27 ms·

The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

247 points by dtjb 5y ago

calibas 5y ago
In my opinion, the campaigns against "misinformation" are largely attempts by big corporations and politicians to deplatform their competition. Gotta make sure people only see trusted news sources that say the right things.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  And IMO they're largely attempts to keep Coca Cola Inc (et al) from pulling their ads because Coke doesn't want their brand on sites posting QAnon/GOP talking points.
0x500x79 5y ago
I am genuinely surprised at the comments in this thread. This article starts "That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about", which is immediately making this a partisan issue. Secondly: "The internet makes me better informed". This is his perspective. Many people are not actively looking for information outside of their own biases. Thirdly: "Cranks often know a lot"... Should be titled "Cranks often think they know a lot". Just because someone can state a fact does not mean they are sufficiently educated to analyze that fact. Saying that there are "vaccine side-effects" (stated in the article) does not mean that Joe Rogan is able to weight the information in totality with other information from the studies. After this, the article got into a bunch of "whataboutism" and doesn't really compel me to believe that misinformation is not a problem. I agree with polarization getting worse, but could that be a symptom/signal of misinformation, is there a cause/effect relationship? My thoughts: There are multiple categories of false information spreading on the internet right now. I honestly believe that there is manipulation of the public happening on all sides of this problem, the thing that is still unclear is whether there is a coordinated source of this manipulation or if it is organic. I disagree pretty strongly with the "misinformation problem" being misinformation. Anecdotally (yes, I know it's not scientific but it is the same information the author is giving) the amount of things shared on social media that are demonstrably wrong has increased over the past couple of years. There are people who truly believe that Trump was going to rally the military on January 20th or whatever date to "take back the white house". This got shared to numerous social media sites and was reposted that the "true president" was coming back. This is one explicit example, but similar things have been popping up for the past couple of years and spreading like wildfire. 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are. If you claim that misinformation is just "information that is partisan" or "wrongthink" I would urge you to dig further into some real, damaging examples. I think there are times when the term is weaponized, but there is a serious increase in how easy it is to spread words in this day and age. The internet, social media upvotes and shares, and other technological tooling has made the problem worse by letting people feel validated by opinions and "likeableness" of something versus things based in facts. Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on social media and "news" outlets. Yes I understand that "individualism" should let them decide whether to make that choice, but there is a public health issue here when people are basing that choice off of Facebook memes and shared content that has no basis and gets 100k shares because it sounds cool.
- t0bia_s 5y ago
  "Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on social media and "news" outlets." You mean those about covid or vaccines? What exactly is wrong to let people choose? Why you think that what is best for you should be best for others?
  - 0x500x79 5y ago
    Nothing is wrong with letting people choose, forcing incorrect information to people... that is wrong.
    - t0bia_s 5y ago
      Define incorrect information. You have always possibility to believe that info or not. Bad for relationship with people is thinking that I know best and others know wrong and incorrect.
- PolygonSheep 5y ago
  > 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are. I do wonder how many people are in these movements. It kind of reminds me of the Westboro Baptist Church who succeeded in getting themselves a ton of media attention despite being ~70 people. I think Qanon is probably a couple orders of magnitude bigger than the WBC but I would be surprised if the core following exceeds 100,000 people in the US. I personally believe these things are more a manifestation of underlying mental illness than anything else and if you somehow pushed a magic button to delete all traces of Qanon from the public consciousness they would immediately become sovereign citizens or Holocaust deniers or something (if, indeed, they aren't already). If someone's in Qanon or a Flat Earther it's not because they didn't read the Snopes article debunking Pizzagate or that they didn't understand how the Foucault pendulum works. I don't think this can be fixed with better information. These people are not well and they need psychiatric help.
verisimi 5y ago
"I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past" I agree. Who has the truth? Government or media? Or neither? What has become worse is the centralised control of information. Which then leads to those centralised sources complaining and publicising of the issue. On the other side, you have governance structures that require the legacy media to support their messaging, as the govern the populace. Both work hand in hand - one provides the message the other the megaphone. In the past 2 years, the government has bankrolled the largest campaign in history, and the media have been willing recipients. Complaining about misinformation however, works for both parties - it provides a self-supporting justification their actions. Truth and faithfully representing reality has very little to do with that "virtuous" circle between media and governance.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  To be honest, in Italy this issue was solved during ww-2 time, a bunch of commercial newspapers from far-left to right (we couldn't have far-right back then, of course :D, we still can't but people has forgot and so we have now, but they can't really read and write), created a cooperative called ANSA (https://www.ansa.it https://www.ansa.it), that is no opionion, no controlling point of view, just facts as they happen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenzia_Nazionale_Stampa_Associata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenzia_Nazionale_Stampa_Assoc...) If you force Fox, CNBC, CNN to create an agency of news reporting where each one oversee the content created, in order to be as objective as possible, then I think the society in US would benefit In Italy those newspapers do money by selling copies containing the premium content, which is like reports, opinion articles, more in depth opinion articles etc, which people is still interested in, but for news and facts then ANSA is the source of truth
  - kurthr 5y ago
    But Berlusconi's (finivest/mediaset) ownership of Il Giornale and 3 of 7 TV channels makes that all a little less relevant due to political manipulation, doesn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Silvio_Berlusconi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Silv... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0163443709361169 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016344370936116...
Tycho 5y ago
“Misinformation” appears to be a term used by people who don’t want to take on the burden of proof when accusing someone of lying.
- ILMostro7 5y ago
  Some people refuse to look at the truth. Then again, it should be assumed that a random person, more often than not, actually cared and spent some time thinking or learning what most people take to be true. Throwing conspiracy theories to see what sticks is a lazy form of destructive behavior. Pointing fingers at people who don't explicitly disprove your claims, whether or not you know them to be true, is just a continuation of the same.
- hobomatic 5y ago
  To me it seems like they are a pot calling the kettle brown so as to divert attention from the fact that their own blackness is the larger offense. 'these guys are just stupid' as they engage in overt deception and manipulation to even make such an accusation.
- gorwell 5y ago
  When you hear the word `misinformation`, you can generally substitute with `wrongthink`. It makes much more sense that way.
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    I dunno about that. Thought experiment: The Earth is a flat disc. Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both? To be sure it's a vague term applied quite continuously online but simply deflecting it as actually meaning "wrongthink" is disingenuous. There's a lot of misinformation being spread specifically about objective measurable facts. It is simultaneously true that a lot of opinions are being mislabeled as misinformation.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
ILMostro7 5y ago
Once misinformation becomes accepted as truth, or a valid mindset even, it doesn't stand out as blatant falsehood. Questioning whether 1 + 2 is actually 3 or a secret way to hide the true meaning of pi is akin to a dog chasing its tail to excercise his brain.
- water8 5y ago
  Nobody feels the need to label you as misinformation when you go around saying 1+1=3. They will simply know you’re a cuckoo and ignore you. The misinformation label seems to only get applied to information that could be harmful to a political party
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Take the "flat earth" people. What they say is factually wrong. But there isn't a flat-earthist political party that wants to change our military deployments because our current deployments are based on a false topology of the planet, or change our immigration policy because Central America doesn't actually connect to Mexico, or something like that. There's no political agenda that flows out of the flat earth nonsense. That's what makes it "nonsense" rather than "misinformation". On the other end of the scale, there is "disinformation". That's where someone is deliberately and systematically trying to persuade you do believe what is false, in order for them to carry out their agenda. Russia has been running a disinformation campaign against the US for several years. (On both sides - trying to drive extremism and destroy the political center, in order to weaken the US.) One could say that both major political parties in the US are also running disinformation campaigns. "Misinformation" is kind of in the middle, in my view. It's not necessarily part of a large-scale organized campaign, but it's not just a nonsense belief with no consequences. So people care about misinformation in a way that they don't care about the flat earthers, because misinformation can cause more harm. But people don't seem to take as seriously as they should the damage that long-running, coordinated disinformation campaigns can cause (and, in fact, are causing).
lnxg33k1 5y ago
One of the worst example that I bring (unfortunately) in my mind, was from like mid-pandemic, when people around was complaining due to newspapers (in that occasion, the BBC in particular), for spreading misinformation.. and you know why they were spreading misinformation? Because they were supporting the right of chronicles by reporting about protests against coronavirus lockdown protests... this was the spreading of misinformation, newspaper should not report things that are happening but are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes news
- feurio 5y ago
  > things that are happening but are wrong for wokes I'll admit that I found parsing the whole comment rather difficult so I may have missed something, but what are "wokes"?
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    I am not sure, english is not my mother tongue so I might have written something in a non-understandable way, if there's something that I might have written better let me know if you want. As for wokes -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
    - feurio 5y ago
      OK, thank you for clarifying. So "wokes" are people who are 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination'. > newspaper should not report things that are happening but are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes news So what have "wokes" got to do with anything? They are just people who aren't racist, right? Again, maybe I have misunderstood.
      - lnxg33k1 5y ago
        Yeah that was the starting point of the culture, and I think it's a start in order to get more documented about what they've grown into and how, so yeah they're those against racism and the likes but are also those who went against newspapers reporting news that they didn't like as written in my post
thenerdhead 5y ago
Ever since a high school current events class, I have questioned the motives of the media. This was circa 2008 after the stock market crash. The common question of "why is significantly more negative news highlighted than happy news?" What matters to me is the truth. In times of FUD(fear, uncertainty, doubt), the information dials are all set to 11. It's an absolute firehose of all the above. It's less misinformation to me, but rather too much information. The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more informed when I read books or scientific articles from credible authors, not opinion columnists. The internet makes me confused. Confusion gives me FUD. FUD makes the truth hard to decipher. Although debate and dissent may help get to the truth earlier, only time will be the judge. It's unfortunate that we live in the present and can't have the truth earlier, but that's just life for ya.
- RangerScience 5y ago
