Jason Steinhauer says this is typical of the sort of ‘history’ that is posted on social media. “If you look online, you will find millions and millions of e-history content,” he says. “Over the course of my career, it has become pretty obvious that public audiences were being informed or misinformed about the past based on what they were finding on social media.” 

Interview with Jason Steinhauer conducted by the author

 In response, he spent more than three years writing his best-selling book, 

History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past

Intense debates about history are also taking place offline, with Steinhauer noting that countries around the world – and the US, in particular – are undergoing a reckoning about their identities. There have been clashes about monuments, street names, buildings, flags, and even the constitution, with dozens of statues toppled or removed from public view. 

The New York Times

Smithsonian

 Meanwhile, some have reacted angrily to attempts to make slavery, for example, more visible at historical sites or to evolve the curriculum taught at schools. 

Time

 “In the United States right now, we are looking for a new set of facts or stories about ourselves upon which to rest a national narrative,” says Steinhauer. “Those narratives that many of us grew up with no longer feel like they have the same currency as they used to.” 

 Canvas8 spoke to him about the impact social media is having on our understanding of the past and how technology shapes historical narratives.

The pace of demographic and cultural change is straining the fabric of American society. The percentage of non-White people in the US has tripled over the past half century, as has the portion of foreign-born individuals. Over this period, the number of children living in single-parent households has doubled, church membership has fallen by a third, the manufacturing workforce has plummeted by two-thirds. 

German Marshall Fund of the United States

 The American Dream – one based on hard work, family values, religious conservatism, and ethnic cohesiveness – is rapidly dissipating (if it ever existed in the first place) and causing divisions to widen. Data from the Pew Research Center suggests that 59% of Americans believe people can’t agree on basic facts, and a separate study carried out in 2020 found that just 9% of Americans didn’t express some level of agreement with any of the 22 conspiracy theories presented to them. 

Pew Research Center

The Atlantic

Amid this confusion, history provides something to cling on to. It’s a shared past, tinged with a touch of nostalgia, and is easy to bond over online with others who are feeling similarly adrift. TikTok posts tagged with 

 have generated over 48 billion views, while there are over 

 such posts on Instagram. It’s a popular content category across social media channels, but the ease with which history can be shared, regardless of its accuracy, means false information spreads quickly. The Twitter war between historians and history photo accounts has been going on for years. Many have called for a mass unfollowing of popular accounts while others dedicate their time to debunking the steady stream of historical myths. 

, has 176,700 followers and was one of the first to disprove the chimney sweep story.

It’s well known that false news spreads more rapidly on social media than real news does – and the same can be said for fake history. One MIT study found that false news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. It also took true stories six times longer than fake news to reach 1,500 people. 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 Another study found that people are twice as likely to share an article that represents their political view, whether or not they’ve identified it as accurate. 

Canvas8

 Humans will typically minimize the effort put into information processing on social networks, meaning simpler and more emotionally charged content goes more viral. 

World Economic Forum

 And changing someone’s mind about history isn’t as easy as it sounds. Laurajane Smith, a professor at Australian National University, spent a decade interviewing thousands of visitors to historical sites worldwide. She found that the majority are “engaged in reinforcing what they knew and believed.” Less than 3% of those she spoke to said they learned something substantial from their visit to a site or monument, and those who spotted information that contradicted their beliefs brushed it off as irrelevant. 

“With so much information about history online, one would expect that it would improve people’s understanding of [it],” says Steinhauer. “But all of this information is actually causing people to feel pretty overwhelmed.” 

 With three-quarters of Americans overestimating their ability to distinguish between legitimate and false news headlines, the deluge of online content makes the already difficult task of verifying facts even harder. 

PNAS

 “At its core, history and the study of history is about accuracy,” Steinhauer adds. “[But] social media companies do not currently prioritize or privilege accuracy. They want your attention and your time on the platform, regardless of whether the information you’re consuming is accurate or not.” 

