8 Mis, Dis, and Mal-Information

Disinformation

What it is.

Disinformation, can come in a variety of forms, it might be political, it might be economic. And it might be kind of a social issue. But, again, I want to mention that those distinctions aren’t always clear. So for example, if you support people having health care, like the healthcare for all or the Medicare for all, or Obamacare, or any one of those potential avenues, about health issues, that’s a political issue, because we have policies that govern our healthcare, it’s also economic, because our healthcare has an impact on the economy. It’s also a social issue, because it affects humans.

So what counts as being fake news? Well, first of all, the one question to ask yourself is, is it actually news? It’s important to always look at that dateline to find out when was this published or produced, because if it’s, it’s not timely, it can kind of confuse you about its relevance. It can’t is news, if it’s something of importance, proximity matters as well. So this is kind of like how important it is to you as a person. So for example, if you are someone who is in America on a green card, policy issues about green cards are probably a little bit more salient to you than someone who is not living here with a green card. prominence is important, too. You may have heard, there’s a there’s a famous phrase that I’m going to paraphrase here, where it’s like, if you break your arm, that’s not famous news. But if the Queen of England breaks her arm, then that is news. And so anything that’s kind of unusual, counts as being news. Again, there’s a famous phrase where it’s like, a dog bites a man, that’s not big news. But if a man bites a dog, now that’s going to be in the news, because it’s just more unusual. Or anything that’s kind of just a human interest story is going to count as news. So that’s question number one. Is it news?

Question number two, Who wrote it? was it written by a professional, so sometimes you can get an idea about that by looking at where it was published or printed? Because if it’s, you know, a news outlet that is run by people who have degrees in journalism, chances are good that it’s going to be written by a professional. And you can’t always tell that though. Even real news gets it wrong sometimes. For example, CBS, this is like many years ago now, but I guess it wasn’t that many years ago. CBS did a report on George W. Bush. And the report was basically saying that while he was in the National Guard, I think it was that he got special treatment in the military. But the report was based on information that could not be verified. And so his evidence is that they weren’t lying on purpose or anything, but that they were relying on faulty information. And in the fall, it was so bad that the very famous reporter Dan rather’s resigned because of this what we would call Miss information, because maybe it wasn’t intentional. But it was not supported by the evidence, Dan Rather, is, you might still know of him because he’s kind of famous on social media now. And it’s not always accidental. Sometimes it’s intentional. give you this weird example, Brian Williams and other famous reporter said that he was in a helicopter that got shot down in a war zone. And that was very easy to show that that didn’t happen. So nobody really kind of knew what was up with that. But again, he was a professional journalist who, you know, that story just was not accurate. So it’s hard to define who is a professional journalist, but they generally have these three qualities, knowledge, organization and autonomy, autonomy, meaning that, you know, they’re not reporting by for a company that they make money off of, as well, like, you know, if you work for a company that makes a product called widgets, and you’re reporting about how awesome widgets are, then that’s not being autonomous. So professional people in journalism are going to seek the truth, the objective truth, they’re also going to minimize harm. They’re going to act independently. Again, they’re not you know, beholden to the their sponsors to say good things about products or people. They’re going to be accountable and transparent. But then you have the question, well, who are they accountable to? Are they accountable to the organization they work for? Are they accountable to their audience, you have to kind of ask those things I wanted to bring up also, because this is an issue that comes up a lot is that people think being impartial is being a good journalist. But we don’t always find that the case. Sometimes there are certain issues where the vast majority of evidence says one thing. So you don’t want to give equal time to the opposing argument. This is a nice article that you can read through if you want, but I can give you an example with climate change. So the vast majority of scientists agree, climate change is real, and it’s manmade. So the New York Times actually posted an article once that was trying to be balanced. And so they give equal credence and equal time to this idea that climate change isn’t real. And they got a lot of flack for that, because they’re like, you shouldn’t give equal time to things that are, you know, widely disproven like that.

