Disinformation - Part 2
I was at a friend’s house a month ago, and she said, in earnest, that unregulated free speech was dangerous because it allowed the spread of disinformation. I asked her if historically governments and powerful institutions like The Church have had a good handle on whether something’s disinformation. She looked at her phone, got absorbed in something and didn’t seem to hear or process my question. The conversation moved onto other topics.
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Disinformation should be relatively harmless to those of us raised with a skeptical mindset, a mental and psychological immune system, so to speak. While critical thinkers might get hoodwinked from time to time, they’re likely to course-correct because they revise their beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.
But people who tend to outsource their beliefs to authority can more easily get trapped in dangerous falsehoods. Once tricked, they have no means of course correction except perhaps an even more powerful authority incentivizing them in a different (and also quite possibly false) direction. It’s no wonder then that the most credulous are also the most worried about disinformation. But their desire to protect others from it is pure projection.
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The problem with trying to eradicate disinformation is obviously that someone must be able to distinguish it from good information. It would be easy to point out a few clear examples in retrospect like “Take this vaccine, and you won’t get covid” or “The Hunter Biden laptop story is Russian disinformation,” or “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” but there was a time when contradicting those statements itself was deemed disinformation.
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The Church deemed Galileo a heretic, and every paradigm shift in science is necessarily heretical to the prior one. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a paradigm shift. Human progress is only possible due to heresy. And heresy is just an old word for disinformation.
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You can no more eradicate disinformation from the internet than you can bacteria and viruses from the biosphere. Vibrant ecosystems require adaptation not sterilization.
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I don’t know what distraction she managed to conjure from the phone, but I let it go. After all, it’s important to be tolerant of others’ views, even when you find them disagreeable. But the view that free speech is dangerous and must be policed isn’t actually a particular perspective, but a view to end all views, a disabling of the corrective mechanism essential to us as error-prone human beings.
Free speech with all it implies, pleasant and unpleasant, is the sine qua non for the discovery of truth, the possibility of an enlightened society. There is a reason it is the very first amendment of the US Constitution, and why virtually every despotic regime and illiberal institution from time immemorial has sought to ban it.
Maybe I should have insisted on a response.