👇Recent attacks on academics . . . background research . . . and animation 👇
You may have seen mention of my studies into fighting misinformation and disinformation in an earlier post.
It turns out there is a LOT of research on this topic, which is now under fire by our increasingly authoritarian president.
But the very effective right-wing political attacks on the field of disinformation research (beware of even using the words “misinformation” or “disinformation” now) have been happening for quite a while.
Even though certain bad actors in the government may not like it, there is peer-reviewed science that helps inform us about how we can fight the negative effects of misinformation.
One of the most effective ways is “inoculation.”
Misinformation is a virus we can inoculate against much like we inoculate against an infectious disease.
In short: introduce actual facts followed by a small dose of what the lie is, state why the lie is demonstrably false, then restate the facts.
You can read much more about the process and how researchers have studied inoculation here. (This “Debunking Handbook” is a great place to start.)
There are even studies about how effective art and videos can be!
(I’ve been trying to inoculate people for years without even knowing it.)
In this animation, I focus on one recent, specific, egregious case of President Trump spreading disinformation.
Trump ordered the US Army Corps of Engineers to release water from two reservoirs in California as the Pacific Palisades wildfires were burning, then proceeded to claim “victory” and say that had we listened to him, “there would have been no fire.”
Scientists and water managers of all kinds pointed out that this is completely bogus.
In order to back up his ongoing lie that there is some magical “valve” in California and all we need to do to stop wildfires is release more water (or “clean your floors,” depending on the year), Trump released dangerous flows of water and reduced the amount of water available to California farmers for the coming summer months.
So now we have a wanna-be (and possibly just “be”) dictator backing up his lies with real actions that endanger people.
. . . which is why I’m so passionate about fighting misinformation, promoting facts or combating “adversarial online abuse” or whatever we call it now.
For our purposes, let’s just call it “cartooning.”
Thanks so much for being here and supporting my work!
-Mark
UPDATE: The Washington Post just released internal Army Corps memos that show the agency knew this was just a stunt.
Thank you so much for this. Every day I find myself wanting to cuss and scream but, wonderful work such as yours helps calm me down. Thank you, thank you.
I think you're going to need to stop sleeping (or start hiring) and speed up production.