My name is Terry McTavish, and the amount of misinformation littering the information highway drives me to distraction. Given the degree to which the internet has become a source of information for people, this is a profoundly serious matter. This blog is my effort to do what I can about it. What follows is a copy of my first post, which explains what I’m on about, how I break down the problem and what can be done about it.

There is a core of truth to Ron White’s joke that, “You can’t fix stupid.” Our brains are not all created equal—no more than our bodies are. So, call it what you will, some of us do have to work harder than others to make sense of what’s going on.

Then again, a lot of us who may seem stupid are actually just ignorant, and that you can fix.  Ignorance is nothing more, or less, than a lack of knowledge. We’re all ignorant in some areas. That is, we all know more about some things than others. Even the smartest people can be ignorant. For example, a great business leader may know next to nothing about ecology.

The good news is that all it takes to fix ignorance is reliable information. The bad news is that bringing our ignorance and the information that’s needed to fix it together presents some sizeable problems.

1) Ignorant people come in two modes; passive and active. The former welcome information—the latter are entrenched in ignorance and resist information.

Passively ignorant people generally have open minds and have delved deeply into enough things to recognize when they’re out of their depth. They’re curious about new facts and ideas and stimulated by the challenge they present. If they find the source to be credible, they reflect on the new information and adjust their understanding accordingly.

Actively ignorant people generally have closed minds and haven’t gathered enough general knowledge to gauge when they’re in over their head. They may lack confidence and be acting like they understand things when they really don’t. They may have built up their confidence in areas that they know something about and be misapplying it to areas that they know little, if anything, about. Facts or viewpoints that counter their uninformed opinions or beliefs can make them feel insecure, stupid or even attacked, so they may feel the need to block or fight them.

Typically, they are not drawn to books, investigative reports or documentaries about important subjects. They aren’t likely to know that public broadcasters are treasure troves of information. They may be in denial; simply refusing to accept the gravity of the issues that face us. They may not have studied enough history to see current world events in a meaningful context. They may not understand the scientific method, or how our store of accepted facts advances through peer-reviewed work. They may not be able to distinguish an opinion from a statement of fact. They may not know enough about the humanities or social sciences to put their basic beliefs and concepts into a broader context.

The goal is to get these people, whom for whatever reasons, lack a solid grasp of important ideas and facts, to see how little they know and to appreciate the value in learning more. It’s important that they become better informed citizens, because we need people to know what’s really going on in the world in order to work together to make it better.

2) Although we have more information at our fingertips than ever before accessing it can be a pain because there’s far more misinformation, too. Vested interests are working hard to deceive us for their benefit, others are naively helping to spread their misinformation, and the various media have systemic flaws that further compromise the truth. The old adage that you can’t believe everything you read has never been truer. In order to use good information to remedy ignorance we have to identify and neutralize the misinformation. To help with this, I’ve broken the crap down into three main categories.

The top tier of misinformation—and, sadly, this is not some conspiracy theory—is largely generated by political and religious ideologues and the most self-serving segments of our wealthy and powerful elites. They work through corporate, political and private organizations to manipulate the public’s perception. Some do so to advance their ideologies, others to gain ever more power and wealth.

Some examples are:

• Political parties and their wealthy backers misrepresenting their own and each other’s positions and actions in ads, interviews and statements.
• Governments creating Orwellian ‘information management’ strategies. (The Conservatives in Canada have crippled the census, restricted access of the press to government scientists, shut down research gathering data that they don’t want to be seen and cut off funding to public interest groups that are critical of their policies.)
• Corporations funding research projects that are tailored to reach conclusions that the company wants.
• The corporate funding and co-ordination of ‘grass roots’ groups that organize rallies and speak to the public and the press, supposedly on behalf of the public good.
• Funding of think tanks where clever ideologues come up with endless analysis and commentary that support policies that benefit the funders.
• The control of school boards and their textbook approval process, to literally rewrite history, purging facts and people that they don’t like.
• The purchasing of media companies to replace balanced reporting with an aggressive bias.
• Attacks on credible sources of information—people who actually study and work in the fields in question—as intellectual elites, socialists or puppets.
• Accusing any press coverage that doesn’t uncritically accept their talking points of having a bias.

