How Do We Get to Herd Immunity for Fake News? We need to match our focus on the supply of misinformation with a focus on the demand for it. By Greg Weiner Mr. Weiner is a political scientist and was a senior Senate aide to Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska. Last week, veto-proof majorities of the House and Senate rejected President Trump’s demand that they use a defense-spending bill to repeal liability protections for social media companies. The demand arose from Mr. Trump’s frustration with platforms like Twitter for taking more assertive measures against misinformation and disinformation, including his own. Yet the chorus of angst over misinformation has focused too sharply on the channels supplying it. The bigger problem is the public’s appetite for consuming it. That demand has been evident recently in the fantastical beliefs of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters that not only did he win the presidential election, he also won by a landslide. At a demonstration in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, the crowd was egged on by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who has claimed that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School did not occur. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, chose the unlikely setting of the steps of the Supreme Court to tell the protesters that there were “still avenues” for a Trump victory. Yet the court closed off those avenues the night before when it refused even to allow, much less decide, Texas’s last-ditch challenge to voting procedures in other states. Those who believe such claims, like others across the political spectrum, occupy an ecosystem of unreality that social media enables. But the bigger project is not to prevent lies. It is figuring out how to educate citizens so they are more resistant to them. Treating misinformation as much as a problem of demand as one of supply will not solve immediate crises. But it may be a more powerful means of addressing the underlying and long-term dynamic of a nation divided not just by ideology but also by perceptions of reality itself. We often speak of disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theories going “viral.” If that is the case, platforms are unlikely to be able to treat every case. Viruses replicate and evolve. When Fox News turned out to be insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump, in his view — by which the president meant that the network would not fully validate his fantasy world — he directed his followers to the friendlier confines of One America News Network and Newsmax. In the three weeks after the election, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, Fox News lost 29 percent of its prime-time viewership. Newsmax nearly tripled its audience. Lies will always find an outlet. In a free society, the best response to viral misinformation is to fortify our immune systems against it, informationally speaking, by developing citizens who are motivated and able to distinguish truth from fiction. Perhaps more important, these citizens must be able to deal ...

1. How Do We Get to Herd Immunity for Fake News?
We need to match our focus on the supply of misinformation
with a focus on the demand for it.
By Greg Weiner
Mr. Weiner is a political scientist and was a senior Senate aide
to Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska.
Last week, veto-proof majorities of the House and Senate
rejected President Trump’s demand that they use a defense-
spending bill to repeal liability protections for social media
companies. The demand arose from Mr. Trump’s frustration
with platforms like Twitter for taking more assertive measures
against misinformation and disinformation, including his own.
Yet the chorus of angst over misinformation has focused too
sharply on the channels supplying it. The bigger problem is the
public’s appetite for consuming it.
That demand has been evident recently in the fantastical beliefs
of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters that not only did he win
the presidential election, he also won by a landslide. At a
demonstration in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, the crowd was
egged on by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who has
claimed that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School did
not occur. Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security
adviser, chose the unlikely setting of the steps of the Supreme
Court to tell the protesters that there were “still avenues” for a
Trump victory. Yet the court closed off those avenues the night
before when it refused even to allow, much less decide, Texas’s
last-ditch challenge to voting procedures in other states.
Those who believe such claims, like others across the political
spectrum, occupy an ecosystem of unreality that social media
enables. But the bigger project is not to prevent lies. It is
figuring out how to educate citizens so they are more resistant
to them.

2. Treating misinformation as much as a problem of demand as one
of supply will not solve immediate crises. But it may be a more
powerful means of addressing the underlying and long-term
dynamic of a nation divided not just by ideology but also by
perceptions of reality itself.
We often speak of disinformation, propaganda and conspiracy
theories going “viral.” If that is the case, platforms are unlikely
to be able to treat every case. Viruses replicate and evolve.
When Fox News turned out to be insufficiently loyal to Mr.
Trump, in his view — by which the president meant that the
network would not fully validate his fantasy world — he
directed his followers to the friendlier confines of One America
News Network and Newsmax. In the three weeks after the
election, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, Fox News lost 29
percent of its prime-time viewership. Newsmax nearly tripled
its audience. Lies will always find an outlet.
In a free society, the best response to viral misinformation is to
fortify our immune systems against it, informationally speaking,
by developing citizens who are motivated and able to
distinguish truth from fiction. Perhaps more important, these
citizens must be able to deal with the nuance in between.
In educational circles, this goes under the name “critical
thinking.” The term’s foundations in criticism as careful
analysis are noble. But critical thinking as taught today is often
more criticism than thought, with criticism amounting to the
parlor trick of deconstruction. Holes can always be poked in
even the best arguments, but the technique is better at
establishing what is fiction than what is true.
It can also become the academic equivalent of the tactic of
disinformation that Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution
has described: “Unlike ordinary lies and propaganda, which try
to make you believe something, disinformation tries to make
you disbelieve everything.” Understandably disoriented, many
people conclude they might as well believe what they prefer to
believe.
That is compelling as an explanation of how disinformation

