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Defining what truth means and deciphering how human brains verify information are some of the challenges to battling widespread falsehoods.
Misinformation-both deliberately promoted and accidentally shared-is perhaps an inevitable part of the world in which we. live, but it is not a new problem. People likely have lied to one another for roughly as long as verbal communication has existed. Deceiving others can offer an apparent opportunity to gain strategic advantage, to motivate others to action, or even to protect interpersonal bonds. Moreover, people inadvertently have been sharing inaccurate information with one another for thousands of years. However, we currently live in an era in which technology enables information to reach large audiences distributed across the globe, and thus the potential for immediate and widespread effects from misinformation now looms larger than in the past. Yet the means to correct misinformation over time might be found in those same patterns of mass communication and of the facilitated spread of information.
Misinformation vs. Disinformation
Misinformation is concerning because of its potential to unduly influence attitudes and behavior, leading people to think and act differently than they would if they were correctly informed, as suggested by the research teams of Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University, among others. In other words, we worry that misinformation (or false information) might lead people to hold misperceptions (or false beliefs) and that these misperceptions, especially when they occur among large groups of people, may have downstream consequences for health, social harmony, and political life.
Does misinformation require intentional deceit on the part of the presenter? Philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who taught at institutions such as Goethe University Frankfurt and the Max Planck Institute in Germany until formally retiring in the 1990s, focuses on a speaker's intent to deceive to distinguish between misinformation and disinformation. Habermas views truth as only possible collectively among people as a product of consensus; one's collegial participation in such collective understanding also matters. Misinformation from such a perspective, then, is contentious information reflecting disagreement among people, whereas disinformation is more problematic, as it involves deliberate alienation or disempowerment of other people. Lewandowsky and his colleagues have carried forward this definition of disinformation as intentionally incorrect...