Misinformation Theory

2,395 words

Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert!
Rick: I was misinformed.
–Casablanca

He who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.
–Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

We live in the age of the fake. Fake names, fake IDs, fake passports, fake tans, fake goods, fake money, fake news, deep fakes; this is a time of forgery and faux. The latest piece of contraband for which we must all be ever-vigilant is misinformation. Sometimes, apparently, you can’t tell just by looking at the label whether or not information is the real McCoy, and misinformation is shaping up to be a major redoubt in the battle for language, a battle we will fight whether we want to or not.

“Misinformation” is becoming the new “racism”, a word of power none other can trump. But it has not appeared alone; the orphan arrived with its non-identical twin. Misinformation and disinformation are not new constructions, but they are a pair of words who have slumbered in terms of their meaning, used casually and interchangeably until now, when a radical makeover is required for words whose political time has come. And, as usual, whoever gets there first gets to define terms.

To know where we are with the toxic twins, misinformation and disinformation, we must first agree on a definition of “information”. You have to know what it is you are missing or dissing. Information is something of which we all necessarily partake. Everything is information, and accordingly we are excellent processors of information. We have to be. This input is primarily visual, but the blind also process the information available to them. If you drive a car, for example, you are constantly processing information, and it is important that you do so without error. The speed you are travelling, the position and speed of other cars, the weather, the distance between you and the cars in front and behind, the various road-signs and instructions, dashboard indicators; all of this information must be constantly correlated and processed if you wish to stay on the road in one piece.

This information comes at us in discreet and instantly recognizable packages. It does not need to be unraveled or tested against anything else to check its integrity as information. We process it automatically and without conscious effort. This is obviously not the case with information taken from the internet, for example, but we can still process that. It just requires more comparison and context. Western governments know that we can do this, but pretend that we can’t, and that we are constantly in danger of being misinformed. Technocratic professionals such as themselves, they believe, are better at it, and the job of deciding what is valid information should be left to them along with the other public utilities. The first time this covert policy broke cover was several years ago, when Obama first talked about the need to “curate the truth”. So, we all participate in information. But what is it?

“Information” in classical philosophical terms is linked with a theory of knowledge originating in Plato’s theory of forms, in texts such as the Timaeus and the Republic. When thinkers such as Cicero and Augustine translated technical Greek terms like eidos (essence), morphe (form), idea (idea), typos (type), and prolepsis (representation) into Latin they used the terms informare and information. Thus, “information” does extra duty in terms of the commerce between Greece and Rome, the source of much speculative language that has found its way into the dictionary, which is where we rejoin it.

The dictionary is a book much despised by the Left, but one which must be fought for hard, as though it were a holy book, by those of us on the Right. As we will see, the information war is being fought over the right to define. We will be very English, and defer to the Oxford English Dictionary: “Information: The shaping of the mind or character; communication of instructive knowledge; education, training; †advice (obsolete).”

There are, as always, other definitions, but the OED has this as its first for “information”, and it is not at all what we were expecting. Casting around more modern dictionaries, “Facts about things, events, and situations” is the consensus definition. The OED does not shy from the archaic (which is why I use it), and illustrates its definitions in a way which makes dictionary-reading a pleasure as well as a vital tool against globalist ontology. For “information”, the OED turns to a letter from 1951, from a Michigan gentleman to his friend, and on the subject of learned institutions: “The literary and scientific institution contributes to the discipline and general information of the mind.”

Keep that definition in a safe place, because we will be needing it again later. I suggest that we think of “information”, in English, we are using the sense of “formation” as a mathematical grid, like military formation or cloud formation. Planes fly “in formation”. We thus neglect the word “information” as the molding or “licking into shape” of a mind. Some Indian tribes tell of the mother bear literally licking her cub from a formless mass into the familiar shape of a bear-cub. So too with the mind when it is “informed”.

Let’s try an experiment. “Misinformation” has become a buzzword, and needs to be assessed in the context of information. Now, I am not academically qualified for this, although philosophy does equip you well for intellectual tourism should you choose to stray from your own chosen path. I was vaguely aware that there exists something called “information theory”, but a cursory glance tells me it is largely mathematical, and so out of my philosophical league. Turning to my reliable and flood-damaged Oxford Companion to Philosophy, I find no entry at all under “information”. So, I am on my own. We’ll take four categories: Information, disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. Let’s say I really am on my own, in an unfamiliar town.

I wish to know the way to the bank. My phone – modern adjunct – is out of juice. I ask someone for directions. From this point, our transaction is informational. If he stares at me blankly, this is information, just as it is if he performs a mime, or tells me angrily that “All bankers are capitalist thieves!” and storms off. If he gives me directions, that is obviously also information, but it is conditional on my taking those directions, so it remains pure, neutral, unrefined information. The first three responses I would say were disinformation. Although informational, the silence, the mime, and the outburst do not fulfil the terms of the informational contract suggested by my question. They are extraneous to that question, and thus take place outside a full informational loop. In context, the first three responses have no informational integrity, and are high in what information theorists call “entropy”. Let’s turn to the giving of directions.

