Countering 'Misinformation'
Sander van der Linden's 'Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity'.
You've always known that you sacrifice your privacy when you engage with social media and are increasingly a victim of surveillance capitalism ('you are the product'). You even know that The Man may be watching you, but to behavioural scientists like Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge Professor of Psychology, you are a data point, and an experimental subject, fair game for a spot of social engineering.
The Twitter Files and Big Brother Watch's recent report 'Ministry of Truth' have revealed the extent to which state surveillance and censorship is prevalent on social media. Moving beyond that and into the world of behavioural science, we have learnt all about nudge theory, courtesy of its founders, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and its pre-pandemic use from David Halpern of the UK's nudge unit, but in the pandemic itself we discovered how Spi-B, a subgroup of SAGE, ran with it to the point that they went far beyond it, as beautifully exposed by Laura Dodsworth.
I imagine that there are many forms of government psy-op in use, some of which we have yet to be made aware of, but another one we can now learn about from its architect is 'prebunking'. Sander van der Linden has written this helpful guide to this social engineering technique for which he is the lead. He advised the UK government during the pandemic (vaccine hesitancy was one of his remits) and the WHO. Now he is also advising Google; you may have seen recent news stories about the expansion of Google's prebunking program.
Prebunking is about inoculating impressionable minds with attenuated vaccines, small doses of misinformation, to train people to recognise misinformation on social media, usually via the medium of games. This virus/vaccine analogy is pushed to the limit, perhaps beyond, throughout the book. The analogy grates a little, given what we have just been through.
Sander van der Linden has quite a history in the 'misinformation' field, being heavily involved in the Facebook climate algorithms ("See how the climate is changing in your area", etc.), as one example. You will read much about the '97% of scientists...' climate claim, though with no explicit acknowledgement (that I noted) that scientific truth is not determined by consensus, nor the fact that few people deny climate change or that humans contribute to it; the dispute is about what to do about it.
He distinguishes misinformation from disinformation but observes that it is hard to draw a line between the two without an accurate determination of motive, which is rarely straightforward. This allows him to talk about 'misinformation' throughout the book whilst (perhaps) placing in the reader's mind that the 'misinformation' discussed may really be 'disinformation' promoted by bad actors.
There is a great deal of interesting information and analysis in the book, with his years of research combined with the standard stuff you will be familiar with from other books about human irrationality, cognitive biases and flaws, propaganda, microtargeting, social media algorithms pushing people to more extreme/polarising content etc.
One suspects that some examples of conspiracy theories, like the influence of globalists on our lives (deliberately dismissed as a belief in lizard people) or that Covid was a lab leak, may not age well. This may be an experiment of his, to see if 'conspiracy theorists' pick up on it, but he is peculiarly at pains to point out how The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded his PhD student. I’ve taken the bait!
As noted above, one should be under no doubt that you are reduced to a data point and experimental subject for behavioural and data scientists. Something that comes strongly across in the book is the depth of analysis applied to social media by all sorts of actors. If your data point transmits or receives ‘misinformation’ with many others, you may be a 'superspreader' or 'super consumer', which may single you out for special interest from scientists (and, possibly, the authorities). At that point, you may no longer be a mere data point but a person again.
He is very much a believer in mono-narratives (that is, censorship). He cites plenty of research to suggest that if people are presented with a high-probability narrative and a low-probability narrative, most will assume that both narratives have equal, or near equal, probability. I don't doubt that this is the case, but, of course, as we know from Thomas Kuhn, this is not how science works when it comes to actually determining the facts of the matter.
I have little doubt that this book will be enthusiastically reviewed shortly in the corporate media and that they will provide excellent (positive) summaries of the book's content and his research, so I will leave them to do that and concentrate on my own narrative (I don't think you should accuse me of not being honest here!).
Sander van der Linden lacks self-awareness. In pointing out the manipulations of others, he fails to see that he is guilty of the same thing. He may think he is merely offering a corrective and is doing things for the right reasons; if he is arguing that, then he has plenty of company, not least conspiracy theorist nemesis Bill Gates, who offers such a defence of his activities. Many people are not happy with being manipulated by agents of the government or transnational organisations and corporations without their consent. There is no discussion of ethical considerations in the book, so we never learn his views (except that, as is common in academic writing for the general public these days, he’s no fan of Trump). To be fair, I think he would defend his prebunking methods by saying that participation in prebunking exercises is a voluntary decision by the participant, even if he was very keen to encourage the sharing of the exercises in the first place.
For me, the most significant problems lie with what the book doesn't say. It assumes that the information is good in the first place. Were these pieces of information good? 'mRNA vaccines are safe and effective', 'vaccines prevent Covid transmission', 'masking prevents the spread the Covid', for example? Whilst he says that the prebunking method does not rely on promoting a particular narrative but on diminishing the susceptibility of vulnerable minds to the effects of misinformation (counter-narratives/alternative narratives?), the hidden assumption remains that there is a 'correct' narrative.
We know now that the vaccines were never tested for transmission prevention, and their safety and efficacy are falling under increasing analysis, as are the long-concealed trial data and the means by which they received EUAs. The recent Cochrane Review concludes that the evidence is scant that masking did anything useful (beyond scaring people into social distancing, as Laura Dodsworth argued).
Sander van der Linden takes it as read, repeatedly, that the fact-checkers are good. However, we know that they are sometimes not (especially now that some of their facts on things like the above may not have been correct), and we know that the tech-media-pharma complex funds most of them. He would appear to assume that anybody who might doubt them is irrational. These are not his words; it is unclear why he thinks we should accept them without question. I would say it is irrational not to doubt them, not least because sometimes the same people who have profited from the pandemic fund them.
He further ignores the possibility that if the whole system is rigged through, for example, Big Pharma funding, directed research, gatekeeping in scientific journals, and corrupt regulatory authorities, then 'trust the(se) experts', not your 'fake experts' might not carry quite the weight he supposes. Of course, that line of thinking would be written off as a conspiracy theory. No conspiracy theory is needed, however, to understand Stuart Ritchie's excellent 'Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science', Aubrey Clayton's 'Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science', or Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients' (which remains, a decade on, the most disturbing book I have ever read).
Something he mentions near the end of the book caught my attention. There was clearly some pushback in No 10 against his ideas and methods, and it is suggested that the Cabinet Office approved and the PM's office did not. There is a hint that somebody who approved went behind the back of somebody who disapproved to put his commissioned work online. Like Sander van der Linden, I will leave it up to the reader to decide who the players may have been here, but I have a pretty good idea.
Lest all the above seem entirely negative, the book is very much worth reading, and I recommend it. It is a valuable summary of many of the countermeasures taken against misinformation, and the section on just why it is so important that if you want to get a message across, you suppress alternatives is valuable. If that fails, you counter them, not by arguing for the 'right' position but by addressing the 'wrong' position. There is a great deal of genuine misinformation out there, and we all succumb to it at times.
For the critical and the conspiracy-minded, a behavioural scientist is telling you about how governments and Big Tech manipulate you. Just supposing that matters pertaining to Big Pharma are rigged, one might read the book as a guide to the latest techniques in effective propaganda. It is up to you to decide whether you think, all things considered, and in the aftermath of the pandemic, this is a good thing or not.
In many ways, one must admire these behavioural scientists because they did a good job getting these inadequately tested vaccines into most people's arms, in getting people to lock down and wear masks. It worked on this experimental subject!
Good piece! You'll like this one Nik, as I suspect many of your readers will too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr0LkPMZ-qc