I thought we were about to see the beginning of the end of what I call the Misinformation Pandemic. Apparently not.
Arguably the world’s largest purveyor of information (and misinformation), Elon Musk, has spent a couple of hundred million to play a pivotal role in getting Donald Trump elected. He is now to take a seat in the new Trump administration to direct “government efficiency”.
Stripping away government regulation and social welfare suggests he wants to loot the system rather than reform it. His two hundred million was a sound investment. On Trump winning, his stock went up tens of billions in value.
The Misinformation Pandemic will continue to have victims as Musk’s “government efficiency” translates into taking away government support from the many less well-off and giving it to the very few extremely well-off.
People will become financially sicker and even die as the pandemic continues and immunity comes too late for them.
The Misinformation Pandemic began, of course, as the internet flourished, removing the filters of (mostly) good sense provided by print and broadcast media, and replacing that with a technology that allows anyone to shacklelessly publish directly to mass audiences anything they want.
More insidiously, to publish to niches of like-minded susceptible people across the planet, building and monetising audiences as they go.
What was initially thought to promise to be a vehicle of knowledge in fact also became a purveyor of political lies; scams; personal abusive bullying; and using fear and ignorance to sell stuff. All four are grounded in the pursuit of ill-gotten money and/or abusive power.
Legislative attempts to provide inoculation are proving difficult if not impossible. Legislation for truth in political advertising has faltered in Australia. There is political agreement in Australia to quarantine under 16-year-olds from social media, but wide recognition that it will be easily circumvented and amount to little on the ground.
Moreover, the evidence that social media is responsible for higher youth mental illness is tenuous at best. There are plenty of other candidates.
In truth, there is no easy vaccine, just a long, slow process of a gradual build-up of immunity against misinformation.
Immunity comes with knowledge, intelligence, education, judgment, and institutional development – often in very short supply, as the November 5 result shows. Immunity from misinformation also develops with experience. As the next four years in the US will show.
Take scams, for example. A few years ago, people fell for the most simple scams. But word got around. The scammers had to become more sophisticated. Word got around. Then institutions, like banks, started warnings. Public immunity has built up. Most people now are more wary, though there is some way to go.
Online bullying is more difficult – because bullying is, unfortunately, part of human nature. Preying on the weak to gain power and money would happen without social media.
Political lies are not new either. But they have been more effective with the emergence of the internet because pre-internet people thought that most media was reasonably credible and sub-consciously equated the new internet with the old media without realising that more and more players were using the internet to propagate misinformation for their own ends.
Again, legislating for truth in political advertising is not a substitute for people developing the skills to sniff out and dismiss lies and rubbish. As more people in conversation ask “you didn’t believe that, did you?” and engender a reaction of shame for being so gullible, the less effective political lies will become.
The most immoral are those who push misinformation merely to attract attention and engender fear to sell wellness products which are just costly junk medicine. The anti-vaxxers are at the top of the list. We don’t want the victims to learn their lesson through the illness or death of their children, but it is happening as the anti-vax message grimly attracts enough customers to jeopardise the herd immunity that usually comes with vaccination rates above around 85 per cent.
As more people fall victim to the Misinformation Pandemic, the more people will learn and the more immunity will build and the more people will seek out the truth, question sources, and not fall for scams, nor rise to the bait of bullying.
You can see immunity from the Misinformation Pandemic building. It comes, of course, at the cost of trust, at least initially. However, it is taking far longer than I, and perhaps many others, thought.
In Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, La Tremouille asks: “And who the deuce was Pythagoras?”
The Archbishop replies: “A sage who held that the earth is round, and that it moves round the sun.”
La Tremouille: “What an utter fool! Couldn’t he use his eyes?”
It has taken 500 years for it to be comprehensively accepted that the earth is round and goes around the sun. And that we are not the centre of the universe.
And 165 years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolution is still not universally accepted.
It took 70 years from the first research papers for it to be generally accepted that smoking causes lung cancer. And climate science is still rejected by far too many for human safety, especially the newly elected president, because the Misinformation Pandemic is still raging.
Humans may not be good at coping with information revolutions with any alacrity – especially the most recent one. But cope and adapt we will.
Lastly, the Misinformation Pandemic has surely made it hard to accept the cliché that in a democracy the voters always get it right. While the Misinformation Pandemic rages, it is hard to blame them for getting it wrong. After all, that is the purpose of the purveyors of misinformation – to get the mass of voters to vote against their own interests and in the interests of the few.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 12 November 2024.