this post was submitted on 12 May 2025

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430

Misinformation Is the Most Urgent Threat to Humanity, Say Leading Experts (integ.substack.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

DISinformation. The difference is misinformation can be accidental or unintended (think misunderstanding), Disinformation is 100% done on purpose to deceive.

But yes, we can't fix anything if half the population is living in a fake reality.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

Disinformation causes people to believe and spread misinformation. It's often hard to tell who is being deliberate and who is an idiot, especially with so many idiots on the public stage and so much societal mass mental illness.

[–] knobbysideup 39 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Only because of poor education and critical thinking.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Which is why the religion and conservatism are the most urgent threat to humanity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

It's always going to be less effort to repeat something than to reason about it.

[–] _druid 0 points 4 days ago

Certainly AI will help us in that regard, right? Let me find a prompt engineer to see what answers they come up with.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

As much as you would criticize a society that only had three television news outlets, you gotta admit, it was much more stable. The problem is people don’t know the difference between getting your information from journalists held to standards of proof and fairness, and a guy like Joe Rogan who spout off bullshit without any need to actually fact check anything.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Joe Rogan is whatever. At least he's a real person. I'm more worried about nation state botnets.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

But Rogan falls for and spreads the information provided by said botnets.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I will bet money that the root of almost all disinformation tracks back to Russia.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago

Russia, the authoritarian petro state. Saudi Arabia, The authoritarian petro state and now America and the UK Authoritarian petro states. Shell Oil, British Petroleum all of them. Oil, we are on the cusp of a nuclear revolution. Which is so efficient it would effectively end for profit energy. Nuclear power plus electric cars means no more fossil fuels. Means the end to the power and influence of the Koch family, founders of the CATO institute. The libertarian think tank that Peter Thiel wrote his essay for where he says "... I no longer believe democracy and freedom to be compatible." War is how they continue to justify their existence and continue to pollute the world. Creating more opportunities for the insurance companies and banks that invest in fossil fuels to profiteer from the misery and suffering they cause. Copenhagen atomics is close to creating a working prototype thorium salt reactor, which can fit in a 40 foot shipping container and solve the energy crisis and climate change. Copenhagen, capital city of Denmark, now does threatening the Danish Territory of Greenland make more sense? War with Denmark and they can bomb the fuck out them. They want perpetual war, War in Ukraine and Gaza are not going to end, they're just the beginning.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

It's terrifying and everything about it is wrong. It whips up hatred towards groups, feeds paranoia and can cause direct harm.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Wtf did i just read..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jANuVKeYezs

Interesting song about his dad. People need to pay attention before queen trumpet the first orders us to be made into buttons or book wrap.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Satan is the father of lies.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Blaming a mythical entity for the deceitfullness of some humans is just another lie.

[+] [email protected] -9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Sorry...

Can't promote/read/endorse anything from Nazistack.

🤷‍♂️ 🤦‍♀️

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

With the Nazi-bar argument that I presume you are making with Substack, where's the line?

Should we stop using the Internet because Nazi views are expressed on it? Should we stop using our toilets because Nazis also flush their shit on the same sewage system?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Hey, look, I found some.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

except not really tho

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The equation "Substack = Nazis" is textbook political misinformation: A thing with a technical grain of truth, entirely missing the point and then dishonestly presented, for the purpose of splintering and confusing the left and getting them to attack each other. I suspect it is deliberately promoted by enemies, because while it has a technical little fig-leaf of truthfulness, it bears so little resemblance to anything real or relevant and is a convenient way to shit on one of the chief leftist platforms for thought and journalism, and leftists love nothing more than a contest of "I am so pure that I hate this thing that everyone else likes because it's actually evil and I'm super clever and informed so I can see that and you can't and I'm the first one."

I guess it is possible that people came up with this all on their own as a purity-test (actually I do think that the original campaign which persuaded Substack to get rid of most of the Nazis, was that), and it's just a general leftist self-own because of that tendency. I do feel like it's pretty likely that it has started coming in in some way from outside though. When this argument is presented in print form, it often has so many hallmarks of propaganda or slanty dishonest framings associated with it that it's hard for me to think that it is entirely self-created organic purity testing gone awry.

Here was my conversation about the details of the underlying Substack Nazi issue the last time it came up. I don't have a lot to add to it: https://ponder.cat/post/1721638/1949850

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument. I think we are approaching the question of "Is Substack a problem" from two different angles. I think I and the threadstarter (though I'm just assuming, everyone on Earth and on earth is different, and they may have different reasons from me for thinking what they think) are less concerned with "are there Nazis on Substack" as a purity test and more concerned with "What do the owners of Substack gain from control of our media sources."

