Information, Disinformation, Misinformation
An Epistemological 'Who Watches the Watchmen?' Problem.
UPDATE - The Ministry of Truth / Disinformation Governance Board was “paused” on May 18, 2022. This article was originally written in response to it having been created.
So this is going to go over well….
Problem 1 - The people saying that non-progressive beliefs are mis- or disinformation have a track record of being wrong. People got banned on social media for ‘spreading misinformation’ for saying things that were later found to be true (i.e., Wuhan lab leak)
Problem 2 - Negative partisan motivated reasoning. Anyone who doesn’t trust the government, or academia, or other similar elites, is going to be strongly incentivized to believe the exact opposite of whatever this board says is true, whether or not it’s true.
Problem 3 - It’s going to give credibility to all of its critics every time it is dishonest, or honest but wrong.
Politics is a story we tell ourselves where we’re the good person on the good team and our opponents are bad people on the bad team. These narratives are not opposites of each other, they’re constructed out of entirely different moral and ethical commitments and worldviews (Moral Foundations Theory). Having a powerful agency say that one narrative is Truth, which is only believed by 7% of the population according to the Hidden Tribes Model, and that all other narratives are mis- or disinformation, means that 93% of the population are going to be accused of mis- or disinformation for believing the narrative that defines their particular political sub-group.
Throw in the sense of perceived hostility and threat to in-group status, and you have a machine that is guaranteed to sharply increase Americans’ distrust of their government.
This is going to lead to populism on steroids.
Dictionary.com defines mis- and disinformation thusly.
Misinformation is “false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead.” So being wrong, basically.
Disinformation means “false information, as about a country’s military strength or plans, disseminated by a government or intelligence agency in a hostile act of tactical political subversion.” It is also used more generally to mean “deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.” So tactical lying.
So then information is truth, but what is truth? As a philosopher, I’ll go with the correspondence theory, and say that truth is a property of words, sentences, or ideas that exists when they accurately correspond to the facts in the real world. I.e., Bertrand Russell’s idea that the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ is true if there is in fact a cat on a mat. I won’t get into Tarski or Wittgenstein here, but the idea is less simple and obvious than it seems on its face, and we can use this idea for pragmatic reasons if nothing else.
As a post-positivist scientist, I know that truth is hard to find. We have facts and events, and if we do our due diligence we can get good data, and then we can extrapolate information from that and interpret it. If we do a really good job then others can replicate our work and confirm the statistical validity of our models. But it’s really hard to build a model that accurately reflects or captures reality, especially when our phenomenon of interest is people’s political behavior in complex environments.
So let’s take a claim that this ‘Disinformation Board’ is likely to call disinformation - Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen. That claim was valid enough that it was brought to the Supreme Court’s attention (Ted Cruz was going to argue the case) before January 6 happened. Something like 70% of conservatives believe it. There were a bunch of oddities like Atlanta sending everyone home for an overflowing sink, which they called a burst pipe, or the people in Detroit blocking observers with large cardboard pieces, or the sudden midnight jump in which everyone went to bed on Nov. 3 with Trump well ahead, only to find that Biden had gotten a ton of votes in the middle of the night in the swing states. You have Arizona politicians accusing each other of electoral misdeeds. Steven Crowder went and found a bunch of houses where votes came from, which didn’t actually exist. Facebook used its money and influence against Trump, funding election processes in several states. Lots of anti-populists did all they could to defeat Trump, even according to Time magazine:
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
Trump supporters put together a huge list of irregularities:
https://hereistheevidence.com/
Does all this prove that the election was stolen? You can decide that for yourself. My point is that if the Democrats use the government to tell the people who are aware of these anomalies that they’re not allowed to say that it was stolen, it’s going to increase the salience of that belief and anger people towards the government, further increasing the deep and dangerous partisan divide.
What could work is if multiple political groups had representation on this board, from MAGAs to Marxists. Lies that no one disputes could be accepted as disinformation, but where there isn’t an obvious lie there’s only a disagreement on facts and interpretation. And that’s ok - different sides can debate how to best get good data on the facts, and everyone is free to interpret established facts however they wish.