Thank you for these valuable summaries, Dan. I hope you will delve deeper into the utility of the "disinformation story" for journalists, politicians, and academics. You mention it's use for discrediting social media, mainstream journalisms competitor. I wonder about the psychological protection it provides as well: people of a progressive/liberal bent can admit that they did not understand the world, but they would have still been right if not for those meddling disinformation peddlers. The explanations for Brexit and Trump's election seem to fit this - it cannot be the case that many, many people were unhappy with the status quo and took an option to express that unhappiness.
When applied as a label, misinformation is often a tell that the person applying the label is chosing to smother their own cognitive dissonance.
The misinformation, if true, would mean they are wrong about something or that the person they want to label as misinformed, or evil, is neither.
Rather than confront potentially being wrong, or that you have something in common with 'the other' it is a happy relief to fall back to misinformation.
The correct response is humility and curiousity. What if that misinformation was actually correct? What would support that? What would it mean? Does it make sense?
Further, the correct response to labels of misinformation is skepticism of those applying the label.
An issue is that the left is obsessed with misinformation from the right(sometimes excusable like UK riot provocations)while left misinformation like biden's health/laptop/covid origins is enthusiastic welcomed by conservatives.Truly a freedom of speech role reversal,leftists want to illiberaly control people and RWingers want their entertainment with access to crazy ppl like Alex Jones and Candace owens
I think that it is a way of dealing with congnitve dissonance. Progressives believe that censorship is wrong, but there are some ideas that they really want to suppress. If they define their suppression of speech as "fighting misinformation," they can still believe that they are not doing censorship.
The entire Cass Report is now being identified as misinformation, for example. Or even when not outright using the M-word, there’s an attempt to slowly move it into the category of mis/disinfo including using the recently-discovered weapon of calling things “weird”. The New York Times on August 13th being the most high-profile attempt at this framing (“The Strange Report…”)
Great series! A philosophical question: You argue here (and in more detail in a January 10 post) that a broad conception of disinformation will never be reliable and impartial. Since communication has to be selective, judging a statement in the news as misleading owing to a lack of context, for instance, is only possible if you start with subjective biases about what context would be important. Well put, but what protects the narrower view of disinformation from a similar charge? I realize you're saying that we don't need to panic about disinformation in the narrow sense (because it's rare and preached to the choir), but it remains a problem, albeit a minor one. If the purveyor of a fake news statement doesn't admit it's fake, what makes it more justifiable to call it disinformation than to use the same term for a statement that's merely misleading? (Tallying the number of people who agree with you seems like a rabbit hole...)
The studies you cite (2017-2020) are quite old in the fast moving world of social media use. I believe (just a belief) that we live in a very different world today.
Very good. I kind-of-recall reading something about misinformation/propaganda not having that great an effect on beliefs, but an important effect on willingness to act. That is, people feel a lot more validated about their pre-existing fringe beliefs. Do you know of research on this?
Thank you for this post, Dan. It’s an extremely relevant topic, not just from an academic standpoint, but also because of its implications for how we should best approach it from public policy, research, or journalism. It’s methodologically very difficult to determine whether misinformation causes changes in a person’s stance on an issue, whether it’s the person’s prior stance that leads them to embrace certain misinformation (while the same misinformation doesn’t affect others), or if it’s a feedback loop. In the area of vaccine confidence and vaccine misinformation, which has been researched for many years, it’s still not entirely clear. The mainstream position is that vaccine misinformation causes distrust in people, leading them not to get vaccinated. But there’s research suggesting something different: for a person who already distrusts, misinformation may simply provide a way to rationalize that distrust.
On a different note, outside of misinformation, could something similar be happening with hate speech? I’m not an expert in this, but it’s something I can’t help but wonder about.
