How to Combat the Evils of Disinformation and Misinformation
There’s never been a moment in history in which information, knowledge, and wisdom aren’t incredibly valuable for our survival, for our overall well being.
There’s also never been a moment in history in which lying, by omission or otherwise, intentionally or unintentionally, hasn’t been profitable to a selected few.
Unless you’ve become a marketable commodity, telling the truth nowadays is dangerous for your financial, physical, and even spiritual health. This is especially perilous for marginalized people. There’s a long history of our leadership getting killed both by states and their own people for telling the truth.
There are so many things that we must take into account when consuming and relaying information that most people are oblivious about.
Human beings are peculiar creatures that need their education and news to be presented to them through the channels of charisma, entertainment, and confirmation biases—through sensational proclamations that are packaged as logical and reasonable by “conventionally attractive” people who mustn’t read as foreign, in any way, shape, or form. We need them to at least sound and look like us or worse, be part of the ruling gender, race, class… since we’ve been conditioned to trust them above all.
The war for our attention is real and it’s vicious.
We spend trillions of dollars on information, producing and consuming it. Be it through the media, social media, streaming platforms, scripted and unscripted, you name it. Governments and industries spend hundreds of billions of dollars, creating and promoting narratives that are beneficial to those who rule over us, for self-preservation only. Ask Elon Musk about it. He wasn’t shy about his reasons for trying to buy Twitter.
This is a constant struggle, though, between individuals vs masses and masses vs the few and the few vs themselves. There is, indeed, a lot of competition at the top, too, and they will drag us all down to perpetual servitude just so they can become and remain number one. But, there’s also a great deal of collaboration among them because they rightly reckoned they need collaborators to keep these ghoulish systems running.
Either way, if you solely hear, watch, and read information from one media entity, for instance, you will get a watered-down version of the truth that never incriminates those who sponsor them. So, if you want to know what conservatives are doing, you must consume media created by liberals, but if you want to know what liberals are doing, the opposite must be done.
If you want to know the entire nuanced and thorough truth, you have to go independent, and even the independent route can mislead you because of a lack of diversity, skills, resources, and scruples. It’s a jungle out there.
To make matters worse, social media and streaming platforms have opened the floodgates to oceans of disinformation and misinformation. There is seriously so much dangerous junk getting passed around as truth that we’ve lost and continue to lose entire generations to them. And it’s not that social media platforms don’t know. It’s that they assume it isn’t profitable for them to put a clamp on them. So what do orgs and the government do to fake the funk? They tell us that we need to combat misinformation and disinformation, but they never admit to taking part in the mess. Seriously, the nerve.
It’s more convenient for the powers that be that we be at each others’ throats, to have marginalized people constantly explain ourselves to others and ourselves, fighting for scraps, to the point of paralysis.
I propose we do numerous things to thrive, not just survive, but by the looks of it, we’re heading straight to extinction because some people rather commit murder-suicide than exist in a just, equitable, and kind world. I know it’s herculean but without these things we’ll never be able to achieve mental, financial, emotional, physical, and spiritual emancipation.
Combat the Alt-Right disinformation and misinformation machine by investing, raining money on independent sources and anyone and everyone who is truly and genuinely fighting for the material well-being of all historically marginalized people.
Unscrupulous and very powerful people are funding all sorts of platforms and people to elevate and disseminate hate—generously compensating anyone no matter how unskilled, nonsensical, and corrosive they may be.
These powerful individuals have branches everywhere and they have no qualms with dropping mad money on those who relay their bigotry to the masses. That’s why we see so many unskilled, bombastic blowhards dominating many platforms, mainstream and independent. Spreading disinformation and misinformation is very lucrative. Ask Alex Jones about it. He knows.
Right-wingers have a huge advantage because they are willing to invest, to give platforms, and positions of power to marginalized people, too—as long as they think, walk, and act just like them. Owning the libs has become a personality trait and how delicious it must be when it’s done by an individual that liberals are extremely condescending and patronizing to? They know paternalism is their M.O.
Liberals hardly, if ever, invest in us like this. In fact, liberals will do everything in their power to kick into oblivion those who speak truth to power because they don’t see us as equals and because they don’t want to give up their silly notions of merit. That’ll be a great upending of all their systems and who wants that when it’s preferable to join forces with conservatives to keep the masses asleep, or worse, actively elbowing in each to be in the graces of the hateful rich and famous. It’s hellish out there.
Some well-intentioned entities have taken it upon themselves to combat the asphyxiating narratives poisoning our airwaves. They will fail. They have failed, but that won’t stop them from receiving millions of dollars in funding to haplessly carry out their mission.
We need to stop tapping solely into legacy institutions to find talent from privileged and marginalized groups.
Seriously, to be noticed and given the green light by these incredibly discriminatory entities one must appeal to the biases of their overlords and their overlords are funded in the hundreds of billions of dollars by those who don’t want to see a material change happening for us all.
