What is misinformation for?

A new article on how many people in the US are increasingly hostile to reality has much to contemplate, but I wanted to briefly muse on this:

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.

I see the point, and agree with it to some extent, but I think this underestimates the persuasive power of misinformation.

It neglects the “rabbit hole” effect that misinformation has had on fostering conspiracy theories and radicalization. It neglects the slow corrosion that has been happening in political discourse. It’s not just that political parties (particularly in the US) are polarized, but that some have gone ever more extreme.

I can see a connection between Caulfield’s “misinformation helps maintain beliefs” and persuasion. People’s beliefs are informed by different points of view. Without countervailing points of view, those existing beliefs can become more certain and more readily drift to ever more extreme versions of that belief.

Misinformation is often better described as straight-up propaganda, though. But we seem to have lost that word through fear of calling lies, lies.

External links

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is