"'Nobody Was Tricked into Voting for Trump': Why the Disinformation Panic Is Over"

An interesting article in Politico.eu (Laurie Clarke). A few excerpts:

"Everyone [following the 2016 Trump victory and the UK Brexit vote] was saying technology is to blame," said Reece Peck, associate professor of journalism and political communication at the City University of New York. "These algorithms are to blame."

What followed was almost a decade of alarm over disinformation, with legislators agonizing over which ideas social media platforms should allow to propagate, and hand-wringing at how this was all irrevocably corroding the foundations of society.

A vibrant cottage industry — dubbed "Big Disinfo" — sprang up to fight back against bad information. NGOs poured money into groups pledging to defend democracy against merchants of mistruth, while fact-checking operations promised to patrol the boundaries of reality.

Not everyone was convinced of the threat, however….

It should be noted that the most powerful misinformation isn't spread solely by anonymous internet trolls.

Instead, "the most consequential misinformation tends to come from prominent, powerful domestic actors, top politicians," said Rasmus Nielsen, professor at the Department of Communication of the University of Copenhagen.

The majority of this information isn't outright lies, either, but is more likely to be nuggets of truth framed or decontextualized in a misleading way….

And some scholars have pointed out that Big Disinfo's roots, forged in a partisan revolt against Trump, led to glaringly one-sided speech prescriptions.

"Misinformation researchers have not transcended the partisan origins of the misinformation discourse to develop an unbiased and reliable procedure for separating misinformation from true information," wrote Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at Miami University, in 2023.

This has resulted in the field's "inadvertent tendency to take sides in the polarized political debates it attempts to study" and the "asymmetrical pathologization of what we, the researchers, consider to be false beliefs."

Of course, there is indeed plenty of falsehood (deliberate and otherwise) online and offline, as the article notes. Rather, the article and some of the sources it quotes question whether the recent focus on "disinformation" and "misinformation" has been an effective way of dealing with such falsehood.