Scouts, managers, talent, casting agents, as experienced as they are, see the world through superficial lenses and dangerous binaries since many of them come from legacies themselves. [Experience has also been weaponized against our advancement because what’s the point of experience if you are terrible at what you do? Donald Trump was president of the United States. That means nothing. Pick any random person off of the streets and I can guarantee you they may be able to run the country better than he did.] They’re ill-equipped to spot talent beyond demographics they are especially oblivious about, beyond what they read from simple studies haplessly dissected by the mainstream media and promoted by nonprofits for monetary gain and access to power.
Don’t get me wrong, entering a space we’ve been historically kept out of is a skill in itself that not everyone possesses, despite the obviously needed “safeness” through presentation, tone, respectability, professionalism, and niceness to enter, coexist, to survive, to thrive in them. A tone, respectability, professionalism, niceness that have brought entire countries to the lowest, darkest, coldest levels of hell.
“Nazis are nice until they aren’t,” indeed.
[Godwin’s Law has been suspended so save yourself the embarrassment.]
Civility has certainly been weaponized against us.
We must have a heart to heart with our family members and friends.
We’ve lost many loved ones to disinformation and misinformation shared on YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, through many communications platforms that are seldomly held accountable for barbarities they let organically proliferate (if there is such a thing) and promote themselves just to keep up with the competition. We have become commodities, pawns, to the detriment of our social bonds and overall well-being.
Charlatans are all around us, condemning our compassion, gaslighting us into thinking our marginalized positionalities are to blame solely on personality traits and character flaws, while they enjoy privileges afforded to them exactly for being in possession of those positionalities. They promote their prosperity gospels, their snake oil, in churches, in conferences, in multi-level marketing pyramid schemes, the media, social media, you name it, just so they can run with our money. There’s no scarcity of people selling us pipe dreams they themselves are most likely (willfully) oblivious as to how they attained and fulfilled them.
We’ve fallen for a great deal conspiracy theories for many reasons, but especially because we’ve been callously mistreated and misled by the monstrous actions of governments, mainstream media, the health department, academia, orgs, and legacy institutions that have shown, time after time, they can’t be trusted with our bodies, with our minds, with our hearts. Unfortunately for us, long-term disenfranchisement, feelings of powerlessness, chronic insecurity, hopelessness, lack of control of our surroundings (and our futures) make us susceptible to fantastical conspiracies that distract and hurt us more than they entertain.
There is a very long history of abuse, of real entities that have experimented on us, that have done unimaginably horrendous things to us, but they’re not really secret. At least not anymore. As bad as it is now, one can easily find all of this information through simple Google searches.
There are no Jewish cabals controlling the banks and the media. There’s no gay agenda trying to groom and ruin your kids.
There are, though, very powerful entities trying to convince you of that. Entities that, ironically, are using very potent tactics to punch down on historically and systemically discriminated people—reflection and deflection.
Seriously, there are long, huge, public trails of their involvement, their manipulation, their incrimination of the very things they accuse others of doing. It’s no secret.
Have certain unscrupulous individuals tried to kill stories that would put them in a bad light? Of course, and they’ve succeeded—a lot. But, why would the media cover it eventually? Either because it represents an opposing group of people (conservative or liberal) or because the cover has been blown and now they must report it or look biased and ridiculous.
It’s why conservative media is obsessed with the private lives of rich and famous liberals. It’s why liberal media is obsessed with the private lives of rich and famous conservatives.
Neither will take on people on their side because if one person goes, entire systems may, too. All of this is public knowledge.
What’s not public knowledge is that we are being told conflicting, often erroneous and dangerous disinformation and misinformation by “independent” sources that sound exactly like mainstream conservative and liberal media. Seriously, these people are hardly independent in their line of thinking. They either lie outright or infuse some truths, omit some truths, corrupt some truths and mix them with big lies to manipulate our emotions, to activate our biases, to truly fan the divisions that are tearing us all apart, and laugh all the way to the bank.
Due to incredibly inhumane hierarchies created for the sole purpose of abuse, exploitation and control, we hold on to all of these lies, to all this hate, to all this inhumanity just because we don’t want to be held accountable and because we’ve formed trauma bonds with those so called pillars of our communities. It benefits them to call everything a conspiracy theory that only they are hipped to but you can be, too, as long as you give them attention and buy their merch. What conspiracy out now propels people to do better by their neighbor? By the less fortunate? They ‘re all, if not all, deployed to uphold power structures.
We have fallen for the myth of being temporarily embarrassed kings and queens.
Question everyone and everything.
We must question every source, every person, every entity appealing to authority about anything and their motives, yes. We must look sideways at those that profess to be legit, validated by so called experts and institutions, and those who proclaim to be independent, with no strings on them. Their motives aren’t usually benevolent. Even if they are well-meaning, they may be oblivious to how they help spread misinformation. But, we mustn’t dive head-first into the jaws of their contrarians, either.
Democrats have a long history of doing our people very dirty: from three-strikes law to deregulation, from abandoning the promises they made to Black and Brown leadership to leaving us to our own devices during a mass disabling event.