We’re moving away from the term fake news because it’s sort of become popular for people to just call anything they don’t agree with fake news, even though there may actually be support for it. The term “fake news” also fails to differentiate between the types of bad information we see in the media.

Misinformation: This is incorrect information, but it was not created with an intention to be incorrect. For example, when a news story is brand new, news outlets can get some information wrong. Good journalists will issue corrections when they realize that information is incorrect.

Disinformation: This false information was created intentionally to deceive the public.

Why it matters.   

It matters because there’s a lot of mis and disinformation out there.

It can cause people to believe something that isn’t true.

Additionally, it can cause people to think that they can’t believe anything that they see in the news, which is also damaging to democratic communication.

In reality, there’s a lot of very real true, accurate information about the world readily available to those who seek it. Recall that in the social science, we assert that we live in an objective reality. So what we don’t want to happen is for people to think that they can trust nothing, because when people start to turn away from journalism, we see a decline in citizenship behaviors.

One form of disinformation is when algorithms or bots are posing as real people, or a real news outlet when it’s really not. We’ve seen some of those targeting Ohio even for example, Russian accounts, were retweeted that were attacks on John Kasick. Also, there was a disinformation story regarding write-in votes for Hillary Clinton being found in a warehouse that was (again proven to be false).

Sometimes the false information can be a real photo but a fake story. For example, there were images from a rally that was a Donald Trump rally. But those images weren’t actually from his rally. It was from a Cleveland Cavaliers party. And it was supposed to make his part of his rally look like he had higher attendance than it actually did.

Or sometimes people take something that is real and pretend that it’s not, and that is disinformation as well. For example, you have all those people who are saying that the school shootings aren’t real when sadly they are.

I do want to always point out when we talk about disinformation, that that’s not the main problem. There are a lot of human issues and cognitive biases, which we’ll talk about as well. Not in this chapter, but eventually, really addressing the idea that disinformation is not the only problem. I would argue that the main problem is more just getting people so that they can recognize what it is when they see it.

Dr. Jason Coronal did a very interesting study where he found that people can create their own false information.

For media literacy, the questions to ask yourself, as far as figuring out if something is accurate or not:  Is it newsworthy? If so, why? If not What’s missing? Who wrote it? Are they professional? What’s their educational background? What organization do they work for? Who owns that organization? What is the purpose of this article?  Are they supposed to be informing you? Are they trying to persuade you? Why do you think one way or the other? Do you find any inaccurate facts? If so, how would you know? And content? Finally, is the story listing facts in some kind of context? If so, is that context fair? Or do you find it manipulative?

So if you have time, every time you read a newspaper article to sit down and ask yourself all these questions, that’s fantastic, that’s ideal. Again, you can’t always do that. So sometimes I like to just make sure that I’m exposing myself to information that is coming from generally reliable professional sources. Like there’s a lot of newspapers that are supported, in general by media literacy professionals that their their information is, you know, the vast majority of the time very accurate.

Opinion Leaders and Conspiracy Theories

In this case, we are looking at conspiracy theories. But before you start, just digging into the research that exists, is really nice. If you begin by asking yourself, what is it specifically that I want to know about this topic? So in our case, we want to ask these questions. What are conspiracy theories? And why are they bad for democracy? I mean, in this case, I already know that they’re bad for democracy. But in general, you might be asking yourself, Is it bad for democracy? what makes them tick? Like why are people attracted to conspiracy theories? are certain kinds of people more susceptible than other kinds of people? And what can we do about it? It’s important to sort of lay these questions out before you start digging into the research, because it guides you where to go and it helps you not overlook certain issues, you know, for example, what makes them work? Or is someone more susceptible than others? These are two kinds of questions that can be easy to overlook. If you don’t very specifically ask yourself.