  > The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more informed when I read books or.. 100% this, excellent observation. > FUD makes the truth hard to decipher One thing I try to do now is "filter out the FUD". I think I'm succeeding, but I don't know how to teach others to do it, so maybe I'm not, haha. Anyway! I filter out the FUD and then look at what's left. To, perhaps, step in it: my current case study for this is pro/anti-vax. "Both sides" definitely use and spread FUD. But, when I filter out the FUD, there's almost nothing left on the anti side, and still piles of stuff left on the pro side.
  - thenerdhead 5y ago
    Would love to learn how you filter out the FUD!
    - RangerScience 5y ago
      Like I said, I'm not sure how to describe it. You kind of have to... identify, and then strip out, the emotional content of a message. (Note: don't do this all the time, but if the emotions are FUD, most of the time is a good rubric). A big part of that is identifying how someone is saying something, as opposed to what they're saying. This can be word choice, italics/bold/caps; grammatical structures, narrative structures. That last one is large and subtle - I once called someone an "active psychological hazard" for the manipulation within their "narrative" structure; think about how good comedians build a kind of meandering story, and then apply that to an affect aside from humor, and you've got the right idea. It's... I don't know. People tell me things, or I read them, and it forms a sort of multidimensional "shape" inside my mind. Then I lop off / rotate the shape so the emotional affects aren't present, or aren't significant, or aren't "in view". But also like I said, I don't actually know if it's working; but I think it is. I know that before I do whatever it is, I feel things; afterwards, I feel them, but at a remove, so they're more like things I could feel, if I chose to. Does that all make any kind of sense, even a little bit?
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
From the article: > That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. I don't know if misinformation is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about, not least because it really depends on the author's definition of "liberal", a word that appears to have only pejorative meaning for most people now. But it definitely is interesting to consider whether for example QAnon has spread more quickly than the conspiracy theories that led to the First World War, not least because QAnon hasn't yet started a war. Give it time.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  It's interesting to consider, but the article references multiple political scientists who've studied conspiracy theories and concluded that they don't spread faster today. Is there a reason to believe they're wrong?
  - lariati 5y ago
    I think this partially a myopic view from young people. I remember being a little kid and watching a week long show about the JFK conspiracy on either one of the big 3 networks or PBS. Area 51 alien conspiracy is so ubiquitous I don't even know how you would track it 30 years ago. Alex Jones that is banned from youtube for all these crazy conspiracy theories he puts out use to be on practically nationally on AM radio stations for hours a day. The Art Bell show was broadcast nightly for decades and was maybe even more insane than Alex Jones. It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at Bigfoot researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the idea of giant apes running around the US forest? Of course, that doesn't count because there is no political gain to be had. The whole process is so transparent. We basically have epistemological certainty as long as their is political gain to be had from the certainty. JFK assassination is probably the best example. The theta/time decay has all evaporated on the political gain from the conspiracy so that no longer matters.
legitster 5y ago
The biggest change is how aware we are of others' views. The internet thrives on showing you people who are "wrong". I wish we would do away with public opinion polling as news. It does nothing to actually inform or help people, but it makes us obsessed with culture wars. Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon landings were real the year they happened. Imagine if someone flashed on the screen to tell you "40% of Americans don't believe this happened, and here are all of their political views". That's what modern journalism feels like.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon landings were real the year they happened. What is your basis for this? Were you alive then? I was. I watched the first Moon landing on television. Nobody was talking about how it was faked.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    Same here, I was 7. Nobody was saying "did you see that fake moon landing?". It was only years later that I became aware that there were people on the fringe who thought it was faked, but I never personally met anyone with that opinion.
    - nickff 5y ago
      >"It was only years later that I became aware that there were people on the fringe who thought it was faked..." Certain groups (namely the Soviets) ran a number of conspiratorial propaganda campaigns, which were much more effective outside 'the West' (NATO-affiliated countries).
      - jandrese 5y ago
        "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." Conspiracy theories have an incredible ability to self sustain, it is entirely possible the "moon landings were faked" theory is an old bit of Soviet propaganda that refused to die.
sleepingadmin 5y ago
Misinformation is misinformation. I am certain I am misinformed about many things. The correct response to when I post misinformation is to inform. What happened recently with the move to yellow journalism is not misinformation but rather censorship. Fact checkers end up labelling things in order to censor them. The interesting thing on my mind in regards to Canada. Trudeau has changed. He would take on people head on at town halls and challenging questions: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-takes-questions-about-blackface-pictures-at-town-hall-69434949608 https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-takes-questions-about-... Today he refuses to even consider talking to these ongoing protests and is going to insane extremes to shut these peaceful protests down. The only way to look at it from his point of view. He must see these people as national security threats. He genuinely believes they are racists and white supremacists. He genuinely believes they are there to overthrow the government. Which there's no justification for other than egregiously being misinformed.
- gorwell 5y ago
  I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis. If you're convinced that's what they are. This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well. Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap.
  - sleepingadmin 5y ago
    >I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis after all. The question though, are these protests really what he has called them? Are they really a military occupation? >This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well. 100% true. You will find even republican ideologues have called him out on many of his bullshit things. Hell his rhetoric was toxic. Tons of improvement could happen over Trump. >Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap. It's built into our psychology, but not something out of control. Harper was in power for 9 years and never called in the military. He never demonized his political opponents. He never falsely labelled a peaceful protest as a military occupation. He never smeared political opponents as 'racists and white nationalists with unacceptable views'. He never declared a state of emergency to crush dissent. Trudeau doesn't need the military. He gave himself to power to seize your bank account because you're a protester. No court orders. No due process. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385 Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at Monday's news conference that banks would be able freeze personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests without any need for a court order.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I've also noticed that the term "willful ignorance" gets thrown around a lot more nowadays. There is a sizeable contingent of people who are so convinced that what they believe is the absolute truth that any disagreement or critique must therefore be out of malice rather than genuine disagreement.
- dang 5y ago
  Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying. Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I think “lying” as more of a “your claim is outright false” while “disingenuous” lends itself to more subjective forms of misleading. For example, if I refer to a given protest as “violent” on the basis that a literal handful (out of tens or hundreds of thousands) were violent, I’m not really lying but I’m certainly misleading people by way of my characterization.
    - pvg 5y ago
      Both imply intent and the common messageboard usage is a kind of pretend-polite way to claim someone is intentionally misleading when they might simply be disagreeing or just unintentionally wrong, misinformed, etc. A strongly held inaccurate belief is not 'disingenuous'. It's a tropey comment-cliche word that is probably best avoided when addressing people you disagree with online.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        If you call someone disingenuous, then yeah, you're being offensive. But if you call the idea disingenuous, then it's much less offensive. If you phrase it like, "isn't that a little disingenuous?" it's even less offensive yet (I think "isn't that a lie" would come off a fair bit more offensive). Using "disingenuous" and words like it, I've had a lot of success finding common ground or at least identifying the locus of disagreement. But of course someone who is set on causing offense can probably manage with any word.
twa999 5y ago
this piece encapsulates the mindset of mainstream libs like Matty, 1 billion stupid takes, Yglesias perfectly and can be summarized as "yeah maybe these normal people were right on some things and I dismissed that without knowing anything, but I was still right to dismiss that because they're stupid". it's now safe for Bari Weiss to ask some questions on TV that "normal people" have been asking for quite some time now and were called all sorts of things by the same people. We will see more articles like this.
- johnNumen 5y ago
  Exactly. I loved how even in this piece he managed to sneak in some jabs at the people he doesn't like--he just didn't call them "misinformed." Progress!
beecafe 5y ago
Misinformation is just due to people and organizations attempting to act optimally. If you don't embrace it, you'll be crushed by those who have.
- zwieback 5y ago
  So true. Misinformation is a misnomer, it's not something that exists in opposition of information and shouldn't be compared. Like you say misinformation is something people use to achieve their goals.
helen___keller 5y ago
The author is correct that in any debate, the prominent skeptics are often extremely well informed (joe Rogan on vaccines, in his example). I think what the author is missing is that Joe Rogan and the likes are not spreading misinformation, but spreading tools for misinformation. My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff. Once, when I was still trying to convince her to get a vaccine, I told her that after Israel’s early vaccine efforts, both cases and deaths are down heavily. Her response was to pull up a screenshot of a fox headline from a YouTube video that simply stated something like “cases up 60% after vaccination in Israel” I don’t know the context of the headline. I’m sure in whatever context, it was accurate and not misinformation. But the actual spreaders of misinformation use skeptical talking points as weapons to spread misinformation, like the vaccine being a weapon to kill off the population for the great reset. Anyways I don’t think it’s wrong to be a skeptic. But skeptic talking points being mass weaponized on social media is absolutely new and uniquely enabled by modern technology.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff. This is likely the big causal factor here. Your MIL is definitely not typical. The notion that conspiracy nuts are specifically being influenced by "skeptic talking points" and not by simply being generically nutty, anti-intellectual and anti-science, is kinda hard to take seriously.
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    She was pretty normal until around 2018 on the contrary. I’m sure losing her job in 2008 and ending up socially isolated because she doesn’t speak fluent English didn’t help. I’m not claiming ordinary and well adjusted people easily fall prey to misinformation if that’s what you’re trying to refute here. It’s simply an observational fact that conspiracy groups wield skeptic talking points as weapons and that modern technology allows efficient dissemination of this discourse (as with any discourse). Whether or not there’s a “misinformation problem”, per the title, is actually an empirical question that neither the author nor I have the tools to answer
mschuster91 5y ago
> More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation” is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would resolve political disputes. The key thing that journalism should do is take factual information and provide context. If 99.999% of scientists claim the earth is a ball and 0.001% claim the earth is flat, for fucks sake don't present these two things as equal. With vaccines it's the same. Just how much airtime was given to people blathering that vaccines cause autism, which is a decades-old debunked fraud? Way too much. And the result of that lack of providing context in media (or, worse, outright and willing deception of the Alex Jones class) is what is the problem. When media or government institutions prove that they are not willing to do their job, people end up not trusting them - which then leads to the disconnect between wide swaths of the population and factual truth we're seeing.
