Misinformation: The First Digital Drug
ebenezermann.medium.com
ebenezermann.medium.com
Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I've seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect). It's simply much more visible now due to the Internet being widely adopted, whereas in the past you'd never know what people across the world (or even your own city) may have been thinking about.
Since there is no stable nor global solution to the problem of deciding who gets to label/regulate information, nor any evidence showing that even with the regulation of information, people actually change their beliefs to the 'correct' ones, I don't personally see merit in this path. The temptation to find a solution is sensible prima facie, but history and human psychology show us that this is a fool's errand.
Do you have a source for that? Not trying to dispute your claim, just curious.
"There are no major comprehensive, longitudinal studies on Americans’ attitudes toward conspiracy theories, mostly because it was not rigorously measured until about 10 to 20 years ago."
"...reviewed over 120 years of letters to the editor, from 1890 to 2010, for both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In over 100,000 letters, this review showed absolutely no change in the amount of conspiracy theory belief over time. In fact, the percent of letters about conspiracy theories actually declined from the late 1800s to the 1960s and has remained steady since then."
They cite: American Conspiracy Theories - Joseph Uscinski & Joseph Parent.
Quotes from here:
https://theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-r...
Social persuasion/cohesion is another: we're all influenced by the views of the people around us (like it or not). When you see half a dozen people in one of your peer groups talking about $WEIRD_THING, you're naturally inclined to give it some time, and maybe some credence.
I don't disagree about the deep problems with regulating it, though.
I have things like this showing up in my mailbox unsolicited. People believe what it says because it's coming from a group they're familiar with. I'd say there should probably be real legal action taken against things like this...
Even if it did, how could the regulators possibly keep up with the gish gallop of misinformation? There are those who seriously examine and rebut the claims of q-anon et al. but can you imagine a more thankless task?
A better approach is to teach good informational hygiene to kids. Pull from a variety of information sources, weight the ones that correct errors, awareness and taxonomy of cognitive biases, stuff like that.
If I were to reform this, I'd place greater emphasis on information composition, and source/author auditing. Acknowledge that mainstream publications often miss things that less reputable outlets will cover (albeit poorly), and teach students to think in degrees of certainty.
It sounds like maybe we should add courses on journalism then too because there is nothing specific about this approach that stretches credulity if done properly. Unnamed sources are a crucial part of a lot of good journalism.
That being said, it's important to be exceedingly leery of them, and use them sparingly, preferably as supporting evidence for a larger story. Lacking the same degree of accountability, they just as easily can be used to launder political narratives to sympathetic journalists who will breathlessly parrot them as they can be used to inform the public of goings-on behind the curtains of corporation and state.
Used too lightly as the primary crux of nearly inconsequential stories which hammer in too small a number of talking points, 'anonymous x familiar with y' can quickly become shorthand for 'this journalist/publication is in bed with a subfaction, and this is the new talking point'.
* They granted him journalistic anonymity for an opinion piece, which is very much not a common practice.
* The NYT published no corroboration of Taylor's claims, and their descriptions of how the editorial got published suggest they didn't even attempt to find corroboration.
* Their description of him as a "senior administration official" substantively misled people - the phrase is generally understood, and was understood at the time, to refer to people like agency heads or cabinet secretaries with direct accountability to the President.
And this is from an uncommonly responsible outlet! Many others will happily publish detailed claims of fact attributed only to "one person with knowledge of the matter".
Once again, another reason people should learn more about journalism in school.
Do you feel that the "Anonymous" op-ed was published in a manner that encouraged any sort of critical consumption?
There's a point where you have to hold organizations accountable under normal standards, rather than letting them set up special rules to define their bad conduct out of existence.
Basically what you are doing is blaming Alphabet because it doesn't hold YouTube and Google Search to the same standards and Trump was banned from one and not the other. Those products serve separate purposes and therefore need to have their own independent expectations and practices.