The man gives me directions to the bank: First right, first left, last building on the right. As noted, this is conditional information. I have to follow the directions first to discover the integrity of the information the directions contain. I do so, and find myself at the bank, just as directed. As information, the man’s directions had and have 100% integrity, were correct both at the time of transmission and that of my arrival, and were and are not entropic. There is one more positive outcome of this sound informational transaction besides my finding the bank (and perhaps tasting a little of the milk of human kindness). It seems petty but it is not, and it will return to cause much mischief. I am now equipped to pass on the information to anyone who should ask me the way to the bank. Also, now I know where the bank is, I am also free to misinform anyone who may ask me.

Misinformation and malinformation seem straightforward. If I follow the man’s directions and turn up at a casino, this is misinformation. I have been misinformed, perhaps because the man forgot that the bank moved premises six months ago and sold their old building to a casino chain. If the man knew he was misdirecting me to a casino, as sheer devilment or to make an obscure point about casino capitalism, this becomes malinformation.

Any practicing information theorists reading this and ready to pick holes in my analysis, save your breath for cooling your porridge. My layman’s definitions are sufficient to my point, which is that the status of information qua information is not the main area of concern for government. What concerns them is the transmission of information. It should be said at this point that “malinformation” – which seemed to me to be an excellent construction – very quickly dropped out of sight. There is, I would suggest, a reason for that. The Western elites (a glib phrase, but they do exist), conscious both of a war over meaning and that it is one they must win, are keen to allocate a meaning and usage to “misinformation” not entirely consistent with its prior definition. Where, then, can we be confident that the information we are to process is not misinformation?

You may remember Jacinda Ardern, the horse-faced ex-Prime Minister of the UK’s Commonwealth partner, New Zealand. During the Covid affair, when vaccinating the populace against whatever was designated as “misinformation” or “disinformation” was as important as filling them with experimental serum, she told New Zealanders – and the world – that her government was and ought to be “your single source of truth”. “Dismiss anything else”, she regally decreed.

She thus set her government up in a quasi-Koranic, near-Biblical position as the ultimate arbiter of reality. Government as your one-stop shop for the truth. How very modern. What of disinformation?

The OED defines disinformation in line with my definition of malinformation, but with an important extension:

[D]issemination of deliberately false information, especially when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media, with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it.

This won’t do at all. There is far too strong a suggestion that the trouble with disinformation lies with the rulers not the ruled, and a way must be found to switch the onus of responsibility. Enter misinformation.

Wikipedia is reassuringly left-wing, and keeps to the standard definitional pairing that equates our two terms: “In January 2024, the World Economic Forum (WEF) identified misinformation and disinformation, propagated by both internal and external interests, to ‘widen societal and political divides’ as the most severe global risks within the next two years.”

The twins have still not been separated. That took place far more recently, once again at the annual globalist WEF showcase.

The WEF recently held its annual convention in Davos in the Swiss Alps, and it featured one fascinating exchange. Outgoing President of the WEF, that curious character Klaus Schwab, was informing President Trump, via video link, of the evils facing the modern world. Proclaiming them as though they were the great plagues of Egypt, Schwab designated the climate as number one, closely followed by the threat of misinformation. Trump had absolutely no truck with this, and told Schwab that he was not getting involved in these post-modern games. Or words to that effect. But what is misinformation, and why are people saying such terrible things about it?

The American Psychological Association represents an industry which deals almost exclusively in information, and has the following as its in-house definitions of both misinformation and disinformation: “Misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts.”

It would seem that the WEF’s new stress on “misinformation” is intended to suggest that ordinary people are not equipped to sift through online information and decide which category it falls into. We don’t mean any harm, we are just unable to process online information correctly. But we should not worry; Government is here to help as Obama’s “curators” of truth.

Misinformation doesn’t have its own branch of theory as such, but it does have its own psychological effect, defined here in a psychological journal: “The misinformation effect refers to a type of memory impairment caused by the introduction of misleading information. Essentially, the misleading information becomes incorporated into the memory of the past event.”

This could be used to explain everything from the Homeric tradition to someone coming to believe that what they wrote on their CV was actually true, but it goes a surprisingly long way to describing the psychological apparatus of a phenomenon in contemporary politics which the governments of the West would rather its citizens do not tackle alone. But we are more than capable of doing so, at least, those of us old enough to have had an education enabling us to do so.

Misinformation has a deadly enemy, like all super-villains, and in this case it is scepticism. The internet is the sceptic’s friend, which is why it is becoming the enemy of government. My initial reaction to the news that Trump’s new press secretary was going to be Alex Jones, for example, was to laugh out loud, and I was right. It was obviously fake news (although it would have been vastly entertaining). But we are not to be trusted; it is government that decides what is and is not valid information, not those who use the internet to try to understand the world those governments are trying to befoul for us.

A statement given last year by a UK spokeswoman to the UN concerned “information integrity”, and contained the following: “The UK’s Online Safety Act will force companies to remove illegal online content, including illegal mis and disinformation generated by AI.”

This throws up serious questions, not least of intent, criminal or otherwise. But it also shows that the globalists are turning their big guns on information and, in particular, misinformation. It is no coincidence that Klaus Schwab prioritized the word as the second biggest global “threat” after the climate hoax, and that the UN as followed suit. And we should be grateful to Donald Trump for drawing his sword at the first sight of the enemy.