Misinformation: A Flawed Concept
“Believe those who seek the truth,” André Gide once wrote, “doubt those who find it.” The same can be said of falsehoods.
Few topics are the subject of more debate than misinformation—what it is, how to identify it, and what we should do about it—but all the arguments in favour of legislating against it threaten not only our individual freedoms, but our capacity to live meaningful lives. Recent legal proposals— including Australia’s digital safety bill and multiple acts of legislation throughout the United States—bear this out.
Misinformation is the name given to falsehoods that are unwittingly spread (otherwise known as rumours or errors), whereas disinformation involves falsehoods that are spread intentionally (also known as lies). The distinction between the two hinges primarily on intention. And that’s where the problems start. Intentions are difficult to discern. We can’t read minds, and our own biases make us terrible at guessing what others are thinking. Besides, people are themselves often confused about what they are doing and why. Motivated reasoning is extraordinarily powerful, and there is evidence to suggest that the smarter you are, the more powerful it becomes. And of course people sometimes lie. This Gordian knot of ambiguity makes it easy for fools and opportunists alike to blur the difference between errors and lies.
Matthew Harwood
And there is a third problem. We cannot take it for granted that the falsehoods marked as misinformation actually are false. One only needs to look at the COVID lab leak theory for a recent example. During the height of the pandemic, the mere idea that the SARS-COV-2 virus originated in a Wuhan lab was taboo, but now many scientists believe it’s worth investigating. (Five years on, it’s still unclear how COVID originated.) The truth is often difficult to know, and there will always be more ways to be wrong than right. These challenges make it impossible to develop systematic means of combating mis- and disinformation through censorship without those measures causing serious problems in themselves.
Australia’s proposed bill threatens to censor the global internet in the name of preventing misinformation. Under the “Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation” bill, something is misinformation if it “is reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive” and “is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm.” Disinformation is that, plus “grounds to suspect” the intent to deceive or “inauthentic behaviour.” There are carve-outs for that which would “reasonably be regarded as parody or satire,” “professional news,” and “any academic, artistic, scientific or religious purpose.” Social media platforms that don’t comply (either by refusing to comply, or by not censoring enough) would face fines. The problem is that if, for example, an operator of a social media site doesn’t like your politics, they might decide they have “grounds to suspect” you intend to deceive others. And the harms the Australian bill enumerates include “harm to public health,” “vilification of a group,” and “harm to public confidence in the banking system and financial markets,” all of which leave plenty of wiggle room for misuse. We have already seen how some truthful statements about vaccines have been treated as misinformation or misinformation adjacent. If it took scientists time to know the truth, why would social media platforms be better at it?
The Quillette Editorial Board
Attempts to regulate misinformation in the United States have been equally ignominious. A 2022 California bill threatened doctors with disciplinary action—including revocation of their medical licences—if they spread “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.” Last year, a federal court blocked enforcement of the law, finding that the term “contemporary scientific consensus” was vague and lacked any “established technical meaning in the medical community.” The court noted that it was especially problematic to apply that ill-defined standard to COVID-19, “a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus.” California repealed the law months later.
Since then, California has moved on to targeting election-related “deceptive digital content” (deepfakes), which “will pollute our information ecosystems like never before,” according to a breathless preamble. A judge has already paused enforcement of one of those laws, finding that prohibiting the spread of digitally generated information has a less restrictive alternative: Simply telling people it’s fake—which the media and the public already do quite effectively without government intervention. Similarly, Florida’s failed attempt to block an abortion rights advertisement led to a judicial explanation that could apply just as easily in California or even Australia: “The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false.’”
Ultimately, the core problem with all legislative misinformation bills is that they inevitably position the government as the arbiter of truth. And, as anyone who has heard of George Orwell should know, that’s a terrible proposition—not only because the truth is often elusive, but because government officials have strong incentives to purge public discourse of opinions and narratives that challenge their hold on power.
There is no doubt that misinformation is a problem. The inability to agree upon what is and isn’t true clearly hinders our capacity for progress. Our modern technologies allow us to silo ourselves in pseudo-realities and distance ourselves from ideas we find ugly or inconvenient. Without a shared reality and baseline of information, society as we know it would become impossible to sustain. But laws are blunt tools and liable to do more harm than good here. Our governments are made up of human beings, susceptible to error. Granting them the power to determine and enforce the truth robs us not just of our agency and right to free expression, but also our responsibility as individuals living in the twenty-first century.
Toadworrier
The internet and social media have brought unprecedented freedom and autonomy. They allow us to be active participants in how our discourse is shaped. Mis- and disinformation are among the many prices we pay for the ability to communicate freely, to express ourselves openly, and to avoid the tyranny of those who would dictate what we should think, read, and say. When people advocate that governments or elites clamp down on misinformation and prevent us from seeing, reading, and hearing things they determine are false or harmful, they are effectively asking to be put back into their playpens. But who should be cast in the role of the adults in this scenario? To whom should we entrust, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, the right to decide which speech is harmful?
We must combat lies and falsehoods with criticism and conversation, not censorship or governmental control. Bad ideas must be defeated by better ones. Bad arguments must be countered by better ones. And it is up to all of us to learn to tell one from the other. To argue that we should not be allowed to see things that other people have determined constitute misinformation is to argue against our own freedom. And those freedoms grant us the only shot we will ever have at discovering the truth for ourselves.
