An academic effort to track the dissemination of misinformation in such domains as politics and medicine is stumbling, due, I suspect, to the Internet:
Nonprofits are also struggling to find funding in an increasingly polarized political environment. First Draft, [Misinformation researcher Claire] Wardle’s nonprofit that helped organizations with misinformation challenges, closed in 2022 after donors significantly scaled back funding.
Federal agencies have also pulled back. Last year, the National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats. In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security dissolved its Disinformation Governance Board after three weeks of broad conservative backlash to the initiative and Jankowicz.
Wardle realized the backlash was reverberating offline a year ago when members of the Rhode Island state legislature received an article that calledher lab at Brown University the “number one leader nationally” in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
She won’t be tracking election misinformation during the 2024 presidential elections.
“Who is doing that in November?” she said. “There’s a massive hole.” [WaPo]
And I don’t doubt that the Internet has greatly increased the ability of the grifters to gather together and work on illegalities together – such as physically threatening researchers who imperil their profits or goals.
Be careful out there. If someone offers you a miracle cure for what afflicts you, such as colloidal silver, walk away. If you read that Democrats eat babies, take that site off your list of sites to read in the future.