'Within limted thought-processes; which can be owed by censorship, selfcensoring or sure a lack of information, one thought may be proceeding linear.'
"If you may give this one moment more, associating happens within a 'certain' time as well it may make 'a career' and runs on a limited tracks."
Now you may imagine conflicts - as unexpected consequence, resulting in a quiet retreat, in its simplest form to shut up, hardened resulting in isolation - just to reenter a thoughtloop of to rest, to became keeping calm... now add promiscuous, rash, screenwork and you have qualified for obsession and addiction, maybe... ^^
edited: eh! ther was way too many chars and text to 'translate' to round the full -too drunk- picture in this little textbox...so... (-; recursion
I have a pet theory that Informational Hygiene is going to be one of the most important classes in the upcoming years, taking a similar place to sex ed.
Are there any resources on classes in the space? I did a quick Google and didn't see anything that stood out.
That's a great analogy, and sadly why I don't think these classes will help as much as we'd like.
The places where they are needed the most are the places that are going to alter the content of the classes to fit their agenda. Just look at sex ed classes in strongly conservative areas.
I recall being taught that the civil war was about "state's rights" -- even the teacher rolled her eyes on that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh-hans/%E4%B8%89%E4%BA%BA%E8%A1...
From 'learning from any 3 random wanders' to 'fear the tiger of 3'. Was that actual wisdom or cynical conclusion of human behaviour?
As a counter-example, to me being right or approaching truth consistently and in a repeatable manner is much more fun than believing whatever I want to believe.
I know which beliefs I'd like to be true, but self-deception isn't as fun as being right; right as in claims made within an independently validated methodological framework that makes my claims reproducible.
That's isn't inherent, I assume, but learned.
> Teaching will not solve the problem with incentives -
Citation desperately needed!
The, arguably, oldest human system of hierarchical organization called Church would like to have a word with you: a system based purely on psychological and social incentives, nothing else, giving relevance to itself and propagating certain world-views, beliefs and thought-systems.
> Citation desperately needed!
You might find this take on QAnon from a game designer's perspective interesting:
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
> It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards [as ARGs and LARPing].
> When players arrive at the “correct” answers they are showered with adoration, respect, and social credit.
> ... the breadcrumbs [from Q] are not facts, they are [...] Puzzles and clues for the “investigators” to uncover. [...] solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us.
When the community is something like a sci-fi fandom community, people on the actually believing end of the spectrum would be considered mentally ill, while people on the camaraderie-and-fantasy end are considered well-adjusted. In a religious community, it's more complicated, and people on either end of the spectrum might be accepted or stigmatized depending on the religion itself and the point of view of the beholder.
Either way, if you think of fandom communities and religious communities as analogues, you wouldn't expect these communities to go away until people can no longer get gratification they want from them. I don't know how that can be accomplished.
From Matt Taibbi’s https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system
I'm all for the direction that drug policy is going (towards more treatment, less prison time - I live in Oregon and we're on the forefront of this in the US) but I'm not sure how this would work in regards to misinformation. How do we get conspiracy theorists into treatment? Won't they just figure that's part of the conspiracy to re-educate them? And a lot of this disinformation is coming from bad actors with intent to harm.
The epistemic gap is, I think the most serious problem we face now. We can't address other serious problems like climate change or even getting COVID vaccines out to people because there's disinformation. We seem to be completely unprepared to deal with this. The immune system offers an analogy - we need a societal immune system that attacks disinformation in some way. No idea how we get there, though.
During the last year, we have seen the following claims from public health authorities affiliated with well-regarded scientific institutions:
- Vitamin D does nothing
- Vitamin D helps
- You should wear masks
- Masks are not actually that helpful
- The Trump attempts to stop travel from China are racist and terrible (Schumer, Pelosi)
- We need to shut down most transportation and not just airports
- We need to lockdown all non-essential businesses
- Hollywood is an essential business, but churches and restaurants aren't
- Lethality of COVID-19 is 2-5%
- Lethality of COVID-19 is ~0.2-0.4%
At what point have the "experts" been right this year? Which of those things should we have labelled misinformation? Attempting to install a technocratic version of truth has never worked, and we should have the grace to allow "wrong" things to be said. The experts, so-called, have been inconsistent and wrong through this whole debacle.
