In Praise of Misinformation
There have been increasingly clamorous calls for the banning, removal, or controlling, or censoring of ‘misinformation’ as an enforced general policy. This may be through law backed by punishment. But what does this mean? The calls seem also to be suggesting that something new and perilous is happening in human life that was not there before. That now, because of misinformation, something especially harmful is occurring.
The fashionable word ‘misinformation’ is not one I like as it comes loaded with an assumptive catch-all normative condemnation and is ironically misleading, to the point that it is in itself an example of putative misinformation – but as it is in use one has to deal partly in its currency. By coining the word ‘misinformation’ there is the suggestion that something ominously new is happening when in fact there is not.
It would be wrong to give a list of ‘examples’ of misinformation – though that is how discussion of it is often done, presenting lists of question-begging presumptive cases that reveal the author’s own present assumptions – for that would only precisely stir a cauldron of claims and counter claims in distracting detail, drawing one away from the question of whether controlling misinformation generally makes sense. All the compiling a list of examples would do is air the prejudices and assumptions of the person doing so.
Banning (let us just stick to that for now) misinformation essentially involves banning people from getting things wrong. It is banning people making mistakes. This is clearly absurd. Nor is something new happening. Human beings have always got things wrong and always will. There is no convincing sense in which people getting things wrong is more harmful now in the history of the human race than it was in earlier times and epochs. It would be like proposing a general ban, or ‘war on’, wickedness or naughtiness.
A small aside. One must distinguish ‘misinformation’ from ‘disinformation’. Misinformation involves getting things wrong, that is, thinking true and spreading as true assertions or claims that are false, unaware that they are false. Disinformation involves not getting things wrong but deliberately spreading as true claims or assertions that are false while aware that they are false. Although lying is a complex term when looked at closely, disinformation is close to just lying, an attempt to deceive knowingly, something that may happen for various nefarious purposes, or even putatively benign ones. I shall concentrate on misinformation here but will note that the idea of trying to ban generally people deceiving each other is equally absurd, ill-conceived and implausible as that proposed for misinformation, deception being a feature of human life since humans first walked the earth. But no-one has suggested a general ban on face-to-face lying, oddly enough.
It may be said that the problem with misinformation today is that it may be spread far more readily than was possible in the past through computer internet technology. This seems to be the target – the convenience of trying to block computer messages is what those proposing such bans have in mind, as presumably banning people telling other people face to face things that are wrong is not included – which rather goes to show how strange in principle such a suggestion is.1
Up until a couple of hundred years ago, that is, for almost the entirety of the existence of homo sapiens, there were only three ways of communicating with another human being: one could be in their presence; one could travel to be in their presence; or one could send a written or verbal message by some other human being travelling to be in the other human being’s presence.2 While this may be so, it’s difficult to see how a strong case can be made for anything new happening here that is not essentially at most a difference in degree and not in kind. People can just pick up a single book and, influenced by it, become cruel fanatics.
Moreover, the central happening is not that the availability of misinformation has dramatically increased, but rather that the availability of putative information has increased. Some of the things we read or hear are true and other things false. But this, again, has always been the case and always will be. It is just part of the human condition. The form of life for human beings, the nature of the human mind, involves a curiosity about what is really the case and what is not really the case, and a thirst often to be able to distinguish the two. No other creature we know of has the slightest interest or understanding of this attitude to the world. We sift, or try to sift, the true from the false. Sometimes we do not try too hard as a result of indifference. This may be bad or it may be good, as when we would rather live our lives without examining the truth too much, especially concerning those matters that give our lives comfort, things that get us through life, a life that can at times be very far from easy. For example, if you find something in your life that gives it meaning that does no harm to others, or find someone that one may reasonably supposes loves you, it is perfectly reasonable not to look into the truth of what is involved too intently.
It is hard to see any essential difference between, say, the coming of public libraries (which contain not only books but also newspapers) and the advent of ‘the internet’. There is of course a long history of self-appointed elites and authorities trying to suppress literacy and access to reading matter for fear of that it might put ideas in ‘ordinary’ people’s heads, ideas they supposedly may not be able to cope with – unlike the clever and wise self-appointed elites, authorities and other priestly classes. From the denial for centuries of a vernacular Bible to the supposedly terrifying arrival of the cheap, and therefore accessible, paperback book, and still the denial of education to women. All were opposed as dangerous. You cannot allow the grubby masses to get their hands on this stuff. They may start thinking things that have not been filtered and checked by those who know better, their ‘betters’.
With an increase in information comes an increase in misinformation simply because people are fallible and get things wrong. A clamp down on misinformation would inevitably involve a clamp down on information simply because no-one is infallible, and people are bound to make mistakes as to which is which. A banning of information does not sound anything like as attractive as a moral crusade as a ban on misinformation – but in aiming to do the latter one would undoubtedly end up doing the former. In case this is doubted, one only need reflect that the determination to ban misinformation is itself underpinned by a pervasive ability of human beings to get things wrong, in this case get wrong what is misinformation. Or shall we make the arrogant and implausible claim that it will not be the people who ban and control misinformation that succumb to believing and holding as true what is false, but always someone else? Who is going to have the audacity to set themselves up in a general sense as the arbiter of the true and the false for others? It is hard enough in particular cases. The world has never been short of people, often embedded and emboldened in institutions to go beyond what they would consider thinking and doing as individuals, that of telling other people what is true and what is false, their gross audacity salved in their minds often by convincing themselves that they are only doing it as part of the body they belong to for other people’s own good.3 Although down through history there have been attempts to anoint priests, experts, leaders and guardians as incorruptible sources of truth, in the end you cannot trust anyone with the truth, so best to get every view out there in the open and let the views fight it out. It is best to test any claim to truth in a marketplace of claims, as only then will any truth emerge worth its metal.
