Thread by @WesPegden

A lot's happened these past years relevant to how we think of the effects of "misinformation" and how to combat it. There was FB censoring lab-leak posts for a year before backtracking, there's Rogangate; there are also weird conspiracy theories about vaccines/5g/etc on SM.🧵
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The term misinformation is often abused, and deployed to belittle what is actually legitimate disagreement or uncertainty.

But claims that are scary and have no basis in truth do spread on SM and have large effects on important individual decisions.

The problem is real. 2/

Most of what people propose doing in response to this is more aggressive censoring. Of course this raises all sorts of questions about who would have the expertise to do this well, what it would actually accomplish in practice, what negative effects it would have, etc.
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Faced with the realization of these difficulties, I think some people, having reasonably concluded that censorship is not a great option, are left with the impression that there's not much a modern society could do to reduce the worst effects of the dissemination of confusion.
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But I think this misses something obvious, which is that misinformation thrives on a vacuum of trusted information.
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For all of our scientific institutions and public figures with scientific credentials, we have no well-known scientific figures who maintain impeccable and apolitical reputations by conservatively sharing only what scientific evidence shows at very high levels of confidence.
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Of course all sorts of decisions have to be made without the highest standards of evidence. But when we fail to distinguish what we truly know with high confidence from what is much more speculative but the basis of policy decisions anyways, we create fertile ground for mistrust

Every one of our nationally known public scientists has been willing to make extremely poorly supported statements that advance a policy goal of the politicians they work for.

It is no surprise they do not command broad trust across society.

https://twitter.com/CDCDirector/status/1456645731691925518

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The hybrid role of
"government scientist / political cheerleader"
is unlikely to go away, as it serves a political purpose. But one could imagine cultivating a second tier of truly trustworthy voices, who would never aim to advance policy and only be a refuge from confusion.
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These figures would not have told people in March 2020 that N95's don't work for regular people, only for Dr's, or in 2021 that we know that cloth masks are highly effective.

They wouldn't have said that vaccinated people can't transmit, or that vaccines prevent new variants.
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But they would be a trusted source about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and therapeutics, which is something the present system has left cynics without.

They could be a lifeline to people that are willing to trust someone they have never heard stretch the truth.
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tldr,
Rather than hoping to eliminate "misinformation" through extensive, highly competent censorship, we could aim to cultivate trustworthy information sources which have truly unimpeachable records of conservatively reporting evidence, never subservient to policy goals.
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