History has always been political, but the debate around how to teach the subject in America’s public schools has reached fever pitch. In 2020, President Trump threatened to halt funding for schools in California that taught 

’ 1619 Project, which tracks the nation’s origins back to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans. 

 The Project has helped push scholarly conversations about the impact of racism on American history into the mainstream. For instance, in July 2021, 

 ran a cover depicting a redacted textbook entitled ‘The History Wars’. Republican governors in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas have signed bills restricting how history is taught at schools, and candidates for school boards are being probed about their views on historical facts. According to a poll conducted by the American Historical Association, while 70% of Democrats believe the study of history should question the past, 84% of Republicans say the goal is to celebrate it. 

With so much information about history available online for free, one of the challenges is that the funding for professional historical analysis and interest in studying history within educational settings is disappearing. “It devalues professional history, because with so much other history available online for free, people feel like that’s good enough,” says Steinhauer. “Why do I need to take a history class when I have Wikipedia? Why do we need to fund and support professional historians to do their work when there’s so many history YouTube videos out there?” 

 In the US, the number of students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history, history teacher education, or historic preservation and conservation fell by more than a third from 2012 to 2019, reaching the lowest number since the 1980s. 

Perspectives on History

 Steinhauer adds that there are 21,000 museums and history institutions across the US, and “80% of them have budgets of $200,000 or less.” 

 in 2021. It’s the first cryptocurrency devoted to history and will be used to provide grants for public-facing history projects. He also founded the 

 (HCI) to distribute the funds. The HCI works with partners on developing media and historical literacy and improving the online and offline environment for history information. Other historians are collaborating to share resources and increase their impact. One such project, 

, is a free online US history textbook put together by public and academic historians to replace some of the old textbooks in classrooms that haven’t been updated for decades. Scholars and activists also crowdsourced syllabi for use in schools after events such as the murder of George Floyd and shootings in Ferguson and Charleston. For Steinhauer, the danger is clear: “If there are no professional historians to do that work, then there is no scholarly accurate history to draw upon. That opens the floodgates for disinformation agents, for hostile foreign actors, for White supremacists and conspiracy theorists to move in and flood the internet with all kinds of misinformation about the past, which have real consequences for our society.” 

The post-truth era and a new American identity

In Tennessee, a statue of Edward Ward Carmack – a newspaper editor who endorsed the lynching of three Black men and incited an attack on activist Ida B. Wells – was pulled down in May 2020. 

 In Virginia, authorities have approved a plan to melt down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and replace it with a public art installation. 

 And in New York, there are plans to relocate the statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the Museum of Natural History because of the depictions of the Native American man and African man who stand beside him. 

 These decisions highlight how many Americans want to right the wrongs of the past and move away from extolling figures lauded for slavery, murder, and oppression.

Steinhauer doesn’t find the timing of these decisions surprising. “If the world of facts is collapsing, perhaps that is also why the very foundations of the American experiment feel on shaky ground,” he wrote for 

. “A national history is, after all, an imagined agreement on facts shared by a diverse group of people. When those agreements become unraveled, we must find new ones – and indeed, we are in the midst of such a tumultuous process.” 

 What will be left in the space that is left? Steinhauer argues that public history has an important role to play in helping America find its sense of self in this moment, and while e-history can be problematic in terms of spreading false narratives, it can also provide new ways to reach a receptive audience.

A few days after joining Clubhouse, the audio-based social network, he created History Club, the first history-focused conversation series on the platform. 

Jason Steinhauer | Medium

 It now has more than 100,000 followers who tune in for discussions about subjects as varied as African American history, the Holocaust, presidential elections, and the filibuster. “I found myself in so many conversations where history was getting invoked,” he says. “So, I said to myself, ‘there really should be a place on this platform for people to talk about history in a format with people who actually have some expertise or knowledge about the subject’. Knowledge about the past that is accurate and based on scholarship can help us think more clearly through some of the challenges and issues that we’re grappling with. Now it’s a question of how do we bring that scholarship to the public and weave it into a national narrative in a way that has some currency.” 

