One of the author’s main complaints is that no one agrees on what “misinformation” actually means. And he’s right, there is confusion. So let’s be precise.
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There is confusion, but he provides tables with definitions that line up with each other pretty well. The confusion is when people use these terms casually.
jun 27, 2025, 7:10 am • 0 0 • view
Media scholar Clare Wardle and colleagues developed a helpful typology: Disinformation = false or misleading information spread deliberately to deceive or manipulate.
jun 27, 2025, 6:53 am • 471 65 • view
Like Western capitalist governments indulge in to justify their imperialist aggression?
jun 27, 2025, 7:48 am • 1 1 • view
Yes, and in my work I point to the parallel between the lose of public trust in institutions after WW1 propaganda and after the invasion of Iraq as key moments. Both moments required rebuilding public trust in foundational democratic ideals, but its not really happened post 2003
jun 27, 2025, 7:50 am • 7 0 • view
I mean the Iraq war and general response to 9/11 severed my connection with the liberal mainstream, drove me further to the left.
jun 27, 2025, 7:53 am • 1 0 • view
Plus we then had the financial crisis, and time and time again we saw the institutions we had trusted to perform the verification, deliberation and accountability functions fail to live up to expectations, or wildly violate those expectations.
jun 27, 2025, 7:56 am • 3 0 • view
And my argument is that neoliberalism also hollowed out our capacity to form effective democratic counterpublics to respond in an effective manner.
jun 27, 2025, 7:57 am • 4 0 • view
Is it Clare or Claire? vivo.brown.edu/display/cwar...
jun 27, 2025, 8:06 am • 0 0 • view
Gah, Claire, my mistake.
jun 27, 2025, 8:15 am • 3 0 • view
Misinformation = false or misleading information spread by people who believe it’s true. Malinformation = true information used in misleading or harmful ways.
jun 27, 2025, 6:53 am • 479 70 • view
What about 'flooding the zone with shit'? Where does that fit in?
jun 28, 2025, 8:16 am • 1 0 • view
It flattens verification and deliberation by not allowing room for either, ensuring no accountability.
jun 28, 2025, 8:22 am • 2 0 • view
These categories help us move beyond vague fears and look more clearly at the different forms that harmful information can take. But even this isn’t the full picture.
jun 27, 2025, 6:55 am • 283 18 • view
The real danger comes when this material forms disordered discourse, systems of belief that reinforce themselves, reject correction, and disconnect people from any shared standard of reality.
jun 27, 2025, 6:55 am • 371 42 • view
Not long after I read this thread I saw this post. The man's entire world is disordered. To the extent that he's forgotten that there is a reality he should be engaging with. bsky.app/profile/cweb...
jun 28, 2025, 8:46 am • 0 0 • view
aka "Conspiracism".
jun 27, 2025, 10:45 am • 0 0 • view
The Cato paper treats harmful information as just a few false claims floating around online. It says people rarely fall for it, the damage is minor, and the real problem is elite overreaction. This radically understates the scale and nature of the issue.
jun 27, 2025, 6:55 am • 423 48 • view
"The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and ***Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries***- wikipedia
jun 27, 2025, 11:15 am • 3 0 • view
You have got to see this presentation by Senator Whitehouse on how your electric bill will go up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cXa... Global warming and AI will raise your electric bill by >30%. Screw you, Chuck Koch!
jul 1, 2025, 1:43 pm • 1 0 • view
i don't think Cato is a good source. "Not surprisingly, Murray’s anti-regulation manifesto is being giddily promoted by right-wing organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, Murray’s institutional home, as well as the CATO Institute..." www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwat...
jun 27, 2025, 11:04 am • 0 0 • view
“People rarely fall for it”
jun 27, 2025, 6:57 am • 2 0 • view
Surely elite fear of losing control of the narrative is what is at play here? Are you claiming only right wing populist lie?
jun 27, 2025, 7:50 am • 0 0 • view
Not at all, but you should think about how the elite controlled narratives through the 20th century, what structures existed to allow that and how thats changed in the last 15 years.
jun 27, 2025, 7:53 am • 3 0 • view
If you're not already familiar with his work, Walter Lippmann was a key thinker in this area, even if, as I do, you disagree with his proposed solution www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/dewe...
jun 27, 2025, 7:54 am • 1 0 • view
Isn't Cato tentatively a similar team and "elite' like the infamous heritage foundation?
jun 28, 2025, 8:24 am • 0 0 • view
How do they reconcile the reductions in vaccines because of false information? Dead people is pretty dangerous to me
jun 27, 2025, 10:11 am • 1 0 • view
Why would they write this? It is like the worst Facebook opinions in a paper
jun 27, 2025, 11:09 am • 1 0 • view
The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities become locked into belief systems that can’t be challenged, where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t just distort truth, it breaks trust.
