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The "misinformation problem" seems like misinformation

If anything people have become better informed

[5]Matthew Yglesias
5 hr ago
89

People are often misinformed about things. Sometimes they obtain that
bad information from false or misleading media coverage; sometimes that
media coverage is deliberately false. And there’s a fine line between
media coverage that seeks to frame issues appropriately and coverage
that’s propagandistic.

All of this is bad.

Propagandistic media coverage is bad, spreading false information
deliberately or carelessly is bad, misleading people is bad, and it’s
unfortunate that voters (and, frankly, elite policymakers) often make
important decisions operating under misconceptions.

That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation
has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due
to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political
trends liberals are most angry about. If anything, people seem to be
better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect
because our information technology has gotten better — and it is very
hard to think of any cure for misinformation that would not be worse
than the disease.

The internet makes me better informed

Accusing other people of being misinformed is easy since the stupidity
of others will always be more evident than our own blind spots.

But personally, I really do think the internet makes me a lot
better-informed than I was when I was in high school in the 1990s. And
I don’t think that’s just because I was in high school; I was a young
politics dork who read The Economist and small political magazines in
the school library during free periods.

Thanks to the internet, I now can and do:
* Read many abstracts of new academic research, read some actual
papers, and maintain a vast storehouse of links in case I ever
decide to write on a particular subject.
* Directly access think tank output on policy issues, as well as the
running commentary from think tankers and university scholars on
the issues that they study.
* Read Canadian news coverage of interesting events that occur in
Canada and UK news coverage of interest events that occur in
Britain. Through the magic of Google Translate, even
German-language coverage of German politics is pretty accessible.
* Look up anything I’m curious about. Recently I wondered if the
government of Slovakia takes a pro-Russian stance (because the
prime minister is a right-wing populist and right-wing populists
are often pro-Russian) or a pro-Ukrainian stance (because Central
European nationalists are often anti-Russian). I [6]quickly
[7]learned that Eduard Heger is [8]pro-Ukrainian. I also found out
that U.S. industrial production has recovered to its pre-pandemic
level, but that the pre-pandemic level itself represented a small
decline from the actual peak in the summer of 2018.

It’s amazing that I can do all of that, and it makes me better
informed. Of course, this is my job. Most people have other things to
do with their time and perhaps less of an inclination to take advantage
of the internet’s bounty of information. But I am not the only
journalist who is able to take advantage of the internet.

Another thing I look up on the internet from time to time is
contemporaneous newspaper coverage of old policy debates, and the
quality of the coverage is just awful by today’s standards — but not
because the journalists covering the 1990 budget deal were idiots. They
had to work with analog reporting methods: they had very limited
ability to put charts in their stories, and they had no ability
whatsoever to link out to more detailed analysis that would let readers
dive deeper into some point of detail. Modern journalists are
better-informed and they create more informative journalism, which
makes you more informed as a reader — and you’re not the only one.

People seem mostly better informed

Also thanks to the internet, I can look up whether it’s true that
people have become more misinformed over time.

And on the basics of civic life, that doesn’t seem to be the case. A
survey from the [9]Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2006,
only 33 percent of people could correctly identify the three branches
of government. By 2021, that was up to 56 percent. That’s way higher
than 33 percent! It’s also a powerful reminder that a huge share of the
population doesn’t pay any attention at all to politics and government.
A broader survey of political knowledge from the American National
Election Survey shows [10]no change in civic awareness except perhaps a
small rise since the 1990s in knowledge of which party controls the
majority in Congress.

Both of those seem consistent with the idea that politics has gotten
more polarized and high-stakes, with more people paying attention.

Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist who literally wrote [11]the book
on conspiracy theories, painstakingly cataloged old letters to the
editor and found a fairly [12]constant level of conspiracy theorizing
in them for over a century.

Brendan Nyhan, another political scientist who studies misinformation
in detail, writes in one of his papers that [13]“no systematic evidence
exists to demonstrate that the prevalence of misperceptions today
(while worrisome) is worse than in the past.”

