Last week’s issue of The Economist featured a few articles about disinformation, which it defines as “falsehoods that are intended to deceive.” More precisely, I would define it as the intentional publication or spreading of fact-related information that is nearly certainly false by a person or an organization whose self-interest it is to spread the lie.
The article “The Truth/Lies Behind Olena Zelenska’s $1.1m Cartier” (“Anatomy of a Disinformation” is the title in the shorter printed version) details a recent case. Clemson University researchers retraced, step by step, the story of the wife of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenski supposedly spending $1.1 million on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The false story, recycled from a previous one, hopped from an Instagram video (probably from somebody in St. Petersburg) reposted on YouTube, to African news sites repeating it often as “promoted content” (that is, paid-for promotion), to Russian news outlets, to a fake American publication called DC Weekly, and to its reposting as a credible piece of news. Ultimately, it was shared at least 20,000 times on Twitter and TikTok. Many people now think it’s proven old “news.”
This sophisticated instance of disinformation was nearly certainly an operation of the Russian government. Such operations by foreign governments are especially difficult to uncover: no journalist can go, find, and interview in St. Petersburg the woman who is believed to have launched the lie on Instagram. In a freer country, the free press can more easily uncover and publicize government disinformation conspiracies, which makes such operations more risky and less likely.
As The Economist notes, disinformation from rulers has always existed, What has changed is the extent of private disinformation and private amplification of government disinformation. The dramatic drop in the cost of producing and disseminating disinformation has multiplied it. The danger comes as much from the left as from the right, notably from their populist wings. If you are “the people,” your lies become true.
Thirty years ago, an observer of human affairs knew that anything he read or heard on TV had been privately verified by some gatekeepers. A news item and its source had been vouched for by at least a journalist and his editor, not to speak of the media’s owners who had a brand name to protect. Similarly, the ideas and authors of books had to pass by private gatekeepers in the publishing industry. Self-publishing was very costly and identified the author as unknown and potentially unreliable (or uninteresting for novels or poetry). Since Gutenberg, much material of questionable value was published (think of Marxism), but its dissemination faced high costs, and the reader actually had to buy publications or go to a library to read the stuff. Even after the invention of radio and television, where the likes of Father McLaughlin were numerous, some private gatekeeping services were provided by station owners or those who financed the maverick broadcasters. While not preventing the circulation and challenge of ideas, the cost barrier eliminated much snake oil.
Nothing was perfect, of course, but what followed carried new dangers. What the World Wide Web did from the mid-1990s and social media from the first decade of the 21st century was to allow anybody to broadcast to the world ideas and disinformation alike at very low cost (at the limit, only the speaker’s or repeater’s time). AI is further reducing this cost: one does not even need to know how to write (that is, to put words one after the other in a coherent discourse) to produce disinformation. From the reader’s or listener’s viewpoint, distinguishing serious heterodox ideas and pure disinformation has become more costly—although AI will also provide tools to uncover fakes.
What is the danger? Past a certain point, no free (or more or less free) society could be maintained. An auto-regulated social order must collapse when a certain proportion of its members become hopelessly confused between what is true and what is false, or come to believe that truth does not exist. Even free agreement among individuals (trade is a paradigmatic example) becomes too costly as the probability increases that anyone is a liar and a fraudster. Where the tipping point is, we do not know. But we know it has been reached in countries like Russia (and the former Soviet Union) or China (despite a glimpse of hope after the demise of Maoism and its Red Guards). At that point, only an authoritarian if not totalitarian government can coordinate individual actions, manu militari.
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By Pierre Lemieux and DALL-E
READER COMMENTS
Richard W Fulmer
May 10 2024 at 11:04am
Technology may be able to provide a solution to the problems that technology caused. AI can be used as a filter to weed out misinformation. For example, it can:
– Check timelines.
– Verify quotes.
– Verify links.
– Check claims for compatibility with the laws of nature such as the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
– Spot discrepancies and self-contradictions.
– Spot the use of common logical fallacies.
– Verify that numbers and statistics add up.
– Identify the use of sensational or misleading language or words and phrases designed to elicit emotions.
– Determine if the article took quotes out of context.
– Cross-check the story’s claims against other sources.
A big problem with misinformation is that debunking it takes time. AI can reduce that time to seconds.
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 2:02pm
Problem is can you trust what those AI programmers will define as misinformation?
Richard W Fulmer
May 10 2024 at 5:40pm
That’s a potential problem, but none of the checks that I proposed are subjective. Either the numbers add up or they don’t, either the piece contradicts itself or it doesn’t, either the links work or they don’t, either it employed logical fallacies or not.