- tstrimple 5y ago
  > Just how much airtime was given to people blathering that vaccines cause autism, which is a decades-old debunked fraud? Way too much. Sure, but cut them off and then they cry censorship. "They wouldn't be trying to silence us if they weren't hiding something!"
softwarebeware 5y ago
IMO the author displays confirmation bias in the post. He doesn't think about the effects of a higher availability information with a lower ability to seek out other contradicting points of view. If you're deluged with carefully chosen factual information, that's more convincing than outright lies. And this is often the situation we are in more often than not these days. Along with an inability to spot logical fallacies in lines of reasoning.
- dathinab 5y ago
  we have higher ability to seek out contradicting views. just most humans nerver do so they at most look for badly done cintradicting arguments to confirm their few
- civilized 5y ago
  > He doesn't think about the effects of a higher availability information with a lower ability to seek out other contradicting points of view. This is a baffling claim. Why on earth would you believe that people now have a lower ability to seek out contradicting points of view?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - svachalek 5y ago
    Which profit driven advertising based search engine or newsfeed is built around delivering contradicting points of view?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - civilized 5y ago
      Replace "profit driven such-and-such" with "print newspaper" and the rhetorical question works equally well. I think the worst you can say against social media is that it feeds you low-quality highly-partisan sources if you seem to like such sources. But your ability to seek out better or contradicting information is not diminished. If anything it is far greater than it has ever been. "Stuff that is against $my_favorite_belief" is a Google search away. Wikipedia alone will usually give you a fairly balanced treatment of a topic with extensive references to diverse perspectives and evidence.
dathinab 5y ago
The German government loves blaming troublesome newish movements like vocal anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorists, some new right wing groups etc. as being the fault of misinformation on Facebook Whatsapp and their recently target telegram. I don't think that's right. Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information, including manipulative information but that's mostly it. In my experience (i.e. people in my environment) many people had such believes long before Facebook or Whatsapp became widespread in their social circle. The difference was that it often wasn't noticed as much until they felt threatened in their way of live, e.g. because of pandemic relateed measurements. Or their conspiracies affected you or made you personally angry/offended. Many of this movements often had been ignored by the government as "just a few crazy people" for years even when it wasn't just a few people anymore (e.g. Reichsbürger). Some (anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist against modern medicine) have even gotten support from major political parties for years (e.g. green party). And sure people radicalized a lot with the pandemic, because they felt threatened and insecure. But the German government and public media _majorly_ made that worse due to incompetence especially around media competence. The problem was less the measurements taken but how they where communicated. And how assumptions which layer turned out to be not sure right where often converted as scientific fact. This created a perfect ground for evil manipulative people to push people further down in the wrong direction. And from what I can tell I'm 100% sure there are some (multiple, distinct) highly intelligent and skilled people spreading and pushing some of this misinformation for whatever reason. Worse when the public media saw this problem instead of reacting with honest open communication they decided they needed to be even more manipulative to protect society. Problem: That doesn't work if it does the manipulator to convince more people by pointing out the manipulation, then through manipulation on their site make it look worse and use the human fallacy of thinking in "black and white" (1) to increase the believe in conspiracy theories of their victims (2). (2): expect that it's more like catch many propaganda then one to one manipulation (1): it should be obvious but in this context this has nothing to do with skin color.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > increase the believe [sic] in conspiracy theories I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that, logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything, at least one of them would be writing for some mainstream media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and believe the same things and agree with each other on almost everything. I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the internet came along. The internet of the mid-90's was almost entirely populated by people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought, "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they all been this whole time?" In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010 (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the 80's.
mikewarot 5y ago
It is important to remember that the media seems to only call out "misinformation" when it is from sources that threaten their market, Have you seen any apology for their failure to uncover the lies that got us into needless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I am very selective in my trust of media these days. I don't want to be lead into collective insanity any more.
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
If you didn't buy that Iraq had WMDs and that there was a BinLaden to Saddam connection, you were on the side of misinformation. The entire media and political establishment was at odds with your take. If you clamp down on misinformation, you're doing nothing more than allowing the establishment to be wrong without consequence, and creating consequence when the average person is wrong. No one labeled the NY Times a perpetuator of misinformation when it blatantly lied about evidence for the Iraq War. Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares. No one cares when the bad info, lies, buried studies or anything else works in favor of power. This isn't about who's right and who wrong. Its about power. It's about who's allowed the freedom to be wrong and who isn't. Who has the ability to manipulate the public and who doesn't. And the power to dictate that is the power to win every public debate no matter how much merit you do or don't have.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  Wow you stepped on every single information landmine possible. The NYT had commentators reporting on what they thought was true. They have done many years of introspection about their rule in the Iraq war, this is not what "perpetuator of misinformation" do - they double down. > Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares. What is one thing either site has gotten wrong (objectively, not your opinion) and refuses to correct ? Everyone makes mistakes, how we respond to those mistakes is the distinction we should care about. > This isn't about who's right and who wrong. Its about power. Sounds like projection of what you believe the digital information space to be.
  - loudtieblahblah 5y ago
    The Free Beacon reported that a source told them the crack kits could specifically include pipes, and the story went viral https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-to-fund-crack-pipe-distribution-to-advance-racial-equity/ https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-to-f... Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating . . . while confirming the Free Beacon reporting as entirely true. Here’s how they explained it: > In 2022, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services substance abuse harm reduction grant did require recipients to provide safer smoking kits to existing drug users. In distributing grants, priority would be given to applicants serving historically underserved communities. However what’s false is this was just one of around 20 components of the grant program and far from its most prominent or important one. Snopes claims that the news about smoking kits is true. It’s just not important. Or here’s Facebook’s “Partly False” Fact Check (https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/02/fact-check-biden-administration-is-not-funding-crack-pipes-heroin-for-drug-use.html https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/02/fact-check-biden-...) that also confirms the Free Beacon reporting: > While a description of the HHS grants stated that the grantees would be required to buy materials like safe smoking kits and supplies to "enhance harm reduction efforts," such kits and supplies are just a few of the many materials that grantees can utilize. This happens all the time.
dboreham 5y ago
I find it odd that nobody seems to mention the similarities between all this and religion. Widespread belief in things that can't possibly be true. Adherents can't be persuaded otherwise despite incontrovertible evidence. Sounds familiar? Perhaps it's baked into the firmware.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  That would be odd, if nobody mentioned it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- standardUser 5y ago
  There have been endless comparisons of Trumpism to a cult, which at first seemed a bit extreme until we saw tens of millions of Americans believe more and more fantastical lies over the course of the last 5 years. Now, I can't imagine how we can describe it as anything other than a cult.
guelo 5y ago
As someone that works on moderation of an online platform I can tell you that lots and lots of misinformation exists and is read by millions of people. On vaccines many people actually believe the microchip, 5G, magnetic, secret ingredients, fetal tissue, vaccines shedding, Bill Gates stuff. Misinformation affects real people's actions in dangerous ways, I don't know what downplaying its existence accomplishes.
- civilized 5y ago
  Of course, the author doesn't downplay its existence, only its impact. But to know that we'd have to read the post.
yehosef 5y ago
An important measure of "misinformation" is who benefits if the information is actually true or false. Also valuable to identify who has the financial capacity to influence the sources of "truth".
godshatter 5y ago
In my opinion, the "misinformation problem" breaks down into a couple of separate causes. Mainly the odd inability of people not being able to view a comment that they disagree with and not try to "correct" that person (highly related to the inability people have to let the other person have the last word) and simple tribalism. I don't know what to do about the "inability not to respond" issue, I suffer from that myself. On the tribalism issue, I strongly suggest becoming the equivalent of a nomadic wanderer. When someone posts something about a topic I strongly agree with, I don't assume I will agree with everything else they might say. The same goes for posts about something I strongly disagree with. Being too caught up in tribalism leads to inoffensive posts from the other tribe causing a knee-jerk reaction to say something, anything, to put them in their place even if the person completely agree with what the other person just posted. Hence, the rise of "whataboutism". I try to take on a view of comments posted in which I don't care who the other person is, what other beliefs they might have good or bad, and just reply to the comment at hand. If the comment is full of insults I just ignore them and pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those. This would seem to be a good way to have less conflict in conversations on the internet but in my experience you need very thick skin to go this route because you are an outsider to all groups, meaning you are a target for everyone. There are people who will stop insulting you when you calmly reply to their points and ignore their jibes, but not as many as a younger more naive version of myself would have expected, unfortunately. This is what I try to do, anyway. I'm unfortunately as human as everyone else, so I slip at times.
- RangerScience 5y ago
  > pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those 100% this. AFAICT, part of where this is coming from is formal debate style, where (IMHO) there's a subtle pressure to address everything the other side said. But in a conversation, you don't have to do that. You can pick up just the parts you want to reply to.
aaron695 5y ago
stephc_int13 5y ago
100% agree. Misinformation and propaganda only seem worse now because it is more diverse and we are collectively better at seeing it. If anything, it is more difficult now to mislead masses.
BikiniPrince 5y ago
I thought this might be a humor piece. The author talks about how misinformation is not terrible and how he is well informed. Then he goes on to make a lot of statements that are wrong or colored with bias. This is funny and sad!
standardUser 5y ago
