The misinformation wars - a reading list
Important readings that challenge conventional wisdom about the nature, novelty, prevalence, and impact of misinformation.
Since 2016, Western societies have been gripped by widespread panic about misinformation and related phenomena such as fake news, post-truth, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and so on. This panic is driven by the narrative that many problematic trends across Western societies are rooted in an unprecedented explosion of false and misleading content spread or amplified by right-wing populists, social media algorithms, foreign disinformation campaigns, and more.
Relative to conventional wisdom among members of the laptop class, I am very critical of this narrative (see here, here, here, here, and here). In next week’s essay, I will continue developing this scepticism with the second part of my five-part “Debunking Disinformation Myths” series (see the first part here). However, because several people have asked me for reading recommendations on this topic, here is a list of articles and books that have influenced how I think about misinformation and the “misinformation wars”.
Joe Uscinski: What are we doing when we research misinformation?
What is misinformation? How should it be defined? And what would it even mean for there to be a science of misinformation? Joe Uscinski, a political scientist and probably the world’s most influential conspiracy theory researcher, addresses all these questions in this excellent piece. In addition to identifying numerous problems with how researchers define and measure misinformation, he argues—persuasively in my view—that much of misinformation research is founded upon the weird assumption that misinformation has intrinsic markers. This was very influential in shaping how I think about misinformation research. As Uscinski notes,
‘The presupposition of such a science [i.e., misinformation studies] is that misinformation has special properties that justify asymmetrical explanations for people’s acceptance of fake news, or misinformation, in comparison to their acceptance of true news, or information… Let me state an alternative view: that there is no reason to assume that the acceptance of misinformation cannot be accounted for by the same factors—priors such as partisanship, ideology, personality, worldviews, and background knowledge and cognitive factors such as confirmation bias—that drive people’s interpretations of, and interactions with, all “information,” regardless of whether it is true or false.
Lorna Finlayson: What to do with post-truth
One idea closely connected to modern worries about misinformation is the idea that we are living through a “post-truth” era. In this excellent article, Finlayson explains why this idea is either wrong or confused. Among numerous important ideas, Finlayson makes the simple but important point—one which is lost on many misinformation researchers—that “the degree of popular wrongness cannot simply be ‘read off’ the badness of elected outcomes.” In other words, even if you think—as I think—that something like the election of Donald Trump really was an unusually bad political event, it does not follow that Trump supporters are unusually misinformed or somehow contemptuous of the very concept of truth. Post-truth, Finlayson writes,
“is first and foremost a slur word: it serves to smear its referents, but without contributing to an understanding of their nature or significance. If what I have argued here is right, the term actively contributes confusion. It performs actions of its own: a protest against a protest, a cry for a return to politics as usual, and a distraction from the basic project of trying to understand what is happening. If this is what ‘post-truth’ talk does, then we would do better to have done with it.”
Michael Hannon - The politics of post-truth
In another excellent debunking of the concept of post-truth and more generally of the popular idea that we are living through an unprecedented “epistemological crisis”, Michael Hannon identifies the many theoretical and philosophical confusions upon which such ideas rest. He also explains why they are not just confused but inherently political (see next week’s essay) and harmful:
“The post-truth rhetoric converts epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth. This narrative is also dubious on epistemic, moral, and political grounds. It is epistemically dubious in being largely insensitive to the problem of complexity in politics; it is morally dubious because “post-truth” is often a derogatory label for individuals or groups that are deemed stupid, irrational, or morally compromised; and it is a politically toxic neologism because it purports to use the language of ‘truth’ as a weapon against power, yet these truth-claims are often themselves attempts to exert power over others by delegitimizing their perspectives.”
Sacha Altay, Manon Berriche, and Alberto Acerbi - Misinformation on misinformation
One of the odd things about research on misinformation and elite commentary surrounding the topic is that it involves a lot of misinformation. In this article, Altay, Berriche, and Acerbi identify and debunk six popular myths:
Misinformation is just a social media problem.
The internet is rife with misinformation.
Falsehoods spread faster than truth.
People believe everything they see on the internet.
A large number of people are misinformed.
Misinformation has a strong influence on people’s behaviour.
I am not fully on board with every point they make, in part because I think a lot depends on how one understands the concept of misinformation and what it means to be misinformed, but the article is a brilliant, concise corrective to conventional wisdom on this topic that anyone interested in misinformation should read.
