Misinformation: The Fictional Foe of Free Thought
2 hours ago Charles Rotter
The term “misinformation” is not what it pretends to be. It’s not a scientific term, nor is it an objective measure of truth versus falsehood. Instead, it is a linguistic cudgel, wielded to discredit opposition and enforce adherence to a narrative. Recent efforts to “inoculate” people against misinformation—most recently championed in a study covered by Science and a preprint on PsyArXiv—are just the latest in a long line of attempts to control thought under the guise of protecting it.
Concern about the impact of misinformation on the epistemic integrity of democracy is
widespread 1. In addition, misinformation demonstrably affects attitudes and intentions towards
health behaviors in experiments2 and in real-world situations3,4. In response, researchers have
tested a variety of interventions to combat misinformation on social media5 (e.g., accuracy
nudges6, digital literacy tips7, inoculation8, debunking9). These interventions work via different
psychological mechanisms, but all share the goals of increasing recipients’ ability to distinguish
between true and false information and/or increasing the veracity of news shared on social
media. This toolkit of approaches is useful, but it is currently difficult to compare the
interventions because they have been tested in different environments, with different sets of
stimuli (e.g., headlines vs. tweets), using different participants and different methods. These
differences make it difficult to know how the interventions would perform in an equal testing
environment.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/11/12/misinformation-the-fictional-foe-of-free-thought/
