Brandolini's law

Last updated

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:

Contents

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. [1] [2]

The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized. [3]

Origins

The adage was publicly formulated in January 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer. [4] Brandolini stated that he was inspired by reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow right before watching an Italian political talk show with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and journalist Marco Travaglio. [5]

Examples

The persistent false claim that vaccines cause autism is a prime example of Brandolini's law. This famous case involved British doctor Andrew Wakefield who wrote an article about a study that claimed to find a relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. The article's findings were later shown to be false; as a result, Dr. Wakefield lost his medical license and then disclaimed and recanted. [6] The false claims, despite extensive investigation showing no relationship, have had a disastrous effect on public health due to vaccine avoidance. Decades of research and attempts to educate the public have failed to eradicate the misinformation, which is still widely believed. [7]

In another example, shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing, the claim that a student who had survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting had been killed by the bombing began to spread across social media. Despite many attempts to debunk the rumor, including an investigation by Snopes, the false story was shared by more than 92,000 people and was covered by major news agencies. [7]

In an example of Brandolini's law during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeff Yates, a disinformation journalist at Radio-Canada said (of a very popular YouTube video), "He makes all kinds of different claims. I had to check every single one of them. I had to call relevant experts and talk to them. I had to transcribe those interviews. I had to write a text that is legible and interesting to read. It's madness. It took this guy 15 minutes to make his video and it took me three days to fact-check." [8]

Due to the rapid dissemination of information on social media, the public is much more susceptible to becoming victims of pseudoscientific trends such as Dr. Mehmet Oz's weight loss supplements and Dr. Joseph Mercola's tanning beds that were meant to reduce one's risk of developing cancer. Although government agencies were able to prevent further sales of these products, millions of dollars had already been spent by consumers and fans. [6]

Another example dates back to 2016, when Iceland's football team had eliminated England out of the UEFA European Championship. Nine months after the victory, Icelandic doctor Ásgeir Pétur Þorvaldsson jokingly tweeted out that a baby boom in Iceland had occurred due to this victory. Despite wide media coverage suggesting the truth behind this statement, statistical analysis carried out by curious researchers debunked the notion proposed by Þorvaldsson's tweet. [9]

Brandolini's Law is accentuated during larger scale and higher tension situations as well. Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom discuss in their analysis of using Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 prevention that, despite Hydroxychloroquine being frequently proven to be ineffective in curing illnesses, including COVID-19, that it was extremely difficult to convince people that it would not prove effective against the highly contagious virus. Because of how afraid people were of COVID-19 during its inception, and how desperately people wanted a cure, widespread social media coverage and a desire for Hydroxychloroquine to work, made it extremely difficult to disprove the misinformation being presented. [10]

Social media

According to the Media Education Journal, "Media portrayal of politics has always been subject to contested claims about accuracy and veracity but this has reached a new intensity." [11]

With social media, ideas, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs can be shared at an extraordinary speed. Social media amplifies Brandolini's Law due to these capabilities. Although there are advantages to social media, there are also disadvantages especially when considering the role it has when spreading misinformation. News and research can be misinterpreted and false beliefs can be spread farther and wider than before. Fake news has a tendency to spread faster and wider through social media than true news, peer review is almost nonexistent in regards to social media, and the way some true research can be presented through social media can make it easier to misunderstand.

Combating the spreading of misinformation requires scientists to establish the validity and quality of research, stories, and claims with a rating system. [6]

Further applications

In 2020, researchers did a study on sensitivity to bullshit and found that, "people are more receptive to bullshit, and less sensitive to detecting bullshit" which establishes Brandolini's law. [12]

Within the context of scientific analysis, Brandolini's law can be put to use not just on the bullshit being presented, but can also bring the bullshitter under scrutiny as well. When the lying becomes apparent on multiple occasions throughout a stretch of scientific research, the bullshitter becomes more obvious than the bullshit itself, and because the bullshitter loses credibility, the ensuing bullshit is easier to identify. [13] [14] In addition, the challenge of refuting bullshit does not just come from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one's community. [15]

In accordance with Kieron O'Hara's research to further analyze how bullshitters operate as opposed to just analyzing the bullshit, while it still takes substantially more energy to disprove bullshit than to create it, the overall amount of energy exerted to discover a bullshitter is less than the amount of energy used to discover the bullshit itself. [16]

