War on misinformation doomed to fail: tariffs a case in point

Experts in misinformation will no doubt be closely following the extraordinary claims being thrown around during the US election, for a number of reasons.  

One hopes Australia’s would-be censors are watching. It might show them their crusade to rid the internet of misinformation and disinformation is a fool’s errand.

Censoring misinformation not only offends a key democratic principle – free speech – it also presents a deeply practical problem: the characterisation of misinformation which advocates want to impose as a basis for censorship is inherently subjective.  

Take a recent example from Donald Trump’s Truth Social account where he claimed his tariffs would be paid for by the “abusing country”, not consumers, and would make America rich again. 

From an economic perspective, it is abundantly clear this is incorrect (making it either misinformation or disinformation, apparently depending on Trump’s assumed level of knowledge).  

Tariffs are a tax largely borne by consumers. Tariffs insulate unproductive firms from the competition that would make them more efficient. And tariffs also distort the efficient allocation of resources — making the economy even less competitive over time.  

Moreover, Australia ran a massive experiment in tariff protections for almost 100 years. The evidence that free trade drives prosperity was irresistible.  

Unsurprisingly, economists have been falling over themselves to condemn Trump’s claims. Perhaps this is an open and shut case of misinformation, and yet things are not that simple. 

Prominent US economist turned Democratic apologist, Paul Krugman, made the problem clear in a recent New York Times column. Krugman claimed “there’s a big difference” between Trump’s “terrible idea” of tariffs, which he opposes, and Joe Biden’s “sophisticated, limited deviations from free trade” which he supports.  

This distinction is self-evidently nonsense.  

An obvious local example is the Future Made in Australia package the government is spruiking. The methodology is slightly different — as is the language — but with all the same flaws and errors in thinking that characterised past Australian policy.  

What really separates Trump’s tariff claims from Biden’s subsidies from Chalmers’ industry policy? Is one misinformation and the others not? 

It’s hard to avoid concluding that the real dividing line is whether it was ‘your team’ that made the original claim, especially given the myriad examples of misinformation cited in the media as justifying censorship.  

Almost inevitably, the examples activists cite come from one side of the argument and are almost never straightforward errors of fact. Usually they are contestable interpretations of future events.  

Thus, when put under the microscope, these so-called experts’ view of ‘misinformation’ is inherently, and fatally, subjective.  

Two important things flow from this. 

First, in a practical sense, this subjectivity creates an impossible dilemma for any regulator tasked with censoring misinformation online; or ensuring truth in political advertising, for that matter. 

Claims like Trump’s, or the Australian Greens’ retrograde proposal for rent controls, aren’t even the most contested or contentious that would likely be referred for adjudication.  

Yet any official decision that they constituted ‘misinformation’ would immediately be rejected by partisans, wielding dissenting views from hand-picked ‘experts’.  

Fidelity to any objective definition of misinformation would either eventually alienate everyone, or render the adjudicating body unable to act in all but the most egregious cases.  

Either option will make it useless in the eyes of its proponents, and contribute nothing towards the ostensible goal of ensuring the public is better informed. 

In practice, over time the body tasked with making these decisions will avoid irrelevance by becoming polarised. Its version of the truth will become more and more coloured by the bias of those appointing its officers.  

After all, it has taken the ‘fact checking’ industry barely a decade to torpedo their credibility in exactly this way.  

Second, at a more fundamental level, this immediate decline in credibility will ensure such a body cannot achieve its real goal; reversing the political tide flowing towards populism. 

It is a source of endless frustration to proponents of regulation for misinformation that populists can ‘lie’ and not be held to account by the public.  

They long for a body of experts they can persuade to officially declare that their “limited deviations from free trade” are “sophisticated”, while the populists’ “strongly regressive tax increase” would “wreak havoc”.  

The political and administrative elites need this because they have largely lost the trust of the public.  

In part this is because they have told too many ‘noble lies’, which the public correctly perceives as just ‘lies’. Those same elites have also been far too eager to find non-existing nuance in the errors of their side, while presuming bad faith on the part of their opponents. 

Perhaps the greater problem is that modern politicians want to choose to be populists as, and when, it suits them. Yet they seek to discard populism without consequences when they face the populists’ reckoning: the inevitable mugging by reality when the tariffs don’t bring back manufacturing, or the rent controls fail to fix the housing crisis.  

Real solutions to tough problems don’t happen overnight — and they require the kind of knowledge, and effort, that you can’t fake.  

It’s not that modern politicians are lazy; the overwhelming majority are clearly not. However, the incentive structure for modern politics rewards investing that effort in political manoeuvring — mostly within one’s political party — not in the hard graft of gaining public support for credible, evidence-based policies.  

Populism, while antagonistic to good policy development, is an existential threat to these political insiders because it exposes that so much of their world is based on sophistry, not science.  

To be clear, at least since the days of the Tiberius Gracchus, politicians have had to blend their policies with populism. All of Australia’s great political leaders found a way to do this in one way or another without jettisoning their credibility.  

Perhaps this is the real problem for the current crop: they keep trying to outsource creditability to a government committee. 

Simon Cowan is Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies. 

Photo by Chanaka