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Binya's avatar

Wishful thinking drives much of the focus on misinformation. It's unpleasant to be disagreed with. It shows people don't share your values, or heaven forbid, that you might be wrong. Misinformation evades that unpleasantness. People don't really disagree with you, they're just misinformed.

It's part of the broader "politics as entertainment" problem. If your top priority is to win elections and enact policy, there's an obvious downside to implicitly labelling as stupid those who disagree with you, and whom you need to persuade to cross to your side. But if you're just trying to feel good about yourself, it's great.

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Andrew's avatar

I think a lot of the misinformation panic comes from the kind of techno optimism that a lot of people lived in in the 90s and 00s. That good information would drive out bad and basically we’d just end up debating marginal tax rates forevermore.

Almost baked into a lot of that era’s cheerleaders like Thomas Friedman is the whole world will one day, soon act like elite westerners and there will still be gatekeepers on respectable conversations it will just include a bit more diversity.

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