>>11598257There is no doubt concerning its effects. My observation: With uncertainty comes divisiveness and polarization. I have noted three types of disinformation, all of which share traits in common and are usually found working together.
1) Infoflation, where the media channels are flooded with trivial information, not necessarily false, but vague and lacking pertinence. Infoflation buries relevant information, makes it harder and more time consuming to extract relevant and reliable information.
2) Uninformation. Purely false information, highly biased articles and stories. Uniformation is characterized with blatant contradictions of other information sources. Cure for Corona virus. No cure for Corona virus.
3) Infotainment. This trivializes the issue and seeks to distract the audience with subtle derailment into other secondary and usually meaningless side topics.
The net effect is to make it too time consuming and too difficult to discern reliable and reputable information, it encourages confirmation bias, and I suspect tends to make people more apathetic towards critical thinking, more ready to absorb the the narrative of the information source they find easiest to access.
Why? I am not sure but I can think of a few competing reasons.
1) The nature of media in the age of social platforms and widespread internet access. It profit driven, more viewers means more money. Much like tabloid journalism. For many content providers the "truth" doesn't matter, making money does.
2) Its an arms race of sort. "Infowars" is a very apt description. Various political, national, social factions all assume their opponents will be doing the same thing and so do what they can to discredit the other side and present propaganda supportive of their own agendas. n this case just muddying the waters with infoflation can be sufficient.
3) Related to above, its also an exercise to refine tactics and assess the results with respect to social manipulation.
