The Cato paper treats harmful information as just a few false claims floating around online. It says people rarely fall for it, the damage is minor, and the real problem is elite overreaction. This radically understates the scale and nature of the issue. - ThreadSky

eliothiggins.bsky.social • 1 day ago

The Cato paper treats harmful information as just a few false claims floating around online. It says people rarely fall for it, the damage is minor, and the real problem is elite overreaction. This radically understates the scale and nature of the issue.

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h-lane.bsky.social•1 day ago

"The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and ***Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries***- wikipedia

h-lane.bsky.social•1 day ago

i don't think Cato is a good source.
"Not surprisingly, Murray’s anti-regulation manifesto is being giddily promoted by right-wing organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, Murray’s institutional home, as well as the CATO Institute..."
https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/charles-murray-wants-right-wing-to-use-scientology-strategy-in-legal-war-on-u-s-government

tomhjhill.bsky.social•1 day ago

“People rarely fall for it”

climatechr1s.bsky.social•1 day ago

Surely elite fear of losing control of the narrative is what is at play here? Are you claiming only right wing populist lie?

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

Not at all, but you should think about how the elite controlled narratives through the 20th century, what structures existed to allow that and how thats changed in the last 15 years.

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

If you're not already familiar with his work, Walter Lippmann was a key thinker in this area, even if, as I do, you disagree with his proposed solution
https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/dewey-lippman

tilmane.bsky.social•19 hours ago

Isn't Cato tentatively a similar team and "elite' like the infamous heritage foundation?

cabbageridge.bsky.social•1 day ago

How do they reconcile the reductions in vaccines because of false information? Dead people is pretty dangerous to me

risu.bsky.social•1 day ago

Why would they write this? It is like the worst Facebook opinions in a paper

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities become locked into belief systems that can’t be challenged, where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t just distort truth, it breaks trust.

suzynuze.bsky.social•1 day ago

I’m not sure you state clearly enough the origin of these lies. People in positions of trust—Trump, GOP, Fox—band together to create these lies, propagate them and “keep up the bit” no matter how absurd, leaving anyone foolish enough to trust them to believe it. THEN the tribalism compounds it.

tomhjhill.bsky.social•1 day ago

Worry a lot about this. In political campaigns they have a “gettable” column of likely voters in the respective district. But I’ve seen anecdotal cases indicating how millions of people who WOULD be persuadable on the merits have been placed beyond the gettable column by these dynamics.

tomhjhill.bsky.social•1 day ago

It means nothing less than the collapse of reason as the basis for organising society. And the centrality and elevation of reason is what makes democracies so successful and adaptable.

climatechr1s.bsky.social•1 day ago

I see that with the war psychosis taking hold in the UK.

jeremybender.bsky.social•1 day ago

What she said 👇

graceofthenorth.bsky.social•1 day ago

The corruption takes place on several levels, on a personal level misinfo undermines citizen's epistemic rights to develop themselves as human beings that can form opinions and evaluate choices. It removes our right to intelligence and uncorrupted cognitive decision-making.

graceofthenorth.bsky.social•1 day ago

Moving beyond the social part you named, it also blows the Marketplace of Ideas to pieces, destroying the very NeoLiberal premise that Cato operates on. The core of their theory is busted. Saying truth doesn't matter in the MoI is like saying money doesn't matter in financial markets.

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

When this happens at scale, it’s not just bad information, it’s a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable. That’s what disordered discourse really is, a collapse in collective reasoning.

sentientstudio.bsky.social•1 day ago

📌

david-pax.bsky.social•1 day ago

On social media quantity beats quality. With all the bots and trolls spinning around, you get a completely skewed view of the facts and the world.

thatproviso.bsky.social•1 day ago

Small screen has little context.

christinak9.bsky.social•1 day ago

Republicans have been about theater since Reagan. Gingrich started the nonsense speak. Now we have a reality television President with a cabinet cast from Fox News. Bombs are for ratings. Billionaires run things. The BBB is so sad.

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

And when debate collapses, power doesn’t disappear, it just becomes unaccountable. Truth becomes tribal. Institutions become hollow. People are left shouting across a void, each group certain the others are insane or evil. That’s not freedom, it’s fragmentation.

massif.bsky.social•1 day ago

That's exactly what is happening: mass radicalization through narratives.

verivir.bsky.social•1 day ago

We essentially enter the realm of religions where you just have to agree to disagree, except we all managed to agree on the public space elements. Where a faith based group make their dogma and blasphemies the law, we all lose out. Actually I make this point on gender blasphemy wars.

paulrichwine.com•1 day ago

I see this dogma/blasphemy view in closed communities that require signifiers of loyalty. Not solely a flaw of the right either. I am wary of any groups dressing alike all using the same words.

verivir.bsky.social•1 day ago

Agreed. It exists in all communities because being a part of it feels good in the short term and we all limit how much friction we are a part of.

septimushodge.bsky.social•23 hours ago

Gresham's Law for information

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

We’ve seen this repeatedly. QAnon. COVID denial. Election lies. War crimes denial. In each case, the problem wasn’t just what people believed, it was how those beliefs hardened into identity and made correction impossible.

taylorlorenz.bsky.social•1 day ago

Totally agree with you, but around COVID specifically, the government and media lied and continues to lie about COVID and its ongoing harms. They continue to downplay the virus and labeled disabled ppl who called attention to breakthrough infections early spreaders of misinfo and deplatformed them

edithenz.bsky.social•18 hours ago

A VERY clever definition of the problem, concisely nailed down! This also explains this hard tension to science. Science is a definition of processes for fact finding, and the constant review of both process & findings. With the intrinsically embedded option of altering one's understanding.

r5-to-philly.bsky.social•1 day ago

https://bsky.app/profile/r5-to-philly.bsky.social/post/3lsllkmi5bk2b

wyrdandnerdy.bsky.social•1 day ago

And we are seeing it *right here*.

Who is correct? *Your* version or the institute's?

(It is a topic that always begs for a bit of fourth wall breaking.)

ggowe.bsky.social•23 hours ago

It’s because MAGA is a cult

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

The Cato paper ignores all this. Instead, it clings to a comforting idea, that “more speech” will fix everything. That if everyone just talks freely, the truth will rise to the top. That was never quite true. And today, it’s a fantasy.

stephentherry.bsky.social•11 hours ago

"More speech" will fix the free speech problem like "More guns" is supposed to solve the gun problem in this country. It's not how it works. It's never how it works.

saffron1.bsky.social•1 day ago

mountain-goat.bsky.social•1 day ago

"More speech" - reminds me of the Mountainhead scene in which Ven argues for more ai content so everything will basically lose meaning.

stillchar.bsky.social•1 day ago

It also ignores the fact that the volume of disinformation exceeds factual information

lifeisamazing.bsky.social•1 day ago

It was never true in the spheres of opinion and faith, and all the discourse you discuss is one of those two things. If it were true religious sects wouldn't have repeatedly sought to destroy each other for millennia, they'd just have talked till Protestants/Catholics/pagans/moslems all agreed.

framethis.bsky.social•23 hours ago

The marketplace of ideas is a scam

eliothiggins.bsky.social•1 day ago

We don’t live in a neutral marketplace of ideas. We live in an attention economy shaped by algorithms, tribal identity, outrage incentives, and profit models that reward engagement over accuracy.

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