"...but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question. That’s why it’s a live debate." It's just rhetoric. Anything can become a debate, such as who won the 2020 presidential election, if one side is willing to make up facts and repeat them over and over. Proponents of the Big Lie are super-informed, insofar as they have a lot of lies they can say with a straight face that act as stand-ins for actual information. And if they keep asserting those lies, the other side is forced to respond, hence a debate. There is still no merit to the Big Lie, but now it must be discussed as if there was. THAT is why there is a live debate. And then there is this nonsense: "overall political climate was much more right-wing in the 1990s." That is so outrageously false I'm not sure why anyone is supposed to think this person is worth reading. Just think of how many mainstream politicians will swear up and down that the election was stolen in 2020. I guess if you pretend "right wing" is about policy you could craft a convoluted argument that today's Republicans are less conservative (as the author does), but that's not what the right wing is about. The right wing is about the Big Lie, it's about illiberalism, it's about demonizing the media and institutions and political opponents - all the policy stuff is just window dressing.
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved disgracefully after the election and that there is still no evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the election. Many still believe it's a major problem that states like Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which should be illegal, but handling that is a separate issue. Many also believe it's a problem that our election processes are so insecure and that we need more election security. That's separate from believing the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that provably illegal voting activity swung the election.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    I'm not asserting every single conservative fits this mold, or that you can't cherry-pick pundits who still play fair. But most of what the right wing is oriented around today is attacking the free press, stifling public education, making voting more difficult for urban citizens and pretending, loudly and constantly, that the last election was stolen. Where are the policy proposals? What major legislation did conservatives pass during the previous Republican administration when they had a trifecta? What was the Republican Party platform in 2020? And why is the RNC choosing not to allow a debate in 2024? This is not a party with lots of ideas ready to fight for the hearts and minds of voters.
duxup 5y ago
I don't quite get where the author is coming from. >And on the basics of civic life, that doesn’t seem to be the case. A survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2006, only 33 percent of people could correctly identify the three branches of government. By 2021, that was up to 56 percent. That’s way higher than 33 percent! Is that really what anyone means about misinformation? I don't think so... As for say the Joe Rogan examples, are knowing factoids that someone thinks support their other opinions really knowledge, or are they things they just like to gather to support public statements? Often I get those factoids tossed at me on the internet and even links to pages that someone thinks supports their opinions but if you read 3 paragraphs in clearly doesn't. That's not being knowledgeable... In fact celebrating those little factoids seem right up the alley of misinformation where someone announces that "5 men were discovered to be impotent after getting the vaccine!" where that might be true, but the intent of the misinformation is obviously to push something else.
- 0x500x79 5y ago
  And factoids don't mean that there is analysis being done on those facts. I can state partial facts or misleading facts all day long that might get upvotes/retweets. That doesn't mean that it is properly conveying information that is needed to analyze the subject. The Covid19 vaccine discussion isn't: "There are side effects that are worse than you think". There are hundreds if not thousands of data points that have to be analyzed together to understand the negatives or benefits of something as complex as this. Cherry-picking on factoid to back up your bias does not make you smart.
engineer_22 5y ago
Misinformation has always existed. I think the emergent phenomena that we are seeing is simply a scaled up version of the problems Plato pointed out in the Republic. The REAL problem, is that democracy as an organization if people isn't going to produce a society of freedom and justice, no, democracy produces a hedonic society. So the question becomes, how do we LIVE with that?
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  I mean if hedonism is what you are concerned about the only difference is democracy brings hedonism to the common man instead of just the elites. And even then the elites can afford to be more hedonistic than than the common man anyway. Anyone with power has always been a hedonist in any form of government.
- scsilver 5y ago
  Isn't modern hedonism just freedom to pursuit happiness without necessitating context of religious frameworks. I don't see what makes you think hedonism isn't sustainable or stable. Democracy has been the biggest boost to science and rationality than any of the other government structures.
- truffdog 5y ago
  Is it even scaled up, or is it just more legible to elites because they can see what the masses are saying?
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
~50% of US voters are wrong about the basic facts of the federal 2020 election. Doesn't matter which ~50% for this statement to be true. Misinformation hasn't been this bad in 300 years, even counting 1939 Germany. Expect similar consequences.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
This seems to be redefining what misinformed means, but I'm not sure what they intend to achieve by that. > "They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks" Having a section about how conspiracy theorists are very knowledgeable about their subjects and then immediately saying that a right wing economist is really well informed about arguments against minimum wage regulations seemed a little on the nose, but I think it was just a coincidence. Basically, people are allowed to be wrong about stuff but only if they are right-wing, because right-wing people have traditionally been wrong. Is that what we are saying? > "So people vote Republican, I think, not because of “misinformation” but because they perceive that the GOP position on many policy topics has moderated while the Democratic Party’s has gotten more left-wing" So they aren't misinformed, they just realised 10 years late that what the "left-wing" opinion 10 years ago was, was what they wanted after all? So how do we know they won't do the same in ten more years, which in fact he pretty openly states they will.
- thxCronyCap 5y ago
  “They” may not because “they” will be dead. The 30 and younger crowd have stuck to their non-religous, progressiveness. Polls over the last decade have suggested progressivism had become even more entrenched in that crowd. If there’s a future rightward lean it would be after a leftward drift. I agree that conservatives are starting to see progressives were arguing for what the conservatives wanted. I scrape comments from Reddit and have quantified there are more posts of the “our side has advocated against our own positions in deference to politicians.”. They want to be left to socially manage their local life, which rubs up against that whole social democracy thing. While the politicians want to extract as much profit off our agency for as little real work of their own as possible, “both sides” on main street want their agency for their neighborhood. The TV addicted pudding brains are dying off. The younger generation was weened on distracting multimedia, they have an intuition for where that ends and shared political life begins that the mush mouths dribbling the same old cable news from their lips don’t. Favored information compositions have changed. Still the same physics on the whole but the ideas that captivate are more than just academic glyph sets with cherry picked snippets highlighted in dayglo. Generating never ending statistical objects is not learning which are most probable. Humanity is still figuring that out. We can’t allow for sentences like “kill all X for Y reason” or “let chainsaw wielding nut run lose” for obvious reasons. But there are more sentences we can allow people to believe are true besides the ones that essentially translate to “grow business.” It’s all very “build and tend your flock” in real habit anyway. That doesn’t sit well with the non-Church going crowd
t0bia_s 5y ago
At the end, it is a matter of believe. We choose what information should we believe or not. But we should always be able to confront that information with real life around us and look in specific topics from multiple sources. And keep asking questions. I hope people will look more and more for information about topic as vaccination. Because right know we come to era that we are really able to get access to information that was hidden for decades. I recommend book from German medical doctor "Gerhard Buchwald - Vaccination - A Business Based on Fear". Book was released in 1994 and observe the development of diseases and vaccination in Germany. Yes, it is easy to say that someone is anti-vax, but if you really inform yourself in this topic, you'll start ask questions that are valid and should be debated more.
joelbondurant2 5y ago
civilized 5y ago
A lot of commenters here seem to want to define "misinformation" to mean something like "selectively presented information to promote a perspective at odds with what I think is a balanced and informed perspective". With this inherently subjective definition, I'm not sure we'll be able to agree on much about the existence or nature of a misinformation epidemic.
User23 5y ago
The only rational position that fits the observables is defaulting to the assumption that everything one sees in the “news” that one can’t personally verify is misinformation to some greater or lesser extent. This means that, for instance, I generally believe that local weather and traffic reports are accurate. Sadly, the Gell-Man amnesia effect means that most people will continue to believe whatever nonsense it is that they’re currently being told.
epgui 5y ago
> I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect because our information technology has gotten better [...] This kind of framing makes me feel very weary. There is plenty of evidence, but I'm not interested in going on a hunt. Rather, let's think for just one second about how to model this: - The number of "bad actors" probably has not changed significantly over time - The cost of producing documents has gone down significantly - The cost of diffusing documents, or information, per audience headcount, has gone down significantly - Overall, the total volume of sketchy information produced yearly has been dramatically increasing as a result of these lowering barriers. - Conversely, the total volume of quality information has clearly increased as well. - The technological tools at our disposal, as consumers of content, have become more and more sophisticated, such that we now have access to more quality information than ever before in History. - However, consuming quality content requires constant deliberate effort and prudence, and it is much easier to stumble upon crappy information, than it is to find quality information. - The less expert you are at a subject, the more energy is required to sift through the crap. - Most people are either not expert at anything, or are expert in a narrow field of interest. - Information no longer flows in the same way it once did: it now diffuses through a social graph which is prone to significant network effects. Non-experts can have a bigger influence than experts, even when the information they share is entirely meritless. Echo-chambers form naturally and require a lot of deliberate and conscious effort to get out from. It is very difficult to reach certain pockets of the graph.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  > If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past [citation needed] more information =/ better informed, the same way drinking from a firehose doesn't allow you to ingest more water than drinking slowly from a glass. This point missed ironically by a website called "slowboring.com"
  - brianfitz 5y ago
president 5y ago
Have you noticed that people that label a position or argument misinformation never want to have a discussion about it? The pattern always seems to be: 1. Call something misinformation 2. Ignore any counter claims (so they cannot be proven wrong on the record) 3. Call for others to "cancel" it (use power in numbers to perpetuate misinfo claim)
archhn 5y ago
If people trusted the establishment and their institutions, "misinformation" wouldn't be a problem. People would just shrug off the rhetoric coming from the fringe. The pervasive mistrust of institutions and the establishment, foretold as the fourth turning, is what is causing people to turn to fringe sources for their information. What we are seeing here is a battle for authority underwritten by decades of establishment failure. It's going to get very ugly.
aftbit 5y ago
>I think the only sensible thing to say about all this is that discerning the truth is hard, and it requires debate and dissent. Functional expert communities and well-run journalism institutions are open to new information, to changing their minds, and to correcting the record. But that process doesn’t work if the fact-check squad slaps a “misinformation” label on you for saying the CDC is wrong about masks. I just wanted to highlight this part really quickly. IMO this is one of the most concerning things to come out of this epidemic of misinformation. We have allowed a handful of for-profit companies to build a system for determining what is true or false. I suppose this isn't meaningfully different than the world before the internet, but that's a huge wasted potential.
joelbondurant4 5y ago