Basically: everyone needs to calm down.
All the examples I provided have been very calmly, very thoroughly promulgated in popular, mainstream media. They're not a matter of my opinion (and my opinion on them was not stated). According to their own standards, the experts have been spreading misinformation this year. The same people saying one thing and then retracting a few months later.
That said, there a mountainous gap between "we are unsure if masks work" to "the president is fighting an underground shadow cabal of pedophiles and blood drinkers." COVID deniers aren't suggesting we don't take vaccines because they are unsure of the effectiveness of vaccines - they are suggesting we don't take vaccines because they are actually microchips by Bill Gates designed to track us.
There is a clear difference between misinformation and just plain being wrong - there's a difference between telling me LeBron James is going to win a championship next year and telling me LeBron is actually an alien from Mars who came here to trick us into watching basketball so they could steal all our water. If the President was wrong about LeBron James winning, he would be wrong. If the President was trying to convince me of the latter, then I think that is misinformation.
We need a shift towards understanding that the best available information is better than nothing and that the information can change as more better information comes to light.
Another thing we need to move away from is crucifying people for getting things wrong - this just doesn't help in the long run. People are fallible and make mistakes. Granted, don't let them make to many in a row but once in a while needs to be acceptable.
We need more education on the scientific method and how it works.
The transition between different models of the atom is a great example of science changing over time. The existing theory explained some things, but not others. The superseding theory explained the previous observations, and made new falsifiable predictions that could not be refuted at the time.
The conflicting claims about fats and carbs is an example of that excuse not holding water. We're talking about a new claim, that is completely incompatible with the prior one. We're taking the old claims that were supposedly evidence-supported, and tossing them in the dumpster. At the very least, this means that overly strong conclusions were drawn from previous experiments.
I think it's a mistake to dismiss such situations as the general public being confused about how science works. Undoubtedly many are, but the reason for that is certainly in large part due to the abuse of "scientific" claims about their everyday life.
That is misinformation. It is absolutely the case that people are unwilling to take the vaccine because the effectiveness (and safety) is questionable. You're just throwing up a strawman.
It's also possible you just don't know the reasoning behind any but the most vocal "covid deniers". That wouldn't be surprising, since the standard practice now seems to be to lump everyone who questions the 'official position' in with the most extreme theories, and that makes rational people shut up. Your generalization is only strengthening your echo chamber.
Effectiveness is one thing; I take the same exact reasoning for wearing masks - you take the insurance especially when it costs you nothing. However, you are welcome to enlighten me on well supported arguments against vaccine safety. You can't just tell me that I'm throwing up strawman, then make 0 actual arguments except "I'm not doing enough research". If you are asking me to doubt vaccine safety on no data except some vague claims on there being "less extreme" positions, then I would argue you are spreading misinformation; especially when there are decades of research showing the safety otherwise.
You're misrepresenting the positions of the people who disagree with you. You're making it sound like the only alternative to your position is rediculous. You're throwing up a strawman.
Disagree with me; that's fine. But this is my point: be intellectually honest about it, and don't fool yourself into thinking that the people who disagree with you are not well-reasoned.
You have me 100% correct; I don't think the people who disagree with me, on this specific point, are well reasoned and are infact misled by deliberate misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories. If you know something I don't, then let me know - but don't accuse me of making a strawman if you can't correct my viewpoint of the opposing argument. Why is it a strawman? Do people have reasons for not taking the vaccines other than amorphous distrust of billionaires? If I'm wrong, explain why, I genuinely want to know. Otherwise I'm led to believe that you aren't being intellectually honest and you are only acting as a foil to provide an air of legitimacy to dangerous arguments; which is also a form of misinformation.