jun 27, 2025, 6:56 am • 758 178 • view
I’m not sure you state clearly enough the origin of these lies. People in positions of trust—Trump, GOP, Fox—band together to create these lies, propagate them and “keep up the bit” no matter how absurd, leaving anyone foolish enough to trust them to believe it. THEN the tribalism compounds it.
jun 27, 2025, 11:51 am • 2 0 • view
Worry a lot about this. In political campaigns they have a “gettable” column of likely voters in the respective district. But I’ve seen anecdotal cases indicating how millions of people who WOULD be persuadable on the merits have been placed beyond the gettable column by these dynamics.
jun 27, 2025, 7:01 am • 5 1 • view
It means nothing less than the collapse of reason as the basis for organising society. And the centrality and elevation of reason is what makes democracies so successful and adaptable.
jun 27, 2025, 7:04 am • 5 1 • view
I see that with the war psychosis taking hold in the UK.
jun 27, 2025, 7:49 am • 0 0 • view
The corruption takes place on several levels, on a personal level misinfo undermines citizen's epistemic rights to develop themselves as human beings that can form opinions and evaluate choices. It removes our right to intelligence and uncorrupted cognitive decision-making.
jun 27, 2025, 2:07 pm • 1 0 • view
Moving beyond the social part you named, it also blows the Marketplace of Ideas to pieces, destroying the very NeoLiberal premise that Cato operates on. The core of their theory is busted. Saying truth doesn't matter in the MoI is like saying money doesn't matter in financial markets.
jun 27, 2025, 2:10 pm • 1 0 • view
Interestingly, that doesn't sound like a modern phenomenon - but I suppose the assumption had become that modern ways would automatically lead to better information?
jul 4, 2025, 8:06 am • 0 0 • view
When this happens at scale, it’s not just bad information, it’s a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable. That’s what disordered discourse really is, a collapse in collective reasoning.
jun 27, 2025, 6:56 am • 502 76 • view
📌
jun 27, 2025, 6:59 am • 1 0 • view
On social media quantity beats quality. With all the bots and trolls spinning around, you get a completely skewed view of the facts and the world.
jun 27, 2025, 11:14 am • 5 1 • view
Small screen has little context.
jun 27, 2025, 2:09 pm • 0 0 • view
Republicans have been about theater since Reagan. Gingrich started the nonsense speak. Now we have a reality television President with a cabinet cast from Fox News. Bombs are for ratings. Billionaires run things. The BBB is so sad.
jun 27, 2025, 7:03 am • 26 3 • view
And when debate collapses, power doesn’t disappear, it just becomes unaccountable. Truth becomes tribal. Institutions become hollow. People are left shouting across a void, each group certain the others are insane or evil. That’s not freedom, it’s fragmentation.
jun 27, 2025, 6:57 am • 416 64 • view
That's exactly what is happening: mass radicalization through narratives.
jun 27, 2025, 7:49 am • 2 0 • view
We essentially enter the realm of religions where you just have to agree to disagree, except we all managed to agree on the public space elements. Where a faith based group make their dogma and blasphemies the law, we all lose out. Actually I make this point on gender blasphemy wars.
jun 27, 2025, 7:51 am • 2 0 • view
I see this dogma/blasphemy view in closed communities that require signifiers of loyalty. Not solely a flaw of the right either. I am wary of any groups dressing alike all using the same words.
jun 27, 2025, 1:32 pm • 1 0 • view
Gresham's Law for information
jun 28, 2025, 4:13 am • 1 0 • view
We’ve seen this repeatedly. QAnon. COVID denial. Election lies. War crimes denial. In each case, the problem wasn’t just what people believed, it was how those beliefs hardened into identity and made correction impossible.
jun 27, 2025, 6:57 am • 469 72 • view
Totally agree with you, but around COVID specifically, the government and media lied and continues to lie about COVID and its ongoing harms. They continue to downplay the virus and labeled disabled ppl who called attention to breakthrough infections early spreaders of misinfo and deplatformed them
jun 28, 2025, 12:47 am • 7 1 • view
A VERY clever definition of the problem, concisely nailed down! This also explains this hard tension to science. Science is a definition of processes for fact finding, and the constant review of both process & findings. With the intrinsically embedded option of altering one's understanding.
jun 28, 2025, 9:21 am • 1 0 • view
bsky.app/profile/r5-t...
jun 27, 2025, 11:58 am • 0 0 • view
And we are seeing it *right here*. Who is correct? *Your* version or the institute's? (It is a topic that always begs for a bit of fourth wall breaking.)
jun 27, 2025, 10:47 am • 0 0 • view
It’s because MAGA is a cult
jun 28, 2025, 4:24 am • 0 0 • view
The Cato paper ignores all this. Instead, it clings to a comforting idea, that “more speech” will fix everything. That if everyone just talks freely, the truth will rise to the top. That was never quite true. And today, it’s a fantasy.
jun 27, 2025, 6:58 am • 384 41 • view