Ironically, the very authorities and institutions – usually ending in governments – who propose to oversee the banning or control of misinformation (and disinformation), deciding what it is and what it is not, as history clearly shows, are the greatest perpetrators of misinformation (and disinformation) – not individuals. This leaves people, including the authorities and institutions as they lose their way rationally and judgementally, even supposing their intentions are initially good, standing amidst a bewildering array of inter-reflecting distorting mirrors quite lost in the attempt to determine what is true or false, as you never know what has been tampered with or withdrawn.
This, in case one is misled, is not an embracing of relativism about truth. That is to say, crudely put, that something can be both true and false depending on how you look at it. Things can just be true or be false but getting it right or knowing what is true and what is false is quite another matter.
The banning of misinformation is also highly dangerous, for one of the motivations for it is perilously close to treating other people as mindless vessels unable to think for themselves, unlike some superior selves who are not prone to being deceived or misled, let alone fooled. This sets a dangerously disparaging attitude towards other people, perhaps whole groups of them, that could easily lead to treating them as lesser than human beings, with correspondingly fewer rights. People must sort out what they believe and do not believe for themselves, and take responsibility for it, for what they decide and what may follow.
The banning of misinformation is also highly damaging. It is damaging to information, that is the holding as true things that are true. This is because we learn from our mistakes. Indeed, it is the foundation of the scientific method, for we test theories, and whether they are something we should rationally believe, if only provisionally, by exposing them to what might show them to be false. Going up blind alleys, holding theories, beliefs, and finding out if they are false by testing them, is the way we stop going up blind alleys, and as a result hold theories and beliefs that are true. The juxtaposition of different views as to what is true is the meat and drink of arguments, and for those arguments to function effectively as a means to finding the truth, or at least the most defensible view, those various views have to be brought together and clash, and not be summarily excluded or hidden. False assertions are best dealt with by being found out, not by being banned.
Information and misinformation are just that, the true and the false. But the true and the false often to be understood properly require each other, and the judgement of correct emphasis, and that requires a broader grasp of whatever the subject is, and in the end that requires knowledge.4 One tinkers about with the foundation of this at one’s peril, for one knows not what the consequences might be of suppressing bits of putative misinformation.
Of course, all this is perfectly compatible with challenging or correcting misinformation or falsehood in a personal capacity. Arguing with people as to what is the truth or the most supported view to hold as far as evidence and argument are concerned. As is the case in this essay! There are circumstances where this is inappropriate, as when a belief one thinks false is held by another and is a pillar of their life and a comfort, and it does no harm, and to take it away would be cruel and unnecessary. One might leave someone thinking their son had died a hero in a war, when one knows it was not true, for example. Or leaving someone to live with a peaceful mind because of something they believe, when no good will come of disabusing them of it.
A general attempt to ban, control, or curtail, misinformation would be a bad idea – and would probably propagate more misinformation connected to the attempt – especially if, as surely it would be, it were carried out by governments or other institutions, the motives of which are unlikely to be pure and be untempted by the efficacy of manipulating what people hear and see as putative information, for their own ends that have nothing to do with truth or falsity – but rather for the sake of matters such as power and survival, a certain result, not losing face, or not being culpable for mistakes.
Leave the misinformation where it is. Let it fight it out with the information, and in people’s minds. Limitations on free speech never end well.
◊ ◊ ◊
Dr John Shand is a Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at the Open University. He studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and King’s College, University of Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge, Manchester and the Open University. The author of numerous articles, reviews, and edited books, his own books include, Arguing Well (London: Routledge, 2000) and Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2014).
Contact information:
- Dr John Shand, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom.
- https://open.academia.edu/JohnShand
- http://fass.open.ac.uk/philosophy/people
John Shand on Daily Philosophy:
Notes
-
It is hard to see what essential difference there is between blocking or taking down computer digital messages and essays and censoring letters and burning books (as in the dystopia of Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451). So why not attack or limit books then? Surely they must be packed with ‘misinformation’. The censorship or control of the various digital online computer outlets looks tantamount to the control or censorship of publishers. In Fahrenheit 451, the only way to save the books is for a person to become the book, totally memorise it, for up until that point the authorities were not seeing into people’s heads, their minds. But now one has doubts as to whether that is safe, and that there are as Orwell warned, ‘thought crimes’, mere thoughts that are crimes. ↩︎
-
I will set aside smoke signals, drumming, and heliography, as not being rich enough in content to make much difference, not to mention stunted in range. ↩︎
-
C. S Lewis: ‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own consciences… This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.’ C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (1942-1963) (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B Eerdmans Publishing Co,1996) ↩︎
-
For example, the assertion that ‘The earth is round’ gains tone and emphasis from the assertion that ‘The earth is flat’, and was once believed to be so by people, as well as pointing tacitly to the distinction between reality and appearance, respectively. The same applies to sun moving, whereas it is the earth that is in reality moving giving the appearance that the sun is moving. ↩︎