So starting with our very first question, what is a conspiracy theory? Tthere are lots of definitions in the literature, this is one of the ones that I like the most. And basically, they say that it’s a conspiracy theory is an explanation for partially observed events in which an unknown, usually powerful group of bad people act in secrets. And I can give you a couple examples of that. Who knows, by the time you see this video, if q anon is still going to be a thing or not. But it has been one of the most widely known conspiracy theories in American history. And it’s been widely debunked. There’s there’s no evidence base to this q&a. But a lot of people believe in it.  But basically, it’s these kind of like wild beliefs that there are people in the democratic party that are drinking the blood of children. And I mean, there’s all kinds of crazy stuff going on here. And a lot of it is believed by a small but loud portion of the American public. And what’s happening is that they’re seeing sort of connections that don’t really exist. And in this new york times article, it describes one particular cue nonbeliever. And one of the things that she noticed is that when Donald Trump was president, there was a Christmas ornament that was a domino on a Christmas tree. And the domino had 17 dots on it. And 17 is the the number that corresponds with the letter Q because it’s the 17th letter of the alphabet. And so she felt that this Christmas ornament was Donald Trump communicating some kind of message to cue non believers. And that’s exactly what a conspiracy theory does is that they’re connecting dots where the dots don’t actually exist.

These kinds of conspiracy theories can have a real impact on citizenship behavior. Which brings us to our next question, why are conspiracy theories bad for democracies? So to start with, a lot of people believe them. According to this study, about half of Americans believe at least one disproven conspiracy theory. And you know, back to that Qanon, in particular, nearly half of Americans have heard of it, which is quite big number of people for a conspiracy theory, out of those half of the Americans who have heard of it, one out of 520 percent, say that it’s either somewhat good or very good. In other words, a lot of people are believing in it. Support for conspiracy theories like that. It’s linked to prejudice, violence and terrorism, including domestic terrorism. In fact, Qanon followers have been labeled by the FBI as a potential terrorist threat, after starting violence in May of 2020. And, obviously, they’ve continued since then, as well.

People who are high in conspiracism, tend to have a lack of trust in the government, they tend to be more lenient toward violence, alienation, and other anti social behaviors. And I think this is important to know, just because someone believes in conspiracy theories does not mean that they’re going to be violent. But it does mean that there’s a chance a better chance that they’re going to be more lenient, toward violence. And that’s something to really keep in mind for a lot of the research that we do in the communication and all social science fields. You know, for example, when we talk about something like violence in television shows, it’s not like if someone watches a violent television show, they’re going to run out and punch someone in the face. That might happen. But it doesn’t happen very often. What we’re more concerned about is the smaller but cumulative effects where people who watch a lot of violent television, they may not run out and be violent themselves, but they may be a little bit more supportive of violence when someone else does it. And those kind of smaller effects cumulatively, cumulatively over time can have some really negative effects on democracy.

One of the troubles also with conspiracy theories is that traditional media relies on evidence, conspiracy theories do not. And it’s harder to come by actual evidence than it is to just make stuff up. So that means it is a lot easier for people who are creating these conspiracy theories to put their information out there. Because there’s no hard work behind it, they don’t need to come up with evidence to support it. And so this makes it very easy for them to gain traction in the media. In addition, just labeling an article as a conspiracy theory makes people interested in it, there’s something about that word that just makes people be like, ooh, I want to read about this. And then the more likely they are to actually believe it. So that makes conspiracy theories, bad for democracy, what makes them work. So humans do naturally see patterns in the world around them and are likely to embrace information that gives them a sense of belonging. This is hardwired into us through evolution over time, because it helps us explain random events or make sense of the world. This is referred to as the functional theories of attitudes, one of the reason why someone might have a positive attitude towards something is because it helps them make sense of the world. And in this case, you can use conspiracy theories as an example of that you might say, some people have a positive attitude towards conspiracy theories, because it helps them have a reason for what they’re seeing in the world. And that reason might not be right, but it it might help them feel like they understand the world a little bit better, even though they are understanding it incorrectly. conspiracy theories make people feel special or unique. As if they’re part of a group, especially an exclusive one. And addition, a group that has a sense of control again, they want to feel like they’re making sense of the world. But these conspiracy theories give people that sense of control by making them feel like they’re there is a clear cut, you know, good guy, bad guy, right answer wrong answer.