Joseph Bernstein - Bad news: Selling the story of disinformation
This is one of the best (and funniest) critiques of the post-2016 panic about disinformation and what Bernstein calls "Big Disinfo”, a “new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research.” Among numerous important points, Bernstein notes that Big Disinfo rests on conceptual confusion, unsupported assumptions about human gullibility, and dubious political and historical assumptions. He also adds that the widespread view that humans are easily influenced by content on social media plays into the hands of social media companies, all of which depend on convincing advertisers that users are highly influenced by content on their platforms.
Gavin Wilde - From panic to policy: The limits of foreign propaganda and the foundations of an effective response
Many concerns about disinformation focus on efforts by hostile foreign powers to subvert democratic processes by spreading propaganda. In this excellent article, Gavin Wilde makes the point that much thinking about this topic exaggerates the impact of these influence operations in ways that are not just misguided but potentially harmful.
“The relationship between people’s attitudes and their media consumption remains murky, at best, despite technological advances promising to decode or manipulate it. This limitation extends to foreign foes as well. Policymakers therefore risk becoming pessimistic toward the public and distracted from the domestic, real-world drivers of their confidence in democratic institutions. Policy interventions may also prove detrimental to democratic values like free expression and to the norms that the United States aims to foster in the information environment.”
Scott Alexander - The media very rarely lies
In this essay, Scott Alexander makes a simple point that is well-known in the political economy of media: most misleading content does not involve outright fabrications. That is, fake news is relatively rare. When media outlets attempt to mislead audiences, they do so via cherry-picking facts, omitting relevant context, situating information in specific interpretive and explanatory frameworks, and so on. From this, Alexander concludes—correctly in my view—that the concept of misinformation does not lend itself to neutral, scientific classification. I have developed (and revised) some of these ideas here:
Ruxandra Teslo - The road to (mental) serfdom and misinformation studies
Ruxandra Teslo is one of the most interesting writers on Substack. In this post, she turns to misinformation research, expressing well-founded exasperation with certain prominent ideas in the area and drawing an important distinction between what she calls “brute misinformation” and “haut bourgeois propaganda".
Hugo Mercier - Not Born Yesterday
Anyone interested in psychology, sociology, and political science should read this book. It clarifies, defends, and explores a simple but revolutionary idea: human beings are not gullible. No book has been more influential in how I think about human psychology and social epistemology (the study of how social processes shape how people form beliefs). Once you drop the popular assumption that human beings are credulous and easily duped into accepting other people’s propaganda, you see the social world in a very different way.
Jennifer Allen and colleagues - Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem
After Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016, one popular explanation appealed to the influence of fake news. In this 2020 study, Jennifer Allen and colleagues estimate that fake news “comprises only 0.15% of Americans’ daily media diet”. Given this, they suggest that the origins of popular misperceptions, political polarisation, and other phenomena are “more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery.” In other words, fake news is a mostly-insignificant feature of the informational ecosystem. When it comes to understanding politics, the subtler ways in which news can be biased and misleading, and the fact that many citizens pay basically no attention to politics or current affairs at all, are far more important.
Brendan Nyhan - Facts and Myths about Misperceptions
Brendan Nyhan does some of the most important and rigorous research in political psychology and political science. If you are interested in understanding political beliefs, misperceptions, and misinformation, it is worth checking out his publications in general. This article on misperceptions (false or unsupported beliefs in politics) is an especially useful, concise overview of the scientific consensus on this topic. It also ends with the following important observation:
“Since 2016, a number of countries around the world have gone even further in using fines or even criminal penalties to try to limit misinformation. … Calls for such draconian interventions are commonly fueled by a moral panic over claims that “fake news” has created a supposedly “post-truth” era. These claims falsely suggest an earlier fictitious golden age in which political debate was based on facts and truth. In reality, false information, misperceptions, and conspiracy theories are general features of human society… In general, no systematic evidence exists to demonstrate that the prevalence of misperceptions today (while worrisome) is worse than in the past.”
He has also uploaded the entire syllabus for his “political misinformation and conspiracy theories” module, which I would highly recommend.
Walter Lippmann - Public Opinion
Published in 1922, Walter Lippmann wrote “Public Opinion” before television, before the internet, before social media, and before social science as we understand it today. And yet in my view, this book is far more insightful as an analysis of issues surrounding propaganda, media bias, public opinion, political psychology, and the role of experts in democracies than most things I read in misinformation studies. In my view, the book is one of the most underrated and important works in political epistemology. I wrote about it here:
Thanks for this, Dan. This is super helpful. +1 for Lippmann. He's the best.
Hugo Mercier is a really great thinker. His other book The Enigma of Reason was brilliant as well.