3. works. But it should not let consumers of lies off the hook.
There is a difference between being uncertain of what is true
and being uninterested in finding out. It is in that second area
— the ability to find our way, however incompletely, amid
chaotic and clashing information — that education has failed us
most.
Over the last generation, education has focused increasingly on
skills and, among those, prioritized the ones that are empirically
measurable. By contrast, the venerable tradition of liberal
education gets its name from the fact that it is undertaken for its
own sake. Often it does yield better workers, but it does so
precisely because it does not set out to achieve that goal.
Rather than skills, liberal education emphasizes habits of mind.
Habits is the key word. Education is often too literal an
enterprise: If we want skilled workers, we instruct students in,
well, skills. If we want informed citizens, the literal approach
holds, we should just teach the basics of government. But
Aristotle observed that most virtues result from cultivating
habits, not from telling people what to do.
That is why liberal education seeks to foster intellectual virtues.
One is humility, which is the foundation of curiosity. It opens
us to ideas that challenge our own. Education that seeks to
affirm rather than unsettle students is fundamentally
incompatible with inquisitiveness.
Yet citizens content in their comfort zones are uniquely
susceptible to disinformation. The irony of the modern media
environment is its ability to bring the entire world onto our
screens while limiting it to those parts we actively choose to
see. Many of those claiming voter fraud are probably insulated
from supporters of President-elect Joe Biden, just as many
Biden voters have never met anyone they regard as a thoughtful
supporter of Mr. Trump. It is a short leap from assuming that no
one could possibly vote for the other side to claiming that fewer
people actually did.
Another intellectual virtue is the ability to embrace nuance —
the fact that most of life occupies a realm of opacity that is

4. neither stark truth or fiction nor obvious right or wrong —
without collapsing into nihilism. The rejection of nuance is
perhaps the most compelling explanation for the rise of
disinformation. In a Manichaean worldview that sees everything
as wholly true or entirely false, a patina of plausibility leads to
an extreme conclusion. A nuanced view of electoral fraud is that
it occurs in isolated instances in every election, but that there is
no evidence that it decided this one. A Manichaean view is that
some electoral fraud — a Trump ballot in a dumpster, or a get-
out-the-vote call to a dead person — proves that the whole
election was fraudulent.
But these virtues cannot be taught in the sense of a teacher
standing in front of a classroom and conveying information.
Edmund Burke characterized the result of liberal education as
“moral imagination,” the ability to derive virtues and
sympathies from settings and sources whose explicit purpose
was not to inculcate them. Plato’s dialogues — based on a
method of conversation that resists pat conclusions — require
not only active engagement from the reader but also a
recognition that answers in life are not always clear. Literatur e
opens us to a range of experiences and relationships that most
of us never have the opportunity to encounter personally.
Reading Frederick Douglass teaches us more about the moral
ambiguities and enduring aspirations of American history than
most lesson plans on race in America could.
Liberal education is a generational rather than an immediate
solution to the legitimate crisis of misinformation. That is not a
reason to reject it. Citizens formed in this tradition of education
will still be exposed to and susceptible to disinformation. But
they will have the capacity and, equally important, the
motivation to confront it. Nor does it excuse media companies
from responsibility for transmitting disinformation.
We need to match our focus on the supply of misinformation
with a focus on the demand for it. A society of information
consumers, content in their padded and custom-built realities,
cannot be rescued merely by reforming social media. That is the

5. equivalent of responding to a pandemic of viral disinformation
by treating each infection only as it occurs. The goal should be
herd immunity, achieved by educating citizens capable of —
and interested in — careful thought.
Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at
Assumption University, a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Political
Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy.”
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