So our next question was, are some people more vulnerable than others? Yes, definitely they are. For one, people who see the world as a dangerous place are more prone to think that information that is, in fact meaningless, is more profound. So they’re more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, they’re probably, you know, statistically, they’re more likely to have low self esteem, low on agreeableness, meaning they’re not very friendly, low on conscientiousness, and low on humility. And I knew that might sound like a bit of a contradiction, they have low self esteem and low humility. And that kind of sounds like that should be the opposite of each other. But just because someone has low self esteem doesn’t mean that they don’t have a sense of grandiosity or a desire for grandiosity, they might feel badly about themselves, but they think that they’re that they are special, maybe just the rest of the world doesn’t see it or whatever. There is also quite a bit of evidence that people who self described as Republicans are more susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories. And people who identify as republican are more likely to spread conspiracy theories. Now, this is one of those reasons why it’s really important before you start digging into the research, to kind of lay out your questions in advance. Because if you don’t leave your questions out in advance, it might lead you to falling victim to confirmation bias, you might see a statement like this, that’s a pretty straightforward correlation, Republicans are on average, more likely to believe in and spread conspiracy theories than Democrats. That is a real correlation. And it would be easy for confirmation bias to make you stop there. You know, if you identify as a Republican confirmation bias might make you think, Oh, those studies are all garbage, even though there’s actually quite a bit of evidence, even more than I’ve got cited here. You know, confirmation bias might make you think, like, I’m not gonna read those studies. They’re their bias. So you know, why should I bother? vice versa? If you identify as a Democrat, it’s very easy to look at some kind of surface level data like this and say, oh, yep, I knew it. We’re just smarter than them. And actually, neither one of those are the case. When you see these kind of surface level data, that’s where it’s important to have your questions laid out in advance and to dig into a little deeper, and try to figure out why that might be. As it is research shows us that Republicans are more likely to believe in or be targeted by conspiracy theories, even when other republicans are the people being blamed. So if it was just ideologically driven, Republicans would be more likely to believe conspiracy theories only when democrats were the person that was classified as the bad guy in the conspiracy theory. But that’s not what we see happening. We see that Republicans are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories when another republican is being painted as the bad guy. So they’re not more likely to believe in conspiracy theories for ideological reasons. And it’s not a personality issue either. So on average, Republicans tend to have less trust for the government than Democrats. But that was statistically controlled in all of this research. So if it’s not an ideology thing, and it’s not a personality thing, what else do you suppose that it might be? And so that’s where it’s important to dig into this, because what we find is that there is a reason, and it’s likely the impact of opinion leaders. So we do not see data supporting the fact that Republicans are gullible. And what we see evidence of is more that people who are republican or conservative who are opinion leaders in the media, tend to be advancing these conspiracy theories. So it’s not a personality difference. It’s a media difference that is really driving this effect. And I think that’s really important to know, because we tend to put people in camps. And by saying like, Oh, well, Republicans are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories must be they’re more gullible is not supported by data. But the idea that republican opinion leaders are advancing more conspiracy theories, and that is contributing to more republicans believe in conspiracy theories that is supported by data.

And so because of that, we can see this spiral happening where opinion leaders who identify as republican or conservative are putting these conspiracy theories out there, more and more people hear about the conspiracy theories. And so the more people that hear about it, the more people to support it, the more people say, well, it must be true because other people believe it. And so you can see how they get out of control. And that’s what we have something like q anon, where, you know, almost 25% of the American public, believe it.