During the pandemic, genealogy websites saw a surge of interest as people stuck at home found time to research their family trees. It’s become a big business, with Ancestry, for example, generating $1.3 billion in revenue in 2021. 

The Financial Times

 is making it possible for Americans to investigate their personal histories within the context of a wider cultural identity. There’s also been a spike in independent, minimally funded digital archiving projects. The Gun Violence Archive, for example, is a non-profit that is considered one of the leading researchers of gun violence in America. Since launching in 2014, it has become an alternative to the FBI and the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention, which track similar data around related deaths but release it months or years after the fact. 

 Other more established archives are making sure their collections are available online as well as in person, challenging the notion of museums being gatekeepers to history. The archives of the magazines 

, for example, have been donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Getty Research Institute. 

WBUR

There are approaches developed to tackle misinformation that could be applied to fake e-history. One of the big challenges Steinhauer outlines in his book is helping users identify the source of a post before it’s shared. “Often, it can be difficult to determine which is which [professional versus crowdsourced history] because they all reside next to each other in the feed, labeled as ‘history,’” he says. “The onus is on the user to figure all of this out. It made me realize how much need there is for media literacy education in the US because there is so much confusion about what to believe online.” 

 One research group of psychologists at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol in the UK has been running 90-second ads on YouTube, using snippets from 

 to describe how truth and news are manipulated online. The study found that after showing the ads to 30,000 participants, the ability to recognize misinformation increased by an average of 5%. “We can, in a very apolitical way, help people gain resistance to manipulation online,” said Beth Goldberg, one of the co-authors of the study. 

The Swaddle

 game from the University of Cambridge taught players to spot fake pandemic news by revealing the techniques used to spread misinformation. “By exposing people to the tactics behind fake news, we can help create a general ‘inoculation’ rather than trying to counter each specific falsehood,” says Cambridge Gates scholar Melisa Basol. 

In May 2022, the National Archives awarded millions of dollars in grants for projects that document the history of enslavement of the Indigenous people of Alaska, a series of walking tours around the history and archives of Chinese American heritage in San Francisco, and a project that aims to publish historical ads placed by formerly enslaved people looking for family members after emancipation. 

National Archives

 “There’s not a lot of knowledge about the role that women played in colonial America or in the American revolution,” says Steinhauer. “So, even though scholars may have some knowledge about that, it's not really part of this sort of national narrative, which largely focuses on the role of men and military leaders and the continental Congress… the names that we're all familiar with. You could look at African American populations, Indigenous populations, Jewish American populations, and ask those same questions.” 

 By democratizing access to those experiences via social media, there’s the potential to write a whole new foundation for a modern America.

When it comes to important issues facing society, 59% of Americans believe people can’t agree on basic facts

While 70% of Democrats believe the study of history should question the past, 84% of Republicans say the goal is to celebrate it

When presented with 22 conspiracy theories, just 9% of Americans expressed no level of agreement with any of them

Information about historical events is everywhere online, but the volume of content and lack of context can make it hard for people to ascertain what’s accurate

While social platforms have contributed to the devaluation of professional historical study, they are also helping to spotlight marginalized stories from the past

Media literacy is essential in tackling the spread of fake e-history, particularly as the digital landscape splinters and people turn to niche online spaces

Jason Steinhauer operates at the intersection of history, tech, social media, and politics. Technology has profoundly re-organised our ways of knowing things about the world, and the positive and negative effects of technology must be balanced with a humanistic perspective. Steinhauer brings this approach to his work, where he writes and speaks about how social media, tech and the web are shaping our history, politics, and future. He is a public historian and the author of 

. He is currently a global fellow at the Wilson Center.

United States

Social networking

Technology

History is one of the most commonly discussed topics on social media, but viral posts rarely provide an accurate or nuanced representation of the past. Canvas8 spoke to public historian Jason Steinhauer about the rise of e-history and the implications for American society.

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