If you're unwilling to see the people who disagree with you as equally intelligent, and equally capable of reasoned decisions, then what can I possibly say to change your mind? And how can you tell me that others of equal mental capacity are misled, while you yourself are untouched by misinformation? If that's what you claim, your hubris is impressive.
You've effectively insulated yourself from any counterargument.
In the chance you're willing to consider that I'm not misled, this is why I'm skeptical of the vaccine. mRNA vaccines are an extremely new technology, and very different from any previous type of vaccine; there has been no time for extensive testing, and we don't know the long-term side effects.
> Given the novel nature of the mechanism of action of RNA vaccines, and their drug delivery vehicles, little is known about the medium and longer-term side effects....Up until December 2020, no mRNA vaccine, drug, or technology platform, had ever been approved for use in humans, and before 2020, mRNA was only considered a theoretical or experimental candidate for use in humans. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RNA_vaccine&oldid... The wikipedia article about mRNA has been altered a lot in the past month, and is now much more focused on COVID-19. Last time I read or quoted from it was prior to those alterations, so that's what I'm citing. No reason to think the data has changed since then, just the interpretation.
Up until this point, you haven't even tried. Within the context of misinformation I don't believe that opponents of the vaccine are making them in good faith, which is why they reach for dubious arguments. When someone says, like I've seen mainly on the blue site, that vaccines are tools of the wealthy to keep us at home and to be tracked, I don't think that person is making a reasoned decision on well researched information; I see someone who is probably being misled by someone else for some other person (ex. downplaying the need to take COVID precautions).
However, your reasoning for not taking the vaccine is perfectly valid and reasoned and is something I've discussed with others - mRNA vaccines are a new technology and we don't know the side-effects. At the very least I can assume you are willing to accept that COVID is real and are making arguments with empirical data.
Circling back to my original argument however, there's a difference between "the COVID vaccine may not be fully tested yet" and "the COVID vaccine is going to be used to track you". Anyone can do the calculus and understand, that while the COVID vaccine may not 100% safe at this moment, that doesn't mean that the government, or the scientific community at large, is completely untrustworthy, or trying to deceive you; they are simply trying to make the appropriate trade offs. In other words, your argument implies a lack of certainty, and the other, and arguably more popular one, implies malice. Our institutions aren't acting on complete malice, so given that they will be wrong sometimes, I think it's unreasonable to abandon our intuitions just because they weren't 100% correct.
From what I've seen, most skepticism of that sort has a pretty simple source: they are far less trusting of their government, and of people in power (political or monetary). I notice you won't definitely claim there is no malice, or that the people in power are definitely trustworthy. The less trust you express, the more might not be copacetic. I saw the same thing happen over the last 15 years with Google: the folks who don't trust Gates overlap by a large margin with the ones who didn't trust Google when they had their "Don't be evil" slogan. Pessimists are rarely disappointed.
> Up until this point, you haven't even tried.
Like I noted before, I wasn't trying. I don't like it when people do not acknowledge the mental capacity of those who disagree with them. It's not up to me to prove to you that I or anyone else is rational; it's up to you to have the intellectual honesty to admit that someone who disagrees with you could be rational. As I asked you already: how can you claim, among intellectual equals, to be the one who is uninfluenced by misinformation?
- Because most people think the way you do? Bandwagon Fallacy.
- Because the experts say so? Appeal to Authority.
- Because it's just so strange? Personal Incredulity.
I mean, it would literally be re-education.
The key part of re-education that's so distasteful is when someone else decides what truth is, and makes others learn it.
Everyone works from whatever information they have, past experience, natural tendencies, etc. And people _can_ break out of an poorly-informed viewpoint. (I grew up in one for many years.) But the process must be cooperative or internally motivated.