So what can we do about conspiracy theories? To start with, challenging the facts alone is not enough. A lot of people think that to combat conspiracy theories, you simply need to present someone with factual information. But that’s generally not going to work. Because a lot of people who believe in conspiracy theories, they don’t want to learn the facts, for one, because then that would take away all those reasons why conspiracy theories work in the first place, giving them that sense of belonging or understanding the world. So they’re, they’re quite motivated not to learn the facts. In addition, they don’t trust experts. So if you provide them with facts from scientific information, they’re just going to dismiss it, and they’re probably not going to read it in the first place, because they’re gonna say, like, oh, all those scientists are corrupt.

Another problem is that fighting conspiracy theories can actually make people believe them more. For example, when social media says you’re not allowed to say these widely debunked and disproven and potentially dangerous or violent conspiracy theories on social media, with the conspiracy theorists here is now they’re trying to censor us, we must be onto something. And so again, you see that kind of spiral were trying to combat the spread of this very serious December disinformation can actually make people believe in it more.

So challenging the facts is an option, but it’s not enough on its own. Another thing you can do is inoculate people against it. So if you can try to teach people a little bit about how media works, and media literacy before they believe in conspiracy theories, then they’re going to be able to be much more equipped to not fall victim to those things. Another thing that we can do is increase information about news media. Because the more people learn about news media and how it works, the less likely they are to believe in conspiracy theories.

So, what it all kind of comes down to is, it’s good to question things, you shouldn’t just accept everything that you see in the media. But if you have a really solid, educational background in general education, where you’re not just taking classes in your major, but you’re taking this general education, cumulatively that can really help people learn how to engage with media and reality in general, without going down this rabbit hole of lies. And so this is why institutions like OSU do have very strong general education programs. Because  each individual general education class is probably not going to make you a more critical thinker. But cumulatively, over time all those general education classes together can really help you to become a more informed, active and responsible citizen

Logical Fallacies

One of my very favorite topics in all of the social sciences is logical fallacies. I like this topic, just because I think it’s interesting. But also because logical fallacies are everywhere. And they have a very strong influence on us. So what is a logical fallacy? Basically, a logical fallacy is an argument that makes sense, unless you think about it.

I’ve got an example here, where this Penguin, I guess, is thinking, penguins are black and white, some old TV shows are black and white. Therefore, some penguins are old TV shows, it follows a kind of logic, except that it doesn’t. And that’s exactly what logical fallacies do. And if you’re not paying attention, they will get you for sure.

We are not going to go through all of them. But we’ll go through a couple of the more common types of logical fallacies. But before we do that, I wanted to first address the fact that everybody, at some point in time has made an argument that is a logical fallacy. I’ve got an example here, if you want to watch it, of former President Obama and a logical fallacy where he just kind of completely dodged a question. The interviewer asked him a question about Sarah Palin. And instead of answering, you know, addressing the actual question, he just kind of said, Well, she’s not qualified for that, and then moved on. And that’s actually the logical fallacy called a red herring where you just kind of changed the topic. Even Einstein, committed logical fallacies. So this one’s a little bit more complicated is called the false equivalence fallacy. But basically, what he was saying is, there’s no way to distinguish the motion produced by inertial forces, like hitting a gas pedal the car from the motion produced by gravitational force, kind of like making these two things sound more equal than they actually are. So if you catch yourself committing a logical fallacy, don’t feel bad about that feel good about that feel good that you caught yourself doing it. Everybody does it. And actually being self reflective is a really good thing.

So I’m going to give you some examples of some of the more common logical fallacies. And for each one, what I like to do is kind of start with a silly example. But I also want to include a real life example as well, because I think that is fun and interesting as logical fallacies are, it’s important to know that they have a real impact on real humans. And in that way, this kind of communication can potentially have a very negative effect on citizenship behavior.

