By Jo Nova
The “Misinformation Industry” has been caught with its pants down — accidentally finding, then burying, the information that nearly everyone in their own industry “leans left”.
This is a field that generated headlines about how conservatives are more susceptible to believing misinformation, and conservatives consume more Facebook disinformation. It would be awkward then if the whole field turned out to be leftist academics, and they tried to hide that, which is exactly what just happened.
The leading “journal” on misinformation surveyed 150 of its own academic experts, then forgot to mention that one of the most striking and significant results from their own survey was that being a “Misinformation Expert” was a left wing phenomena.
Bjorn Lomborg noticed the statistics on their self-admitted political leanings buried in an appendix, and graphed it himself. He writes: “Misinformation experts are perhaps not quite unbiased”.
There was barely a conservative among them:
Speaking of misinformation, it’s a little misleading, don’t you think, to pretend this doesn’t matter in a field “devoted” to researching political misinformation?
It seems The Misinformation Review has been misinforming its readers.
The Misinformation Industry looks, acts and smells like a leftist invention to censor the right
Looking at their own statistics, the “misinformation” experts are a self-confessed group of leftist soft-scientists with little understanding of maths, physics, mining, chemistry and real life.
Experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum: very right-wing (0), fairly right-wing (0), slightly right-of-center (7), center (15), slightly left-of-center (43), fairly left-wing (62), very left-wing (21).
And they specialize in media-science and political-science and think that’s a “broad range”:
The misinformation experts represent a broad range of scientific fields. Experts specialized in psychology (39), communication and media science (32), political science (22), computational social sciences (17), computer science (9), sociology (8), journalism (8), philosophy (5), other (4), medicine/other (2), linguistics (2), history (1), physics (1).
Experts of what exactly?
As a theoretical field of science, the experts of misinformation could not even agree on a definition of misinformation itself. Only one in ten thought misinformation was “false information” alone. The rest felt that “misleading people” intentionally, or even unintentionally could qualify, which means the misinformation label can apply to anyone discussing a fact which they thought was true, and is actually true, but (as defined by the left-voting-experts) was “misleading” in the wrong context.
They just want to shut you up
When asked what we should do about misinformation, the correct answer, of course, is “explain why it’s wrong”. But the experts didn’t even think of that — instead they suggest nine ways to hide information and the vast majority of the pool of “experts” were happy with nearly all of them — deplatform, silence, moderate and censor away!
When asked “why do people believe misinformation?” the politically biased experts didn’t even blink — it was the human failures of confirmation bias, social identity and partisanship they declared — while buried six feet deep in confirmation bias, social identity and partisanship.
REFERENCE
Altay, S., Berriche, M., Heuer, H., Farkas, J., & Rathje, S. (2023). A survey of expert views on misinformation: Definitions, determinants, solutions, and future of the field. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-119
Website: misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu
h/t Ryan Maue, David Maddison