247 points by dtjb 5y ago

In my opinion, the campaigns against "misinformation" are largely attempts by big corporations and politicians to deplatform their competition. Gotta make sure people only see trusted news sources that say the right things.

notreallyserio 5y ago
And IMO they're largely attempts to keep Coca Cola Inc (et al) from pulling their ads because Coke doesn't want their brand on sites posting QAnon/GOP talking points.

0x500x79 5y ago

I am genuinely surprised at the comments in this thread. This article starts "That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about", which is immediately making this a partisan issue. Secondly: "The internet makes me better informed". This is his perspective. Many people are not actively looking for information outside of their own biases. Thirdly: "Cranks often know a lot"... Should be titled "Cranks often think they know a lot". Just because someone can state a fact does not mean they are sufficiently educated to analyze that fact. Saying that there are "vaccine side-effects" (stated in the article) does not mean that Joe Rogan is able to weight the information in totality with other information from the studies. After this, the article got into a bunch of "whataboutism" and doesn't really compel me to believe that misinformation is not a problem. I agree with polarization getting worse, but could that be a symptom/signal of misinformation, is there a cause/effect relationship? My thoughts: There are multiple categories of false information spreading on the internet right now. I honestly believe that there is manipulation of the public happening on all sides of this problem, the thing that is still unclear is whether there is a coordinated source of this manipulation or if it is organic. I disagree pretty strongly with the "misinformation problem" being misinformation. Anecdotally (yes, I know it's not scientific but it is the same information the author is giving) the amount of things shared on social media that are demonstrably wrong has increased over the past couple of years. There are people who truly believe that Trump was going to rally the military on January 20th or whatever date to "take back the white house". This got shared to numerous social media sites and was reposted that the "true president" was coming back. This is one explicit example, but similar things have been popping up for the past couple of years and spreading like wildfire. 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are. If you claim that misinformation is just "information that is partisan" or "wrongthink" I would urge you to dig further into some real, damaging examples. I think there are times when the term is weaponized, but there is a serious increase in how easy it is to spread words in this day and age. The internet, social media upvotes and shares, and other technological tooling has made the problem worse by letting people feel validated by opinions and "likeableness" of something versus things based in facts. Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on social media and "news" outlets. Yes I understand that "individualism" should let them decide whether to make that choice, but there is a public health issue here when people are basing that choice off of Facebook memes and shared content that has no basis and gets 100k shares because it sounds cool.

t0bia_s 5y ago
"Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on social media and "news" outlets." You mean those about covid or vaccines? What exactly is wrong to let people choose? Why you think that what is best for you should be best for others?
- 0x500x79 5y ago
  Nothing is wrong with letting people choose, forcing incorrect information to people... that is wrong.
  - t0bia_s 5y ago
    Define incorrect information. You have always possibility to believe that info or not. Bad for relationship with people is thinking that I know best and others know wrong and incorrect.
PolygonSheep 5y ago
> 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are. I do wonder how many people are in these movements. It kind of reminds me of the Westboro Baptist Church who succeeded in getting themselves a ton of media attention despite being ~70 people. I think Qanon is probably a couple orders of magnitude bigger than the WBC but I would be surprised if the core following exceeds 100,000 people in the US. I personally believe these things are more a manifestation of underlying mental illness than anything else and if you somehow pushed a magic button to delete all traces of Qanon from the public consciousness they would immediately become sovereign citizens or Holocaust deniers or something (if, indeed, they aren't already). If someone's in Qanon or a Flat Earther it's not because they didn't read the Snopes article debunking Pizzagate or that they didn't understand how the Foucault pendulum works. I don't think this can be fixed with better information. These people are not well and they need psychiatric help.

verisimi 5y ago

"I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past" I agree. Who has the truth? Government or media? Or neither? What has become worse is the centralised control of information. Which then leads to those centralised sources complaining and publicising of the issue. On the other side, you have governance structures that require the legacy media to support their messaging, as the govern the populace. Both work hand in hand - one provides the message the other the megaphone. In the past 2 years, the government has bankrolled the largest campaign in history, and the media have been willing recipients. Complaining about misinformation however, works for both parties - it provides a self-supporting justification their actions. Truth and faithfully representing reality has very little to do with that "virtuous" circle between media and governance.

lnxg33k1 5y ago
To be honest, in Italy this issue was solved during ww-2 time, a bunch of commercial newspapers from far-left to right (we couldn't have far-right back then, of course :D, we still can't but people has forgot and so we have now, but they can't really read and write), created a cooperative called ANSA (https://www.ansa.it https://www.ansa.it), that is no opionion, no controlling point of view, just facts as they happen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenzia_Nazionale_Stampa_Associata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenzia_Nazionale_Stampa_Assoc...) If you force Fox, CNBC, CNN to create an agency of news reporting where each one oversee the content created, in order to be as objective as possible, then I think the society in US would benefit In Italy those newspapers do money by selling copies containing the premium content, which is like reports, opinion articles, more in depth opinion articles etc, which people is still interested in, but for news and facts then ANSA is the source of truth
- kurthr 5y ago
  But Berlusconi's (finivest/mediaset) ownership of Il Giornale and 3 of 7 TV channels makes that all a little less relevant due to political manipulation, doesn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Silvio_Berlusconi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Silv... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0163443709361169 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016344370936116...

Tycho 5y ago

“Misinformation” appears to be a term used by people who don’t want to take on the burden of proof when accusing someone of lying.

ILMostro7 5y ago
Some people refuse to look at the truth. Then again, it should be assumed that a random person, more often than not, actually cared and spent some time thinking or learning what most people take to be true. Throwing conspiracy theories to see what sticks is a lazy form of destructive behavior. Pointing fingers at people who don't explicitly disprove your claims, whether or not you know them to be true, is just a continuation of the same.
hobomatic 5y ago
To me it seems like they are a pot calling the kettle brown so as to divert attention from the fact that their own blackness is the larger offense. 'these guys are just stupid' as they engage in overt deception and manipulation to even make such an accusation.
gorwell 5y ago
When you hear the word `misinformation`, you can generally substitute with `wrongthink`. It makes much more sense that way.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  I dunno about that. Thought experiment: The Earth is a flat disc. Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both? To be sure it's a vague term applied quite continuously online but simply deflecting it as actually meaning "wrongthink" is disingenuous. There's a lot of misinformation being spread specifically about objective measurable facts. It is simultaneously true that a lot of opinions are being mislabeled as misinformation.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

ILMostro7 5y ago

Once misinformation becomes accepted as truth, or a valid mindset even, it doesn't stand out as blatant falsehood. Questioning whether 1 + 2 is actually 3 or a secret way to hide the true meaning of pi is akin to a dog chasing its tail to excercise his brain.

water8 5y ago
Nobody feels the need to label you as misinformation when you go around saying 1+1=3. They will simply know you’re a cuckoo and ignore you. The misinformation label seems to only get applied to information that could be harmful to a political party
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Take the "flat earth" people. What they say is factually wrong. But there isn't a flat-earthist political party that wants to change our military deployments because our current deployments are based on a false topology of the planet, or change our immigration policy because Central America doesn't actually connect to Mexico, or something like that. There's no political agenda that flows out of the flat earth nonsense. That's what makes it "nonsense" rather than "misinformation". On the other end of the scale, there is "disinformation". That's where someone is deliberately and systematically trying to persuade you do believe what is false, in order for them to carry out their agenda. Russia has been running a disinformation campaign against the US for several years. (On both sides - trying to drive extremism and destroy the political center, in order to weaken the US.) One could say that both major political parties in the US are also running disinformation campaigns. "Misinformation" is kind of in the middle, in my view. It's not necessarily part of a large-scale organized campaign, but it's not just a nonsense belief with no consequences. So people care about misinformation in a way that they don't care about the flat earthers, because misinformation can cause more harm. But people don't seem to take as seriously as they should the damage that long-running, coordinated disinformation campaigns can cause (and, in fact, are causing).

lnxg33k1 5y ago

One of the worst example that I bring (unfortunately) in my mind, was from like mid-pandemic, when people around was complaining due to newspapers (in that occasion, the BBC in particular), for spreading misinformation.. and you know why they were spreading misinformation? Because they were supporting the right of chronicles by reporting about protests against coronavirus lockdown protests... this was the spreading of misinformation, newspaper should not report things that are happening but are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes news

feurio 5y ago
> things that are happening but are wrong for wokes I'll admit that I found parsing the whole comment rather difficult so I may have missed something, but what are "wokes"?
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  I am not sure, english is not my mother tongue so I might have written something in a non-understandable way, if there's something that I might have written better let me know if you want. As for wokes -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
  - feurio 5y ago
    OK, thank you for clarifying. So "wokes" are people who are 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination'. > newspaper should not report things that are happening but are wrong for wokes, they should only report things that they like, even if what they don't like happened and makes news So what have "wokes" got to do with anything? They are just people who aren't racist, right? Again, maybe I have misunderstood.
    - lnxg33k1 5y ago
      Yeah that was the starting point of the culture, and I think it's a start in order to get more documented about what they've grown into and how, so yeah they're those against racism and the likes but are also those who went against newspapers reporting news that they didn't like as written in my post

thenerdhead 5y ago

Ever since a high school current events class, I have questioned the motives of the media. This was circa 2008 after the stock market crash. The common question of "why is significantly more negative news highlighted than happy news?" What matters to me is the truth. In times of FUD(fear, uncertainty, doubt), the information dials are all set to 11. It's an absolute firehose of all the above. It's less misinformation to me, but rather too much information. The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more informed when I read books or scientific articles from credible authors, not opinion columnists. The internet makes me confused. Confusion gives me FUD. FUD makes the truth hard to decipher. Although debate and dissent may help get to the truth earlier, only time will be the judge. It's unfortunate that we live in the present and can't have the truth earlier, but that's just life for ya.

