Ladies and gentlemem, what's in a word?

TUESDAY, MARCH 26, 2024

Combatting falsehoods (or possibly lies): We'll be absorbing a medical procedure tomorrow morning. For that reason, we don't expect to post again until Thursday. 

As of this very afternoon, we had shut things down for the day! Still and all, we were drawn in by Quinta Jurecic's new essay for The Atlantic. 

She's writing about a very important topic. The dual headlines said this:

Good Luck Fighting Disinformation
A group that formed during the pandemic to counter medical lies found that every lever it pulled on failed to produce the results it was hoping for.

For the record, Jurecic is very bright and very experienced. Her identity line says this:

Quinta Jurecic is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and a senior editor at Lawfare.

Jurecic is smart. That said, she had us at the word "disinformation," but also at the word "lies."

The essay concerns a well-intentioned group which set out, during the pandemic, to counter inaccurate claims about Covid. Or was the group attempting to counteract "lies?" 

Jurecic is very smart. But early on, in the passage shown below, it seems that she may not be sure:

JURECIC (3/26/24): The collapse of No License for Disinformation, and of AB 2098, is a cautionary tale about why the harmful falsehoods flooding American life are so difficult to control, even when enormous efforts are made to do so. Sawyer and his colleagues believed that disinformation could be clearly identified and successfully countered—that the industry consensus would support them, that allies would line up behind them, that their professional organization had the power to tamp down those untruths. All of these assumptions proved wrong, to varying degrees. The market for lies still has no shortage of buyers and sellers, and few, if any, levers exist that can directly change this dynamic.

What was the group in question trying to counter? Was it trying to counter "falsehoods" and "untruths," or was it trying to counter "lies?"

Also, is every "harmful falsehood" a form of "disinformation?" And is "disinformation" the same thing as "misinformation?" 

Also, why should anyone care?

For now, we'll postpone an answer to that last question. First, let's examine the somewhat pessimistic passage which closes Jurecic's essay:

JURECIC: The difficulty of responding to falsehoods about COVID isn’t just because of the First Amendment or institutional inaction. It’s because there’s political benefit in promoting those falsehoods, and political, legal, and even physical danger for those who oppose them. Lies, it turns out, have a constituency.

That constituency uses harassment as a tool to silence those who disagree, as Sawyer and Nichols discovered—a way to raise the cost of pushing back. Reporting and research have documented how both misinformation researchers and health-care workers seeking to combat pandemic falsehoods have struggled under the weight of online threats. Among the doctors affected by such harassment is Natalia Solenkova, a Florida critical-care physician who collaborated with the NLFD team and was later targeted with online abuse after a faked tweet of hers began circulating widely among anti-vaccine activists and was promoted by Joe Rogan. (Rogan later apologized.) “Whoever speaks about disinformation immediately gets harassed,” Solenkova told me. “And there is no institution that can support you.” She still posts about health care and COVID on social media, but worries about the security of her job if another, more convincing, fake begins to circulate.

Reflecting on her initial efforts with NLFD to respond to COVID lies, Solenkova seemed to look back on that early idealism with resignation. She explained to me over email that the organization’s work had been motivated by the belief that responding to falsehoods was largely a project of spreading truth. If No License for Disinformation could identify those falsehoods and explain their dangers clearly enough, the group had reasoned, then surely medical authorities would take action. But, she wrote, “we were naive.”

 Had Solenkova been "responding to falsehoods?" Or had she been trying to "respond to COVID lies?"

Surely, everyone knows that "lies" are a subset of the (presumably) much wider universe of "falsehoods" (or "untruths"). Surely, everyone knows that "disinformation" is a subset of the world's larger collection of "misinformation."

Or then again, maybe not! We used to assume that everyone agreed on such basic traditional points. But over the course of the past quarter century, it has seemed increasingly clear that many people, including very bright people within our blue tribe, don't seem to accept such traditional verities at this point.

(We blame our one-time almost friend, David Corn, for dumbing this traditional standard down. And we love David Corn, a genuine prince of a fellow!)

It's endlessly surprising to us when people who are very smart are this cavalier with this kind of language. Jurecic is writing about a very important topic, but it seems to us that her thinking and her analysis are undermined right out of the box.

We'll offer one tiny thought concerning the very important question which lies at the heart of this important essay:

As a general matter, we'll guess that it's easier to get people to rethink a "falsehood" than it is to get them to rethink something you've described or denounced as a "lie."

In a highly partisan age, it's exciting and fun to accuse The Others of "lies." On the downside, it commits the accuser to an act of mind-reading—and it may tend to drive others away.

"Lies" are a subset of "falsehoods!" There was a time before the red-blue wars when we thought that we all agreed on that traditional notion!

(Also, RICO plainly isn't a crime. It's a federal law!)