How to Confront Highbrow Misinformation

Institutions can fall prey to groupthink. That doesn’t mean they’re inherently flawed.

(Photo via Getty.)

When confronted with the growing popularity of populist, extremist, and generally destructive ideas over the past decade or so, many establishment politicians, journalists, and experts have blamed “misinformation” (see also “disinformation,” “fake news” “information disorder,” and “post-truth”).

Although this narrative comes in different forms, it typically involves three core ideas: (1) misinformation is widespread, (2) it is much worse than in the recent past, and (3) it is highly impactful in driving worrying political trends and developments.

But there is much to question about this narrative. For example, this narrative exaggerates both the quality of the past information environment and the gullibility of ordinary voters. The narrative is also self-serving. By explaining support for populism as a result of manipulation and misinformation, it exempts establishment institutions from any blame for anti-establishment politics. Finally, the idea that “misinformation” is the kind of thing that mainstream journalists and experts can detect and regulate presupposes that misinformation is not a significant problem within their institutions. As many have pointed out, this assumption is highly questionable. There is a substantial amount of what Matt Yglesias calls “elite misinformation,” although there are good reasons to prefer Joseph Heath’s “highbrow misinformation” as an adaptation of that term.

Now is a good time for those in “elite” or “highbrow” circles to look to their own houses before casting stones, and to consider how the dissemination of “misinformation” can be an issue even in credentialed, institutionalized settings.

Let’s take a few examples of these patterns:

Climate Change

A vast amount of energy and funding is directed at addressing the problems of climate misinformation. The overwhelming majority of the focus here is on climate denialism, a category of misinformation prevalent on the political right. This focus therefore overlooks highbrow misinformation surrounding climate change skewed in favor of mainstream progressive narratives, which tend towards alarmism and catastrophism, as well as simplistic morality tales aimed at condemning capitalism and corporations.

This highbrow misinformation includes reporting and punditry that encourage the widespread but mistaken ideas that climate change is likely to cause human extinction or civilizational collapse, that it is forecast to make the world poorer than it is now, that deaths from natural disasters have increased as a consequence of climate change, that a small number of corporations produce the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions, and that fossil fuel companies receive vast state subsidies. To the extent that large numbers of people hold such beliefs, it is not because of right-wing denialists. It is because mainstream reporting on the topic is often highly misleading.

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Dan Williams on Misinformation

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Such misleading reporting is not immaterial. For example, one survey from 2023 suggested that nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 16-25 endorsed the statement that “Humanity is doomed” due to climate change, with more than half (52%) claiming that they are hesitant to have children as a result. A study in the same year in Canada reported nearly half (48%) of young people saying that they also think humanity is doomed.

Gender Parity

Several years ago, Jordan Peterson went extremely viral in part due to his Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman. One of the simple points that Peterson made in the interview is that the widely reported gender pay gap (e.g., that women earn 85 cents for every dollar a man earns) refers to an average pay disparity that doesn’t control for differences such as industry, occupation, experience, education, working hours, and so on. This means that the mere existence of the pay disparity doesn’t prove discrimination.

In the aftermath, I spoke to many ordinary people (especially guys) who were blown away by Peterson’s observation and felt that they had been lied to by mainstream media and politicians on this issue. On the one hand, this was a surprising reaction because the points that he made were obvious to anyone even moderately knowledgeable about these things, not to mention anyone familiar with what conservatives think. On the other hand, the feeling was understandable, given that the mainstream presentation of this issue is highly misleading.

By presenting the pay gap as proof of gender-based discrimination, or as part of an argument for why women deserve “equal pay for equal work,” the mainstream presentation often falsely implies that men and women are being paid radically different amounts for doing the same job. This likely explains why so many people seem to be misinformed about this, and why Peterson’s arguments could come as an explosive revelation to so many.

Youth Gender Medicine

For several years, I assumed that there was a lot of high-quality medical evidence supporting the efficacy and safety of youth gender medicine (i.e., treatments like “puberty blockers” and hormone therapy for young teens), as well as evidence suggesting that those who don’t get specific treatments are at high risk for suicide. I thought this because I’m the sort of person who generally trusts what expert organizations, academics, professional journalists, and those in my social network (mostly, highly-educated progressives) say about things.

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How to Navigate Transgender Issues in the Trump Era

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Given this, I was surprised when the Cass Review was published in the UK, clearly demonstrating that the scientific evidence for much of the mainstream discourse surrounding youth gender medicine is extremely weak.

