‘The Problem With Misinformation Is the Problem With Information’

Rafael Holmberg uses a psychoanalytic lens to explore why fact-checking is not enough

The Trump administration has officially terminated all funding for research aimed at combatting online misinformation, which is distorting public opinion on life-threatening issues such as measles, war, and climate change. But even when factually correct information has been widely distributed through fact-checking campaigns to counter this, it is largely ineffective. The end of anti-misinformation campaigns, then, will likely only have a minor effect on its ubiquity.

What this highlights is an error in the assumption that there is a logical opposition between ‘information’ and ‘misinformation’: that one is self-evidently true, while the other is therefore self-evidently false.

As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggested in 1999, misinformation is not the antithesis of information – rather, it reflects a problem with information itself; it is the culmination of information.

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