How Big A Threat Does Misinformation Pose To Democracy

Ullrich Ecker is a professor at the School of Psychological Science and a fellow at the Public Policy Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Jon Roozenbeek is assistant professor in psychology and security at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK. Sander van der Linden is a professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, UK. Li Qian Tay is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Medicine and Psychology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. John Cook is a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne, Australia. “Epistemic” is a good five-dollar word.

It means, roughly, “of or relating to knowledge or knowing.” Or “relating to knowledge or the study of knowledge.” (Think epistemology, fellow liberal-arts graduates.) The first time I remember encountering it in mainstream usage was during the early days of the Obama administration, when some of the internal intellectual bonds within the Republican Party were beginning to fracture. For those conservatives skeptical of the growing Tea Party/talk radio/Fox News wing of the party, a key phrase was “epistemic closure” — the idea that some of their fellow partisans had shut themselves off... From The New York Times in 2010: Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R.

Levin and Glenn Beck — have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.” (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.) As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy, like the belief that President Obama was not born in the United States... Soon conservatives across the board jumped into the debate. Jim Manzi, a contributing editor at National Review, wrote that Mr. Levin’s best seller, “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” (Threshold Editions) was “awful,” and called the section on global warming a case for “willful ignorance,” and “an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.” Megan...

Keywords: Communication; Government; Policy; Politics. “We’re seeing higher levels of distrust in our elections, how they’re run and the validity of their outcomes,” USC Price’s Mindy Romero says. (Photo/iStock) With misinformation on the rise and American voters increasingly losing faith in elections, USC experts explore strategies to restore confidence in democracy. Public trust in our free and fair elections — a fundamental pillar of American democracy — is eroding. We don’t need polls to tell us Americans are losing faith in democracy, though the numbers back it up: Recent survey data shows that almost 60% of Americans are dissatisfied with the current state...

The flow of misinformation and coordinated disinformation campaigns are generating alarming levels of doubt among voters, USC experts say. From narratives around contentious issues like abortion and immigration to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, the damaging effects of misinformation on democracy are increasingly evident. Even misinformation surrounding federal responses to crises such as Hurricane Helene show how public perception can be swayed and the consequences that can follow. Disinformation Is the Real Threat to Democracy and Public Health Disinformation abounds, and it can kill. Fortunately, it can often be unambiguously identified

By Stephan Lewandowsky, Sander van der Linden & Andy Norman House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) speaks to reporters before heading into a House Republican caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on September 19, 2023 in Washington, DC. Disinformation is the coin of the modern realm. Vaccine denial, climate denial, election denial and war-crime denial have joined the grotesque denial of the Holocaust in the ranks of dishonesties now regularly foisted on the public. We can, however, do something about this crisis of the information age.

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