Moreover, people who would consider employing an AI fact-check filter presumably care about the facts. Such people would be unlikely to employ a filter that has a reputation for flagging true statements as false and false statements as true.
rick shapiro
May 13 2024 at 8:56am
“Moreover, people who would consider employing an AI fact-check filter presumably care about the facts.” There you have elided the major problem with your argument. MAGAts don’t care.
Richard W Fulmer
May 13 2024 at 2:08pm
Trump’s minions aren’t the world. I think that enough people care about the truth that products would sell. Knowledge is power only to the extent that it’s true.
Dylan
May 11 2024 at 10:56am
I know some smart AI engineers who built something along these lines, but just recently folded. Couldn’t figure out a monetization strategy that was credible to investors.
Richard W Fulmer
May 10 2024 at 11:07am
This is the fallacy in Mandeville’s “The Fable of the Bees.” A free market cannot exist in a society in which everyone is out to cheat everyone else and everyone knows it. Who would exchange goods or services in such a world? Honesty and trust are essential to free markets – not only do they lower transaction costs, but they make transactions even possible.
Pierre Lemieux
May 10 2024 at 1:33pm
Richard: Influenced (mainly) by Buchanan, I have come close to the opinion you are expressing; see, for example, his Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative. Hayek, of course, shares same beliefs, but with a quite different explanation of the source of morality. In a still different way, de Jasay argues that Humean conventions would or could develop in a free stateless society.
Jerry Melsky
May 10 2024 at 11:24am
The free flow of information is not a danger. The danger comes from thinking that there are better alternatives to the free flow of information and ideas. But, by far the biggest danger is having thought leaders and political leaders who believe it’s perfectly acceptable to tell lies and perfectly acceptable to censure information they don’t like.
The good ol’ days of newspapers and network news being our primary source of information was no utopia of truth. Consider:
Hearst’s newspaper empire single-handedly started the Spanish-American war by claiming with zero evidence that the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor by the Spanish. That war just so happened to distract Americans away from the sometimes lethal conflict taking between terribly treated factory workers and their bosses.
WWII was sold to the American public as a great moral struggle. In fact it was more about who would have access to what resources and what markets in the existing global imperialist economic system. Equally wrong in my view is that the “official” story is that good triumphed over evil in WWII. What actually happened was that communism gained a foothold while imperialism was fighting itself to the death.
Most of what Americans learned of the Vietnam war through “official” information channels was false. Once alternative stories about the war surfaced, the public turned against the war. Would this have happened faster if the internet existed in 1965?
If you have faith in the intelligence and common sense of the average citizen then there is nothing to fear from a free and open market for ideas, good, bad, truth and lie. But, things would be a whole lot better if our political leaders and our previously trusted information sources valued truth more highly.
Pierre Lemieux
May 10 2024 at 1:13pm
Jerry: I completely agree when you write:
As Craig suggests, a Ministry of Truth is the worst of all words. But I am afraid this is what’s in stock if the age of post-truth and proud ignorance continues to develop. Perhaps my post “Political Economy of the Alex-Joneses” expressed that better.
steve
May 10 2024 at 1:35pm
I wouldn’t think of it in terms of danger but rather cost/benefit ratio. So far, that ratio has favored free speech. It’s not free speech has no costs, it does, it’s just that it also has benefits and all of the alternatives are worse. However, it’s hard to know whether or not that will always be true. As noted above if disinformation is so cheap and it is universal that could add enough costs to stop or severely limit trade, stifling economic growth. I think the hope is that Richard outlines above that the countermeasures will stay ahead of disinformation but everything he suggests has costs while disinformation can in many cases cost only a person’s time, and maybe not much of that if they leverage AI.
Steve
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 2:21pm
This will work out about as well for you as Danton’s support for the Revolutionary Tribunal worked for him.
Pierre Lemieux
May 10 2024 at 3:08pm
Laurentian: It’s not clear what you mean. Is it that, like Danton, I should tell my executioner, “show the people my head. It is well worth seeing”?
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 4:47pm
Danton supported the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal to stop mob violence and was put to death by it just a little over a year later.
Pierre Lemieux
May 13 2024 at 11:13am
Laurentian: Of course I knew this. But how is it related to what I said in this post or in reply to your comments?
Craig
May 10 2024 at 12:32pm
Perhaps a government subsidized Ministry of Truth? 😉
Pierre Lemieux
May 10 2024 at 1:21pm
Craig: Why duplicate? The Russian state and the Chinese state would be happy to have Americans and Europeans as customers of theirs.
More seriously, my answer to Jerry above emphasizes that this would be the worst solution.
Craig
May 10 2024 at 1:39pm
Yes, of course, I never believed you would countenance such a thing but not too long ago there was the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ being proposed.
