Misinformation studies as "Scientific" thought control

I am afraid the field of misinformation studies has elements that are (very poorly) veiled attempts to grab power and control what people can say and think.

As a kid, I was particularly fascinated by a specific title in my grandmother’s bookshelf. It was called “Scientific Socialism and its applications”. At the time, the main reason I found this book interesting was due to its author: a quite successful post-Communist Revolution politician, Corneliu Vadim Tudor (he almost won the Presidency in 2000). Before the Revolution, he had served as a sort of Chief Propagandist for the Communist Party - and this tells you a lot about just how much Romanian leadership actually changed post-Revolution. I found it funny at the time to recognise such a prominent name, that was mentioned all the time on TV, among my grandmother’s books. I remember asking my mom what the book was about. Her answer was something along the lines: “It’s some BS we needed to learn in high school and regurgitate for our exams”. And I was like “well but it says it’s Scientific”. She laughed: “Yeah, that’s what they always said”.

This is not the exact book my grandmother had, but it’s similar

I had forgotten about this book, but I had a flashback today when reading the following tweet from a “Misinformation Expert” Professor. My very thoughtful mutual Dan Williams correctly pointed out that it’s weird the meme below was labeled as “misinformation” by a social science paper. The paper in question aims to study misinformation propagated on Facebook.

This is the tweet from the misinformation Professor, in which he argues this obvious joke is an example of “misinformation”

And this was the Professor’s response, where he seriously argues that this joke is misinformation. Most people would use their judgement and recognise this as humour, without the need of "an expert”. Given that jokes often rely on unrealistic exaggeration, I struggle to think how you could even make one that is not “misinformation”, if interpreted literally. And we learn quite early in life to not take jokes literally- Indeed, it’s a crucial part of our socialisation. But here we are, classifying memes as misinformation in the name of Science.

So what is the point of connection with the Scientific Socialism book?

I was reminded about how totalitarian propaganda loves to coat itself under the fake disguise of Science. A key part of legitimising speech and thought control in totalitarian regimes is pretending there are “scientific” reasons to do so. It’s stolen valour from actual Science: you get all the legitimising effect of Science with none of the actual rigour. So-called Science is applied to the messy, subtle, hard to quantify world of human interactions to obfuscate and avoid any dissent. Notice how none of these topics has anything to do with the areas where the scientific method works best (STEM fields).

It’s all applied to inherently subjective fields. But the legitimising impact of Science works: “You don’t agree with me? Well, you’re wrong! It’s SCIENCE!”. Natural human instincts and reactions are ignored. One needs to defer to “experts”, who come up with new and more complex categories for things normal humans would quickly label as “bad”, “good”, “joke” & “serious”.

This scientism attitude is even more clear in the following replies to the initial tweet. Apparently, in order to judge whether something is a joke or not, one needs to read the literature (!!!!). READ the SCIENCE before you make a joke.

I am not the first to notice this. Indeed, here is Hannah Arendt, in her “Origins of Totalitarianism” book, describing this phenomenon better than I could:

“Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obsession of totalitarian movements with "scientific” proofs ceases once they are in power. The Nazis dismissed even those scholars who were willing to serve them and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for entirely unscientific purposes (…) The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterised by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from the more old-fashioned appeal to the past. Nowhere does the ideological origin of socialism, in one instance and racism, in the other, show more clearly than when spokesmen pretend they have discovered the hidden forces that will bring good fortune in the chain of fatality (…) It is quite apparent that very few changes are needed to express Stalin’s creed in 2 sentences which might run as follows: “The more accurately we recognise and observe the laws of history and class struggle, so much the more we do conform to dialectic materialism. The more insight we have into dialectic materialism, the greater will be our success. Totalitarian propaganda raised ideological scientificality and its technique of making statements in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content, because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying only the future can reveal its merits”

Hannah Arendt- my go-to thinker when it comes to understanding the process of totalitarianism

We are living in confusing times—much has been said about the impact of social media on how people perceive “truth”, the rise of fake-news and so on. The rise of AI poses yet another threat to our informational system. It is understandable that people want to cling to security and a higher authority. And it is seductively tempting to succumb to the lulling serenade of “experts”, who, like siren voices, promise to soothe our worries to rest, only to beguile us into surrendering our judgment to the “latest science” (which has nothing to do with STEM). I fear that the field of misinformation studies may contain elements that aim to simply dictate the boundaries of public discourse and thought. The question of the nature is truth is an important one, but power over defining what Truth is can be very easily abused.

The Siren Call of Scientism in a confusing world