I’ve been trying to stop myself whenever I use a war metaphor to talk about countering political or science disinfo/misinfo like it’s a proxy war in Vietnam because it makes my family and neighbors the theater of operations and that’s some bullshit.

For one, it reduces misinfo to a battle between good info and bad info and that's misleading. Mistrust is a strategy for survival. Yes, that gathers like sediment into a big target for bad actors but we have to understand it as a failure of trust first.

Reducing good info to a binary fails the promise of science. Science is supposed to be a moving target — to improve with new information. The strength is in not being right but in getting better whenever proven wrong.

Making misinformation a battle has effects on what we then decide to do about it. If we seek to wage war and destroy it, maybe we focus on weapons instead of cultivating trust and respect. All in the minds and psyches of uncles and aunties, friends and neighbors, btw.

Health communications folks have been processing this for decades. There's a lot for misinfo folks to learn from there. https://twitter.com/theRSAorg/status/1341325359325859841

Susan Sontag on war metaphors and health: “It overmobilizes, it overdescribes, and it powerfully contributes to the excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill” https://buggery.org/2004/12/29/susan-and-her-metaphors/

Similarly, viral infodemic metaphors present their own problems, creating a desire to separate the "virus" from its cultural context https://anthropologyandgerontology.com/going-viral-metaphors-for-managing-an-emerging-infodemic/

I'm still cataloging existing alternatives. One of my favs so far is @timhwang suggestion of a climate metaphor https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/deconstructing-the-disinformation-war/

There's also probably a useful metaphor to be grown from a reading of @EthanZ's new book on mistrust (which I haven't gotten to yet) https://ethanzuckerman.com/books/mistrust/ 

Still thinking all of this through but I'm really hoping to find a new metaphor to use when talking about misinfo/disinfo. Any help would be appreciated.

btw: this @js_rubin + Abby Holloway infodemic piece is spot on: https://anthropologyandgerontology.com/going-viral-metaphors-for-managing-an-emerging-infodemic/