Should we trust misinformation experts to decide what counts as misinformation?

Science, truth, bias, ideology, postmodernism, expertise, and more.

I recently published an essay arguing that modern misinformation research confronts a dilemma when it comes to defining ‘misinformation’:

• On the one hand, if researchers define the concept so that it only includes clear-cut falsehoods, misinformation appears to be relatively rare in the media ecosystem and largely symptomatic of other problems, at least in Western democracies.

• On the other hand, if researchers define the concept to include subtler ways in which communication can be misleading even when it’s not demonstrably false, the concept becomes so expansive, amorphous, and value-laden that we shouldn’t trust misinformation experts to decide what counts as misinformation.

Unsurprisingly, many people, including numerous leading misinformation researchers, disagreed with the essay. In this post I will respond to several critiques. First, however, I will re-state my argument, hopefully in a clearer and more persuasive form.

What is misinformation?

The term ‘misinformation’ is everywhere. We’re told that we live in the “misinformation age” (see also “disinformation age” and “post-truth era”); that misinformation has “reached crisis proportions”; that misinformation is (along with disinformation) the “top global threat over the next two years”; that misinformation is a major cause of all sorts of troubling social and political trends; and so on.

Accompanying such claims, there is also a vast body of scientific research on misinformation that purports to establish various findings about it.

For example, misinformation experts tell us that conservatives are more “susceptible” to misinformation than liberals; that misinformation has certain surface-level “fingerprints”; that people can be “inoculated” against misinformation by learning these fingerprints; that misinformation spreads differently to reliable information; that the prevalence of misinformation can be quantified; that misinformation is more common in right-wing media than in centrist or left-wing media; and so on.

For any of this to make sense, we must know what misinformation is. Moreover, whatever it is - however we define the concept - it must be the kind of thing that lends itself to scientific classification, measurement, and generalisation by experts.

So what is it?

False information?

Some critics of misinformation research argue that the term is just a deceptively technical-sounding way of dismissing - or, worse, censoring - content that powerful people dislike.

I think that’s too strong. At least when it comes to really clear-cut cases of false content - absurd conspiracy theories, clear contradictions of overwhelming and reliable expert consensus (e.g., “the Earth is flat”, “vaccines cause autism”, etc.), and so on - I think it’s fine for experts to classify such content as misinformation. (I’m against censorship in such cases, but that’s a different issue).

In my essay I referred to such content as “demonstrably false content.” Admittedly there are still many complications that arise even for this simple definition. Experts can be wrong, for example. (In practice, wouldn’t this definition have classified Galileo and Einstein’s ideas as misinformation?). And who counts as an expert, anyway? And what degree of expert consensus is necessary? And so on.

Moreover, I think there are legitimate worries that misinformation researchers and Big Disinfo more broadly are not very even-handed in which examples of demonstrably false content they focus on.

Nevertheless, at least on a very narrow, conservative interpretation of “demonstrably false content”, I don’t have much of a problem when misinformation researchers classify such content as misinformation. In this sense I’m different from critics who want to do away with the concept altogether.

Misleading Information?

The problem is that many misinformation researchers do not want to stick to a narrow definition. Instead, they want to use the term ‘misinformation’ to classify content that isn’t demonstrably false but is nevertheless in some sense misleading - for example, because it’s cherry-picked or lacking appropriate context.

I think this is a bad idea.