BTW, it's interesting how misinformation can overwhelm proven information. Much like spam and bot activity accounts for email and Internet traffic it's easy to lose the signal among the noise. We're all trying to adapt to find the signal. (At least those of us who aren't intentionally producing noise.)
It's difficult for me to express my thoughts on the matter without writing a huge, unintelligible screed.
The author, like many others, considers misinformation a disease that can be cured by using authority to administer objective information.
I feel strongly that we no longer have any choice but to accept all information is based in trust. This is not meant to be a metaphysical statement. Perhaps at the metaphysical level, objective truth exists. Regardless, at the scale society needs to verify information, objectivity is inaccessible.
Consider how long it took Russel's Principia to add 1+1. For the claims we encounter in our everyday lives, an appeal to objectivity will only add another layer of obfuscation.
In the case of current crisis in the US, the government claims that the crisis is an attack by the Russians. Perhaps this is true on a superficial level, but the attack is only possible because sources of power in our society abuse that society's trust so heavily. This isn't only limited to the government, but the entire structure of power.
The Q conspiracy is on its face absurd and easily contradicted by reliable observations. Why do adherents engage in it? At some point when you're surrounded by lies on every side and no way to understand your environment, your brain just melts.
Unfortunately there is no sign that society will even stop digging itself into this hole.
I think that for things to change they will need to reach a breaking point. I hope and pray that we will be able to get through this breaking point and to the other side to a better civilization before some x-level threat destroys us.
It's philosophically true that all information is based in trust. Yet, I should warn you that all trust is reliant on assumption. Thus, we end up in a paradoxically, revolving door-esque statement which has no end.
Please ignore this poor lad, this comment is unintelligible, and unreasonable... I'd honestly respect anyone who can seek the truth out for themselves.
I hope I'm not misinterpreting your statements, but it appears you agree that information is rooted in trust. In fact, you say it's philosophically so, while I make a weaker claim about practicality.
A paradox would arise if I were to say "information is based in trust, trust no one". But I would instead say "information is based in trust, empirically evaluate your basis for trust".
I'm not sure I recognize what's dangerous about the claim, or what your proposed alternative is.
It’s a known incorrect error message that human interpret statements as “baseless”, “false” or “lie” in certain corner cases, like how some computer GUI shows “disk full” or “permission denied” or “irrecoverable hardware error” for running out of inodes or exceeding filesize limits. It should not be taken literally.
I can’t immediately point at a solution but overloading them further by giving more precise informations isn’t one.
There are two things that can be done:
One is requiring misinformation to be corrected, with penalties for disinformation. This won't be popular with free speech advocates, but maybe they should reconsider whether malicious lies (which have adverse consequences) ought to be protected. There's also the more practical problem that the disinformation might not be detected, or detected too late.
The other is to ensure that people are educated from an early age to spot dubious information and fallacious reasoning, and learn how to fact-check sources. An understanding of science (along with its acceptance of being proven wrong), history, and folklore is also helpful.
* There are rare exceptions to this.
Misinformation has always been a part of television, whether knowingly or not. Most people will fall down when shot: not because a bullet actually knocks you over, but because you’ve learned that that’s what happens from watching TV shows and movies.
Even without that, the parallels are clear, especially if we take “drug” to mean a recreational or illicit drug. Terence McKenna (who had lots of wild ideas that must be individually evaluated; you can’t trust him) said decades ago that if there was a pill you could take that encouraged you to sit on your couch for 4+ hours a day and “blot out the real world,” they’d have made it illegal ages ago.
I am not dismissing the dramatic rise of misinformation over the past decade or so. To me, it looks a lot more like the spiking of heroin with fentanyl than the heroin itself. The addiction was already present; it’s just gotten a lot more dangerous to consume.
