At Politico, Laurie Clarke takes a look at the rather obvious and clumsy attempts by governments in recent years to control the news by citing the dangers of disinformation.

In her view, the panic went viral among the “chattering classes” when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 US election and Britain exited the European Union:

What followed was almost a decade of alarm over disinformation, with legislators agonizing over which ideas social media platforms should allow to propagate, and hand-wringing at how this was all irrevocably corroding the foundations of society.

A vibrant cottage industry — dubbed “Big Disinfo” — sprang up to fight back against bad information. NGOs poured money into groups pledging to defend democracy against merchants of mistruth, while fact-checking operations promised to patrol the boundaries of reality.

“‘Nobody was tricked into voting for Trump’: Why the disinformation panic is over,” January 2, 2025

Now, even the disinformation experts are questioning their quest:

Four years later and Trump is once again president-elect (and back on Facebook), vaccine skepticism is rising, and trust in the media continues its precipitous decline. Against this backdrop, misinformation researchers are beginning to question the utility of their field.

There is currently a “crisis in the field of misinformation studies,” announced an October article in Harvard University’s Misinformation Review. The disinformation panic is over”

After a while, reality began to sink in. For example, Clarke tells us, “studies since then have revealed that the most egregious misinformation only tends to be consumed by a small swath of highly invested, conspiratorially-inclined people.” No surprise there.

But much more important — and at Mind Matters News we have been saying this for years — disinformation that matters generally comes from the top, not the bottom. Clarke again:

Instead, “the most consequential misinformation tends to come from prominent, powerful domestic actors, top politicians,” said Rasmus Nielsen, professor at the Department of Communication of the University of Copenhagen.

The majority of this information isn’t outright lies, either, but is more likely to be nuggets of truth framed or decontextualized in a misleading way. And it’s not restricted to social media. “Many of these claims are made at campaign rallies,” Nielsen said. “They’re made in televised debates or other forms of media coverage.” “The disinformation panic is over”

Indeed. Anyone who has paid much attention to a typical election cycle will hear disinformation from all sides, along with misinformation, accurate information taken out of context, hype, blather, fantasy, dangerous lunacy, and now and then a nugget of useful truth. If our only alternative is authoritarian or totalitarian government, most of us are prepared to just live with the hideous din and judge for ourselves.