The Authoritarian Consequences of "Disinformation"
A pollster claims to show that conservatives believe "disinformation." So why let them vote? (1,300 words, 7 min).
The pollster Frank Graves likes to measure “disinformation,” and claims (here) to show that conservatives have a propensity to believe “disinformation”. I disassemble these claims below, but suppose for a moment that Graves is right, and conservatives really are idiots who believe “disinformation”: why then let them speak? Indeed why let them vote? Grave’s direction, like that of so many in the Censorship-Industrial complex (to borrow from Michael Shellenberger), is authoritarian.
Frank Graves is a well-known political pollster, and I don’t doubt that he accurately surveys the opinions of his sample. The problem is what counts as “disinformation”. In 2022, Graves published a similar “disinformation index” using the COVID lab leak, an explanation now widely thought to be true, as his first example of disinformation. This time, he asks about economic growth, and he is the one who gets his facts wrong, according to the International Monetary Fund statistics below. Graves himself is pushing disinformation.
The exercise is circular: Graves is really measuring skepticism of elite opinion.
He is no doubt correct that conservatives are skeptical of the views of progressive elites, but it is tendentious to call this “disinformation”. Someone in the US Department of Homeland Security defined “mal-information” as information that is true, but off-narrative. This would be a better description of Graves’s “disinformation.”
Grave’s last outing: “Disinformation” in 2022
I went in detail through Graves’ 2022 attempt to measure disinformation here:
The Credentialization of Opinion: A Case Study in Disinformation
Supriya Dwivedi, @supriyadwivedi on X, formerly of something called “the McGill Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy,” now of the Prime Minister's Office, also hosts a podcast on TV Ontario (she seems to have several hats), here: https://www.tvo.org/podcasts/screen-time
Graves’ conclusions were very useful to state institutions, including the Prime Minister’s staff, and were duly cited by state and mainstream media, establishment commentators, and by the “disinformation” industry. But as I argued then, they rely entirely on the establishment’s conception of “disinformation”, starting with the idea that the "lab leak" theory was disinformation: Graves was just measuring dissent.
Graves, it is relevant to note, has a long-standing hostility to conservatives and to populists.
Disinformation in 2024
Graves summarizes his current study, apparently not yet out in full, on X/Twitter here.1 The influential Professor Timothy Caulfield, a well-funded state authority on “disinformation,” retweets Graves’s conclusions with approval (more on Prof. Caulfield from the estimable investigative journalist Andy Lee here; from me here).2
The left-wing cultural magazine CultMtl reports on Graves’s study here, from which I take this screenshot, which accurately cites his language:
As with the earlier lab-leak example, let’s start with the first claim. International Monetary Fund figures on real GDP growth are displayed here (link on chart):
So Canada’s real GDP growth for 2024 is projected to be 1.2%, versus a G7 figure of 1.7%. Much will depend on the phrasing of Graves’ question about growth “lag[ging] well behind the G7 average”. We are certainly well behind the United States, at 2.7%, and it is hardly unreasonable to say that a growth figure 30% lower (1.2% versus 1.7%) than the G7 average is “well behind.” Graves has no basis for large epistemic conclusions about disinformation.
It gets worse if one looks at GDP per capita, which is obviously more relevant to direct experience and hence to popular opinion than national aggregates. Canadian GDP per capita lags badly, and the lag gets noticeably worse in 2015, when the current government took power:
There have been some encouraging headlines recently, and apparently we may expect a rebound in GDP growth, if not in GDP per capita, in future years. But Graves claims to be an empiricist, and cannot base claims about current facts on forward-looking projections.3 The Canadian economy has lagged badly, and anyone who tries to spin a different case could be accused of trafficking in disinformation.
Briefly examining Graves’ three other examples of “disinformation”:
Vaccine-related deaths concealed: numerous institutions, including the media, medical and state bureaucracies, and the government in power, have invested their credibility in COVID-19 vaccines. There are significant bureaucratic incentives to minimize adverse effects, though it is difficult to know what effect this has had on reporting. This question really asks whether the respondent believes official accounts, and implicitly attributes truth to those accounts.
The Right to Bear Arms: this is the only unproblematic factual question Graves asks, and of course anyone who said that we have such a right in Canada would be wrong.
Climate Change Caused by Greenhouse Gases: this is a hypothesis supported by much highly-credentialed opinion, but a hypothesis is not a fact. Again, Graves is measuring conformity.
Graves’ method is to assign a score to poll responses, giving three points for each statement rated “completely” true or false (according to his beliefs), two for each rated “mostly” true/false, and one point for each skipped question. In other words, he is measuring not merely orthodoxy, but the enthusiasm of the respondent’s conformity to orthodoxy. We have come some distance from critical thought.
The Authoritarian Consequences of “Disinformation”
Graves’s “disinformation index” is misleadingly named: it pretends to measure how well-informed (or not) a population is, and by implication their intelligence, but it is really a conformity index.
The accusation of conservative stupidity has a long and it must be admitted distinguished history, going back to Lord Palmerston’s denunciation of “the stupid old Tory party,” and to John Stuart Mill’s later and better-known attack on “the stupid party.” (I once got a peer-reviewed article out of this theme4). The difference today lies in the social direction of the insult: once directed against a ruling aristocracy, it is now directed downward against a disobedient populace. Once anti-elitist, the charge of stupidity has become the weapon of a credentialed state-employed elite, an elite demanding obedience.
Graves's direction is clear, as is that of the entire disinformation industry. And it is a very large state industry, as Matt Taibbi’s Racket has shown:
Graves wants to delegitimize conservative opinion. But if illegitimate or misinformed opinion can be shown to have negative, even catastrophic, social effects (from a deadly virus to democracy in danger to riots in the streets), then why not censor it, or jail those who propagate it, as the British government now does, and as the Trudeau government would like to do with Bill-63?
Indeed, why let the morons vote at all, especially if they are going to vote for the wrong parties, even for “authoritarian” or in Biden’s words “semi-fascist” parties?5 We are one step away from authoritarianism in the name of protecting “our democracy.”
The Kings and Commissars of the past claimed to rule on the basis of superior knowledge. The managerial class of the present has better graphics and a confected appearance of empirical support. Their language has abandoned theology, drawing instead from a newly constructed pseudo-discipline of “disinformation”, but the conclusions haven’t changed much.
Our rights to speak and to think freely are now under threat.
The Attack on Tucker Carlson (1)
Tucker Carlson is a lightning rod. This week, he brought lightning to Canada, speaking in Calgary and Edmonton. As always, he spoke well, and as always he employed a powerful combination of mockery, humanity, and declamation. His words are simple, his sentences direct, his conclusions arresting, his enemies enraged.
On Intellectual Status
We often classify ideas by their intellectual status: smart people are supposed to talk about some things, but not others. An older, and perhaps too polysyllabic, attempt to grapple with the problem.
Excellent comments, as always. You have characterized it perfectly, he is actually measuring dissent. The climate change question is the give-away, if you give a yes answer then you conform with the narrative, and if you give anything other than a yes (in this case a forced binary choice) he says you are misinformed, but on a complex question that really requires nuance, and your answer is no you are really just dissenting from the narrative. This is the problem with complex scientific questions. The simple fact based questions are OK. The actual list of questions, is in my view, poorly composed and he is simply not measuring what he thinks he is measuring.