The issue of misinformation and disinformation has been prominent in the news recently.
The ease with which information, facts and fictions, misunderstandings and deliberate disinformation can spread via the electronic media is clearly a major part of the problem.
What is also a problem is the insouciant willingness of people we might expect to know better to either invent “facts” or spread those. Clearly that’s not something that fits with our four-way test, but research shows a surprisingly high number of people believe at least one conspiracy theory. In Britain its estimated to be up to 60%.
Why might this happen? In some cases, the theory fits a view that a person already holds about an event person or organisation, so the misinformation fits nicely with what they want to believe. In other cases, it’s because the event seems so large or important that people can’t believe it may have happened by chance, therefore there must be a reason or a person or an organisation behind it. How many for example thought something important would occur on the 2/2/2022? How about the conspiracy that questions how the House of Rothchild can have the same corporate colours as the Ukrainian flag?
Then we are subject to people with a public platform, often via cable news or other electronic media who use some pretty sophisticated techniques – the bare assertion stated as a fact, the ominous question and innuendo, the statements such as “just asking questions” or “I would love to know more but what I know is troubling enough”, the use of an actual fact but then drawing an unwarranted and unsupported conclusion and of course simply repeating a claim so many times that it becomes the accepted truth.
