Misinformation

Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic is very concerned about this country’s misinformation crisis. He is so frustrated that he has difficulty finding words to convey how serious the misinformation crisis is.

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

That’s all I can read of the article unless I want to pay for a subscription to the Atlantic. I do not want to pay to read the Atlantic so that is all I can quote. Perhaps it will suffice.

I can guess what Mr. Warzel believes is the cause of all this misinformation. I can also guess what Mr. Warzel’s solution is likely to be. No doubt he blames the rise of alternate, conservative sources of information that mislead the people. Probably Donald Trump is also to blame.

Mr. Warzel is correct, after a fashion. The rise of the Internet and social media has allowed a far greater array of dissenting voices and opinions to reach the general public. It has permitted the public to obtain information that might have been hidden in the past. Because the public has greater access to wider sources of information, it has learned that many of the sources of news that Warzel might consider reliable are not reliable at all. Many people have discovered that the mainstream media is ignorant when it is not outright mendacious.

In the old days, the broadcast and print media largely spoke with one voice. The news people received largely reflected a fairly narrow, center-left perspective. There some a few “Republican” papers, but they seldom ventured far from the consensus. When Walter Cronkite said, “That’s the way it is”, people believed him. Why shouldn’t they? No one else was saying anything much different. There was no easy way to verify if Walter Cronkite was mistaken or lying, especially about events in faraway countries.

As a matter of fact, people shouldn’t have taken for granted that Cronkite knew what he was talking about. In 2002, Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, referring to a conversation with the physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Even if you did detect an error in a news story or have an opinion that dissented from the prevailing consensus, your options for reaching the public were limited. You could pass out leaflets on the street. You could write a letter to the editor and hope it got published. If you were rich and had connections you could start a magazine or build a news network.

The Internet changed that. The Internet and the rise of social media changed the flow of information in our society from a predominantly top-down flow to a more democratic network. The Internet allowed ordinary people to exchange information, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers. It became easier for people around the world to communicate with one another. It was now feasible to fact-check Walter Cronkite’s successors. Dissenting viewpoints could be easily broadcast to the whole world. The effect on the traditional gatekeepers of information is much the same as the introduction of the printing press five centuries ago.

This means, of course, that it is also easy for unreliable information and even hoaxes to spread around the world. False information can be disseminated as easily as true. I cannot read far enough in the article to learn Mr. Warzels’s solution to this problem, but I think I can guess. Warzel probably suggests giving someone some control over the distribution of information over the Internet. Maybe, he believes some government agency or a public-private partnership should seek out and suppress misinformation. This seems to be the attitude of many public figures, especially journalists, who you might suppose to be against this form of censorship.

This is a bad idea. Leaving aside the usual arguments in favor of freedom of speech, the simple fact is that censorship will not work in the modern age. Unless the internet is shut down altogether, there will be a way to work around any attempt at suppressing information. Even totalitarian China with its Great Firewall is not entirely successful at keeping out unwanted knowledge of the outside world. The fact is, labeling a story misinformation in an environment where the traditional media lost trust only enhances that story’s credibility. Why believe anything the government and the media say when they have been proven to be untrustworthy?

I can think of one solution to the problem of misinformation. These solutions may not be easy but neither requires government control or censorship. The answer to misinformation is to teach people how to distinguish truths from lies. We should be teaching critical thinking and even logic in every school. Students from an early age, maybe beginning in kindergarten, should be trained to approach everything they read, in newspapers, the web, and even their own textbooks, with a critical eye. The more common logical fallacies and appeals to emotion could be taught.

It is easy to see why this is not taught in our schools. For one thing, it would probably put the advertisers out of business. It might also make indoctrinating our children into the state-sponsored leftist ideology more difficult. It might be difficult to convince children that there are fifty-seven genders or the great-great-great-grandchildren of slaves deserve reparations if the students know how to pick apart such arguments.

It might also help if the mainstream media worked at being unbiased and factual. If the networks and newspapers made a real effort at being reliable sources of news, they might regain the public’s trust. I do not see that happening. In the meantime, we must trust in the people’s good sense and know that in the long run, true information wins bad information.