As Helen Lewis points out in The Atlantic, there has been a powerful “liberal misinformation bubble” surrounding youth gender medicine. This has been reinforced by many authoritative figures’ incessant repetition of the unsupported claim that children are likely to kill themselves unless they transition. But it has also been upheld by powerful social pressures in place for several years that stigmatized anyone who challenged this apparent consensus. For example, a former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has likened skepticism of youth gender medicine to Holocaust denial.

Race, Ethnicity, and Crime

For many years, I also assumed that all discourse about the over-representation of Pakistani-heritage men in “grooming gangs” in the UK was part of a sinister disinformation campaign by the far right. I thought this because a prominent Home Office Report in 2020 strongly implied that any concerns about the over-representation of this group in perpetrating such crimes were at odds with reliable evidence, as did multiple mainstream outlets. Although I was aware that some prominent people had claimed differently, many of them (e.g., Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson) strike me as extremely unreliable and racist, so I didn’t trust what they said.

Given this, I was surprised when I read Baroness Casey’s recent in-depth report on this issue. She points out just how bad and misleading the mainstream reporting on this topic has been, with a culture of “denial” and “flawed data… used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalized, biased or untrue.” For example, the official Home Office Report from 2020 alleged that “the ethnicity of group-based CSE [child sexual exploitation] offenders is in line with… the general population, with the majority of offenders being White.” This “finding” from the report was then repeatedly quoted in other official reports and in the mainstream media. As Casey points out, the actual data provides no support for such conclusions. In two-thirds of cases, the ethnicity of perpetrators has simply not been recorded, which, she argues, is itself an “appalling” scandal and “major failing” partly rooted in politically-motivated evasion. “Instead of examining whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity or cultural factors at play in certain types of offending,” she notes, “we found many examples of organizations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions, or causing community cohesion problems.” Moreover, in several areas where data has been collected (Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, and West Yorkshire), it shows “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation.”

Understanding Highbrow Misinformation

Of course, these examples are far from an exhaustive list of cases of highbrow misinformation. (For other relatively clear-cut examples, one can look at reporting on how 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, how maternal mortality rates have dramatically risen in the last twenty years in the United States, claims about global happiness rankings, and much establishment punditry and reporting surrounding the pandemic).

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The "Everyone Is Biased" Bias

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There is a general pattern here in the dissemination of material. Highbrow misinformation primarily misinforms audiences not through explicit falsehoods but through forms of communication that select, omit, frame, and contextualize information in misleading ways, signal-boosting some facts, de-emphasizing others, placing real statistics in deceptive contexts, and soliciting commentary from experts offering preferred opinions. Ruxandra Teslo calls this “Haut Bourgeois Propaganda,” which contrasts with the kind of “brute misinformation” (i.e., outright lies and fake news) often associated with lowbrow sources and alternative media.

A second feature of my examples of highbrow misinformation is that they are all designed to favor politically progressive narratives. There are multiple reasons for this. There also is such a thing as progressive misinformation that isn’t highbrow, but what is of overwhelming significance is educational polarization.

Over the past couple of decades, people with university (and especially advanced) degrees have become increasingly culturally progressive, while those without degrees have shifted to become more supportive of culturally conservative, often populist politics. This means that the highly-educated, credentialed professionals who staff our most prestigious institutions, including our knowledge-producing institutions, typically share culturally progressive attitudes and values. Even non-populist conservative politicians usually have much more progressive cultural views than ordinary voters.

The result is a homogeneity of outlook in institutions. Institutions of knowledge are based around the idea that, although biases can be powerful at the individual level, they tend to cancel out at the collective level—people tend to be pretty good at unmasking and criticizing other people’s biases. The problem is that this process breaks down in contexts where everyone or almost everyone has the same biases. When that happens, individual biases don’t cancel each other out; they compound and reinforce each other. And that is the case in many of our established knowledge-producing institutions today.

In general, highbrow information environments often create a culture that discourages people from communicating truths in tension with progressive ideology or correcting falsehoods supportive of it.

How Bad Is Highbrow Misinformation?

From experience, even highly-educated professionals who acknowledge the existence of highbrow misinformation mostly downplay its harms. One reason for this is contrastive: when you compare the flaws of the highbrow information environment with its main rivals (alternative and “populist” media, conspiracy theory culture, TikTok feeds, etc.), it comes out looking pretty good. I will return to this point below.

However, another influential argument is simply that the effects of highbrow misinformation, even when real, are benign or even positive. This goes hand in hand with the idea that most highbrow misinformation is “well-intentioned.” If one thinks that climate change, transphobia, gender inequality, racism, and so on are crises, then maybe misleading communication is fine if it leads people to take them seriously.

