There are people which distribute false information which use extreamly clever highly manipulative methods which more often then not show a clear understanding of the matter in question. And I feel that it's a degree of understanding of both the topic and method about how to subtitle manipulate people that I think they themself should be clearly aware about them spreading false information.
One method often used is to take some "official" article, paper, etc. which is not targeting a general-public audience but a audience of people with specialized knowledge and then twist what it supposedly says and spread it to people which in general do not have this specialized knowledge but
where they know that with the given combination of
pre-feed misinformation and non-understanding of the content and complex language/terminology their targets will see it as proof for the false information. Even if it might proof the exact opposite.
Examples include:
- this link
- a case where two very different statistics of the CDC (from different sources) used the same "label name" for a graph with similar but very different data
- cases of studies showing that e.g. some vaccine is not perfect in some very specific situations being taking as proof that it's not working at all
- same for tests etc.
- court cases won due to formalities being taken as proof that vaccines don't work (e.g. anti-vaccer creating a bounty for a proof of them being wrong but intentionally formulating the requirement for the bounty submissions subtle in a way that no submission is ever valid for submission and as such they won the court case about not paying out the money, even through the submission proofed them wrong)
A commonly used fallacy of the mind is that people jump from "this solution is not perfect" to "this solution MUST be replaced" to "a solution which is perceived to be the opposite is therefore true".
Like "this test has wrong results in rare cases" => "this test can not be trusted at all" => "all tests of this kind are untranslatable" => "there is no need to test because all tests are fake anyway" => "covid doesn't exists".
As a side not I have seen that kind of thinking to often in IT too like: "this library turned out imperfect once we knew more about it" => "we must replace this library" => "this other library which used the imperfection of the first library in it's advertisements but of which we don't know anything about is correct and must be used".
I believe it's of upmost importance to improve science to general-public communications and argument all kinds of reports, articles and papers with a section targeting the general public. As well as rehabilitating state organs which are focused on providing easy understandable content and explanations, while being vowed (by law required) to objectivity and transparency and making it highly punished for politicians, other state organs or well any kind of institution trying to influence it.
