Why Fighting Fake News With the Facts Might Not Be Enough

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/books/review-misinformation-age-cailin-oconnor-james-owen-weatherall-down-to-earth-bruno-latour.html

Why Fighting Fake News With the Facts Might Not Be Enough
By Jennifer Szalai
Jan. 9, 2019

“Alternative facts”: The term manages to be tedious, ridiculous and perilous at once — a real sign of the times. For anyone who doesn’t remember, Kellyanne Conway introduced it in early 2017 to defend the White House’s falsehoods about attendance numbers at Donald Trump’s inauguration the week before. There she was on “Meet the Press,” serenely chiding an exasperated Chuck Todd for being “overly dramatic” as he repeatedly tried to get her to concede that lying to the American public was bad.

Her phrasing may have been new, but Conway was taking part in what has apparently become a conservative tradition — performing a skepticism so extreme that it makes the ancient Greek skeptics look like babes in the woods. Recall a high-ranking aide in the Bush administration needling a journalist for belonging to “the reality-based community.” A respect for facts, the aide suggested, was ultimately for suckers: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” ...

Of the two volumes, “The Misinformation Age” takes the more methodical and earnest approach. O’Connor and Weatherall are professors of logic, and they break down the mechanics of misinformation accordingly. They introduce their subject with the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary — a tree that reportedly grew gourd-like fruit filled with tiny lambs. The claim was propagated during medieval times by so many respected naturalists and scholars that it took nearly four centuries before it was satisfactorily debunked.

Those medieval scholars kept citing one another rather than verifying (or disproving) the Vegetable Lamb for themselves. “Social factors are essential to understanding the spread of beliefs,” O’Connor and Weatherall write, “including — especially — false beliefs.” Similar to the network of right-wing sites that nurtured elaborate conspiracy theories about a Hillary Clinton-sponsored pedophilia ring in a Washington pizzeria (a notion only slightly less outlandish than lambs growing on trees), the medieval scholars had created their own ecosystem for fake news.

O’Connor and Weatherall include contemporary examples of misinformation like Pizzagate, but they focus mainly on ideas held by scientists, highlighting how even the most well-intentioned beliefs can get deployed and distorted. After all, they say, “most scientists, most of the time, are doing their best to learn about the world, using the best methods available and paying careful attention to the available evidence.” Scientists are “the closest we have to ideal inquirers,” even if, as the authors make clear, there’s an unavoidable element of uncertainty in the scientific enterprise.

This uncertainty, it turns out, is central to how so much contemporary misinformation works. O’Connor and Weatherall make a distinction between absolute certainty and the confidence necessary to make informed decisions. “The worry that we can never gain complete certainty about matters of fact is irrelevant,” they write — though it comes up again and again in “The Misinformation Age,” as they show how industrial interests have repeatedly exploited any whiff of uncertainty to argue against government regulation.

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