My favorite study about how Facebook is bad finds that it follows what
you’d essentially call an addiction or compulsion paradigm. If you give
people a [14]cash incentive to turn off their Facebook account, they
spend more time watching TV but also more time socializing with friends
and family. This leads to an increase in their subjective well-being
(i.e., they’re happier) and generates “a large persistent reduction in
post-experiment Facebook use.” In other words, people struggle to go
cold turkey. But once they do, they generally like it. So what about
misinformation? It turns out that getting offline “reduced both factual
news knowledge and political polarization.”

I tend to think that a lot of what is going on is that people see the
internet increasing polarization — more people are fighting about
politics and saying things they think are really dumb — and confusing
that with people being misinformed.

Cranks often know a lot

When I went on The Joe Rogan Experience in early December of 2020, he
surprised me by veering way off-topic to do vaccine-skeptical takes.

Since this is not what my book is about and isn’t something I had
professional background covering, I was not prepared to rebut his
talking points effectively. That’s especially true because, at the
time, the Covid-19 vaccines were loosely Trump-branded, so I wasn’t
really expecting this to be a controversial issue and hadn’t looked
into it. Which is just to say that Rogan was actually much better
informed about the vaccine issue than I was. He (correctly) said the
common, non-severe side-effects were considerably worse than I
realized. And he also correctly said that the Phase III clinical trials
were not long enough to gauge how enduring the protection the vaccines
offered was. He, as a vaccine skeptic, had sought out a lot of vaccine
skeptic talking points, and many of those talking points were factually
true.

I, a normal sane individual who supports vaccination efforts, never
bothered to look into anything about it other than when was I going to
be able to get my shots.

But this is actually the general pattern in life. A normal person can
tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his
neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical
trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton
about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t
have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and
tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks. If you
can remember the number of the Kennedy administration executive order
about reducing troop levels in Vietnam, then you’re probably a crank
— that EO plays a big role in Kennedy-related conspiracy theories, so
it’s conspiracy theorists who know all the details.

More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation”
is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would
resolve political disputes. Both [15]David Neumark and [16]Arin Dube
know far more than you or I do about the empirical literature on
minimum wage increases. Nonetheless, they disagree. It is simply a
heavily contested question. Relative to Neumark, the typical
progressive is wildly misinformed about this subject; relative to Dube,
the typical conservative is wildly misinformed. And lots of political
disputes have this quality — most people don’t know that much about it,
but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question.
That’s why it’s a live debate.

Anti-vaccine sentiment isn’t new

When I asked Twitter followers to suggest the best evidence they had
that misinformation has become worse than it was 30 years ago, a lot of
people expressed their frustration with the people who won’t get
Covid-19 vaccines. I also find this extremely frustrating.

That said, vaccination rates for kids have [17]actually risen since the
mid-1990s, even as the number of [18]recommended shots has increased. I
think that is probably mostly due to SCHIP and Medicaid expansion
putting more children in regular contact with a healthcare provider
than with anything to do with media coverage. But that in turn is a
reminder that the focus on social media is probably a mistake.

A lot of people know that the licensing of the polio vaccine in the
1950s was widely greeted with celebratory headlines and the ringing of
church bells. A lot of people also know that as part of a
pro-vaccination effort led by the March of Dimes, Elvis Presley got
vaccinated on camera for the Ed Sullivan show. What I think a lot of
people don’t know is that the [19]announcement came on April 12, 1955,
and Elvis went on TV in [20]October of 1956. Eighteen months after
authorization, vaccine uptake was still slow, and that was after a much
longer development process.

IFRAME:
[21]https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/zlISLBBnYOo?rel=0&autoplay=0
&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

More broadly, I think we shouldn’t get cause and effect backward in
terms of the media and anti-vaccine sentiment.

In the case of Covid-19, we actually had pretty powerful early
validators in the form of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. But every
time Trump talks about vaccination in a positive way, that seems to
generate a negative response from his core audience. That dissuades him
from doing it. Trump, allegedly, is an aspiring statesman, so I think
it’s fair to say that he should do more to help push good information
onto his people even if it costs him.

