[cassalian]

I'm doubtful of the harms of misinformation and the role it plays in persuading people's opinions (I believe people are fairly intelligent rather than undiscerning parrots of thought). However, if I were to accept the claim misinformation is rampant and that it is persuading large numbers of people, then I would think the solution would be to better educate people on how to "not believe everything you read" by checking sources, questioning what motives the author might have, checking who the author is, finding a related article from a different source, etc. IMO this would prevent the need for platforms to remove misinformation (something that can be easily abused to remove content that doesn't fit a certain political agenda or similar) since the public would capable of filtering out misinformation themselves.

The war on misinformation seems to be driven by the democrats today; however, it could easily be driven by the republicans in the future. Regardless of who is pushing the war, IMO a war on misinformation will always lead to polarization. After all, your opponents aren't rational, rather, they've been brainwashed. As such, there is no need to engage with your opponents views, conveniently leaving your own views completely unopposed (and thus obviously correct and good).

[epgui]

I think framing it as a war is problematic. We’re not waging war against pollution and CO2, we’re trying to limit and manage it. Disinformation and misinformation can be conceptualized similarly as information pollution. Our brains don’t have magic powers: garbage in, garbage out. Just like AI.

[Applejinx]

Objective reality does exist, even if it's hotly denied. And brazen denial is one thing we do repeatedly see in all this, which has drawn my attention to the specific things that get the most brazen denial, with the most emphasis (and, where possible, the most brigading and reinforcing by mysterious upvotes/downvotes/manipulations)

I get that it's desirable and appealing to frame it as random noise and organically produced info pollution from dumb people who just want attention. It would be nice to think this.

There's also an argument that this is indeed war waged through other means… interestingly, with a death toll very comparable to the old-fashioned, less deniable forms of open warfare. If there were no pandemic, someone would've had to invent one… or make do with bombings, vehicular assaults, and other sorts of terrorist action. But since there is a pandemic, the war becomes essentially a matter of maximizing the performance of the pandemic by any means necessary.

Could be worse, could be nukes. That would be more obvious, mind you.

[epgui]

I'm not sure that I understand your point. I don't consider something worse just because it's called a war, and I don't mean to suggest in any way that this isn't a real and serious problem: in fact, I compared it to pollution, and I consider pollution to be a serious and urgent problem.

I just feel like the war metaphor is not great: it evokes unnecessary violence and connotes confrontation. We wage war against each other, but we can solve serious problems together. Neither war nor problem-solving are zero-sum games, arguably, but not everyone can win in war.

[Applejinx]

Yes, it does evoke unnecessary violence. If it's modern warfare and a guy is piloting a drone over a little screen and kills dozens of people, it's still war and violence even if he's not bayoneting them directly. If it's postmodern warfare and a guy is piloting a meme over a keyboard and kills hundreds of thousands of people, that's still war too. Ingenious war, but still war.