Misinformation and disinformation
Censorship?
People have a sense that is unique in nature.
We call it language.
With language we can get information from far away in space and time.
The language informs our structure of understanding. We learn about our world.
Our 5 biological senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) connect to reality pretty directly.
But that direct connection is also pretty meaningless. We interpret that information into a meaningful structure that we call a world. Language is key to sensing that world.
Most animals have depth perception, but that is always an interpretation. We don't experience depth directly - what we experience is a combination of the images from each eye which gets interpreted as depth. Since depth perception is an interpretation, it's prone to illusion. It's actually pretty easy to create the illusion with just pencil and paper.
Stereo music depends on a similar mechanism to detect the direction a sound is coming from.
Though language is a wonder for getting information it is also very very prone to misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation and disinformation both look exactly the same as real information and are interpreted by the same mental process.
An example of misinformation might be information that vaccines cause autism. To the non-expert the statement in itself is plausible if given by an authority figure.
An example of disinformation is Trump's lie that Jan 6, 2021 wasn't an insurrection. We all saw it happening at the time. That was caused by months of disinformation against all evidence that somehow the election was stolen from Trump.
But the distinction is a bit fuzzy - personally, I can't believe that anti-vaxxers have not seen the good arguments and evidence in support of vaccinations
To set up the illusion of stereo vision takes a bit of effort and you're highly aware when doing it that you're dealing with an illusion. I've long liked that illusion as a direct probe into how my brain works.
No such effort is required with mis/disinformation. You just have to say it and there it is - just as real and easy to understand as anything else that's said. You don't need a special apparatus to get it.
I think mis/disinformation is a huge problem. If language is a sense then mis/disinformation is like blindfolding people so you can lead them easily.
What is to be done?
Censorship is not the answer at all. There's no god and I wouldn't trust anything less as a censor.
And besides - censorship is a whack-a-mole sort of thing. Suppress info here and it just pops up there.
One thing about mis/disinformation is that it does try to construct a world that does not work in reality.
I like the idea of an open society. That is, a society that solves its problems as they arise without having a conception of what the future should be like. The problem with autocrats is that they can't see social problems; they see their own interest which creates a brittle culture.
Democracies have prospered against many tyrants in the last 150 years
The blindfold of mis/disinformation may destroy democracy if too many people take it on. But also it's a thing that people can take off. McCarthyism in the 1950s came to that sort of end - people were like "What is this thing on my face!!!?"
(ok I dramatize:-)
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.