Disinformation, Misinformation, and Politics

So apparently a person’s political leanings have a big influence on their willingness to hop on social media and gleefully post stuff that just isn’t true – or if they’re feeling somewhat lazy, just link to or repost disinformation, misinformation or other fake crap.

Around the world, people who lean right-wing (including some who lean so far right that they fall right over) spread more disinformation and misinformation than people who don’t lean right-wing.

Why would this be?

It would be because the entire political agenda of people who are right-wing is based on a series of lies. Why would the entire political agenda of any group of people be based on a series of lies?

That would be because sometimes people just do not like the truth. Sometimes they don’t like the truth so much that they pretend it isn’t the truth.

Sometimes people like lies and disinformation.

Sometimes lies are so much prettier and more attractive than the truth that people fall in love with their favorite lies and even build their lives around them.

And sometimes people get fooled. Getting fooled hurts. Sometimes getting fooled hurts so bad that you just can’t admit to yourself that you got fooled. So you kinda lie to yourself that you didn’t really get fooled. And you kind of lie to everyone else that you didn’t get fooled. And then you gotta keep up the lie. Which sometimes entails telling more lies. And bigger lies. And more complicated lies. And lies that everyone who knows you’re lying can see right through almost before you tell them.

That’s not a right-wing thing. That’s a human thing. Leftists are just as prone to falling for lies as righties. There was a time when lots of leftists convinced themselves that Stalin was a good guy or that communism was gonna save the world.

The difference these days is that the right-wingers around the world are so much more extreme than the lefties that they hogging up all the lies, delusions, disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, and flat-out fucking bizarre made-up fake shit. That won’t last forever. But it may last awhile.

Anyway, here’s the research on political affiliation and frequency of sharing misinformation on social media.

A big part of the problem, and it is a problem, is that the public doesn’t trust the most trustworthy information sources. What are the most trustworthy information sources?

The mainstream media

Yup, that’s right. The mainstream media may be lamer than lamety-lame-lame-lame, but by and large it disseminates actual facts. ABC news, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post – all decent sources of factual information. Even AOL isn’t that bad.

But you currently cannot get a majority of the public to come to that conclusion. There are enough people getting their online news from places like dailycaller.com and infowars.com to mess up an entire nation. The Daily Caller and Infowars ain’t in business to tell you the truth. Infowars is in business to rip you off. The Daily Caller is in business to lie to you.

So…. so sad, too bad, you kinda got choose your old-fashioned mainstream media source of information and look to that if you want to get anything that’s not a …. lie. Where you should not get your news is from social media. Unless it’s the social media of one of those old-fashioned lamestream media outlets.

So there you go. Something to not get fed up with – mainstream media.

And something to get fed up with – lying alternatives to mainstream media like, you know, the Daily Caller and Infowars.