So let’s start with the a priori logical fallacy. This is where you start with a fact and then go from there. But the problem with it is that the fact is not necessarily true. So let’s start with this one. It says cats are liquids. And liquids take the shape of a container that maintain a constant volume. And so here’s your evidence that cats are liquid. And again, it seems to follow a certain logic unless you think about it. The real life example of this, you know, actually happened with the Salem witch hunts, where they particularly targeted women, and accused them of being witches, and murdered them, real human women murdered for being witches, when of course, in fact, they were not witches. But a lot of the justification for these murders started with that a priori logical fallacy, and it went like this. Listen, we all know that witches float. So if we drown this woman, and she dies, then we know she wasn’t a witch. But if she lives, we know she’s a witch. And so it starts with this fact. We all Know that which is float as if that’s just true, when in fact, it’s obviously not. But you know, imagine living in that time period, it would be
not that difficult to accept, well, if someone’s telling me that which is float, then must be they do.

So the next logical fallacy I wanted to talk about is called the just world. And in our silly example, we have these fish, where the very big fish has obviously a lot of advantages in life. And so this big fish thinks the world is a just kind place, everything is okay in the world. And then the middle fish is like, yeah, there’s some justice, you know, some things really aren’t fair. But for the most part, things are fair, then the very little fish who has a lot of natural disadvantages is saying, well, there’s no justice in the world. And so their points of view, are very different than each other because of their different situations. And we see this, of course, happening in the real world a lot. Perhaps you’ve seen this cartoon before it was making its rounds through social media a couple of years ago. But I, I really liked this cartoon as an illustration of a real world example of the just world, which you may have also referred to as the fundamental attribution error. And actually, I think that this inability for people to understand other people’s perspectives, and other people’s lived experience is different than theirs is one of the main problems that we see in the relationship between media and citizenship. So in this cartoon, is basically chronicling the lives of these two people. So we have the young boy looks like he’s a teenager here, his name is Richard. And then we have a girl named Paula. And, you know, going down the left side of the column, we see things that are happening in Richards life and going to in the right column, we see things that are happening in policy life. And to start with, you know, Richard’s parents are home a lot more often. And so his home life is very different than Paul, Paul, his parents are working. And so she’s home alone more often than we move along to school. You know, Richard school is very well funded. So he has a lot of interaction with his teachers. And in Paula’s school is not very well funded. And so the teachers overworked underpaid, she just doesn’t have as many educational opportunities as he does. Then we have expectations where, you know, Richard’s parents really want to see him getting the best grades he can. So they’re going to provide him with a tutor. And the expectations for Paula are lower because her resources are lower than we see them at work. And this guy is familiar with Richard’s dad. And so he has high expectations of him at work. Versus Paula is not getting that kind of instant benefit of the doubt from from her boss. And we see Richard being very successful. And Paula is working at an event where Richard has yet gotten a promotion, there’s whatever he’s celebrating. And then the very end, they asked Richard, well, what is the key to your success? And he says, less whining, more hard work, I say, I’m sick of people asking for handouts. No one ever handed me anything on a plate. And you can see the irony here in this frame. And I think there’s two things about this cartoon that that make it one of my favorites. The first is that it really illustrates all the different life situations that caused their their lives to turn out the way that they did. And this is very much supported by the social science, people who have different opportunities in life are more likely to get a high paying job. The other thing that I really like about this cartoon in his accuracy is at no point is the cartoon saying that Richard didn’t work hard. I mean, look at this, he’s doing his homework, his parents are saying good job. He’s interacting with this teacher, he’s very pleasant. When he doesn’t get the great grade that well, I say, a B pluses are really good grade. But for the point of this cartoon, you know, he didn’t get the grade he wanted. So he works with a tutor. You know, he starts lower on the totem pole at work, and he develops a good relationship with his boss. He’s working hard the whole time. No one is saying that Richard wasn’t working hard. The only thing that this cartoon is saying is that his life situation wasn’t holding him back. Whereas Paula was. And so that is a very real world example of the fundamental attribution error where we think sometimes that other people’s circumstance stances are more relevant to choices they made, when actually all this background stuff has a huge influence on the outcomes.

