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Reasonable emotion
Peddlers of misinformation typically appeal to their audience’s emotions. But emotion also has a benign role in our cognition. How to spot the difference?
You don’t need to look far for examples of disinformation — two instances that passed through my line of sight this week were the claim that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is “planning” a new pandemic, and the claim that median rents in the US have vastly outstripped household income since 1987. Almost by definition, fake news consists mainly of falsehoods or speculation rather than of verifiable facts and testable argumentation. There is no truth to the alleged plans of the WEF (not only is the document a fabrication, but even if this organization wished to orchestrate a pandemic, the idea that such an endeavour is possible is the product of fevered imagination, rather than from robust argumentation), and while the chart showing the growing discrepancy between rents and income does use actual data, despite its claim that both lines are “inflation adjusted”, only the wage line is.