But in terms of the media, I think it’s much more likely that people
are seeking out anti-vax content than that they are being brainwashed.
There is fundamentally no way anyone could be unaware that the bulk of
public health and medical professionals say the vaccines are safe and
effective. The anti-vax stance isn’t misinformed about this reality; it
simply asserts that public health and medical professionals are bad and
you shouldn’t listen to them.

Just as the people who voted for Trump in 2016 were surely aware of the
fact that most credentialed people in America felt he was a bad choice.

Trump and misinformation

Donald Trump is a huge liar, which generates a natural affinity between
complaints about Trump and complaints about misinformation.

But I think this is fundamentally misguided on a number of levels. The
2016 election generated a lot of discussion of “fake news,” but the
evidence suggests that a [22]relatively small group of people
constituted the bulk of the audience for fake news and that those
people were mostly very right-wing. By contrast, lots of people who
were not particularly right-wing read the New York Times’
[23]wall-to-wall coverage of the Hillary Clinton email saga, which
generated [24]more television coverage than all policy issues combined.
But critically, that email-centric coverage wasn’t “misinformation.”

There really was an FBI investigation into Clinton’s email server. She
really did violate federal policy about email usage. There really was a
re-launch of the investigation after new copies of already-reviewed
emails were discovered on her laptop. The coverage was disproportionate
and absurd but not false, and it appeared in very traditional outlets.

Meanwhile, if you want to somehow blame zany internet stuff for Trump's
ability to win, I think you need to grapple with the fact that the
[25]overall political climate was much more right-wing in the 1990s.
Bob Dole wanted to [26]kick the U.S.-born children of undocumented
immigrants out of public school, which is further than Trump ever went.
Trump’s positions on immigration were covered as more extreme than
Dole’s because [27]mass opinion is less hostile to immigration than it
was in the nineties.

But American politics has been shifting leftward for years.

I know some people find that absurd. But imagine if Kevin McCarthy gave
a speech this week where he said “after we retake the House this fall,
we’re going to fight against wokeness by kicking gay soldiers out of
the military and curb inflation by privatizing Social Security and
cutting Medicaid and K-12 school funding.” That would be the best news
the DCCC and DSCC have heard in years! But it would just mean McCarthy
was reiterating his support for Paul Ryan’s policy ideas from 10 years
ago. Meanwhile, Biden’s positions on virtually everything are at least
a little bit to the left of Obama’s.

So people vote Republican, I think, not because of “misinformation” but
because they perceive that the GOP position on many policy topics has
moderated while the Democratic Party’s has gotten more left-wing. I
think it’s very possible that the perception of Republican moderation
is, in fact, a mistake and that their next trifecta will return to hard
austerity and welfare state rollback. But the idea that they won’t
isn’t “misinformation” in the sense of bad Facebook memes; it’s
reflective of the parties’ current arguments and of mainstream coverage
of those arguments.

I do think Republicans are misleading people about their economic
policy agenda, but this is an extremely not-new phenomenon (remember
the Bush tax cuts or Ronald Reagan’s whoppers about welfare queens).

Truth is a moving target

Beyond being overstated, I worry that misinformation panic could, over
time, make discerning the actual truth harder.

A big part of my job is trying to understand what the credentialed
experts are saying and where the consensus is. But as anyone who’s paid
attention to Covid-19 knows, the consensus shifts. Masks were bad, then
they were good. You were supposed to emphasize the utility of even
cloth masks to the point where I think we clearly overshot the mark and
underemphasized the value of a high-quality mask. Trump’s vaccine
development timeline was too optimistic, but then it turned out to be
correct. Then the vaccines were more effective than the consensus
thought they’d be. But then immunity turned out to wane faster than the
consensus said it would. Boosters went from unnecessary to obligatory
in a blink of an eye. Thirty months ago, only right-wing cranks said
the FDA is too hesitant to approve new drugs. [28]Now it’s in Vox, and
the right-wing crank view is that the FDA is too permissive.

I think dumbass populists look at this and go “aha! the experts are all
a cabal of liars and we can ignore them in favor of whatever batshit
conspiracy theory we like!”

