Not a great take, I must say. "They assume, falsely, that the only reasons why some would seek to understand how disinformation flows is to suppress informatio

Not a great take, I must say. "They assume, falsely, that the only reasons why some would seek to understand how disinformation flows is to suppress information. Again, though, that’s not the intent of such research." Over the years I've written a few essays about the problem of fraudulent research into misinformation, specifically social science papers that claim to track bots on Twitter and understand the misinformation they're spreading. There's an enormous literature that studies this topic with over 10,000 papers in it. I got interested in meta-research into these studies because I used to do anti-bot work for Google, but the problem was, every time I read one of these papers it turned out to be some sort of intellectual fraud. I wrote about one of the more famous papers on my blog in 2017, which was later picked up and cited in a paper by Gallwitz & Kreil which studied the problem of meta-misinformation more rigorously. I summarized it here: https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n... Their paper can be summed up as "social science has engaged in a vast conspiracy-like effort to argue that the existence of a grand conspiracy to control social media [e.g. by Russians] justifies imposing controls on social media". Which isn't so far off the thing that the TechDirt article attacks, is it? So when Masnick says "that’s not the intent of such research" I wonder which papers he's been reading, because it sure seemed like the intent of a lot of the papers that are out there. Why are academics publishing so many invalid papers? Speculatively, there seem to be a few reasons: 1. Such papers are easy to publish. If you throw around enough equations apparently you can bluff your way past peer reviewers and journal editors without having real results to report. 2. They want to believe. It feels smart to write about the false beliefs of the little people. 3. The authors are ideologically predisposed towards information control. These papers invariably argue for imposing strict speech controls justified by their "findings". 4. There's a lot of foundations and NGOs dishing out grant money for such findings. Journalists also lap it up, because it gives them ammo to argue that people should only get information from legacy media.