Harvard Study: Misinformation ‘Experts’ a Bunch of Leftists

“Misinformation” is a wonderfully flexible term. It means whatever the labeler decides it means. 

As we discovered during the pandemic, it certainly has little relationship to truth or falsity. Something that is true, such as the Hunter Biden laptop being really Hunter Biden’s, can also be misinformation because it says things that the powers that be don’t want us to know.

False things can be labeled “accurate” and be used to debunk “true” things because “truth” now means “what the establishment wants you to believe.” 

No doubt many of the people who make these judgments actually believe them to be good ones, because they begin with the belief that their vision of the good is superior to yours, so they should be in charge of deciding what you believe for your own good. Others don’t care whether it is good for you or not, because their only concern is what is good for them. 

Me? I don’t distinguish between them because in either case, the people are liars. 

Misinformation experts are perhaps not quite unbiased

“Experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum”

Data from Harvard Misinformation Review, survey of 150 misinformation expertshttps://t.co/J5e3CYu2fQ (here with left to the left and right to the right) pic.twitter.com/RepDrYVA3P

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) February 16, 2024

For the moment, let’s assume that all “misinformation” experts are well-intentioned, as no doubt many are. As I said, practically speaking, this makes little difference because the foundation of their enterprise is fundamentally corrupted by a desire to make the world in their image. Their goal is to manipulate people and deny them the fundamental autonomy that defines us as human beings. 

A new study by the Harvard Misinformation Review tells us what we already knew from experience: “misinformation” experts are an ideologically homogenous group of people who all see the world similarly. 

Experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum: very right-wing (0), fairly right-wing (0), slightly right-of-center (7), center (15), slightly left-of-center (43), fairly left-wing (62), very left-wing (21). 

The misinformation experts represent a broad range of scientific fields. Experts specialized in psychology (39), communication and media science (32), political science (22), computational social sciences (17), computer science (9), sociology (8), journalism (8), philosophy (5), other (4), medicine/other (2), linguistics (2), history (1), physics (1). 

They are all Left-wing. The modal “disinformation expert” classifies himself as “fairly left-wing,” and 85% of them classify themselves as at least somewhat left-wing. 

It is quite possible to be left-wing and honest, but it is impossible to have an ideologically homogenous group whose job it is to determine “truth” to be unbiased. When everybody begins the process with a set of biases, those biases get reinforced rather than challenged. When everybody in the same room agrees at the beginning, everybody in that room will come to the same conclusion. 

And that’s if you assume everybody has goodwill, which in a politically charged environment is a rather generous assumption. I don’t assume that to be the case when I walk into a room of Republican politicians, and given what I know about how political debates take place I am quite confident that isn’t true of anybody else trying to convince people of a position. 

Harvard’s misinformation study was all about how misinformation studies are done, and how to improve them. But there wasn’t any focus on the most important thing: how to ensure that there is genuine debate aimed at getting to the truth. The assumption is that these “experts” know the truth. 

The goal of the study:

In this article, we do not seek to provide an authoritative definition of misinformation, but rather to document how experts across disciplines define the concept—which can ultimately help practitioners and researchers to operationalize it. Experts agreed that misinformation not only comprises falsehoods, but also misleading information (Søe, 2021). This stands in contrast with most experimental studies on misinformation, which focus primarily on news determined to be false by fact-checkers (Pennycook & Rand, 2022). Researchers may thus want to broaden their nets to include more misleading information and subtler forms of misinformation, such as biased or partisan news. Most experts in our survey also agreed that pseudoscience and conspiracy theories represent forms of misinformation, while satirical and parodical news do not. These findings could help future studies make decisions about what to include in the misinformation category, as some studies have in the past included satirical and parodical news websites (Cordonier & Brest, 2021). 

It is ironic that misinformation “experts” identify “motivated reasoning” as an explanation for why people might believe what they call misinformation while being utterly unaware that they are all lefties who spend their days calling anything believed by conservatives “misinformation” and working to censor it. 

Unaware, or perhaps simply not caring. 

The very nicest thing you can say about this enterprise is that its practitioners are dedicated to spreading “noble lies,” shaping the information landscape to fit their notion of what a good society looks like. Debate, they believe, is bad because it might lead people to accept “bad” ideas as true. 

Not only is this line of reasoning immoral–and it is, because it is an attack on people’s autonomy–but it is counterproductive for their goals. They have simply convinced a vast and growing segment of the population that the powers that be are liars. Which, to be fair, is true. 

This isn’t good for society. It creates an ever-growing sense of hostility between the in-groups and out-groups–after all, the in-group is clearly trying to silence the out-group–but it also undermines trust in genuinely useful and true information. 

The smallpox vaccine was a massive social good as are many others, but the “experts” undermined faith in all vaccines by insisting an experimental one of variable value and excessive danger to many was just as important and valuable as the MMR vaccine. 

“Misinformation” is obviously a real phenomenon–states, including our own, work to convince people of falsehoods for their own benefit. But the category is too broad, the solution is better information based on reliable sources, and the misuse of the term has done little but pour corrosive on our social fabric. 

That Harvard’s study can simultaneously find that all misinformation experts are politically biased and recommend ways to increase their power tells you quite a bit. 

The hostility of academics and the MSM to free and open debate is the real problem. The impulse to harass and shut people up is, at best, misguided. And usually it is nothing more than a tyrannical impulse to reshape society to mirror the wishes of people in positions of power and authority. 

Want proof of this? It’s simple enough to see it:

Funding 

This study has partially benefited from the support of the project co-financed by the European Commission within the framework of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) – Telecommunications Sector (contract no. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2394372). 

Europe, of course, is on a tear pushing censorship. Go figure.