On Disinformation

How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

De: Lee McIntyre

Narrado por: Brian P. Craig

The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation, Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth.

McIntyre goes through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens-from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congress people to regulate social media-as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take.

On Disinformation empowers us to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late.

©2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2024 Tantor

Excellent general information and historical reference that sorely needs an update

Talking about disinformation in our modern era is like hitting a moving target with ever-increasing challenges. I commend the author for committing himself to this much-needed education which should be included in upper-level education in our country. First, the good stuff: The author does an excellent job of offering a pocket-level understanding of disinformation from the 20th century-onward, with easy-to-remember and follow suggestions for how to combat it. The narrator does an excellent job and the overall technical quality is outstanding.

This is a good general education for what I would expect out of a shortened length (2.5 hours), but it’s already showing its signs of age with several references and omissions. (There are zero mentions of AI’s involvement with misinformation, no mentions of TikTok, or how influencers have been co-opted for governmental misinformation schemes.) Also, the author extemporizes on the late Russian dissident, Navalny, as still among the living.

The author should have provided an addendum to the audiobook.

Frightening Truth Well Spoken

Effective at shaking us out of our complacency. This is a book that should be taught in Civics classes. Highly recommended!

Lacks Abbreviated Historical Insight

This work lacks a fundamental understanding of the history of disinformation. First, when researching disinformation, one must remain as apolitical as possible. However, in the exordium, it doesn't take much thought to understand which side of the aisle the author stands on...thus rendering his entire argumentation in the US about disinform baseless.

As this work describes the disinformation playbook, which the tenets of disinformation were present in this treatise, it begins to lean more on the tenets of propaganda than disinformation.

The very playbook on disinformation that he presents is the one the Soviet Union developed when they infiltrated US cultural centers in the early 1920s. However, no data is presented on how effective the Soviets were in sowing seeds of discontent that fester in the US today. Instead, the argument is couched as the age-old provincial one: "left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal, democrat vs. republican." Both sides are using disinformation and propaganda techniques, and we as Americans would do well not to look to the political parties for any form of solid information; we'd look to the history of how such pernicious actions as disinformation were allowed to grow.

This work is a solid attempt but falls short.

I expected more from this work other than a treatise on how some political party is destroying the country. Based on the overt political presentation in this work, a work of disinformation itself is quite possible. Why would such a critical element in understanding the history of disinformation not be included in a job that describes how it functions in society today?

I'm sure as people read this, I will be labeled as an 'ill-informed idiot." However, keep in mind the Soviets had a name for those who disagreed with the left-leaning worldview - the Soviets called them "moron millions."