Systemic Misinformation

Here's another belated link that was too long to include in my recent October Twitter round-up. 

Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor at the University of Bristol, posted a thread about a new article (published as open access) in the Current Opinion in Psychology. He co-authored it with several other researchers.

We consider the effect of misinformation on the epistemic integrity of democracy. We argue that democracy relies on the public agreeing on a body of reliable knowledge and information, two of which are particularly important:

1. Confidence in the processes by which power is distributed, in particular the integrity of elections. 
2. Reliable information about the evidence in support of various policy options. 

Both of these epistemic pillars of democracy are under attack in many countries (we focused on the US). The baseless claims by the loser of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump, that the election had been stolen from him are one example. 

One justification of democracy as a system of governance derives from the idea that it can deliver “better” decisions and outcomes than e.g. autocracy because the “wisdom of crowds” is known to outperform any one individual. 

The benefits of the wisdom of crowds vanish, however, if people are pervasively misinformed. We highlight the ongoing organized disinformation campaign against climate science as one example. A further example is the campaign against COVID-19 vaccines, which are linked through a common ideology and often involve the same political actors. 

The thread goes on from there, and the article, of course, goes into more depth.