Critical Scoping Review of Expert Meanings of “Misinformation” in the Covid Era
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-8112/4/9/101
Trust Us—We Are the (COVID-19 Misinformation) Experts: A Critical Scoping Review of Expert Meanings of “Misinformation” in the Covid Era
1School of Health Policy and Management, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
2Medical School, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 7BH, UK
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
COVID 2024, 4(9), 1413-1439; https://doi.org/10.3390/covid4090101
Submission received: 18 June 2024 / Revised: 19 August 2024 / Accepted: 28 August 2024 / Published: 10 September 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue How COVID-19 and Long COVID Changed Individuals and Communities 2.0)
Abstract
Since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, prominent social actors and institutions have warned about the threat of misinformation, calling for policy action to address it. However, neither the premises underlying expert claims nor the standards to separate truth from falsehood have been appraised. We conducted a scoping review of the medical and social scientific literature, informed by a critical policy analysis approach, examining what this literature means by misinformation. We searched academic databases and refereed publications, selecting a total of 68 articles for review. Two researchers independently charted the data.
Our most salient finding was that verifiability relied largely on the claims of epistemic authorities, albeit only those vetted by the establishment, to the exclusion of independent evidentiary standards or heterodox perspectives. Further, “epistemic authority” did not depend necessarily on subject matter expertise, but largely on a new type of “expertise”: in misinformation itself.
Finally, policy solutions to the alleged threat that misinformation poses to democracy and human rights called for suppressing unverified information and debate unmanaged by establishment approved experts, in the name of protecting democracy and rights, contrary to democratic practice and respect for human rights.
Notably, we identified no pockets of resistance to these dominant meanings and uses. We assessed the implications of our findings for democratic public policy, and for fundamental rights and freedoms. (See link for article)
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Important excerpt:
Take, for instance, the Virality Project mentioned earlier, a US-government supported “partnership” among Stanford University, New York University, and University of Washington researchers; tech companies; federal agencies; state-funded or independent non-profit organisations; and six social media platforms, described as “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis” that boasted a program on “democracy and the Internet” [95]. However, as critics have pointed out, the project has reduced democracy, by accelerating “the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact” (Twitter Files Tweet, dates March 18, 2023) (emphasis added).
The study found that continued efforts to identify, manage, or suppress ‘misinformation’:
- blunts democratic and open debate
- impairs open scientific inquiry
- has chilling effects on normative academic principles such as the pursuit of knowledge, protection of freedom of expression, and the promotion of critical thinking
- is a grave threat to bioethical principles such as informed consent
- violates the dignity of human beings by placing them lower than ‘higher’ societal goals despite a long history of policy interventions implemented ‘for our own good’ or ‘for the greater good,’ that turned out to be morally disastrous
As long as the establishment vetted experts—or, rather, a cult of expertise [149]—dominate public discourse and policy practice, the loss of public trust that appears to preoccupy authorities as they attempt to regain this trust will be inevitable.
Disturbingly, this classic propaganda technique where the perpetrator claims to hold agency over the truth and then uses the arrow of “misinformation” to injure the victim is now fully entrenched in modern academic medicine. Anytime one wants to gain an advantage over another, they can accuse their opponent. This form of academic oppression can cause great harm and stifles scholarly interchange particularly on a novel topic such as the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and genetic vaccines. ~ Dr. Peter McCullough Source: https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/scoping-review-uncovers-new-expertise?
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