Wil Anderson: Misinformation cycle is ‘intrinsically broken forever’
There’s no coming back from the misinformation and disinformation we see on the news and social media, according to Australian comedian Wil Anderson.
Appearing on The Plug podcast in support of the third season of his ABC show, Question Everything – which aims to unpack everything making news headlines – the comic commented on whether the misinformation cycle has gotten better or worse coming out of the Covid pandemic when the show made its debut.
“I think it’s intrinsically broken forever now,” Anderson said.
“You now cannot, if you just read the headlines of the newspapers when I studied journalism 25 years ago, the headlines would still give you a reasonable idea of what would then be in the stories.
“Whereas now, when you read the headlines on major news sites… you read the headline and often the story can have absolutely nothing to do with what it implied it was in the headline. And to me, in some ways that’s even more damaging than, cause that’s that misinformation and disinformation that is hiding in plain sight.”
Anderson said that one of the pleasures of his hosting role with Question Everything is that he gets to cut through the noise and “shut out” those who are spreading misinformation and potentially making money from it.
“It is in people’s best interest to mislead people now. The algorithms reward it,” Anderson said.
“Social media has meant that conflict is something that people are more interested in than they are in facts and truth. So being provocative or deliberately taking a position that they, even maybe the person who was taking that position knows is untrue, but is taking it in a calculated way because they’re trying to monetize.
“It’s not a fair fight anymore.”
Listen to the full episode here.
Question Everything airs on ABC TV and ABC iView every Wednesday at 8.30pm.
