Ministry of “disinformation”
Two recent news articles got me thinking about how we are using computer science to deal with “disinformation”: an op-ed looking at the “opinion dynamics” predictions of Michael Goldhaber and Herbert Simon, and Glenn Greenwald’s diatribe about repression of “disinformation” in media and online.
To me, both give credence to the idea that a theory of attention, or attention dynamics, is more promising than a theory of disinformation. The latter, as many working on information warfare and semiotics have previously thought, is very difficult (if not impossible) to operationalize, and thus of being useful to build scientific theory. In other words, information does not have a negative/complement, because it always depends on what a user/observer makes of it (see Borges’ Library of Babel). This is an age-old view from the very origin of written symbol systems. Indeed, God has been equated with the symbolic, while the devil with its negation, the diabolic (etymologically, the confusion of symbol or information).
To be clear, I think science can approach truth by useful prediction. But any definition of “disinformation”, just like information, assumes a (semiotic) consensus in some population. It implies some “guardianship of truth” that always suffers the type of issues Greenwald raises. Ultimately, rather than legislating “disinformation” and building tools to enforce such legislation, perhaps a more sustainable solution is to compete for attention with better predictions and solutions. After all, that is what Darwinian selection is all about. I imagine that a COVID vaccine that works (see amazing results from Israel) will be phenomenally fit for attention — -more so than any anti-vaxxer opinion…. so why bother repressing anti-vaxxer opinion online?
I guess all of this to say that science is best put to use to make better predictions and tech that protects our health (i.e. our usual business) than building tools that only help repression of opinion, like face-recognition or detecting communities that someone deems to be trading in “disinformation”, etc. Which brings to mind, Brazil, Terry Gillian’s brilliant movie about all this.