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 2:25pm
Didn’t quite a few classical liberals embrace the public school system and the universities to prevent this? Worked out well now didn’t it.
Pierre Lemieux
May 10 2024 at 3:33pm
Laurentian: Most classical liberals, in both the 19th and the 20th centuries, believed in the necessity of a public education system. To know how it fared, we would need to know the counterfactual: what the situation would be now had public education not existed. I think a cogent counterfactual argument can be made for both sides. We also need to distinguish among different sorts of public education “system” and at what education level.
Perhaps we can here invoke (or at least think about) Anthony de Jasay‘s vision of the 19th century:
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 5:08pm
The classical liberals supported public schools for the explicit purposes of state-sanctioned religious bigotry and for state-sanctioned social engineering so the dangers should have been obvious. The classical liberals just assumed that public school teachers and university teachers would always agree with them.
“Interlude” is the key word here. Classical liberals assumed the 19th century was the end of history however it is more and more looking like it was a weird fluke of history. How did this “interlude” happen, why did it end and can it be revived?
Richard W Fulmer
May 10 2024 at 6:07pm
Historian Edward Gibbon dismissed Oxford as the “seat of ignorance” and regarded it as little more than a drinking society. By contrast, the Scottish universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow were, at the time, centers of scientific and intellectual inquiry and advancement. The key difference was that Oxford’s instructors had tenure and were paid regardless of their performance. At the Scottish schools, professors were paid in proportion to the number of students they attracted to their lectures.
Modeling America’s education system after that of 18th Century Scotland – that is, letting parents and students select schools and teachers, and rewarding schools and teachers accordingly – would significantly improve educational outcomes.
steve
May 11 2024 at 1:15am
Wouldn’t the outcome be that the US had the best, most consistent economic growth in the world?
Steve
Richard W. Fulmer
May 11 2024 at 8:45am
Increased productivity is a likely outcome. And so is less illiteracy, less poverty, less homelessness, a shrinking permanent underclass, and, in general, more human flourishing.
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 2:50pm
I’ve never liked the term “post-truth” since it is predicated on the assumption that our politicians and the media were at some point truthful and that our elites and the general public never had “wrong” beliefs and never believed in conspiracy theories. Not to mention it is a very over-idealized and overly romantized take on Post-WWII US politics and media.
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 5:18pm
Is the fact that John Locke’s own patron supported the execution of over 20 innocent people because of a made-up conspiracy theory an example of a “truth era” or an auto-regulated social order?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popish_Plot
Laurentian
May 10 2024 at 7:05pm
This brings up a key flaw in classical liberal and libertarian thought: that a free society requires certain beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. Once people are free from ignorance, coercion, poverty and reaction they will behave in a way that classical liberals and libertarians want. Free trade, laissez-faire economics, technology, prosperity, immigration, social liberalism, education, travel, urbanization, consumetism, industrializaton, ending coercion, legalizing all drugs, yimbyism etc. Are all supposed to cause people to behave in a way that will support a free society. And there will be no social, cultural, economic and political changes that will undermine this.
Until very recently classical liberals and libertarians took it as a given that a free society required “civilized” behavior and nothing they advocated would cause the rise of “barbaric” behavior.
For example I see lots of people invoking Mill’s “experiments in living” and “tyranny of custom” but they tend to ignore the part in On Liberty were Mill explicitly states that his arguments in On Liberty are only meant to apply to “civilized” people.
Mill clearly took it as a given that “barbarians” would not be conducting experiments in living and that these experiments would not result in civilized people behaving barbarically.
Likewise Mill took it as a given that barbarians wouldn’t be challenging old customs and that civilized people wouldn’t be challenging customs that ensured civilized behavior.
Richard W Fulmer
May 11 2024 at 8:02am
A classically liberal society is one that respects and defends individual freedom and responsibility, personal property rights, free markets, limited government, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Our society no longer respects – much less defends – any of these, and no political party consistently champions them.
The country’s founders placed the liberal society they built behind the protective walls of a federalist system, a difficult-to-amend Constitution, and a separation of powers. But neither ideas nor walls defend themselves. Conservatives failed to adequately man the ramparts, which fell one by one.
Once independent states were bought off with federal money. We no longer must amend the Constitution to “fundamentally transform” the nation. Today we simply reinterpret the Constitution’s text along with its various “emanations and penumbras.” Congress ceded legislative powers to the executive branch, and the courts ceded judicial power to its regulatory agencies.
The libertarian solution is to repair and rebuild the ramparts; the populist approach is to complete their destruction.
Richard W Fulmer
May 11 2024 at 9:14am
Also, in a classically liberal society, while people would be free to make their own choices, they would also have to bear the consequences of those choices.
