[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_coverage_of_Sri_Lank...
Edit: I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Those of us who have studied misinformation have actually spent a lot of time documenting how misinformation has appropriated the trappings of malinformation in order to become more convincing. Furthermore, most of the misinformation being shared by volume on social media isn't of the "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil" variety.
Wow, that is such an Orwellian thing to say.
The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information.
Yes, this factual information is upsetting, but we need to let Facebook cover our eyes and decide how outraged we are allowed to be. Otherwise we might hurt ourselves or others.
I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?
Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it. If the truth is upsetting, then try to solve the problem, not people talking about it.
---
Then again, perhaps good malinformation policies could have averted rioting last summer, and we could have censored the initial George Floyd video that made it look like Floyd was murdered by a cop. The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes. So, if our friends in big tech had simply censored things until the full facts came out and we could see context, it would have been more orderly and harmonious.
Isn't preventing rioting and civil unrest one of their goals? Too bad we couldn't have blunted the outrage.
I don't see that the second half of that is inherent to the concept of "malinformation". There are situations where unabashed, unfiltered truth can be damaging or problematic. Defining that concept with a term is not in any way attempting to solve that concept. It doesn't presume that something has to be "done" about malinformation, but it can provide additional perspective on ways that misinformation can spread.
Do you not agree that truthful information can sometimes cause harm? What if I, say, reveal the identities of all CIA agents operating in China?
> I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?
Misinformation and malinformation are two different terms that mean different things: misinformation is never true, and malinformation is always true.
If you read my posts, I've been pretty careful to say that I don't necessarily have all the answers to the way different types of information spread across the internet. I just wanted to give some more context to the way researchers discuss these subjects.
> The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes
I hadn't heard this before, and don't really want to wade into it, but I'll just leave this here: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/25/blog-posti...
There are of course rare cases when someone acts on misinformation to do something harmful. I can easily think of several examples of bad reporting from supposedly reputable media outlets that caused a ton of damage over the last year.
Conversely, most true information does not cause harm either. But some true information does cause harm.
In that sense, I think the veracity of the information has little to do with the risk of harm, and that we should not allow this trojan horse for free speech regulation to take hold. For whatever problems free speech has, trying to stifle it is just not going to provide the benefit that people think it will.
The Iraq war was based on misinformation. It did cause perhaps the greatest harm in the last several decades. However, that was “officially sanctioned” misinformation directly from the government (whether they believed it in good faith or not). I think before doing anything to limit the flow of information, consider whether the proposed framework for suppression of misinformation have caught this. Worse, if someone knew that the WMDs were not there, and could have corrected that disaster, would they have been considered misinformation?
We have already seen this in action with the tech companies giving very loose directives to their content moderators to remove certain types of misinformation. A popular youtuber was censored for telling people that masks are a good idea back in March. The official information at the time was that they do not help. The truth was that they obviously do, and now you get censored for saying that they don’t help. If someone asks honestly about something suspicious related to the election, or believes a voting rule change was procedurally unfair, without paying any mind to the weird conspiracy theories, they get moderated. Because it sounds like “claims of election fraud” and the 3 seconds that the moderator spends on it don’t allow for nuance. Or the hunter biden “misinformation” that wasn’t. That basically means that the word of the US Government (particularly the Democrats) is the “true information” and anything else in conflict with that is misinformation. And that’s a pretty bad place to be. In practice, this just doesn’t seem to work, and does more harm than good.