Great piece from Manvir Singh in the New Yorker on how the causes and mechanics of misinformation are often misunderstood. In particular, it covers how the shared belief system that misinformation depends upon requires explicit participation by those that adopt it.
Findings like these require that we rethink what misinformation represents. As Dan Kahan, a legal scholar at Yale, notes, “Misinformation is not something that happens to the mass public but rather something that its members are complicit in producing.” That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.
From this perspective, railing against social media for manipulating our zombie minds is like cursing the wind for blowing down a house we’ve allowed to go to rack and ruin. It distracts us from our collective failures, from the conditions that degrade confidence and leave much of the citizenry feeling disempowered. By declaring that the problem consists of “irresponsible senders and gullible receivers,” in Thagard’s words, credulity theorists risk ignoring the social pathologies that cause people to become disenchanted and motivate them to rally around strange new creeds.
— Manvir Singh, Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation, The New Yorker
While Singh doesn’t mention it in the article, the piece reminded me most of Joseph Laycock’s Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds. Laycock’s analysis of the moral panic and how shared realities are constructed in daily life, religion, role-playing games, and yes, even conspiracy theories, makes it an apt companion piece to this article.