So the next logical fallacy is ad hominem, you’ve may have heard this as you know, attack to the person. So you see this a lot when someone is engaged in an argument. And it’s like they run out of things to say, and because they don’t have any way to kind of defend themselves, instead, they attack the person instead of the person’s argument. So in our silly example, we have a debate here, where this guy’s like, No, your face is a logical fallacy. And here’s a real life example. We see this happening in politics. This is an older one. But I think it’s a good example of one of these in the area of politics, because we see it in politics all the time, where someone may not be addressing an actual argument, but they’re attacking a person, person speech, do you remember that catastrophe? And he’s like this, and we will. I need water help me, I need water, hell. And he said, this is on live television. This total joke artists. It’s Rubio. All right. So what we see there is an example of an argument that locks that lacks any sense of logic, or reasoning, it’s just really making fun of someone, which is not a great way to make decisions, when it comes to real life and citizenship.

The next logical fallacy is the affective fallacy, basically, where people have this idea that if they have a feeling, they have an emotion, that emotion must be justified. You know, like, if I’m angry, I must be angry for a reason. And so probably you did something wrong, that made me feel angry, when, in fact, maybe my anger has nothing to do with you. But people feel like their own emotions are justifiable. We see this in real life where people are really quite cruel to each other. For example, this was a famous case where this guy Brock Turner, sexually assaulted a young lady, and she was unconscious when he did so. And his dad defined that as 20 minutes of action, which is very callous way to describe a very serious sexual assault. And basically, what he’s doing is just kind of saying like, well, he wanted to, so must be he was justified in doing it. And you can see that that can have some very serious real life consequences.

The next one is appeal to tradition, where people say, Oh, we should do this, because it’s always been that way, you know, like the carrier pigeon, when in fact, that’s not always the best way to make decisions. The real life example that I have here is a newspaper article from the Washington Post, you can click on this and read it if you would like. But to summarize, this is where a politician from Poland made these very, very sexist comments against women and against women in politics, basically, saying they shouldn’t, you know, make decisions, they should just raise children and be quiet is essentially what he said. It wasn’t even that long ago. This was only in 2017. So you know, it’s not super recent, but it’s not like it was, you know, 100 years ago. Um, and you can see where those kind of appeals to tradition are just not logical.

The next one is gaslighting, which you’ve probably heard of where someone is trying to convince you that what you see or hear is not real or not really happening, and they make you kind of question your sense of reality. So here we have a guy clearly talking about a banana. Clearly he is a banana. And then he’s like, Oh, I didn’t say anything about bananas. And we see this happening in real life quite a bit too.  gaslighting in the world of politics, which can happen quite a bit. And even in what, at one point in time, Donald Trump said, Don’t believe what you see, or what your eyes are telling you or something like that. I’m paraphrasing, but he actually said, Don’t believe the things you see happening in the world.

And one of my favorite fallacies, which is called the fallacy fallacy. And with the fallacy fallacy, basically what it is, is, you might catch someone in a logical fallacy and then kind of be like, haha, I’ve caught you in a logical fallacy, you must be wrong. But just because someone’s using a logical fallacy doesn’t mean that their main point is incorrect. It means their logic is bad. But just because their logic is bad doesn’t mean that the outcome is incorrect. It reminds me of a song by Nirvana. Nirvana was a band that was really popular when I was a teenager. And a lyric in one of their songs says, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean we’re not after you. And that just kind of reminds me of the fallacy fallacy.

References

Boburg, S. & Swaine, J. (Sept 21, 2021). One lawyer’s rise shows how vaccine misinformation can fuel fundraising and far-right celebrity. The Washington Post.

Editorial Board. (date). Instead of restricting political ads on social media, actually address the misinformation in them. The Washington Post.