Disinforomation can be funded through all sorts of ways. The truth needs a patron.
https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
I'll tell you what's happening, here. Journalists are encouraging a Zeitgeist of censorship, prepping us all for Internet censorship to protect us from ourselves. That's because the young people who are behind Medium blogs and WP op eds and Vox articles are too young to have a collective memory of censorship in the West jn and before WWII, the McCarthy years, the wars to decriminalize porn, and much more.
Because of myopia we want to go backwards in our liberal democracies. All this because you're worried that your neighbor will believe Alex Jones or not get a vaccine?
I have bad news: History shows this will not go away despite all the censorship in the world.
I have bad news: History shows this will not go away despite all the censorship in the world.
Why wouldn't deplatforming and muting these sources wouldn't work? The only reason why they spread as well as they did was because the like of youtube and other social media decided to give these people megaphone.
What if we stop giving them these megaphones and give it to someone else instead?
It is wrong to think of these platforms as neutral. They are not. They are always choosing what to show to the public based on selection criteria.
The problem is always the same: NOT what value do we have in Alex Jones, conspiracy theories, liars, misinformation spreaders, etc. All the people that you and I already agree that there is a low value to misinformation that they spread. The question is truly: who decides what's true and false. Today you might agree with the current Fact Checker group. What if tomorrow Trump decides to be the fact checker. Rudy Giuliani tried to ban certain art in NYC when he was mayor, because it offended his religion (Catholicism). McCarthyites in the 50's sought to ban anything unpatriotic (from the State Department removing books from libraries to finger-pointing and 'calling out' people accused of communism, to the visa entry forms that may still exist that ask if you were a communist).
We defend the megaphones of the stupid and the fake as an insurance policy. We're wary of giving too much power to those who can yank megaphones away and pick winners and losers, because history itself shows us that the alternatives threaten all of us more than fake information.
>It is wrong to think of these platforms as neutral. They are not. They are always choosing what to show to the public based on selection criteria.
Oh, but the devil is in the details, here. How they choose is the critical question that we should be talking about, debating and thinking through.
We defend the megaphones of the stupid and the fake as an insurance policy. We're wary of giving too much power to those who can yank megaphones away and pick winners and losers, because history itself shows us that the alternatives threaten all of us more than fake information.
Except people aren't entitled to megaphones of their own, nor their own newspapers or their own radio station, much less on a platform governed by an uncaring algorithm over literal million of people who might say something else.
And misinformation really do real damage to people. You can't just pretend that conspiracy theorists don't exist and can't influence people to do real damage, regardless of who's in charge and who decides what is true or false and regardless of what damage censorship did or didn't do.
You mentioned government v. private platforms, and reminded me that those examples I gave of government don't apply. But again I wanted to point out the examples of the "who" part, and the same argumentation they had "this _ is harmful" where _ is art, or books, or speech. Who bloody decides what is true and false, how do we choose them, and what credentials makes them the choosers? And what if today's choosers and tomorrow's choosers have completely different notions of True and False?
You're defending censorship using an ancient argument of "harmful information" that has dangerous downstream effects is the point I am driving at.
Porn is still censored extensively even in its most inoffensive forms and people under certain ages aren't allowed to watch films with rude words, and yet people are insisting that true liberty means that whilst corporations are entitled to decide boobies and f-bombs are inappropriate for their platform, they must be compelled to host Qanon. I'm not sure that was the lesson we were supposed to take from past battles over obscenity laws.
Extreme framing that makes it easy to dismiss. There are people who think this recent election had some very fishy stuff going on, but are not buying the lunatic fringe, q-anon type of stuff.
As for people with concerns about 'fishy stuff', they've been granted plenty of prime time TV hours to talk about it, had fifty lawsuits thrown out by judges often politically aligned with them and are happily posting all over the Internet without fear of any consequences whilst elected officials loudly advocate their cause. Suffice to say this is not the experience of the average 1950s communist or pornographer.
I'm not convinced that the existence of more nuanced arguments about elections means social media should be obliged to broadcast Donald Trump declaring that he won a landslide victory without challenge or Lin Wood making Trump look rational, which all too many 'free speech' arguments have been devoted to.