This attitude is another critical factor driving highbrow misinformation. In many cases, academics, reporters, pundits, and politicians believe that conveying selective or simplified messages—“noble lies” or at least noble half-truths—will cause audiences to support noble causes.

This attitude is pernicious.

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First, the popular idea that progressive misinformation is “well-intentioned” whereas non-progressive misinformation is “ill-intentioned” is shockingly self-serving. Most people who communicate misleading ideas will convince themselves that they are doing so for some higher purpose or noble ideal. That’s why it’s important to enforce norms across the board rather than letting people or factions police their own behaviour. This includes basic norms of honesty, accuracy, and respect for one’s audience.

Second, people need to be able to trust experts and establishment knowledge-producing institutions. If such institutions uphold a culture that tolerates or even encourages misleading communication when it aligns with progressive values, that trust will evaporate. In this sense, any short-term political benefits that highbrow misinformation might have will be outweighed by growing institutional mistrust and resentment among a diverse public with different values and ideological allegiances. I suspect that this is a significant factor explaining why so many people have lost trust in institutions like universities and legacy media in recent decades.

Finally, for all the examples of highbrow misinformation I have listed, they are scandals! It’s terrible if large numbers of people mistakenly believe that humans are doomed due to climate change, or that they inhabit a society where men and women are being paid radically different amounts for doing the same job, or that they can’t trust establishment institutions to investigate topics whenever they connect to progressive values or taboos among educated elites. These are not trivial issues. And it is an extreme indictment of our institutions that the people who identify and object to such institutional failures are often stigmatized more than those who participate in them.

How Should We Respond?

For these reasons, I think it’s partly understandable that, when some people discover that the establishment presentation of many issues is highly misleading, they become angry, outraged, resentful, and sometimes “radicalized.” They come to think that they are being systematically lied to, assuming that the rot might go extremely deep. If people would lie about some things, they think, maybe they would lie about everything.

Nevertheless, although this dynamic can partly explain why people lose trust in establishment knowledge-producing institutions, it cannot explain why so many people embrace far worse information sources. This includes most of “alternative” media and the increasingly influential cranks, conspiracy theorists, and bigots who thrive within this space.

It’s noteworthy also that for almost all examples of highbrow misinformation documented above, their detection and critique comes from people working within establishment institutions. In other words, the primary way that anyone can discover the truth about topics like climate change, grooming gangs, youth gender medicine, or anything else, relative to which misinformation (including highbrow misinformation) can be identified, is by relying on credentialed experts and professional journalists operating within these institutions.

This doesn’t mean that nobody operating within the world of contrarian punditry or alternative media ever says anything true. But usually when figures in alternative media make legitimate critiques of establishment narratives, they’re drawing on knowledge produced by establishment institutions. For example, when Elon Musk decided to turn his attention to the issue of grooming gangs in the UK, almost all of the actual “evidence” he and others on the far right cited came from official government reports and professional journalists operating within establishment institutions. When Musk and his allies did introduce genuinely new information into the conversation not reported by establishment sources, it overwhelmingly involved absurd falsehoods and fake news.

Ultimately, this shouldn’t be surprising.

Discovering the truth about complex issues is extremely challenging. The default state of political debate and public opinion involves wholesale capitulation to prescientific intuitions, tribal mythology, and ideological delusion. To overcome such ignorance and misperceptions, you need hard-won, fragile institutions that can support activities like careful data collection, scientific research, investigative journalism, and fact-based reporting. The thriving world of “alternative media” has not created such institutions, or even shown any evidence that it recognizes their necessity. Instead, it has mostly abandoned the project of uncovering and reporting knowledge altogether.

Sometimes, such observations are used to dismiss the significance of highbrow misinformation, or to argue that establishment institutions are sufficiently diverse and self-correcting that there is nothing to worry about. I hope it’s clear from what I’ve written already that I disagree with this. Our institutions need urgent reform. They need more ideological diversity and stronger norms against pernicious forms of motivated reasoning and progressive groupthink. But “reform” is different from destruction.

In other words, highbrow misinformation is a huge institutional problem. But it’s a solvable problem, not an excuse to replace our only hope for acquiring knowledge in complex, modern societies with an informational state of nature dominated by charlatans, demagogues, and bullshitters.

A version of this essay originally appeared in Conspicuous Cognition.

Dan Williams is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He works on issues at the intersection of science, politics, and technology. He blogs at www.conspicuouscognition.com.

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