But so have Republicans: from the war on drugs that specifically targets Black and Brown people to gutting services provided to our most marginalized, from doing away with environmental protections to letting major corporations take their own disastrous precautions with our safety.
As someone who comes from an oppressed group and exposed to all of these things, you’d have to be a glutton for punishment to side with either party. Yeah, one has to often get dirty, soil our souls with these monstrous people to get shit done but that isn’t sustainable and usually those wins come at the expense of others. We are usually the expendable others. There’s got to be depths we won’t sink to.
Engage, patronize, sponsor, elevate independent entities, sources, individuals but with the understanding that they, too, may have their own ulterior motives, that they, too, may be limited in their understanding of the cultural, socio, geo political world around us and that they, too, may operate with limited resources—but get your information from everywhere, mainstream and the other side of your political ideology, of all spectrums.
Let’s face it, rarely do independent people cite and yield to experts in their respective fields, change their stance with new information, and put the overall wellbeing of everyone above their own self-interest and megalomania.
Rarely are we exposed to independent disseminators of information who have hit the goldilocks of being highly skilled with data (gathering, analysis, and its translation for mass consumption), a deep understanding of others and themselves, caring, humble, bold, crazy, and selfless enough to present, consistently and persistently, with an active voice, thorough, nuanced, current, and urgent affairs.
Mostly because we don’t all have the personalities to hyper-focus, to learn new things, to apply them to our rhetoric, and the courage to share them with a hostile world. Our free time is also finite and so is our access to resources to help us create, platform, and promote content. Mainstream and well-funded “independent” media have entire teams for that, usually sponsored in the tens of millions of dollars. The rare funding that independent sources get from corporations and the government comes with many nasty restrictions and expectations, short of selling your soul.
This is why we must enter any space we can, gather as much information as we can, and share it as much as we can.
We need to, now more than ever, form alliances and share our expertise and resources with each other, publicly and privately.
We need to, now more than ever, validate and elevate those looking out for us in and outside systems that haven’t been good to us.
We need to, now more than ever, invest in ourselves beyond a degree (or two or three) of separation, become patrons of our artists, our champions, of our intellectuals who have the audacity to speak freely and unapologetically, without unreasonable provisions, even if we get burned by their righteous indignation and condemnation in the process—like some have done for centuries.
We combat disinformation and misinformation by becoming omnipresent without becoming Machiavellian.
We combat disinformation and misinformation by sharing resources, giving recommendations, without hoarding and gatekeeping opportunities.
We combat disinformation and misinformation by coming to terms with the facts that we don’t know it all, that we are imperfect and prone to making mistakes, that sometimes our instincts are wrong, and by not being so hard on ourselves.
We combat disinformation and misinformation by working on upending all oppressive systems, even the ones that have individually and temporally clothed and fed us while exploiting and discriminating the majority of our people.
There’s no way around this.
Like the late great Maya Angelou used to say: “The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.”
That will never happen if we continue to be conduits of disinformation and misinformation.
That will never happen if we continue to let cognitive dissonance consume us instead of letting it pass through us.
Truly, the truth* is the only thing that will set us all free*.
*But always consider the source.
*¿Quién la patrocina?
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César Vargas is a distinguished writer, advocate, strategist, and social critic, celebrated for his influential voice in modern Latinx America. His insightful social criticism spans a broad spectrum of topics including geopolitics, race, ethnicity, immigration, and culture. His work resonates across various platforms and communities, engaging editors, writers, journalists, celebrities, activists, artists, executives, politicians, professors, students, and more.
Recognized as one of the '40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics' by the Huffington Post, his writings have been featured in prestigious publications like the 'Bedford Guide for College Writers' and 'Caribbean Latino Perspectives in the Second Decade of the 21st Century'. His essays and articles have been published and quoted in NBC, Fox News Latino, Voxxi, Okayafrica, Okayplayer, The Huffington Post, Sky News, Salon, The Guardian, Latino Magazine, Latino Rebels, Vibe, The Hill, BET, and his own widely-followed online magazine, UPLIFTT, reaching millions globally.
He is known for creating content that goes viral, thanks to his unique perspective on documenting contemporary issues. His work, which played a pivotal role in bringing Afrolatinidad to the mainstream, is taught in high schools and colleges and shared widely, including in state prisons. His contributions to the arts were acknowledged with two awards from Fusion and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts for his short films 'Some Kind of Spanish' and 'Black Latina Unapologetically'.
As a Salinas Scholar at the Aspen Institute's Latinos & Society, he continues to push boundaries and inspire change. His academic background in Film Studies from Queens College, CUNY, underpins his diverse skill set.
Beyond his professional achievements, Vargas is deeply committed to philanthropy. He has raised and distributed funds for various causes, including supporting Haitians in Sosúa, his birthplace. This commitment to social good has piqued the interest of publishing houses, MacArthur Fellows, and major foundation leaders, leading to the ongoing development of his personal memoir.
Currently residing in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Delmy, and their son, Omari, Vargas continues to be a dynamic voice and advocate, championing diverse causes and shaping the narrative around Latinx issues in America and beyond.
