> 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 [...]<p>This kind of framing makes me feel very weary. There is plenty of evidence, but I'm not interested in going on a hunt.<p>Rather, let's think for just one second about how to model this:<p>- The number of "bad actors" probably has not changed significantly over time<p>- The cost of producing documents has gone down significantly<p>- The cost of diffusing documents, or information, per audience headcount, has gone down significantly<p>- Overall, the total volume of sketchy information produced yearly has been dramatically increasing as a result of these lowering barriers.<p>- Conversely, the total volume of quality information has clearly increased as well.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- The less expert you are at a subject, the more energy is required to sift through the crap.<p>- Most people are either not expert at anything, or are expert in a narrow field of interest.<p>- 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.
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.
"...but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question. That’s why it’s a live debate."<p>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.<p>And then there is this nonsense: "overall political climate was much more right-wing in the 1990s."<p>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.
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.
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?"<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>This is what I try to do, anyway. I'm unfortunately as human as everyone else, so I slip at times.
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".<p>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.
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.
I don't quite get where the author is coming from.<p>>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!<p>Is that really what anyone means about misinformation? I don't think so...<p>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?<p>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.<p>That's not being knowledgeable...<p>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.
The biggest change is how aware we are of others' views. The internet thrives on showing you people who are "wrong".<p>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.<p>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.
>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.<p>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.
Misinformation has always existed.<p>I think the emergent phenomena that we are seeing is simply a scaled up version of the problems Plato pointed out in the Republic.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
100% agree.<p>Misinformation and propaganda only seem worse now because it is more diverse and we are collectively better at seeing it.<p>If anything, it is more difficult now to mislead masses.
This seems to be redefining what misinformed means, but I'm not sure what they intend to achieve by that.<p>> "They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks"<p>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.<p>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?<p>> "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"<p>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.
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.<p>I don't think that's right.<p>Sure this modern media allows faster spread of information, including manipulative information but that's mostly it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Some (anti-vaxer, conspiracy theorist against modern medicine) have even gotten support from major political parties for years (e.g. green party).<p>And sure people radicalized a lot with the pandemic, because they felt threatened and insecure.<p>But the German government and public media _majorly_ made that worse due to incompetence especially around media competence.<p>The problem was less the measurements taken but how they where communicated.<p>And how assumptions which layer turned out to be not sure right where often converted as scientific fact.<p>This created a perfect ground for evil manipulative people to push people further down in the wrong direction.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>(2): expect that it's more like catch many propaganda then one to one manipulation<p>(1): it should be obvious but in this context this has nothing to do with skin color.
> 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.<p>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, <i>for fucks sake don't present these two things as equal</i>. 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>No one labeled the NY Times a perpetuator of misinformation when it blatantly lied about evidence for the Iraq War.<p>Snopes and Politifact have outright lied and no one cares.<p>No one cares when the bad info, lies, buried studies or anything else works in favor of power.<p>This isn't about who's right and who wrong.<p>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.<p>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.
~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.
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!
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.
The author is correct that in any debate, the prominent skeptics are often extremely well informed (joe Rogan on vaccines, in his example).<p>I think what the author is missing is that Joe Rogan and the likes are not spreading misinformation, but spreading tools for misinformation.<p>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.<p>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”<p>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.<p>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.
From the article:<p><i>> 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><p>I don't know if misinformation is <i>at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about</i>, 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.<p>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.
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".
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.<p>Sadly, the Gell-Man amnesia effect means that most people will continue to believe whatever nonsense it is that they’re currently being told.
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.
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.<p>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?<p>My thoughts:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
Misinformation is misinformation. I am certain I am misinformed about many things. The correct response to when I post misinformation is to inform.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-takes-questions-about-blackface-pictures-at-town-hall-69434949608" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trudeau-takes-questions-about-...</a><p>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.<p>Which there's no justification for other than egregiously being misinformed.
In my opinion, the campaigns against "misinformation" are largely attempts by big corporations and politicians to deplatform their competition.<p>Gotta make sure people only see trusted news sources that say the right things.
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 <i>any apology</i> for their failure to uncover the lies that got us into needless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?<p>I am very selective in my trust of media these days. I don't want to be lead into collective insanity any more.
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:<p>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)
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
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".<p>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.<p>We will see more articles like this.
"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"<p>I agree. Who has the truth? Government or media? Or neither?<p>What has become worse is the centralised control of information. Which then leads to those centralised sources complaining and publicising of the issue.<p>On the other side, you have governance structures that require the legacy media to support their messaging, as the govern the populace.<p>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.<p>Complaining about misinformation however, works for both parties - it provides a self-supporting justification their actions.<p>Truth and faithfully representing reality has very little to do with that "virtuous" circle between media and governance.