RangerScience 5y ago
> The internet does not make me feel better informed. I feel more informed when I read books or.. 100% this, excellent observation. > FUD makes the truth hard to decipher One thing I try to do now is "filter out the FUD". I think I'm succeeding, but I don't know how to teach others to do it, so maybe I'm not, haha. Anyway! I filter out the FUD and then look at what's left. To, perhaps, step in it: my current case study for this is pro/anti-vax. "Both sides" definitely use and spread FUD. But, when I filter out the FUD, there's almost nothing left on the anti side, and still piles of stuff left on the pro side.
- thenerdhead 5y ago
  Would love to learn how you filter out the FUD!
  - RangerScience 5y ago
    Like I said, I'm not sure how to describe it. You kind of have to... identify, and then strip out, the emotional content of a message. (Note: don't do this all the time, but if the emotions are FUD, most of the time is a good rubric). A big part of that is identifying how someone is saying something, as opposed to what they're saying. This can be word choice, italics/bold/caps; grammatical structures, narrative structures. That last one is large and subtle - I once called someone an "active psychological hazard" for the manipulation within their "narrative" structure; think about how good comedians build a kind of meandering story, and then apply that to an affect aside from humor, and you've got the right idea. It's... I don't know. People tell me things, or I read them, and it forms a sort of multidimensional "shape" inside my mind. Then I lop off / rotate the shape so the emotional affects aren't present, or aren't significant, or aren't "in view". But also like I said, I don't actually know if it's working; but I think it is. I know that before I do whatever it is, I feel things; afterwards, I feel them, but at a remove, so they're more like things I could feel, if I chose to. Does that all make any kind of sense, even a little bit?

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

From the article: > That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. I don't know if misinformation is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about, not least because it really depends on the author's definition of "liberal", a word that appears to have only pejorative meaning for most people now. But it definitely is interesting to consider whether for example QAnon has spread more quickly than the conspiracy theories that led to the First World War, not least because QAnon hasn't yet started a war. Give it time.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
It's interesting to consider, but the article references multiple political scientists who've studied conspiracy theories and concluded that they don't spread faster today. Is there a reason to believe they're wrong?
- lariati 5y ago
  I think this partially a myopic view from young people. I remember being a little kid and watching a week long show about the JFK conspiracy on either one of the big 3 networks or PBS. Area 51 alien conspiracy is so ubiquitous I don't even know how you would track it 30 years ago. Alex Jones that is banned from youtube for all these crazy conspiracy theories he puts out use to be on practically nationally on AM radio stations for hours a day. The Art Bell show was broadcast nightly for decades and was maybe even more insane than Alex Jones. It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at Bigfoot researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the idea of giant apes running around the US forest? Of course, that doesn't count because there is no political gain to be had. The whole process is so transparent. We basically have epistemological certainty as long as their is political gain to be had from the certainty. JFK assassination is probably the best example. The theta/time decay has all evaporated on the political gain from the conspiracy so that no longer matters.

legitster 5y ago

The biggest change is how aware we are of others' views. The internet thrives on showing you people who are "wrong". I wish we would do away with public opinion polling as news. It does nothing to actually inform or help people, but it makes us obsessed with culture wars. Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon landings were real the year they happened. Imagine if someone flashed on the screen to tell you "40% of Americans don't believe this happened, and here are all of their political views". That's what modern journalism feels like.

pdonis 5y ago
> Only 60 something percent of Americans believed the moon landings were real the year they happened. What is your basis for this? Were you alive then? I was. I watched the first Moon landing on television. Nobody was talking about how it was faked.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Same here, I was 7. Nobody was saying "did you see that fake moon landing?". It was only years later that I became aware that there were people on the fringe who thought it was faked, but I never personally met anyone with that opinion.
  - nickff 5y ago
    >"It was only years later that I became aware that there were people on the fringe who thought it was faked..." Certain groups (namely the Soviets) ran a number of conspiratorial propaganda campaigns, which were much more effective outside 'the West' (NATO-affiliated countries).
    - jandrese 5y ago
      "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." Conspiracy theories have an incredible ability to self sustain, it is entirely possible the "moon landings were faked" theory is an old bit of Soviet propaganda that refused to die.

sleepingadmin 5y ago

Misinformation is misinformation. I am certain I am misinformed about many things. The correct response to when I post misinformation is to inform. What happened recently with the move to yellow journalism is not misinformation but rather censorship. Fact checkers end up labelling things in order to censor them. The interesting thing on my mind in regards to Canada. Trudeau has changed. He would take on people head on at town halls and challenging questions: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-takes-questions-about-blackface-pictures-at-town-hall-69434949608 https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-takes-questions-about-... Today he refuses to even consider talking to these ongoing protests and is going to insane extremes to shut these peaceful protests down. The only way to look at it from his point of view. He must see these people as national security threats. He genuinely believes they are racists and white supremacists. He genuinely believes they are there to overthrow the government. Which there's no justification for other than egregiously being misinformed.

gorwell 5y ago
I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis. If you're convinced that's what they are. This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well. Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap.
- sleepingadmin 5y ago
  >I hadn't thought about it that way, but it certainly would explain his actions. You don't compromise with nazis after all. The question though, are these protests really what he has called them? Are they really a military occupation? >This would explain a lot about Trump too. He was in a misinformation bubble as well. 100% true. You will find even republican ideologues have called him out on many of his bullshit things. Hell his rhetoric was toxic. Tons of improvement could happen over Trump. >Which means even world leaders aren't immune to this tribal trap. It's built into our psychology, but not something out of control. Harper was in power for 9 years and never called in the military. He never demonized his political opponents. He never falsely labelled a peaceful protest as a military occupation. He never smeared political opponents as 'racists and white nationalists with unacceptable views'. He never declared a state of emergency to crush dissent. Trudeau doesn't need the military. He gave himself to power to seize your bank account because you're a protester. No court orders. No due process. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385 Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at Monday's news conference that banks would be able freeze personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests without any need for a court order.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I've also noticed that the term "willful ignorance" gets thrown around a lot more nowadays. There is a sizeable contingent of people who are so convinced that what they believe is the absolute truth that any disagreement or critique must therefore be out of malice rather than genuine disagreement.

dang 5y ago
Also "disingenuous", which is a fancy way of saying lying. Edit: that's not quite right, as throwaway894345 and xyzzyz and Sohcahtoa82 have pointed out below. It's also not quite what I meant (I was being hasty). The point is that 'disingenuous', like 'lie', implies intent to deceive.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I think “lying” as more of a “your claim is outright false” while “disingenuous” lends itself to more subjective forms of misleading. For example, if I refer to a given protest as “violent” on the basis that a literal handful (out of tens or hundreds of thousands) were violent, I’m not really lying but I’m certainly misleading people by way of my characterization.
  - pvg 5y ago
    Both imply intent and the common messageboard usage is a kind of pretend-polite way to claim someone is intentionally misleading when they might simply be disagreeing or just unintentionally wrong, misinformed, etc. A strongly held inaccurate belief is not 'disingenuous'. It's a tropey comment-cliche word that is probably best avoided when addressing people you disagree with online.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      If you call someone disingenuous, then yeah, you're being offensive. But if you call the idea disingenuous, then it's much less offensive. If you phrase it like, "isn't that a little disingenuous?" it's even less offensive yet (I think "isn't that a lie" would come off a fair bit more offensive). Using "disingenuous" and words like it, I've had a lot of success finding common ground or at least identifying the locus of disagreement. But of course someone who is set on causing offense can probably manage with any word.

twa999 5y ago

this piece encapsulates the mindset of mainstream libs like Matty, 1 billion stupid takes, Yglesias perfectly and can be summarized as "yeah maybe these normal people were right on some things and I dismissed that without knowing anything, but I was still right to dismiss that because they're stupid". it's now safe for Bari Weiss to ask some questions on TV that "normal people" have been asking for quite some time now and were called all sorts of things by the same people. We will see more articles like this.

johnNumen 5y ago
Exactly. I loved how even in this piece he managed to sneak in some jabs at the people he doesn't like--he just didn't call them "misinformed." Progress!

beecafe 5y ago

Misinformation is just due to people and organizations attempting to act optimally. If you don't embrace it, you'll be crushed by those who have.

zwieback 5y ago
So true. Misinformation is a misnomer, it's not something that exists in opposition of information and shouldn't be compared. Like you say misinformation is something people use to achieve their goals.

helen___keller 5y ago

The author is correct that in any debate, the prominent skeptics are often extremely well informed (joe Rogan on vaccines, in his example). I think what the author is missing is that Joe Rogan and the likes are not spreading misinformation, but spreading tools for misinformation. My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff. Once, when I was still trying to convince her to get a vaccine, I told her that after Israel’s early vaccine efforts, both cases and deaths are down heavily. Her response was to pull up a screenshot of a fox headline from a YouTube video that simply stated something like “cases up 60% after vaccination in Israel” I don’t know the context of the headline. I’m sure in whatever context, it was accurate and not misinformation. But the actual spreaders of misinformation use skeptical talking points as weapons to spread misinformation, like the vaccine being a weapon to kill off the population for the great reset. Anyways I don’t think it’s wrong to be a skeptic. But skeptic talking points being mass weaponized on social media is absolutely new and uniquely enabled by modern technology.

zozbot234 5y ago
> My mother in law is very deep in misinformation. I’m not talking simple anti vax, I’m talking “trump will raid the Vatican for stolen gold so we can be a free country for the first time since the 19th century” misinformation, like QAnon tier stuff. This is likely the big causal factor here. Your MIL is definitely not typical. The notion that conspiracy nuts are specifically being influenced by "skeptic talking points" and not by simply being generically nutty, anti-intellectual and anti-science, is kinda hard to take seriously.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  She was pretty normal until around 2018 on the contrary. I’m sure losing her job in 2008 and ending up socially isolated because she doesn’t speak fluent English didn’t help. I’m not claiming ordinary and well adjusted people easily fall prey to misinformation if that’s what you’re trying to refute here. It’s simply an observational fact that conspiracy groups wield skeptic talking points as weapons and that modern technology allows efficient dissemination of this discourse (as with any discourse). Whether or not there’s a “misinformation problem”, per the title, is actually an empirical question that neither the author nor I have the tools to answer

mschuster91 5y ago

> More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation” is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would resolve political disputes. The key thing that journalism should do is take factual information and provide context. If 99.999% of scientists claim the earth is a ball and 0.001% claim the earth is flat, for fucks sake don't present these two things as equal. With vaccines it's the same. Just how much airtime was given to people blathering that vaccines cause autism, which is a decades-old debunked fraud? Way too much. And the result of that lack of providing context in media (or, worse, outright and willing deception of the Alex Jones class) is what is the problem. When media or government institutions prove that they are not willing to do their job, people end up not trusting them - which then leads to the disconnect between wide swaths of the population and factual truth we're seeing.

