The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

> increase the believe [sic] in conspiracy theories

I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, when the only information sources were newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. I remember reading all of those sources back then and thinking, "man, there's nobody in the entire world who agrees with my viewpoints on anything". I mean, you'd think that, logically, if even 10% of the world agreed with me on anything, at least one of them would be writing for some mainstream media source. But they all seemed to say the same things and believe the same things and agree with each other on almost everything.

I felt like my opinions were so far out of the mainstream that I didn't dare mention one to my close friends. Then the internet came along.

The internet of the mid-90's was almost entirely populated by people who agreed with me on nearly everything. I thought, "how could this possibly be? How could there be so many people who disagree with nearly every opinion you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in magazines or newspapers? Where have they all been this whole time?"

In the past ten years or so, I've seen them slowly disappear though. They dominated the discourse until around 2010 (roughly) but bit by bit we're coming back to the same opinions I used to see on TV, Radio, newspaper and magazines back in the 80's.

100% agree.

Misinformation and propaganda only seem worse now because it is more diverse and we are collectively better at seeing it.

If anything, it is more difficult now to mislead masses.

I thought this might be a humor piece. The author talks about how misinformation is not terrible and how he is well informed. Then he goes on to make a lot of statements that are wrong or colored with bias. This is funny and sad!

Take the "flat earth" people. What they say is factually wrong. But there isn't a flat-earthist political party that wants to change our military deployments because our current deployments are based on a false topology of the planet, or change our immigration policy because Central America doesn't actually connect to Mexico, or something like that. There's no political agenda that flows out of the flat earth nonsense. That's what makes it "nonsense" rather than "misinformation".

On the other end of the scale, there is "disinformation". That's where someone is deliberately and systematically trying to persuade you do believe what is false, in order for them to carry out their agenda. Russia has been running a disinformation campaign against the US for several years. (On both sides - trying to drive extremism and destroy the political center, in order to weaken the US.) One could say that both major political parties in the US are also running disinformation campaigns.

"Misinformation" is kind of in the middle, in my view. It's not necessarily part of a large-scale organized campaign, but it's not just a nonsense belief with no consequences. So people care about misinformation in a way that they don't care about the flat earthers, because misinformation can cause more harm.

But people don't seem to take as seriously as they should the damage that long-running, coordinated disinformation campaigns can cause (and, in fact, are causing).

I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved disgracefully after the election and that there is still no evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the election.

Many still believe it's a major problem that states like Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which should be illegal, but handling that is a separate issue. Many also believe it's a problem that our election processes are so insecure and that we need more election security. That's separate from believing the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that provably illegal voting activity swung the election.