These professional manipulators understand willful ignorance, and they’re banking on it. It provides them with blind support for their ideological and corporate agendas while also swelling their fortunes and egos. They know that ignorant people want to hear opinions that sound like their own, and simple explanations for complex situations, so that’s what they dish up. They bring them onside by tailoring commentary to suit their fears, hopes and biases, then give them ‘explanations’ and ‘solutions’ that actually advance the manipulator’s agendas. They believe that by appealing to the ill-informed biases of the ignorant they can keep them in-line and unquestioning of the ‘facts’, and they’re right.

The next tier of misinformation has linkages to the first but is largely an unwitting echo chamber. It’s made up of people on the take and people who simply believe the top tier misinformation—or other random misinformation—which they then rebroadcast. It also includes scammers, the mischievous and those who feel they can improve on the truth.

Here you will find:

• Bloggers who take money to churn out biased reports on everything from books to products to people.
• Paid and unpaid ‘trolls’ who undermine online comment sections by attacking facts, informed opinions and reputations with rumours and lies.
• All the people who not only believe the misinformation, but who are moved to repackage, and often embellish it, then pass it along.
• The people who turn truth to lies, by taking images, news stories or blogs and patching them together with some words of their own to create things that never really happened.
• Scammers who use trending topics and popular consumer products to lure people in, to hack their accounts, get their personal information, etc.
• The pathetic people who spread nonsense just to get ‘Likes’, or to see how many people they can suck in, or to purposely stir up trouble.

The last factor isn’t a separate tier; it’s the systemic flaws in our information networks that allow misinformation and manipulation to flourish at all levels.

Some of these shortfalls are:

• The Reagan/Thatcher era changes to broadcast regulations that freed broadcasters from the duty to present fair and balanced coverage of important issues, which fostered the newsish shows; where biased commentators incite the ignorant with their creative versions of the facts.
• The ironic, and all too common, confusing of issues by news organizations that do support ‘fair and balanced’, but go too far; creating the illusion of real debate or uncertainty about a subject by giving equal time to opposing views on it even when one side is solidly backed by evidence and agreed upon by most experts, while the other is an unsubstantiated minority opinion being pushed by vested interests.
• Giant corporations owning media companies, which puts in question their reporting on all of their owner’s subsidiaries activities.
• Tighter budgets at news organizations, that make it harder to do in-depth on-site reporting and thorough fact checking.
• Understaffed news organizations publishing flattering ‘articles’ written by corporate PR departments, not by reporters.
• Per-page-view and per-click online ad payments, which tempt some individuals and companies to sensationalize and outright lie to generate web traffic.
• The ability to sell ‘likes’ and ‘fans’ which leads shameless hucksters to post all manner of outrageous and sentimental nonsense to generate hordes of them.
• The use of social media to distort online poll results by rallying like-minded people to swarm-vote issues.
• The reduction of complex issues to soundbites and post-it note sized chunks of text that simply can not convey the whole truth.

All of these distortions are being greatly amplified by social media. Since it’s become so easy to ‘share’, along with all of the wonderful, inspiring, funny, moving, activist and informative things, people are spreading misinformation like never before.

To reduce the flow of misinformation, we need to find practical ways to sort good information from bad and trustworthy sources from unreliable ones. We also need to develop the habit of fact-checking when we aren’t sure.

The purpose of this blog is to aid in that process. I realize that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but, being someone whose idea of a good time as a child was to read through encyclopedias, and to compare the entries in different aged editions, it’s second nature to me. I’ll offer tips on how to spot the crap, I’ll correct misinformation when I can, and provide references to reputable sources.

You can support the cause by sharing information and corrections that you find here, and elsewhere, and by deleting misinformation. Please do so with kindness and humour. The intention is to reduce the misinformation that contributes to ignorance, not to attack the ignorant—that’s all of us, to one degree or another. Accordingly, any meanspirited comments that I find here, will be deleted. Thanks. Every little bit helps.

Terry McTavish