tstrimple 5y ago
> Just how much airtime was given to people blathering that vaccines cause autism, which is a decades-old debunked fraud? Way too much. Sure, but cut them off and then they cry censorship. "They wouldn't be trying to silence us if they weren't hiding something!"

softwarebeware 5y ago

IMO the author displays confirmation bias in the post. He doesn't think about the effects of a higher availability information with a lower ability to seek out other contradicting points of view. If you're deluged with carefully chosen factual information, that's more convincing than outright lies. And this is often the situation we are in more often than not these days. Along with an inability to spot logical fallacies in lines of reasoning.

dathinab 5y ago
we have higher ability to seek out contradicting views. just most humans nerver do so they at most look for badly done cintradicting arguments to confirm their few
civilized 5y ago
> He doesn't think about the effects of a higher availability information with a lower ability to seek out other contradicting points of view. This is a baffling claim. Why on earth would you believe that people now have a lower ability to seek out contradicting points of view?
- deleted 5y ago
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- svachalek 5y ago
  Which profit driven advertising based search engine or newsfeed is built around delivering contradicting points of view?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - civilized 5y ago
    Replace "profit driven such-and-such" with "print newspaper" and the rhetorical question works equally well. I think the worst you can say against social media is that it feeds you low-quality highly-partisan sources if you seem to like such sources. But your ability to seek out better or contradicting information is not diminished. If anything it is far greater than it has ever been. "Stuff that is against $my_favorite_belief" is a Google search away. Wikipedia alone will usually give you a fairly balanced treatment of a topic with extensive references to diverse perspectives and evidence.

dathinab 5y ago

The German government loves blaming troublesome newish movements like vocal anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorists, some new right wing groups etc. as being the fault of misinformation on Facebook Whatsapp and their recently target telegram. I don't think that's right. Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information, including manipulative information but that's mostly it. In my experience (i.e. people in my environment) many people had such believes long before Facebook or Whatsapp became widespread in their social circle. The difference was that it often wasn't noticed as much until they felt threatened in their way of live, e.g. because of pandemic relateed measurements. Or their conspiracies affected you or made you personally angry/offended. Many of this movements often had been ignored by the government as "just a few crazy people" for years even when it wasn't just a few people anymore (e.g. Reichsbürger). Some (anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist against modern medicine) have even gotten support from major political parties for years (e.g. green party). And sure people radicalized a lot with the pandemic, because they felt threatened and insecure. But the German government and public media _majorly_ made that worse due to incompetence especially around media competence. The problem was less the measurements taken but how they where communicated. And how assumptions which layer turned out to be not sure right where often converted as scientific fact. This created a perfect ground for evil manipulative people to push people further down in the wrong direction. And from what I can tell I'm 100% sure there are some (multiple, distinct) highly intelligent and skilled people spreading and pushing some of this misinformation for whatever reason. Worse when the public media saw this problem instead of reacting with honest open communication they decided they needed to be even more manipulative to protect society. Problem: That doesn't work if it does the manipulator to convince more people by pointing out the manipulation, then through manipulation on their site make it look worse and use the human fallacy of thinking in "black and white" (1) to increase the believe in conspiracy theories of their victims (2). (2): expect that it's more like catch many propaganda then one to one manipulation (1): it should be obvious but in this context this has nothing to do with skin color.

commandlinefan 5y ago
> increase the believe [sic] in conspiracy theories I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that, logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything, at least one of them would be writing for some mainstream media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and believe the same things and agree with each other on almost everything. I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the internet came along. The internet of the mid-90's was almost entirely populated by people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought, "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they all been this whole time?" In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010 (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the 80's.

mikewarot 5y ago

It is important to remember that the media seems to only call out "misinformation" when it is from sources that threaten their market, Have you seen any apology for their failure to uncover the lies that got us into needless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I am very selective in my trust of media these days. I don't want to be lead into collective insanity any more.

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

If you didn't buy that Iraq had WMDs and that there was a BinLaden to Saddam connection, you were on the side of misinformation. The entire media and political establishment was at odds with your take. If you clamp down on misinformation, you're doing nothing more than allowing the establishment to be wrong without consequence, and creating consequence when the average person is wrong. No one labeled the NY Times a perpetuator of misinformation when it blatantly lied about evidence for the Iraq War. Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares. No one cares when the bad info, lies, buried studies or anything else works in favor of power. This isn't about who's right and who wrong. Its about power. It's about who's allowed the freedom to be wrong and who isn't. Who has the ability to manipulate the public and who doesn't. And the power to dictate that is the power to win every public debate no matter how much merit you do or don't have.

fortuna86 5y ago
Wow you stepped on every single information landmine possible. The NYT had commentators reporting on what they thought was true. They have done many years of introspection about their rule in the Iraq war, this is not what "perpetuator of misinformation" do - they double down. > Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares. What is one thing either site has gotten wrong (objectively, not your opinion) and refuses to correct ? Everyone makes mistakes, how we respond to those mistakes is the distinction we should care about. > This isn't about who's right and who wrong. Its about power. Sounds like projection of what you believe the digital information space to be.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
  The Free Beacon reported that a source told them the crack kits could specifically include pipes, and the story went viral https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-to-fund-crack-pipe-distribution-to-advance-racial-equity/ https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-to-f... Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating . . . while confirming the Free Beacon reporting as entirely true. Here’s how they explained it: > In 2022, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services substance abuse harm reduction grant did require recipients to provide safer smoking kits to existing drug users. In distributing grants, priority would be given to applicants serving historically underserved communities. However what’s false is this was just one of around 20 components of the grant program and far from its most prominent or important one. Snopes claims that the news about smoking kits is true. It’s just not important. Or here’s Facebook’s “Partly False” Fact Check (https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/02/fact-check-biden-administration-is-not-funding-crack-pipes-heroin-for-drug-use.html https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/02/fact-check-biden-...) that also confirms the Free Beacon reporting: > While a description of the HHS grants stated that the grantees would be required to buy materials like safe smoking kits and supplies to "enhance harm reduction efforts," such kits and supplies are just a few of the many materials that grantees can utilize. This happens all the time.

dboreham 5y ago

I find it odd that nobody seems to mention the similarities between all this and religion. Widespread belief in things that can't possibly be true. Adherents can't be persuaded otherwise despite incontrovertible evidence. Sounds familiar? Perhaps it's baked into the firmware.

edgyquant 5y ago
That would be odd, if nobody mentioned it.
deleted 5y ago
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standardUser 5y ago
There have been endless comparisons of Trumpism to a cult, which at first seemed a bit extreme until we saw tens of millions of Americans believe more and more fantastical lies over the course of the last 5 years. Now, I can't imagine how we can describe it as anything other than a cult.

guelo 5y ago

As someone that works on moderation of an online platform I can tell you that lots and lots of misinformation exists and is read by millions of people. On vaccines many people actually believe the microchip, 5G, magnetic, secret ingredients, fetal tissue, vaccines shedding, Bill Gates stuff. Misinformation affects real people's actions in dangerous ways, I don't know what downplaying its existence accomplishes.

civilized 5y ago
Of course, the author doesn't downplay its existence, only its impact. But to know that we'd have to read the post.

yehosef 5y ago

An important measure of "misinformation" is who benefits if the information is actually true or false. Also valuable to identify who has the financial capacity to influence the sources of "truth".

godshatter 5y ago

In my opinion, the "misinformation problem" breaks down into a couple of separate causes. Mainly the odd inability of people not being able to view a comment that they disagree with and not try to "correct" that person (highly related to the inability people have to let the other person have the last word) and simple tribalism. I don't know what to do about the "inability not to respond" issue, I suffer from that myself. On the tribalism issue, I strongly suggest becoming the equivalent of a nomadic wanderer. When someone posts something about a topic I strongly agree with, I don't assume I will agree with everything else they might say. The same goes for posts about something I strongly disagree with. Being too caught up in tribalism leads to inoffensive posts from the other tribe causing a knee-jerk reaction to say something, anything, to put them in their place even if the person completely agree with what the other person just posted. Hence, the rise of "whataboutism". I try to take on a view of comments posted in which I don't care who the other person is, what other beliefs they might have good or bad, and just reply to the comment at hand. If the comment is full of insults I just ignore them and pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those. This would seem to be a good way to have less conflict in conversations on the internet but in my experience you need very thick skin to go this route because you are an outsider to all groups, meaning you are a target for everyone. There are people who will stop insulting you when you calmly reply to their points and ignore their jibes, but not as many as a younger more naive version of myself would have expected, unfortunately. This is what I try to do, anyway. I'm unfortunately as human as everyone else, so I slip at times.

RangerScience 5y ago
> pick out the pieces of their posts related to the discussion topic and reply to those 100% this. AFAICT, part of where this is coming from is formal debate style, where (IMHO) there's a subtle pressure to address everything the other side said. But in a conversation, you don't have to do that. You can pick up just the parts you want to reply to.

aaron695 5y ago

stephc_int13 5y ago

100% agree. Misinformation and propaganda only seem worse now because it is more diverse and we are collectively better at seeing it. If anything, it is more difficult now to mislead masses.

BikiniPrince 5y ago

I thought this might be a humor piece. The author talks about how misinformation is not terrible and how he is well informed. Then he goes on to make a lot of statements that are wrong or colored with bias. This is funny and sad!

standardUser 5y ago

"...but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question. That’s why it’s a live debate." It's just rhetoric. Anything can become a debate, such as who won the 2020 presidential election, if one side is willing to make up facts and repeat them over and over. Proponents of the Big Lie are super-informed, insofar as they have a lot of lies they can say with a straight face that act as stand-ins for actual information. And if they keep asserting those lies, the other side is forced to respond, hence a debate. There is still no merit to the Big Lie, but now it must be discussed as if there was. THAT is why there is a live debate. And then there is this nonsense: "overall political climate was much more right-wing in the 1990s." That is so outrageously false I'm not sure why anyone is supposed to think this person is worth reading. Just think of how many mainstream politicians will swear up and down that the election was stolen in 2020. I guess if you pretend "right wing" is about policy you could craft a convoluted argument that today's Republicans are less conservative (as the author does), but that's not what the right wing is about. The right wing is about the Big Lie, it's about illiberalism, it's about demonizing the media and institutions and political opponents - all the policy stuff is just window dressing.

