Information about Misinformation on Disinformation

To keep abreast of current developments in science and technology, which has potential professional relevance, could inspire a story idea, and feeds my polymath tendencies, I try to keep pace with a variety of scientific journals on a weekly basis.  I don’t read these cover to cover, but I select a smattering of articles that seem most interesting to me, and try to carve out time to read them in between all of my other responsibilities.  Most of the papers come from Science Advances, Science, or SPJ: Space, but I’ll sprinkle in those from other sources, and I even have an app that searches all open access scientific databases for new papers published that match my interests.  This habit became far more robust after I stopped reading Scientific American, and while bias can still be found in these scientific papers (and in the publication decisions that the editors make), it is mitigated by the fact that the data is presented in the paper in such a fashion that the reader can derive conclusions independent of the author.  There was, for example, a paper about biodiversity which stated a conclusion I considered to be in direct contradiction to the presented data.

All of this is context to an observation I’ve made, which is that the scientific community has a peculiar view of misinformation and disinformation.  This is reflected in editorials, book reviews, and some of the papers themselves purporting to study the “phenomenon” of mis- and disinformation.  Three concerning pillars seem to compose this view: conflation of mis- and disinformation, belief in scientists (not science – scientists) as arbiters of Truth, and condescension towards a vague conception of the “typical information consumer.”  Combined with an exceptionalism that treats the current information ecosystem as fundamentally different from any previous information ecosystem, this view is a serious impediment to constructive efforts to address the real issues which mis- and disinformation beget.

While the terms are often conflated, misinformation and disinformation are not equivalent, and efforts both to study and address them should take care of that distinction.  Disinformation is a deliberate effort to mislead.  The actual information involved may or may not be factually based, but it is the intentionality that matters for disinformation.  Disinformants (if that’s not yet a word, it should be) seek to achieve a particular end through the application of crafted presentation of information, both factual information spun in a certain way, and nonfactual information invented for the purpose.  Propaganda and advertising can both fall into this category, but only if they meet the deliberate effort to mislead standard, which should also not be confused with a deliberate effort to persuade.  In other words, there is a certain maliciousness necessarily involved in the very definition of disinformation.

Misinformation, on the other hand, is simply nonfactual information, lacking any conscious intention to deceive.  It may be easier to disassociate the term by examining the word in another form: misinformed.  Someone who is misinformed is not deliberately deceiving you, but simply communicating their understanding in good faith.  We are all of us guilty of misinformation, since all we can ever communicate is our current understanding of reality based on the available data, a necessarily incomplete understanding which we would be wise to regularly and continually update as new data become available.  While it can be damaging, it is not malicious, not intentionally deleterious.  Intent is the key differentiator between misinformation and disinformation, although proving one versus the other becomes a pernicious challenge when it comes to implementing measures to mitigate them.

Science, which I have sometimes referred to as a “discipline of skepticism,” is better described as a structured etymological union of empiricism, rationalism, and skepticism.  It combines data, logic, and doubt to achieve an incrementally improving understanding of reality.  As a system, it is the best tool humanity has developed for inquiring of the cosmos, but its avatars would do well to recall that they are imperfect wielders of an imperfect tool.  Scientists are still human, with all that condition’s concomitant messiness, and do not possess some special insight that sets them apart from those who are not engaged in active, structured science.  Furthermore, scientists are wont to apply scientific methodologies to the exclusion of other methods of inquiry, supposing that there is a correct answer that science provides, without accounting for the moral and philosophical dimensions that are not as clear-cut as a limited view of maximizing the scientist-defined good of the many.

This tendency of scientists to differentiate themselves as superior to those who are not scientists results in serious logical fallacies and mistaken assumptions when it comes to analyzing mis- and disinformation, and especially when it comes to recommendations for addressing them.  The greatest of these is the supposition that “the masses” cannot be trusted to form their own conclusions based on the information available to them, but must be spoon-fed the conclusions to which scientists want them to come.  Furthermore, scientists seem prone to assume that any information presented contrary to their own opinions and perspectives is automatically misinformation or disinformation, which is convenient for them, but far from reality.  Additionally, while disinformation should be mitigated, misinformation should not be.  All of us are guilty of misinformation, and, in fifty years, it is almost inevitable that much of what we now call “information” would be considered “misinformation” by our successors.  The Ptolemaic model of the universe would be considered misinformation today, but it was valuable in its time, and laid the foundation for numerous advances in our understanding of the universe.

In free speech litigation, there is a standard colloquially known as the “don’t shout fire in a crowded theater” standard.  The freedom of speech, of expression, has direct bearing on discussions about information, misinformation, and disinformation.  Someone shouting that there is a fire in a crowded theater because they believed there was a fire, but there was not, is a qualitatively different circumstance from someone blatantly lying about there being a fire in a crowded theater.  Efforts to mitigate disinformation should adopt an “innocent until proven guilty” standard for assessing misinformation versus disinformation, and, as for misinformation, the best remedy is more information.  By “best,” I do not necessarily mean best from a utilitarian standpoint, or from what a scientific paper on the subject might conclude, but from a moral perspective that places a primacy upon, and high value to, the freedom of expression.  In other words, I consider it more dangerous to over-compensate for misinformation than to undercompensate for disinformation.

Misinformation and disinformation are nothing new.  One of the Xerxes – I forget which one – had his lineage carved into cliff faces as a kind of giant billboard, asserting his right to rule…but it was disinformation, a stretching of the truth to show a royal connection that was not really present in order to convince the people of his legitimacy.  That was over two thousand years ago.  While there is far more information available far more rapidly and widely than before, and there are new techniques available to those who would disinform us, our present circumstances are not so radically different from those of the past.  If anything, the amount of information each of us has at our disposal renders us less susceptible to dis- and misinformation, not more.  If there is a problem, the answer is not scientist arbiters of Truth.  It is in fostering better thinking.