What Misinformation Does to Deliberation

Misinformation is commonly understood as a failure to get the facts right, either out of ignorance or as a result of manipulation. Because deliberation promotes the pooling of information and the gathering of evidence, misinformation so understood is expected to dissipate in the deliberative process. In the last decade, however, liberal democracies have found themselves in a misinformation crisis, with misinformation proving increasingly resistant to democratic deliberation. Instead of publicly acceptable policy decisions, democratic deliberation produces political polarization, civic distrust, and mutual contempt. Admittedly, existing democratic deliberative processes suffer from serious shortcomings in terms of equality, inclusiveness, opportunities for participation, and the quality of political argumentation. Nevertheless, for deliberative democrats, it remains to be explained why misinformed citizens persist in holding false beliefs in the face of vast, publicly available, countervailing evidence. Such denial of evidence contradicts the commitment to rationality at the heart of deliberative democracy, blocking democratic deliberation as a result. Of course, misinformation alone cannot explain deliberative failure: other factors—economic, cultural, ideological—contribute decisively to the derailment of democratic deliberation. In this paper, I argue that misinformation is as much a manifestation of these other factors as it is a product of ignorance of manipulation. In many cases, misinformation can be understood as an expression of background political beliefs or desires rather than as a set of false beliefs. In these cases, misinformation functions as a kind of signaling (Levy & Ross 2021; Bergamaschi Ganapini 2021) or cheerleading (Hannon 2021). I argue that misinformation sometimes resembles a fictional experience: misinformed citizens who engage with fake news do not believe its content to be true but engage with it in a fictional way. Misinformation could then be understood as the perverse equivalent of the stories and myths that some deliberative democrats argue should be allowed and taken into account in the deliberative process, as expressions of affects and needs that cannot take an argumentative form (Young 1996, 2000).