Do we need more good information?
I’m at a symposium about misinformation, and a topic that keeps coming up is the idea that misinformation can somehow be mitigated by increasing the amount of good information.
But if anything I’ve read in the last few years is right, this just isn’t true. Or at least, it is not true in any simple sense.
Misinformation is not caused by a lack of information. That is closer to the older rumour model in communications theory: uncertainty fills a vacuum, and better information corrects it. But that is not really the media environment we are in.
What seems more useful is to think about misinformation as working through uncertainty in a different way: not by filling an absence, but by helping people form sticky interpretive schemas. People do not just absorb information; they organise it, attach it to existing identities and narratives, and use it to build a coherent picture of the world.
So yes, in some limited sense, flooding the zone with good information might matter. But only if we account for how people actually encounter information, how they interpret it, and why some narratives become durable while others do not.
Essentially, focusing on good information alone ignores media and communications almost entirely.
We are in an attention economy. At every point along the way, we need to think about how good information gets into the places people are actually looking, what form it takes when it arrives there, and what kinds of trust, habit, identity, and affect shape whether it will be taken seriously at all. Information does not circulate in a vacuum.
And then there is the question of communities who think the mainstream media is peddling misinformation. It is not really enough to say that they are seeking out falsehoods. In their own terms, they are often seeking out truth, or at least an account of the world they experience as more truthful than official versions.
That makes the problem harder. You cannot simply out-inform a worldview that is already organised around mistrust of the institutions producing your “good” information. The question is not just how to provide better facts, but how to engage without deepening alienation, hardening interpretive schemas, or confirming the sense that official narratives exist to dismiss, manage, or suppress other ways of making sense of the world.