Claims that Online Misinformation Fears Are Overblown ‘Radically Understates’ the Scale of the Threat

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

The Cato Institute has just published a long paper arguing that public concern around misinformation is overblown, politicised, and harmful to free speech. It’s slick, readable — and fundamentally misleading.

Here’s why.

One of the author’s central complaints is that no one agrees on what “misinformation” actually means. And he’s right — there is confusion. So let’s be precise.

Media scholar Clare Wardle and colleagues have developed a helpful typology:

• Disinformation: false or misleading information spread deliberately to deceive or manipulate
• Misinformation: false or misleading information shared by people who believe it is true
• Malinformation: true information used in misleading or harmful ways

These categories help us move beyond vague fears and examine the different forms that harmful information can take.

But even this isn’t the full picture. The real danger comes when such material forms ‘disordered discourse’ — systems of belief that reinforce themselves, reject correction, and disconnect people from any shared standard of reality.

The Cato paper treats harmful information as a few false claims floating around online. It argues that people rarely fall for such claims, the damage is minor, and the real problem is elite overreaction.

This radically understates the scale and nature of the issue.

The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities can become locked into belief systems that cannot be challenged — where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t merely distort truth; it breaks trust.

When this happens at scale, it isn’t just bad information — it is a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable.

That’s what disordered discourse really is: a collapse in collective reasoning.

And when debate collapses, power doesn’t disappear — it just becomes unaccountable. Truth becomes tribal. Institutions become hollow. People are left shouting across a void, each group convinced the others are insane or evil.

That isn’t freedom. It’s fragmentation.

We have seen this repeatedly: QAnon, COVID denial, election lies, war crimes denial. In every case, the issue was not merely what people believed — it was how those beliefs hardened into identity, making correction impossible.

The Cato paper ignores this entirely. Instead, it clings to a comforting idea — that “more speech” will fix everything. That if everyone is free to speak, the truth will naturally rise to the top.

That was never quite true. Today, it is a fantasy.

We no longer live in a neutral marketplace of ideas. We live in an attention economy shaped by algorithms, tribal identity, outrage incentives, and profit models that reward engagement over accuracy.

Cato argues that freedom means letting all ideas compete without interference. But this rests on a narrow definition of liberty — what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called ‘negative liberty’, or freedom from interference.

Berlin also described ‘positive liberty’: the freedom to act meaningfully in the world. It is not enough to be left alone. People need the capacity to understand, reason, and participate.

If people are overwhelmed by manipulation, confusion, and information engineered to mislead, they are not free. They are vulnerable. Disoriented. Easy to exploit.

That is not liberty. It is abandonment.

Real democratic freedom — what Berlin called positive liberty, and what I would call ’empowered freedom’ — means having the tools to think clearly, challenge power, and act meaningfully in public life.

That requires more than “no censorship”. It requires foundations.

We need systems that make debate constructive. Systems that help people evaluate competing claims. Systems that prevent the most manipulative actors from hijacking public discourse.

Not to impose a single truth — but to defend the process by which free societies function.

Because once that process collapses — once verification breaks, debate fragments, and accountability vanishes — what remains is not freedom.

It’s a shouting match. Or worse, a battlefield.

So the real question is not, “Who decides what’s true?”

The real question is: do we still have the ability to decide anything together at all?

Because once we lose that, democracy is not under threat. It’s already gone.