We've just had a General Election here in the UK, shrouded by an atmosphere that politicians can't be trusted and are selective with the facts (a point I think @MichaelKowalik might have been making?). Most people still vote, which says to me freedom of speech is still conquering dis-mis-info-bias worries, but the atmosphere obfuscates our view of democracy; the authoritarians led by PRC (which blocks many websites like substack, for example) are salivating ...
@Uadlup touched on the academic angle, @conspicuouscognition, and it may not have escaped your notice that fake citations in scientific research are rife - https://retractionwatch.com/
All news are (provably) fake: every assertion of fact based on opinion, consensus or authority is either unproven or unprovable, therefore knowingly misrepresenting the lack of knowledge as knowledge. Our world is built on false claims, delusions, pretences, lies, and false claims of authority. It is a confidence trick by those who are ignorant but have the will to impose their narrative about reality on everyone else. A trick like this that can be reliably pulled off only by the dominant power, the culture of deception is therefore the dominant cult of empires, the cult of official lies, a form of epistemic ‘fashion’ imbued by the ruling class on the obtuse masses. Neither side possesses the truth.
Interesting perspective, and lots of great information, thank you. But must say I disagree with the thrust.
Disinformation is pernicious and not just online. It is not just a small minority regarding QAnon anymore. Some 20% of Americans subscribe to outrageous QAnon conspiracy theories these days.
35% of the country believes the Big Lie.
Twitter has lost its luster as a place where truth is valued, at least imo. This has unfortunate downstream effects. And in a dramatic escalation of real life impacts of online disinfo, it seems Twitter misinfo is intimately tied to the recent race riots in the UK. It is not just a few mass shooters leaving manifestos on 4chan, bad enough as that was.
Truth is under assault as politicians, social media barons and autocrats take on the media and education.
These seem to me critical problems, particularly for societies that choose leadership by democratic elections. Cheers
Thank you for these valuable summaries, Dan. I hope you will delve deeper into the utility of the "disinformation story" for journalists, politicians, and academics. You mention it's use for discrediting social media, mainstream journalisms competitor. I wonder about the psychological protection it provides as well: people of a progressive/liberal bent can admit that they did not understand the world, but they would have still been right if not for those meddling disinformation peddlers. The explanations for Brexit and Trump's election seem to fit this - it cannot be the case that many, many people were unhappy with the status quo and took an option to express that unhappiness.
Yes I think that's insightful - this protective element seems to play a big role.
When applied as a label, misinformation is often a tell that the person applying the label is chosing to smother their own cognitive dissonance.
The misinformation, if true, would mean they are wrong about something or that the person they want to label as misinformed, or evil, is neither.
Rather than confront potentially being wrong, or that you have something in common with 'the other' it is a happy relief to fall back to misinformation.
The correct response is humility and curiousity. What if that misinformation was actually correct? What would support that? What would it mean? Does it make sense?
Further, the correct response to labels of misinformation is skepticism of those applying the label.
An issue is that the left is obsessed with misinformation from the right(sometimes excusable like UK riot provocations)while left misinformation like biden's health/laptop/covid origins is enthusiastic welcomed by conservatives.Truly a freedom of speech role reversal,leftists want to illiberaly control people and RWingers want their entertainment with access to crazy ppl like Alex Jones and Candace owens
Yep - a lot of truth to this.
I think that it is a way of dealing with congnitve dissonance. Progressives believe that censorship is wrong, but there are some ideas that they really want to suppress. If they define their suppression of speech as "fighting misinformation," they can still believe that they are not doing censorship.
The entire Cass Report is now being identified as misinformation, for example. Or even when not outright using the M-word, there’s an attempt to slowly move it into the category of mis/disinfo including using the recently-discovered weapon of calling things “weird”. The New York Times on August 13th being the most high-profile attempt at this framing (“The Strange Report…”)
The problem with "fake news" studies is that upon inspection much of the "fake news" they list turns out to not in fact be fake.