Bullshit and Brandolini's law has also has been involved in gender issues. The U.S. Department of State defines gendered disinformation as "a subset of misogynistic abuse and violence against women that uses false or misleading gender and sex-based narratives, often with some degree of coordination, to deter women from participating in the public sphere. Both foreign state and non-state actors strategically use gendered disinformation to silence women, discourage online political discourse, and shape perceptions toward gender and the role of women in democracies." This is a specific type of bullshit commonly found in politics where women are the victims of false claims. [17] Misinformation is used frequently in fostering gender inequalities especially in social platforms and in political matters. As the refuting of bullshit takes a lot more energy than producing it, lives and jobs are affected especially by women. [18]

Mitigating the effects of Brandolini's law

Environmental researcher Phil Williamson of University of East Anglia implored other scientists in 2016 to get online and refute falsehoods to their work whenever possible, despite the difficulty per Brandolini's law. He wrote, "the scientific process doesn't stop when results are published in a peer-reviewed journal. Wider communication is also involved, and that includes ensuring not only that information (including uncertainties) is understood, but also that misinformation and errors are corrected where necessary." [1]

Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West, researchers on the topic of bullshit, study how to refute the bullshit that takes a large amount of energy to discover. This complicated process depends on the audience the bullshit is intended to influence, the time and energy a person is willing to invest in this process, and the medium used to do the refuting. In order to refute one needs the following: [19]

  1. Be correct by including all necessary information that was run by a friend and double checking facts.
  2. Be charitable by acknowledging the possibility of your own confusion, not attributing malice, and not assigning stupidity.
  3. Be clear and coherent about the argument you are making.
  4. Admit mistakes and faults.

Other techniques for increasing the effectiveness of retracting misinformation include: preexposure warnings, repeated retractions, and providing an alternative narrative. [20]

Similar concepts

The adage, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on", has taken various forms since as early as 1710. [21]

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late, the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or, like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

—  Jonathan Swift, The Examiner (November 9, 1710) [22]

In 1845, Frédéric Bastiat expressed an early notion of this law:

We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.

—  Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, First Series (1845) [23]

Prior to Brandolini's definition, Italian blogger Uriel Fanelli and Jonathan Koomey, creator of Koomey's law and researcher, also shared thoughts aligning with the bullshit asymmetry principle, Fanelli stated, "An idiot can create more bullshit than you could ever hope to refute", when generally translated in Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. [24]

Koomey states, "In fast-changing fields, like information technology, refutations lag nonsense production to a greater degree than in fields with less rapid change." [25]

See also

Related Research Articles

Bullshit is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive. It is mostly a slang term and a profanity which means "nonsense", especially as a rebuke in response to communication or actions viewed as deceptive, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false. As with many expletives, the term can be used as an interjection, or as many other parts of speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings. A person who excels at communicating nonsense on a given subject is sometimes referred to as a "bullshit artist" instead of a "liar".

Disinformation is misleading content deliberately spread to deceive people, or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through attacks that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."

Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such checking done in-house by the publisher to prevent inaccurate content from being published; when the text is analyzed by a third party, the process is called external fact-checking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Misinformation</span> Incorrect or misleading information

Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. Misinformation can exist without specific malicious intent; disinformation is distinct in that it is deliberately deceptive and propagated. Misinformation can include inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or false information as well as selective or half-truths. In January 2024, the World Economic Forum identified misinformation and disinformation, propagated by both internal and external interests, to "widen societal and political divides" as the most severe global risks within the next two years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Mercola</span> American alternative medicine proponent and purveyor of anti-vaccination misinformation

Joseph Michael Mercola is an American alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Internet business personality. He markets largely unproven dietary supplements and medical devices. On his website, Mercola and colleagues advocate unproven and pseudoscientific alternative health notions including homeopathy and opposition to vaccination. These positions have received persistent criticism. Mercola is a member of several alternative medicine organizations as well as the political advocacy group Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which promotes scientifically discredited views about medicine and disease. He is the author of two books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Bergstrom</span> American theoretical and evolutionary biologist

Carl Theodore Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist and a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, United States. Bergstrom is a critic of low-quality or misleading scientific research. He is the co-author of a book on misinformation called Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World and teaches a class by the same name at University of Washington.

