'Misinformation' is a threat--but not in the way they want you to think

s of today there 1598 articles listed in PubMed containing the word ‘misinformation’ in the title. Of these, 27 are in Nature magazine. The most recent one is titled “Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter.” It's paywalled so it doesn't get a link, but in the abstract they write:

Here we evaluate the effect of the decision by Twitter to suddenly deplatform 70,000 misinformation traffickers in response to the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (a series of events commonly known as and referred to here as 'January 6th'). . . . The results inform the historical record surrounding the insurrection, a momentous event in US history, and indicate the capacity of social media platforms to control the circulation of misinformation, and more generally to regulate public discourse.

In other words, if someone cites peer-reviewed research supporting a point of view the authors disagree with, it should be censored and the writer deplatformed. Note how they sneak the inflammatory term 'insurrection' into their writing even after saying they won't.

If you're behind a paywall, that means you don't want to be part of the conversation. Yet they also want to prevent everyone else from discussing it. The hypocrisy is obvious: if they really wanted to eliminate misinformation, all they would need to do is provide correct information. They don't. They want the government and Big Tech to censor any interpretation of facts they disagree with.

If this article passed peer review, then science is in big trouble. The abstract doesn't say how they determined whether something is ‘misinformation.’ Presumably they relied on whatever political algorithm Twitter (now X) was using.

One article in Sci Adv.^[1] concludes that censorship reduced the number of posts in “antivaccine venues,” but did not change engagement with antivaccine content. In fact, “misinformation patterns” increased.

I have seen many posts and articles by scientifically untrained people making statements that inaccurately represent the source material. This, to my mind, is the only valid definition of misinformation. Here at randombio, we have consistently criticized mis­in­for­mation whether it comes from RFK Jr, substack blogs, the US government, the news media, or Nature. With so much science behind paywalls, it's harder than ever to get essential facts. That allows misinformation to spread; a conspiracy theorist would say that's why it's done.

Should we then censor the NYT, the directors of NIAID and CDC, and Nature? Elsewhere, a Nature commentary titled either “Misinformation poses a bigger threat to democracy than you might think” or “Misinformation remains a threat to democracy” ^[2] (depending on where it's indexed) says:

The threat to democratic integrity posed by misinformation and disinformation looms large. . . .

The Holocaust did happen. COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 US presidential election. The evidence for each of these facts has been established beyond reasonable doubt, but false beliefs on each of these topics remain widespread.

The inclusion of “holocaust deniers” in this list shows that the principal concern is not really misinformation, but beliefs held by their real or imaginary political opponents. The fact that in a large percentage of scientific papers, whether on Alzheimer's disease or nutrition or global warming, misinterpret their own results matters as little to them as the fact that Snape lied to Harry Potter about what was in the Draught of the Living Death.* For example, one paper claimed that 99.85% of climate papers endorse the climate crisis hypothesis, but their data actually showed that the true number was closer to 31.09%. Yet people repeat the incorrect number.

As for the 2020 election, we all know how one party changed the election rules to favor their candidate—they boasted about it in an infamous article in Time magazine—and why the other doesn't challenge them. An argument could be made that the Jan 6 rioters should have stormed RNC headquarters for doing so little to prevent it, even though everyone knew it was going to happen. As for vaccines, see Pandemrix.

But it's ironic that what many have described as tactics worthy only of a banana republic are being done in the name of “preventing a threat to democracy.”

The Covid experiment

During Covid, scientific journals tried an experiment: make everything about Covid publicly available. It produced the biggest explosion of scientific literacy in a century. Tens of thousands of people read the papers, studied the textbooks so they could understand them, and were able to rebut the misinformation created by the press, the government and international organizations.

Yes, some of them didn't have enough molecular biology background and got some details wrong. A few guys on Substack started deliberately misinterpreting them. But we also started to see laymen talking intelligently for the first time in history about furin cleavage sites, DNA sequences, prion peptides, messenger RNA, and aerosols. It was almost like living in the Italian Renaissance.

This terrifies the authors. They would prefer to return to the old feudalistic model, where only they have access to the information and only they can influence the dialogue. It's legitimate to ask: why would someone be so insistent in being the only voice?

What causes misinformation

I agree: misinformation is a threat. Unfortunately, most of it comes from the media, the science establishment and, increasingly, politicized science magazines. Regardless of the source, the biggest threat to any democracy is not misinformation, but censorship. A society stops being free when it becomes impossible to express dissenting interpretations. That's what is really meant when people say ‘misinformation.’ What a terrible precedent Nature is setting by allying themselves with such ideas.

Misinformation is caused by political groupthink that pushes people into all-or-none thinking. The argument about masks was an example. Even at the beginning, we knew Covid was spread by aerosols, not fomites, so sanitizing everything in sight and wearing masks would have little effect. But almost no one else recognized that. They all jumped on their approved political positions, saying either “masks work” or “masks don't work.” And each accused the other of peddling “misinformation.”

The solution is simple. If you want people to know the truth, stop hiding it from them. If you want people to believe what you say, stop lying.

jun 08 2024, 7:16 am. updated jun 09 2024, 6:46 am