My issue with Substack isn't that there's Nazis on there, it's that Substack's owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme. People put up a stick and Substack responded by deplatforming those nazis, but it didn't changed the fact that Chris Best, Hamish Mackenzie, and Jairaj Sethi considered it important to Substack's future that those Nazis be present and paid. All three of those people are still present in Substack's leadership. The thing with mass media, is that the true master of the mass media is not the person putting a message out there, it's the owner of the media machine that decides what values get promoted, demoted, and what contexts those messages appear in. The owners of the Substack media machine have demonstrated themselves to be tolerant of intolerance. Even if they've adjusted their algorithms and platformed people, the fact remains that as a person who does a lot to analyze the propaganda value and biases present in a media mechanism, Substack appears compromised until those three are removed from the equation.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us. I find myself thinking that the only ethical stance to take with Substack is "If you can get your news from somewhere else, do." To be clear, this is not an endorsement, either, of print, radio, or television on the whole as a superior way of finding journalism. Journalism is always at battle with media. Journalists can only ever truly co-opt a waveform to get a message to the recipient. Right now I think the best methods of doing this are on self-hosted blog feeds like It's Going Down, Anarchist News, Propublica, and a few other examples that simply aren't coming to my mind right now. And yes, the outlets I've picked off the top of my head bias towards an anarchist world view because that's how I see the world. However, all media is biased, and I particularly appreciate those outlets for being up front with who they represent, what they think of the world, and what that leads them to think about the facts. Of the media outlets I follow closely, Propublica probably fits the most closely with someone who seeks "objective truth" as much as it is even possible for such a thing to exist.

I guess ultimately, what I'm driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us. Substack, may be of the techbroligarch platforms the least abundantly abused, much as how people view Bluesky as being "woke twitter" even though Bluesky is still owned by a techbroligarch and better alternatives to exist. I do however, sometimes accept that a good piece of journalism is simply exclusively on Substack, and I must accept this, much as how sometimes I put a playlist on Spotify because Spotify still has the best social features, even though I loath Spotify and all that it stands for. But I don't think discouraging people from promoting Substack as a platform is ultimately a purity test. I think it's just a valid concern about our future.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument.

Yeah, all good. I mean maybe I am wrong, we can talk about it.

My issue with Substack isn’t that there’s Nazis on there, it’s that Substack’s owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme.

Okay so this is actually one of the issues that made me start to say that this is deliberate disinformation, not just people saying some stuff I don't agree with. The thing is: I don't think this is actually true. I saw a big article that made this claim, I dug into the details, and it turned out to be one of those "Ship of Theseus" things where, the people they invited were not the Nazis, just some random people with MAGA-type ideas, and they hadn't expressed those MAGA-type ideas until long after Substack's dealings with them had been and gone (pre-2017 Matt Taibbi I think was one). Basically, Substack in this aspect did nothing wrong at all. But people wrapped it up like they had sought out Richard Spenser and invited him to the platform and made sure to give him some money to get things started, which is false, and it was weird that people were trying so hard to say that that had happened. What they did was took millions of dollars from VCs and then gave it to good journalists.

Who are you talking about when you say the Substack owners made sure there were Nazis? I want to dig into this a little bit more and where you heard that from.

There's a whole separate issue of them allowing for real neo-Nazis. I'm probably in the vast minority, but I actually think that was fine. It's the same like I think Hasan Piker can say whatever the fuck he wants, it's the same like I think nutomic can have transphobic views if he wants. I think it is fine.

Like I say, I'm probably the minority there.

considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us.

Just to be clear: Are you saying that they're in any way promoting or in favor of Nazis? Or just that they allow them on the platform and that's the huge problem?

I've seen the first thing, and I think that's what you're saying, but if you are saying the second thing it's a different conversation.

I guess ultimately, what I’m driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us.

I don't think any of this is true. I haven't seen any indication at all that they're distorting anything about the blogs that are hosted there, and the very nature of them (as far as I'm aware) makes it pretty difficult for them to start rigging the algorithm to promote one instead of another, or anything like that.

I do think it's a problem that Substack is a centralized platform. That I will 100% agree with you on. The point being that regardless of whether the current owners are up to anything, there's the strong likelihood in the future that it will succumb to the inevitable like so many before it.

I think Ghost is probably a much better model, to be honest. On the other hand, because Substack is centralized, they were able to subsidize good journalism to get the ball rolling, and I think that was a really good thing. And, of course, it's absolutely impossible to keep Nazis off of Ghost either. Actually, even the purge of Nazis that Substack eventually did, would be impossible on Ghost, because its decentralized nature means they would be there to stay if they chose Ghost. It's more or less impossible to stop, generally speaking. (Which is part of why I agree with Substack's original stance on it.)

Does this make sense?