Recently I’ve moved to a mostly text based internet. I’ve changed the sites I go to for entertainment (Reddit, Twitter) to basically only show text by default, and it’s crazy how much less inundated I feel by the news. With less information, I feel much more equipped to separate out what is real and what is fake. I’ve also made an active attempt to separate news and information from entertainment.
There are [studies](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0 ) showing that people are generally ok at dealing with misinformation, but if you show them text on images(especially emotive), or show them misinformation when their guards are down, they are much more likely to believe it.
I also think you’re underestimating how hard it is to avoid basic misinformation. By basic misinformation, I mean stuff that’s verifiably false with a couple of google searches. It’s really easy to recognize misinformation when you already disagree with it. It’s so much harder to do when you agree with the general sentiment. Even on HN, so much bs about Facebook gets upvoted and repeated without critical thought just because most people (and I agree with them) don’t like FB. Images and memes ratchet this up by like 10x.
It is all text here and there are plenty people who repeat over and over that they are off reddit. They still repeat bs because it's a circle jerk and you're being punished for not following it. But HN is text too and following OPs recommendation won't help at all.
I think the opposite is the way to go. Flood trains you to see bs before it reaches any regions which are relevant for decision. I see that constantly when I watch my parents shopping on amazon and trying to avoid those prime dark patterns the put all over the process. They have to THINK about it. Literally stop and look on all those buttons, links, symbols where I just flow past it without even having to read more than a word. It works.
For politically motivated misinformation (e.g. "Stop the steal") I think recent events show we should pretty clearly play it extra safe (e.g. ban the dealer) until we figure out how to reduce the risk of it being weaponized against democracy.
I don't think giving someone(s) the power to ban information they think is harmful is going to be the net win for democracy you want. The first amendment to the constitution seems to agree with me.
If some conspiracy theorist started spouting off how Saddam didn’t have nuclear weapons and it was all about oil should we have banned them?
edit: in the sense of a moral panic
For people skeptical of this point, look at mask recommendations in the US. There are only two reasons that masks were not recommended in February. Incompetence or deception to secure mask supply for health care workers. Neither options inspires confidence in the government.
It seems like a certain degree is of apathy is necessary. As in, yes there are problems with ~INSTITUTION~, but changing it would be hard and it is good enough for now.
Could be that conspiracies are trending so hard now because people do not have other worthwhile personal pursuits to focus on, due to lock downs.
1. Smart people who have never been burned by a bad argument. 2. Smart people who have been fallen for a bad argument. 3. Average people who have been been tricked before.
The first two groups as described defer to authority, but the first tends toward extreme ideas while the second relies on institutions as a filter.
The third group is the most interesting in my opinion, tending toward ideas that "feel right". The important point here, that the author stops short of making, is that the second and third groups are very similar, just with different filtering criteria. The difference is that, with less education/training, the filtering of the third group is more easily undermined.
Which brings me back to my original point. Given that the third group comprises the vast majority of the public, governmental institutions have an exceptional burden to not erode trust. If these institutions fail at that, it opens the door for epistemic learned helplessness.
The simplest way to put it is that we're caught in "a war between rival gangs of hypnotists."
(You know the old saw about poker? "If you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's you."? Along the same lines, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're the sucker at the table.)
"Misinformation" isn't a drug, it's a kettle of viruses. Hypnotic programs. The messed up thing is that it doesn't matter if they come from alien or homegrown cultures: once the virus is here it (really "they": a virus is legion) becomes everyone's problem, and it can mutate.
How do you fight hypnotists? I can't tell you in a brief post like this. (And I'm not actually qualified anyway.) But I can leave you with a simple spell that works pretty well:
"A trance is only as deep as you are."
Good luck, and God bless
We've already seen some drugs be restricted for political reasons. Do we wish risking that with truth also?