PathOfEclipse 5y ago
I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved disgracefully after the election and that there is still no evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the election. Many still believe it's a major problem that states like Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which should be illegal, but handling that is a separate issue. Many also believe it's a problem that our election processes are so insecure and that we need more election security. That's separate from believing the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that provably illegal voting activity swung the election.
- standardUser 5y ago
  I'm not asserting every single conservative fits this mold, or that you can't cherry-pick pundits who still play fair. But most of what the right wing is oriented around today is attacking the free press, stifling public education, making voting more difficult for urban citizens and pretending, loudly and constantly, that the last election was stolen. Where are the policy proposals? What major legislation did conservatives pass during the previous Republican administration when they had a trifecta? What was the Republican Party platform in 2020? And why is the RNC choosing not to allow a debate in 2024? This is not a party with lots of ideas ready to fight for the hearts and minds of voters.

duxup 5y ago

I don't quite get where the author is coming from. >And on the basics of civic life, that doesn’t seem to be the case. A survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2006, only 33 percent of people could correctly identify the three branches of government. By 2021, that was up to 56 percent. That’s way higher than 33 percent! Is that really what anyone means about misinformation? I don't think so... As for say the Joe Rogan examples, are knowing factoids that someone thinks support their other opinions really knowledge, or are they things they just like to gather to support public statements? Often I get those factoids tossed at me on the internet and even links to pages that someone thinks supports their opinions but if you read 3 paragraphs in clearly doesn't. That's not being knowledgeable... In fact celebrating those little factoids seem right up the alley of misinformation where someone announces that "5 men were discovered to be impotent after getting the vaccine!" where that might be true, but the intent of the misinformation is obviously to push something else.

0x500x79 5y ago
And factoids don't mean that there is analysis being done on those facts. I can state partial facts or misleading facts all day long that might get upvotes/retweets. That doesn't mean that it is properly conveying information that is needed to analyze the subject. The Covid19 vaccine discussion isn't: "There are side effects that are worse than you think". There are hundreds if not thousands of data points that have to be analyzed together to understand the negatives or benefits of something as complex as this. Cherry-picking on factoid to back up your bias does not make you smart.

engineer_22 5y ago

Misinformation has always existed. I think the emergent phenomena that we are seeing is simply a scaled up version of the problems Plato pointed out in the Republic. The REAL problem, is that democracy as an organization if people isn't going to produce a society of freedom and justice, no, democracy produces a hedonic society. So the question becomes, how do we LIVE with that?

thatguy0900 5y ago
I mean if hedonism is what you are concerned about the only difference is democracy brings hedonism to the common man instead of just the elites. And even then the elites can afford to be more hedonistic than than the common man anyway. Anyone with power has always been a hedonist in any form of government.
scsilver 5y ago
Isn't modern hedonism just freedom to pursuit happiness without necessitating context of religious frameworks. I don't see what makes you think hedonism isn't sustainable or stable. Democracy has been the biggest boost to science and rationality than any of the other government structures.
truffdog 5y ago
Is it even scaled up, or is it just more legible to elites because they can see what the masses are saying?

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

~50% of US voters are wrong about the basic facts of the federal 2020 election. Doesn't matter which ~50% for this statement to be true. Misinformation hasn't been this bad in 300 years, even counting 1939 Germany. Expect similar consequences.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

This seems to be redefining what misinformed means, but I'm not sure what they intend to achieve by that. > "They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks" Having a section about how conspiracy theorists are very knowledgeable about their subjects and then immediately saying that a right wing economist is really well informed about arguments against minimum wage regulations seemed a little on the nose, but I think it was just a coincidence. Basically, people are allowed to be wrong about stuff but only if they are right-wing, because right-wing people have traditionally been wrong. Is that what we are saying? > "So people vote Republican, I think, not because of “misinformation” but because they perceive that the GOP position on many policy topics has moderated while the Democratic Party’s has gotten more left-wing" So they aren't misinformed, they just realised 10 years late that what the "left-wing" opinion 10 years ago was, was what they wanted after all? So how do we know they won't do the same in ten more years, which in fact he pretty openly states they will.

thxCronyCap 5y ago
“They” may not because “they” will be dead. The 30 and younger crowd have stuck to their non-religous, progressiveness. Polls over the last decade have suggested progressivism had become even more entrenched in that crowd. If there’s a future rightward lean it would be after a leftward drift. I agree that conservatives are starting to see progressives were arguing for what the conservatives wanted. I scrape comments from Reddit and have quantified there are more posts of the “our side has advocated against our own positions in deference to politicians.”. They want to be left to socially manage their local life, which rubs up against that whole social democracy thing. While the politicians want to extract as much profit off our agency for as little real work of their own as possible, “both sides” on main street want their agency for their neighborhood. The TV addicted pudding brains are dying off. The younger generation was weened on distracting multimedia, they have an intuition for where that ends and shared political life begins that the mush mouths dribbling the same old cable news from their lips don’t. Favored information compositions have changed. Still the same physics on the whole but the ideas that captivate are more than just academic glyph sets with cherry picked snippets highlighted in dayglo. Generating never ending statistical objects is not learning which are most probable. Humanity is still figuring that out. We can’t allow for sentences like “kill all X for Y reason” or “let chainsaw wielding nut run lose” for obvious reasons. But there are more sentences we can allow people to believe are true besides the ones that essentially translate to “grow business.” It’s all very “build and tend your flock” in real habit anyway. That doesn’t sit well with the non-Church going crowd

t0bia_s 5y ago

At the end, it is a matter of believe. We choose what information should we believe or not. But we should always be able to confront that information with real life around us and look in specific topics from multiple sources. And keep asking questions. I hope people will look more and more for information about topic as vaccination. Because right know we come to era that we are really able to get access to information that was hidden for decades. I recommend book from German medical doctor "Gerhard Buchwald - Vaccination - A Business Based on Fear". Book was released in 1994 and observe the development of diseases and vaccination in Germany. Yes, it is easy to say that someone is anti-vax, but if you really inform yourself in this topic, you'll start ask questions that are valid and should be debated more.

joelbondurant2 5y ago

civilized 5y ago

A lot of commenters here seem to want to define "misinformation" to mean something like "selectively presented information to promote a perspective at odds with what I think is a balanced and informed perspective". With this inherently subjective definition, I'm not sure we'll be able to agree on much about the existence or nature of a misinformation epidemic.

User23 5y ago

The only rational position that fits the observables is defaulting to the assumption that everything one sees in the “news” that one can’t personally verify is misinformation to some greater or lesser extent. This means that, for instance, I generally believe that local weather and traffic reports are accurate. Sadly, the Gell-Man amnesia effect means that most people will continue to believe whatever nonsense it is that they’re currently being told.

epgui 5y ago

> I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect because our information technology has gotten better [...] This kind of framing makes me feel very weary. There is plenty of evidence, but I'm not interested in going on a hunt. Rather, let's think for just one second about how to model this: - The number of "bad actors" probably has not changed significantly over time - The cost of producing documents has gone down significantly - The cost of diffusing documents, or information, per audience headcount, has gone down significantly - Overall, the total volume of sketchy information produced yearly has been dramatically increasing as a result of these lowering barriers. - Conversely, the total volume of quality information has clearly increased as well. - The technological tools at our disposal, as consumers of content, have become more and more sophisticated, such that we now have access to more quality information than ever before in History. - However, consuming quality content requires constant deliberate effort and prudence, and it is much easier to stumble upon crappy information, than it is to find quality information. - The less expert you are at a subject, the more energy is required to sift through the crap. - Most people are either not expert at anything, or are expert in a narrow field of interest. - Information no longer flows in the same way it once did: it now diffuses through a social graph which is prone to significant network effects. Non-experts can have a bigger influence than experts, even when the information they share is entirely meritless. Echo-chambers form naturally and require a lot of deliberate and conscious effort to get out from. It is very difficult to reach certain pockets of the graph.

fortuna86 5y ago
> If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past [citation needed] more information =/ better informed, the same way drinking from a firehose doesn't allow you to ingest more water than drinking slowly from a glass. This point missed ironically by a website called "slowboring.com"
- brianfitz 5y ago

president 5y ago

Have you noticed that people that label a position or argument misinformation never want to have a discussion about it? The pattern always seems to be: 1. Call something misinformation 2. Ignore any counter claims (so they cannot be proven wrong on the record) 3. Call for others to "cancel" it (use power in numbers to perpetuate misinfo claim)

archhn 5y ago

If people trusted the establishment and their institutions, "misinformation" wouldn't be a problem. People would just shrug off the rhetoric coming from the fringe. The pervasive mistrust of institutions and the establishment, foretold as the fourth turning, is what is causing people to turn to fringe sources for their information. What we are seeing here is a battle for authority underwritten by decades of establishment failure. It's going to get very ugly.

aftbit 5y ago

>I think the only sensible thing to say about all this is that discerning the truth is hard, and it requires debate and dissent. Functional expert communities and well-run journalism institutions are open to new information, to changing their minds, and to correcting the record. But that process doesn’t work if the fact-check squad slaps a “misinformation” label on you for saying the CDC is wrong about masks. I just wanted to highlight this part really quickly. IMO this is one of the most concerning things to come out of this epidemic of misinformation. We have allowed a handful of for-profit companies to build a system for determining what is true or false. I suppose this isn't meaningfully different than the world before the internet, but that's a huge wasted potential.

joelbondurant4 5y ago