But rejecting the consensus opinions of qualified experts is not a
personality, it’s a grudge. It doesn’t give you answers because it
doesn’t tell you in what direction the error was made. During the
depths of the Great Recession when the establishment was
catastrophically under stimulating the economy, there was a mania for
Rand Paul’s argument that the Fed’s policies were dangerously
inflationary. But that whole experience created too much complacency,
and now we really do have inflation.

I think the only sensible thing to say about all this is that
discerning the truth is hard, and it requires debate and dissent.
Functional expert communities and well-run journalism institutions are
open to new information, to changing their minds, and to correcting the
record. But that process doesn’t work if the fact-check squad slaps a
“misinformation” label on you for saying the CDC is wrong about masks.

[29]As Tyler Cowen wrote last week, it does seem like our overall level
of public health knowledge is improving rather than getting worse.
People take the health risks of smoking much more seriously, and
compliance with seatbelt rules is high even though practical
enforcement is weak. And, yes, [30]seatbelt mandates were very
controversial when they were first introduced, and it took years for an
idea that launched in New York State to be more broadly accepted.

Information and polarization

The thing that really has increased is polarization and the
accompanying “everything is about everything” totalizing political
conflict.

New York was the first state to mandate seatbelts, and it was a
somewhat liberal-coded idea. But the bill was spearheaded in the New
York State Legislature by a Republican. There used to be tons of
moderate Republicans in northeastern state legislatures, and this kind
of public health measure that didn’t touch on the core of
distributional politics was exactly the kind of thing they liked to
make centrist gestures on. And U.S. Transportation Secretary Elizabeth
Dole seemed to take a fairly technocratic view of the topic. At the
same time, Democrats in other states did not face immediate pressure to
make this a uniform partisan view. There was just much more looseness
to overall conflict.

By the same token, we had plenty of conspiracy theories in the past,
but they weren’t [31]as clearly aligned with partisan politics.

But it’s worth saying that polarization seems more likely a consequence
of good information than bad. In times past you’d expect someone like
Steve Bullock — a locally popular guy who’d won several statewide races
— to win a Senate seat in a strong year for Democrats, even as Joe
Biden lost his state. His problem is that today’s voters have a more
sophisticated grasp of the structure of national political conflict and
know that a Bullock win would, in practice, empower progressives who
most Montana voters don’t like.

Similarly, while liberals make a big deal out of [32]“misinformation”
as a factor in the [33]rightward shift of Hispanic voters in 2020, what
[34]Equis Research (among others) find is that the Trump shift was
concentrated among self-described conservatives.

Polarization, in other words, is largely a question of people becoming
more sophisticated about American politics. People vote less on the
basis of ethnic identity or “Steve Bullock seems like a nice guy” and
more on the basis of ideological alignment.

This creates a lot of very real problems for a political system that is
not built to operate with highly organized, highly ideological
political parties. But misinformation doesn’t seem to be a significant
contributor to it. If anything, things are getting harder because
information has gotten better.
89
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[38]Binya
[39]4 hr ago·edited 4 hr ago

Wishful thinking drives much of the focus on misinformation. It's
unpleasant to be disagreed with. It shows people don't share your
values, or heaven forbid, that you might be wrong. Misinformation
evades that unpleasantness. People don't really disagree with you,
they're just misinformed.

It's part of the broader "politics as entertainment" problem. If your
top priority is to win elections and enact policy, there's an obvious
downside to implicitly labelling as stupid those who disagree with you,
and whom you need to persuade to cross to your side. But if you're just
trying to feel good about yourself, it's great.
Expand full comment
[40]Reply
[41]Andrew
[42]5 hr ago

I think a lot of the misinformation panic comes from the kind of techno
optimism that a lot of people lived in in the 90s and 00s. That good
information would drive out bad and basically we’d just end up debating
marginal tax rates forevermore.

Almost baked into a lot of that era’s cheerleaders like Thomas Friedman
is the whole world will one day, soon act like elite westerners and
there will still be gatekeepers on respectable conversations it will
just include a bit more diversity.
Expand full comment
[43]Reply
[44]2 replies
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