Disinformation as COVID-19's Twin Pandemic: False Equivalences, Entrenched Epistemologies, and Causes-of-Causes.

Abstract

We are currently facing and traversing in the thick of a twin pandemic: coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and disinformation. Disinformation is false information created and spread deliberately with the intention to mislead public opinion, obscure truths, and undermine trust in knowledge. The digital age we live in is quite different than the printing revolution and invention of the oil-based ink printing press centuries ago. Digital technologies can spread and repeat disinformation at extremely high speeds, while anyone, a qualified expert or not, and with internet access, can become an author. To fight disinformation, we ought to dismantle the entrenched and extractive epistemologies that act as upstream drivers and sites of disinformation production. Epistemology refers to the value-laden knowledge frames, overarching master narratives, and storylines, in which knowledge is produced. If the epistemologies in which we generate knowledge are false, then the knowledge products will be laden with disinformation. Moreover, the harms caused by disinformation can extend well beyond the immediate knowledge domain where disinformation has originated. This occurs when "false equivalence" is used as a form of rhetoric. False equivalence is a type of flawed sense making where equal weight is given to arguments with concrete material evidence, and those that are conjecture, untrue, or unjust. This article presents an analysis of the disinformation pandemic attendant to COVID-19, with an eye to its causes-of-causes: unchecked extractive epistemologies (e.g., technocracy), and the practice of false equivalence in pandemic discourses. We argue that holding the political agency of master narratives to account is essential (1) to fight the disinformation pandemic and (2) for prefigurative politics to build egalitarian and democratic societies in place of the instrumental/transactional relationships that typify the contemporary nation states and the neoliberal university whose ossified rituals lack the normative capacities for critical governance in a time of converging social, digital, and ecological crises. For liberation from disinformation, we should start with liberation from entrenched extractive epistemologies in science and society.