Disinformation is the coin of the modern realm. Vaccine denial, climate denial, election denial and war-crime denial have joined the grotesque denial of the Holocaust in the ranks of dishonesties now regularly foisted on the public. We can, however, do something about this crisis of the information age.
In January the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranked the spread of misinformation among the greatest threats to humanity in its Global Risks Report. With more than four billion people voting in the upcoming 2024 elections (roughly half the world’s population), the report makes clear that now is the time to prepare the world against disinformation and those who peddle it.
Some commentators have dismissed the report’s conclusions as another attempt to censor free speech. But this is disingenuous; the people who oppose misinformation research, whether pundits, politicians or crackpots, are not fighting for freedom but against a discerning and well-informed citizenry.
The public’s beliefs, we know, are only partially aligned with the facts: Virtually all Americans, for example, know that Belgium did not invade Germany to start World War I. But one in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth. Years after the Iraq War, 42 percent of the public mistakenly believed that weapons of mass destruction had been there. More than one third mistakenly believe that the risks of COVID vaccines outweigh their benefits.
Somebody lied to these people. The difference between justified public beliefs and mistaken ones is usually disinformation, whether spread on social media or through other channels by political actors.
In short order, following the WEF report’s release, pundit Nate Silver declared its nearly 1,500 expert consultants “idiots,” and Elon Musk used the report to decry the very concept of misinformation as an insidious conspiracy. They echoed key talking points increasingly used to downplay the urgency of the misinformation crisis, including the flawed notion that the label “misinformation” is subjective, ambiguous and biased. Philosopher Lee McIntyre has described this effort as the hijacking of postmodern principles to advance a war on truth.