What’s Behind the News

There’s a constant buzz about disinformation flooding everywhere. But! There are people who are fighting it. Here’s a DOT about the fight and ways to arm yourself against it all.

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Huffington Post interviews RFK Jr. debunker Seth Mnookin

HP interviewer Matt Shuham gets into how HP was an early and frequent booster of antivax junk before finally deleting much of their earlier coverage. Mnookin savages the notion of simply providing both sides of debates and letting readers pick and choose. He describes major problems with present day coverage, such as mainstream press simply calling RFK Jr.’s views “controversial” rather than flat out false, and how right wing outlets like the National Review and Fox are agressively pushing RFK Jr.’s lies.

Shuham: “Is there a version of engaging with those arguments in a debate that can be productive?“

Mnookin: “No, I don’t think so. It’s the same reason that I refused to debate Andrew Wakefield when my book came out, and the same reason I wouldn’t debate RFK Jr.”

“When you’re dealing with someone who is completely divorced from facts, it’s impossible to win a debate. If you are committed to reality, and if you are committed to evidence, it’s impossible to win a debate with someone who isn’t.”

Note that he doesn’t write off rebutting people like RFK Jr., but he talks about where and when it’s worth it and when it’s a waste of time, and even counterproductive.

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For another recent witness to the futility of treating bad faith goons as reasonable people:

Scientific American: Debating Antivaccine Cranks Debases Science and Harms the Public

“The mistake Hotez dodged and I made—no matter how well meant—was to participate in an adversarial format that presents science and pseudoscience as equals, creating a false balance between truth and lies. When evidence overwhelmingly supports one position while discrediting another, treating them as equivalent gives a misleading impression that a settled question—vaccination—is scientifically contentious. This is a Trojan horse for the most odious of mythologies.”

Neither of these people are arguing against debate in general. But they are clearly pointing out that refusing to vet the other side first is a sucker’s game. When someone takes a ridiculous position, assume they are, in fact, ridiculous rather than just uninformed.

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Poynter: Jessikka Aro, international fact-checkers discuss combatting Russian disinformation campaigns at GlobalFact 10

Journalists and fact-checkers “have to expose these operations and bring them to daylight, and also to acknowledge that this warfare exists and to explain it to people,” Aro said. “I have been so astonished that there are not so many journalists covering this topic.”

Aro offered specific tactics for defeating disinformation. She recommends labelling disinformation and pointing to the networks that produce it. In other words, passively citing ideas in isolation without noting where they come from helps disinformation spread.

She also says “encouraged journalists to keep investigating and producing stories — and to ensure those stories are ‘interesting enough to also reach those audiences who we might normally dismiss and who are turning to the Russian state media for information.'” In other words, journalism that follows tropes of dry descriptive “official sources say” and narrow fact checking is wildly insufficient.

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WSJ (news): Meta’s Threads Isn’t Labeling Propaganda Accounts From Russia, China State Media

Zuckerberg is clearly blowing off anti-disinformation experts.

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CNN: Former Fox executives say they regret helping Rupert Murdoch birth ‘disinformation machine’

Labelling Fox as a disinformation machine is valuable, but it’s also critical to label the disinformation when it jumps from the right wing outlets to the mainstream.

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For a good example of how to anticipate and undercut disinformation proactively:

NY Times (Opinion): Republicans Are Resurrecting Trump’s Burisma Lie

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And for an issue-specific guide to approaching a battle, here’s an excellent example of how people can do first things first: check the validity of sources, then look at their methods of arguments, and only if a source checks out move forward to examine the argument.

NARAL: How to Identify and Combat Anti-Abortion Misinformation

This post from earlier this month closes with a great bit of advice. In short, never lose sight to the overall framework. Resist the temptation to pointlessly cede ground, complicate, and become confused about where you stand:

“Extremists want to control people’s bodies, period. Their goal is to interfere in our personal decisions and restrict access to abortion care in order to amass political power. Call out the anti-abortion movement’s agenda. “

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For a front row view of how crazy the disinformation can be, this month’s article by Gary Shteyngart is a wild ride

The Atlantic: I Watched Russian Television for Five Days Straight

Shteyngart is an original, and hilarious writer by the way. I thought Absudistan was great.

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Self-styled contrarians are at the heart of the “Debate Me!” and “Just asking questions…” crowd. This recent book describes the horrifying, painful costs of treating them as serious people.

Psychology Today: “We Want Them Infected”: A Review of the Push for Herd Immunity

The review notes: “it is crucial to restate Howard’s principal caveat: ‘No population has ever achieved herd immunity to a virus through natural infection alone.'”

And yet, multiple writers felt it necessary to give equal weight to “both sides” and treat a wild outlier as a subject worth debating. Meanwhile, as the piece notes, in New York City alone up to 800 people per day were dying.

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In terms of disinformation, there are few things sadder than a madman forcefeeding his vision to schoolchildren.

Jamelle Bouie: Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die

And as Bouie puts it both more eloquently and more intelligently than any right winger or contrarian ever has:

“The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were. A curriculum that distorts the truth of past injustice is meant, ultimately, for a country that excludes in the present.”

And just as there is a valid reason to laugh at anyone who suggests we should throw a good dinner into a blender with a bad one and hope for something better, we need to ask what, exactly, could possibly be the value of reading some bad faith kook like Rich Lowry from the National Review who defends DeSantis?

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And if you want background on how shameless right wingers manufacture their anti-historical frameworks, this recently released podcast is a great addition to the field.

If Books Could Kill – Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

Goldberg squeezed out roughly 500 pages of ridiculous nonsense about how conservatives had nothing — NOTHING! – in common with fascists on the eve of the Tea Party, and was hailed by many as an intellectual heavyweight because he had footnotes. And did I mention all those pages? That’s all you need to know, right?

In truth, the podcast wields a great scalpel as it carves up the pure nonsense in Goldberg’s book. How he crystalized so much of the idiocy we’ve been hearing since then about how Hitler was the same as Obama and the South was innocent of racism and everything was the fault of modern day liberals.

It also shows how it’s possible to construct, through sheer pigheaded refusal to act in good faith, a 500 page book that contains a bunch of facts that are carefully selected to back the most idiotic conclusions possible.

Did I mention the 500 pages? At one point the podcast’s cohost, Peter Shamshiri, groans about how much time it took to just read the nuttiness, and it underlines one of the basic stupidities of the claim that there is value, nay, IMPORTANCE to engaging with things like this. The kooks know that the more time people spend just sifting through the muck and mire, the less energy they will have to think about anything, really.

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In closing, let’s turn to turtles. As the good folk at American Tortoise Rescue have noted, even turtles and tortoises can be victims of misinformation.

And in the category of good news, the fine folks in Bloomington Minnesota are seeking a grant to fence off a portion of Bush Lake Road to keep their local terrapins safe.

“Turtles are worth all this trouble, [Bloomington’s water resources specialist Jack] Distel said, because they’re an important part of watery ecosystems, eating dead and decaying plants and animals that could spread disease.”

Good job, Bloomington!