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Post-truth politics</span> Political culture where facts are considered irrelevant

Post-truth politics, also described as post-factual politics or post-reality politics, amidst varying academic and dictionary definitions of the term, refer to a recent historical period where political culture is marked by public anxiety about what claims can be publicly accepted facts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fake news</span> False or misleading information presented as real

Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information claiming the aesthetics and legitimacy of news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term fake news was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information presented as news. It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.

The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

An infodemic is a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about certain issues. The word is a portmanteau of information and epidemic and is used as a metaphor to describe how misinformation and disinformation can spread like a virus from person to person and affect people like a disease. This term, originally coined in 2003 by David Rothkopf, rose to prominence in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Plandemic is a trilogy of conspiracy theory films produced by Mikki Willis, promoting misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. They feature Judy Mikovits, a discredited American researcher and prominent anti-vaccine activist. The first video, Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19, was released on May 4, 2020, under Willis' production company Elevate Films. The second film, Plandemic Indoctornation, which includes more interviewees, was released on August 18 by Brian Rose's distributor of conspiracy theory related films, London Real. Later on June 3, 2023, Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening was released on The Highwire, a website devoted to conspiracy theories run by anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree.

Stella Gwandiku-Ambe Immanuel is a Cameroonian-American physician and pastor. In mid-2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a video went viral on social media platforms in which Immanuel said hydroxychloroquine can cure COVID-19, and that public health measures such as social distancing and the wearing of face masks were ineffective and unnecessary. The platforms removed Immanuel's videos and posts, which they said promoted misinformation related to the pandemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">America's Frontline Doctors</span> Right wing, anti-science political group

America's Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) is an American right-wing political organization. Affiliated with Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin and publicly led by Simone Gold, the group is opposed to measures intended to control the COVID-19 pandemic, such as business closures, stay-at-home orders, and vaccination. The group promotes falsehoods about the COVID-19 pandemic and COVID-19 vaccines.

Disinformation attacks are strategic deception campaigns involving media manipulation and internet manipulation, to disseminate misleading information, aiming to confuse, paralyze, and polarize an audience. Disinformation can be considered an attack when it occurs as an adversarial narrative campaign that weaponizes multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value-laden judgements—to exploit and amplify identity-driven controversies. Disinformation attacks use media manipulation to target broadcast media like state-sponsored TV channels and radios. Due to the increasing use of internet manipulation on social media, they can be considered a cyber threat. Digital tools such as bots, algorithms, and AI technology, along with human agents including influencers, spread and amplify disinformation to micro-target populations on online platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simone Gold</span> American anti-vaccine activist and founder of Americas Frontline Doctors

Simone Melissa Gold is an American doctor and anti-vaccine activist. She is the founder of America's Frontline Doctors, a right-wing political organization known for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Before her arrest and guilty plea for participating in the 2021 United States Capitol attack, she had gained attention when a video of an America's Frontline Doctors press conference in front of the US Supreme Court Building went viral in July 2020. During the press conference, she touted the supposed benefits of hydroxychloroquine, despite evidence that it is ineffective as a COVID-19 treatment and can carry significant risks.

Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines consists of disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic propagated by various sources.

This timeline includes entries on the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. This includes investigations into the origin of COVID-19, and the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 which is caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2. Social media apps and platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Telegram, and YouTube, have contributed to the spread of misinformation. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) reported that conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 began on "day one". CAHN reported on March 16, 2020, that far-right groups in Canada were taking advantage of the climate of anxiety and fear surrounding COVID, to recycle variations of conspiracies from the 1990s, that people had shared over shortwave radio. COVID-19 disinformation is intentional and seeks to create uncertainty and confusion. But most of the misinformation is shared online unintentionally by enthusiastic participants who are politically active.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Renée DiResta</span> Writer and internet researcher

Renée DiResta is a professor, writer and former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). DiResta has written about pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare. She has also served as an advisor to the U.S. Congress on ongoing efforts to prevent online and social media disinformation.