Imagine how dangerous the world would be for a person without the ability to feel pain – as happens with certain forms of leprosy. Such a person could hurt himself terribly by continuing to walk on a badly sprained ankle or putting his hand on a hot stove without knowing it.
Governments and doting parents can create a sort of moral leprosy by not allowing people and children to face the consequences of their actions, weakening or even destroying the feedback loops linking cause and effect.
As the consequences of self-destructive actions (such as dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, and drug and alcohol abuse) are increasingly borne by others, the incidence of such behavior will rise. At the same time, as the rewards for hard work, perseverance, and integrity fall, such virtues can be expected to fade.
Pierre Lemieux
May 11 2024 at 6:56pm
Laurentian: Note also that many weighty classical liberals including David Hume, Friedrich Hayek, and Anthony de Jasay believed that a free society generates the ethics necessary for its maintenance: in this perspective, morals are immanent, not transcendent. The question is complex.
But don’t get stuck in Mill, however interesting he is (despite taking the wrong branch in the 19th-century fork of the classical liberal tradition). Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, is of course a must to understand the Scottish Enlightenment, although it does require some historical knowledge. For a contemporary Enlightenment man, read James Buchanan Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, which is a small and easy-to-read book. Don’t limit yourself to my review of the latter, although I think it can provide a useful introduction. Expect to be challenged.
J. Michael Vore
May 12 2024 at 6:35am
Mr. Lemieux covers a lot of ground, yet he ignores the source of our online Babbledom: Section 230, which gives way to language without consequence. Publishing had individual responsibility until Section 230. Secondly, we must consider that news used to be self-regulated by its arrival at certain times of the day; why do we need every minute to be breaking? We don’t. Along with push technologies, sending us inane irrelevancies, how much can any of us take in before we’re simply scrolling automatons? Each of us has a limit; printed newspapers had guides that lead us to what we wanted. Where are those built-in guides online? Next we must be realistic about bias: to think that we all have some sense of neutrality as regards our information ignores reality. We don’t sort by neutrality but by bias. We tend to know what the biases are of the sources we choose and if we’re wise, we choose a multiplicity of biases. We choose the standards when we choose the outlet. Fourthly, the difficulty of a world in which gatekeepers multiply to the point of irrelevance is that we will not easily be info-corralled. One cannot be sure that this is as it always has been; more voices reach more varied audiences today. Perhaps many of those audiences simply had no way of being registered in the past? Force platforms to take responsibility for what they publish. Make all publishers follow the same rules. Our problems with disinformation will then clear themselves up.
Pierre Lemieux
May 13 2024 at 11:52am
Michael: Thanks for your comment and welcome to EconLog! If I read you correctly, there are a few problems with your arguments. Let me try to summarize the problems in three general general points.
(1) You write:
Who will do the forcing? Who will determine what needs to be do by force? The “lawmakers”? Will they have, like the “forced,” to take personal and legal responsibility for what they say?
(2) You speak of “language without consequence.” How do you weigh the consequences for different individuals? How do you measure (even only conceptually) the consequences of Gutenberg, the consequences of Galileo, the consequences of Anthony de Jasay’s very subversive book The State (just to give a few examples)?
(3) You write:
This “we” that you use very often does not take seriously the crucial problem of the aggregation of individual preferences. Some individuals do need breaking news: traders and arbitrageurs, individuals in immediate harm’s way, many students of society who want to be alerted to what is developing in order to follow it, etc. At least they think that they need breaking news and who knows better than them what they want or who can identify these knowers? Why is some part of the “we” justified to impose its preferences on the rest of the “we”? Sometimes, just trying to reformulate one’s argument by replacing the we’s with descriptions of the individuals in the different groups alerts one to one’s errors.
Anders
May 14 2024 at 6:33am
The dis and misinformation based on outright falsehoods should be easy to handle. But most stories that are highly misleading are not based on falsehoods, but careful selection of facts, the most jarring anecdotes, and the statistics that fit – and crafting the narrative in a way that is intuitively appealing.
Take the downside of, say, rent controls, licensing, and minimum wage – basic economics, common sense, and even starkly lived experience are enough to understand why their effects are wasteful, distortionary, and regressive in its distributionary effects. Yet the story of greedy landlords and exploitative businesses hits a nerve, and no amount of analysis or evidence sounds compelling in comparison.
Or take, in the US, the narrative that immigration drives down wages. The data is pretty clear that is not the case (less so for automation), and often the argument of the opposite can be made. In fact, the US and the Anglosphere stand out for its ability to absorb and integrate immigrants, in stark contrast to much of Europe where hordes of young men see little prospect other than crime or unemployment. Yet it takes hold.
I could go on…