Great series! A philosophical question: You argue here (and in more detail in a January 10 post) that a broad conception of disinformation will never be reliable and impartial. Since communication has to be selective, judging a statement in the news as misleading owing to a lack of context, for instance, is only possible if you start with subjective biases about what context would be important. Well put, but what protects the narrower view of disinformation from a similar charge? I realize you're saying that we don't need to panic about disinformation in the narrow sense (because it's rare and preached to the choir), but it remains a problem, albeit a minor one. If the purveyor of a fake news statement doesn't admit it's fake, what makes it more justifiable to call it disinformation than to use the same term for a statement that's merely misleading? (Tallying the number of people who agree with you seems like a rabbit hole...)
The studies you cite (2017-2020) are quite old in the fast moving world of social media use. I believe (just a belief) that we live in a very different world today.
Could be - but then people also though that about the years before that and the research proved the assessment wrong.
Very good. I kind-of-recall reading something about misinformation/propaganda not having that great an effect on beliefs, but an important effect on willingness to act. That is, people feel a lot more validated about their pre-existing fringe beliefs. Do you know of research on this?
Hmm I'm surprised by that - no I'm not familiar with research
Thank you for this post, Dan. It’s an extremely relevant topic, not just from an academic standpoint, but also because of its implications for how we should best approach it from public policy, research, or journalism. It’s methodologically very difficult to determine whether misinformation causes changes in a person’s stance on an issue, whether it’s the person’s prior stance that leads them to embrace certain misinformation (while the same misinformation doesn’t affect others), or if it’s a feedback loop. In the area of vaccine confidence and vaccine misinformation, which has been researched for many years, it’s still not entirely clear. The mainstream position is that vaccine misinformation causes distrust in people, leading them not to get vaccinated. But there’s research suggesting something different: for a person who already distrusts, misinformation may simply provide a way to rationalize that distrust.
On a different note, outside of misinformation, could something similar be happening with hate speech? I’m not an expert in this, but it’s something I can’t help but wonder about.
We've just had a General Election here in the UK, shrouded by an atmosphere that politicians can't be trusted and are selective with the facts (a point I think @MichaelKowalik might have been making?). Most people still vote, which says to me freedom of speech is still conquering dis-mis-info-bias worries, but the atmosphere obfuscates our view of democracy; the authoritarians led by PRC (which blocks many websites like substack, for example) are salivating ...
@Uadlup touched on the academic angle, @conspicuouscognition, and it may not have escaped your notice that fake citations in scientific research are rife - https://retractionwatch.com/
Musk buying twitter was fantastic.
How much disinformation do you get listening to CNN or a White House press briefing.
Musk does a lot more good than ill.
All news are (provably) fake: every assertion of fact based on opinion, consensus or authority is either unproven or unprovable, therefore knowingly misrepresenting the lack of knowledge as knowledge. Our world is built on false claims, delusions, pretences, lies, and false claims of authority. It is a confidence trick by those who are ignorant but have the will to impose their narrative about reality on everyone else. A trick like this that can be reliably pulled off only by the dominant power, the culture of deception is therefore the dominant cult of empires, the cult of official lies, a form of epistemic ‘fashion’ imbued by the ruling class on the obtuse masses. Neither side possesses the truth.
Interesting perspective, and lots of great information, thank you. But must say I disagree with the thrust.
Disinformation is pernicious and not just online. It is not just a small minority regarding QAnon anymore. Some 20% of Americans subscribe to outrageous QAnon conspiracy theories these days.
35% of the country believes the Big Lie.
Twitter has lost its luster as a place where truth is valued, at least imo. This has unfortunate downstream effects. And in a dramatic escalation of real life impacts of online disinfo, it seems Twitter misinfo is intimately tied to the recent race riots in the UK. It is not just a few mass shooters leaving manifestos on 4chan, bad enough as that was.
Truth is under assault as politicians, social media barons and autocrats take on the media and education.
These seem to me critical problems, particularly for societies that choose leadership by democratic elections. Cheers