4 Comments

Your rant is unfortunately fairly one-sided. In it you present only the meagerest statements re the harms of misinformation while in a somewhat slipshod way relating efforts to contain/counter it as authoritarian. You do not seem to appreciate that what you glide over as misinformation, can be powerful enough to bring down countries or gather a public behind policies that have zero basis in fact. I’m thinking here both of Jan 6th in the US and of the support Putin enjoys for his insane polices that is created and driven by an extraordinary misinformation campaign.

Now Putin is interesting because while he combines the two trends, it doesn’t take much effort to analyze the power of each of these separately as applied to a guy who uses both. But I would strongly push back against the artificial silos you’ve created for misinformation and authoritarian style censorship. As Jan 6th shoildve taught us, misinformation can lead directly to authoritarianism. Trumpublicans don’t believe in democracy; they believe in stealing elections, thus their misinformation campaign re the elections in numerous states and cities in which Trump lost. This “misinformation” inspired millions to take to the streets to “defend” democracy when in fact they were the ones thwarting it.

That is the power of misinformation and if they’d been successful, we’d be governed by an authoritarian/mob elected government. So when you discuss this, make sure you fairly state the stakes in play with what your tone suggests is a little bit of inconvenient misinformation on the one side v big bad authoritarianism on the other. In fact, the former is usually a necessary antecedent for the birth of the latter.

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Would love to see you back on Clubhouse to hear the two of you discuss this.

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Solid point.

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Amazing! I hear you. We should discuss in more detail in a recorded audio format.

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