How to Confront Fake News, Misinformation, and Disinformation
By: Sam Vaknin, Brussels Morning
There are two types of fake info: goal-oriented and narrative-minded. The motivations behind these twin operations are different although the channels of dissemination are often one and the same.
Still, the root etiology of these insidious activities is identical: they thrive on the distrust between the citizen and the media as well as on persecutory and paranoid ideation regarding the elites and the authorities.
Fake news and skewed data often involve some kind of alleged occult conspiracy. They leverage psychodynamics and traits such as conspiracism, cognitive biases and distortions (e.g., grandiosity), naïve gullibility, and magical thinking.
Goal-oriented misinformation and disinformation are instruments wielded to secure political, geopolitical, or economic outcomes favorable to the source of the wrong data (“active measures”).
Fake news also make an appearance within wide-ranging conspiracy theories intended to undermine the remaining good faith between people by virtue signaling the “courage” to undo and expose claimed advertent obfuscation, propaganda, falsities, and outright lies.
The remedy is to restore the trustworthy rapport between individuals and institutions, including with the state, law enforcement, the media, and the intellectual and business elites.
This requires transparency hard-wired into all processes, full disclosure, participatory decision-making, crowdsourced access to all communication channels, and external, trusted observers and rankers.
Still, in conditions of extreme indeterminacy, gossip replaces investigation and “commonsensical” flights of fancy substitute for research.
We have an innate need to make sense of the world. The more uncertain reality is, the more inclined we are to impose counterfactual narratives on it. But it is when these works of fiction hijack politics that we are in real trouble.
To eradicate the cancerous growth of post-truthism, an effort needs to be made both to restore the covenant between individual and collective and to introduce more predictability into our dystopian reality.
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is a former economic advisor to governments (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, North Macedonia), served as the editor in chief of “Global Politician” and as a columnist in various print and international media including “Central Europe Review” and United Press International (UPI). He taught psychology and finance in various academic institutions in several countries (http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html )
