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The War Against Misinformation Is Over. The Lies Won

New research suggests people know images and headlines are false but share them anyway

I was sitting in my office on a quiet Saturday afternoon in January when my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID: “SCIENTOLOGY MISSIONS INTERNATIONAL.”

I sighed and answered the phone.

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On the other end of the line was David Bloomberg, an executive in the secretive church and head of media relations for its sprawling religious-corporate empire. And I knew exactly why he was calling.

In that morning’s edition of the Toronto Star, I had a column decrying the Canadian government’s wrong-headed approach to fighting hate crimes. Ottawa had decided to emulate Germany and the United Kingdom by attempting to criminalize all manner of symbols associated with hate and terror, to adopt a whole new class of hate crimes, and to forbid any protest that may “provoke a state of fear in a person” enough to prevent their entry into a place of worship. It is bone-headed state overreach, I think.

“How would the law apply,” I wrote, “if a Jewish group protested outside a synagogue at which Israeli real-estate firms were marketing illegal West Bank settlements? Or if Muslims picketed an event at a mosque held by a marginal group known to glorify terrorism?”

In my first draft, the examples had ended there. But I am a slave to the rule of threes and set my brain to thinking of a third case where such a law might be problematic. I came up with, what I thought, was a sterling way to complete the trio: “What about protestors demanding to know ‘Where is Shelly Miscavige?’ outside the Church of Scientology?”

I expected plenty of complaints from defenders and critics of Israel for the column. I should have known I was far more likely to hear from Scientology HQ. Sure enough, Bloomberg was not happy.

Miscavige, wife of the church’s high-profile leader, David Miscavige, has not been properly seen in public in decades. Her virtual disappearance has become a meme with which to mock the church and to highlight its cultish inclinations.

Bloomberg was calling to tell me that was all bullshit. The Los Angeles Police Department had checked out the claim, he said, and declared it unfounded. He told me that ex-Scientologist-turned-critic Leah Remini—who had filed a missing persons report for Miscavige after she had disappeared from public view for six years—was unstable and unreliable.

Repeating such a statement, Bloomberg told me, was dangerous and irresponsible. It opened up Scientologists to harassment and violence. It would be akin to uncritically quoting a dispatch from the Ku Klux Klan or amplifying the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I tried to stifle my astonished laughter. “Dave, come on,” I managed.

After the conversation went around a few times, Bloomberg mentioned he had consulted some various thoughts I had posted online critical of Scientology over the years. I must have some kind of “animosity” toward the Church, he said.

With the conversation reaching fifteen minutes, I told Bloomberg that his call was in vain: I would not change the text of my column. Bloomberg eventually followed up with me over email. “The statement in your article is demonstrably false and should be removed,” he wrote. “At a minimum, if you choose not to delete it entirely, you need to include a parenthetical noting that the LAPD officially deemed the report ‘unfounded.’ Leaving it as-is misleads readers and misrepresents the facts.”

For years, I’ve covered the information beat. I’ve penned deep dives on the scourge of misinformation for major international papers, provided analysis on campaigns sophisticated and slapstick to delude us en masse, and delivered speeches to industry and government aimed at priming them on the state of our toxic information problem.

And now, Scientology says, I’m the problem.

Complaints from flack to journo are as old as the profession itself. But things have shifted in bizarre ways since “fake news” was declared word of the year by Collins Dictionary in 2017, followed by “misinformation” by dictionary.com the year after.

These words—and the concepts which have sprung up to both perpetuate and combat them—are emblematic of our excessive-information age. Everything is wrong and nothing can be trusted. All information is meant to mislead and deceive. Everyone has secret motives and must be approached with hostility.

Plenty of smart people acknowledge this reality and yet remain awfully sure that, with the right combination of grit, technology, and institutional buy-in, we can put an end to the scourge of fake news, misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories—whatever you want to call it.

We’ve lost the battle against misinformation. And maybe that’s okay.

But this year’s pick from Merriam-Webster—“slop”—should be an indication that we have melted into a bubbling tar pit of nonsense, fakery, and bullshit. There is no amount of fact checking, media literacy, or platform moderation to solve the extent of this problem. No volume of good journalism or education campaigns will unscrew up our toxic information ecosystem.

I’m here to wave the white flag. We’ve lost the battle against misinformation.

And maybe that’s okay.

It’s 2024, and 730 American partisans are being presented with twenty headlines. Of those, ten are legitimate news, and ten are bullshit. Half of those participants are being shown headlines designed to evoke rage; the other half are shown headlines with no particular emotional appeal. And they are each asked the same two questions:

“To the best of your knowledge, how accurate is the claim in the above headline?” and “How likely would you be to share this news article on your social media account?”

This study, conducted by researchers at Princeton and Northwestern, should have shown something quite simple, if our popular understanding of misinformation is correct. It should have shown a very tight relationship between a misjudgment in the accuracy of the article, the emotions it stirred up, and the propensity of one to share it.

But the researchers actually found that outrage had very little impact in how participants judged the accuracy of news articles and that people proved quite good at separating fact from fiction. Study........

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