References

  1. 1 2 Williamson, Phil (6 December 2016). "Take the time and effort to correct misinformation". Nature . 540 (7632): 171. doi: 10.1038/540171a .
  2. ↑ Thatcher, Jim; Shears, Andrew; Eckert, Josef (2018). "Rethinking the Geoweb and Big Data: Mixed Methods and Brandolini's Law". Thinking Big Data in Geography: New Regimes, New Research. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 232–. ISBN   978-1-4962-0537-7. JSTOR   j.ctt21h4z6m. OCLC   1008767674.
  3. ↑ Richardson, Heather Cox (28 June 2024). "June 27, 2024". Letters from an American. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It's a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them.
  4. ↑ Brandolini, Alberto (2013-01-11). "Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it". Twitter. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
  5. ↑ Brandolini, Alberto (2015-11-11). "@rpallavicini I discovered Uriel's post later :-) My inspiration was Daniel Kahneman…". Twitter. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
    — (2015-11-17). "@RPallavicini seeing Berlusconi vs Travaglio after reading "thinking Fast & Slow" :-)". Twitter. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 Dijkstra, Suzan; Kok, Gautam; Ledford, Julie G.; Sandalova, Elena; Stevelink, Remi (2018). "Possibilities and Pitfalls of Social Media for Translational Medicine". Frontiers in Medicine. 5: 345. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2018.00345 . PMC   6291449 . PMID   30574495.
  7. 1 2 Bergstrom, Carl T.; West, Jevin D. (2020). Calling bullshit: the art of skepticism in a data-driven world. Random House. pp. 11–17. ISBN   978-0-525-50918-9. OCLC   1127668193.
  8. ↑ Lapierre, Matthew (June 18, 2021). "Truth, lies and the disinformation problem that won't go away". The Montreal Gazette.
  9. ↑ Grech, Victor; Masukume, Gwinyai (December 2017). "Fake news of baby booms 9 months after major sporting events distorts the public's understanding of early human development science". Early Human Development. 115: 16–17. doi:10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2017.08.007. PMID   28843137.
  10. ↑ West, Jevin; Bergstrom, Carl (August 5, 2020). "Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 prevention? How to separate science from partisanship". NBC. Retrieved April 15, 2024.
  11. ↑ Law, Alex (2017-06-03). "Post-truth and fake news". Media Education Journal. 61: 3–6. ISSN   0268-1951.
  12. ↑ Petrocelli, John V.; Watson, Haley F.; Hirt, Edward R. (July 2020). "Self-Regulatory Aspects of Bullshitting and Bullshit Detection". Social Psychology. 51 (4): 239–253. doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000412. ISSN   1864-9335.
  13. ↑ Allchin, Douglas (2023). "Ten competencies for the science misinformation crisis". Science Education. 107 (2): 261–274. Bibcode:2023SciEd.107..261A. doi:10.1002/sce.21746 – via Wiley Online Library.
  14. ↑ Murray, David; Schwartz, Joel; Lichter, Robert (2001). It Ain't Necessarily So. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 159. ISBN   978-0-7425-1095-1. OCLC   606500666.
  15. ↑ Spicer, André (April 2020). "Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations". Organization Theory. 1 (2): 263178772092970. doi: 10.1177/2631787720929704 . ISSN   2631-7877.
  16. ↑ O'Hara, Kieron (August 2016). "Bullshit 2.0" (PDF). eprints.soton.ac.uk. Retrieved 15 April 2024.
  17. ↑ "Gendered Disinformation: Tactics, Themes, and Trends by Foreign Malign Actors". U.S. Department of State. March 27, 2023.
  18. ↑ "[InternetLab] The gender dimensions of disinformation" (PDF). July 2023.
  19. ↑ Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data. University of Washington Information School. 2017. Retrieved 2024-04-21– via YouTube.
  20. ↑ Lewandowsky, Stephan; Ecker, Ullrich K. H.; Seifert, Colleen M.; Schwarz, Norbert; Cook, John (2012). "Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing". Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 13 (3): 106–131. doi:10.1177/1529100612451018. ISSN   1529-1006. PMID   26173286.
  21. ↑ A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes, Quote Investigator, July 13, 2014, retrieved 17 March 2024
  22. ↑ Swift, Jonathan (November 9, 1710). "The Examiner". The Examiner. Retrieved November 21, 2024.
  23. ↑ Ladwig, Craig (October 21, 2022). "At last, a law for our times". Seymour Tribune. Retrieved 29 April 2023.
  24. ↑ Bergstrom, Carl T.; West, Jevin Darwin (2021). Calling bullshit: the art of skepticism in a data-driven world. Random House. ISBN   978-0-525-50920-2. OCLC   1139013709.
  25. ↑ Koomey, Jonathan (2020). "Estimating Bitcoin Electricity Use: A Beginner's Guide" (PDF). coincenter.org.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.