Claims That Online Misinformation Fears Are Overblown Radically Understate the Scale of the Threat

Entire communities are now becoming locked into dangerous belief systems that are almost impossible to challenge. This is not freedom, and has profound implications for our governance, writes Eliot Higgins

The US libertarian think tank the Cato Institute recently published an extensive paper arguing that public concern about misinformation was overblown, politicised, and harmful to free speech. It is slick, readable – and fundamentally misleading.

One of the central complaints of the author, David Inserra, is that no one agrees on what ‘misinformation’ actually means, and he is right – there is confusion. So let’s be precise.

Media scholar Claire Wardle and her colleagues have created a helpful typology:

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