The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Fake Priesthood of ‘Misinformation’

Posted on | January 12, 2025 | No Comments

We shall explore the buffoonery of Jeff Hancock, of whom Professor Glenn Reynolds has said, “Honestly, that he calls himself a ‘misinformation expert’ proves that he is a charlatan already.”

Before we get into the details of Hackock’s blunder, however, I first wish to point out that our beloved hero and role model, Ace of Spades, has for months been styling himself “Misinformation Expert Ace,” the point being that he’s just as much an “expert” as any of the academics sucking up federal grant money and 501(c)3 cash for their alleged “expertise” in this entirely bogus field. “Misinformation studies” sprang into existence — a la Athena emerging from the head of Zeus — after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Democrats blamed this event on Russian “meddling” in the election. Supposedly, a handful of Internet trolls operating in the Balkans had flipped the 2016 election by publishing “fake news” clickbait. Any sophomore student of logic could have found the flaw in this absurd claim — how is X the cause of Y? It might be true, on the one hand, that these Macedonian “misinformation” farms were somehow part of a Russian intelligence operation, but where is the evidence that even one American voter was influenced by these “fake news” stories? Yet it was on the basis of such unproven causality that there emerged an apparently lucrative industry employing self-anointed “misinformation experts,” an industry that subsequently proclaimed itself qualified to determine the truth of claims surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. “Misinformation experts” were closely allied with the “fact checkers” who were paid to direct Facebook’s suppression of inconvenient news about, e.g., the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Misinformation studies” is a cult religion, of whom “experts” are the priesthood. The existence and purpose of the quasi-religious witch hunt against “misinformation” is entirely political, having originated in the post-2016 effort to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump.

Now, via Wikipedia, this thumbnail biography:

Jeffrey T. Hancock is a communication and psychology researcher and professor at the College of Communication Stanford University. Hancock is best known for his research in fields of deception, trust in technology, and the psychology of social media. Hancock has been published in over 80 journal articles and cited in National Public Radio (NPR) and CBS This Morning.
Hancock was born in Canada, though he currently resides in Palo Alto, California. He received his bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Psychology from the University of Victoria in 1996. . . . In 1997, he began his doctoral program in Psychology at Dalhousie University in Canada, from which he would graduate in 2002. From 2002 to 2015, Hancock was a faculty member and professor of Information Science and Communication at Cornell University.

The man is a psychology major. You know who else has a Ph.D. in psychology? Deb Frisch. “Your honor, I rest my case.”

“Argument from authority,” as we sophomore logic students were once taught to call the fallacy of relying on the prestige of a source as evidence of the truth for any assertion. The fact that Jeff Hanckcock has a Ph.D. and has been associated with elite univerities (Cornell and Stanford) is insufficient to prove that we can trust every word he utters.

Professor Hancock’s expertise was solicited in defense of a 2023 Minnesota law “to criminalize the use of deep-fake technologies to influence elections.” Christopher Kohls is an online content creator known as “Mr. Reagan,” who had used artificial intelligence (AI) technology to create parody videos about Kamala Harris. At least one of these videos was shared by Minnesota Republican state legislator Mary Franson. When one of Kohl’s parody videos got retweeted by Elon Musk and went viral, it was denounced by prominent Democrats, including Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Subsequently, Kohls and Franson filed for a preliminary injunction on First Amendment grounds to prevent the use of Minnesota’s “deep fake” law against themselves. Professor Hancock was then enlisted as an expert witness by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and submitted a brief with the federal court under penalty of perjury — a phrase that the judge made a point of emphasizing in his ruling that disqualified Hancock’s testimony:

With his responsive memorandum in opposition to Plaintiffs’ preliminary-injunction motion, Attorney General Ellison submitted two expert declarations … [including one] from Jeff Hancock, Professor of Communication at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. The declarations generally offer background about artificial intelligence (“AI”), deepfakes, and the dangers of deepfakes to free speech and democracy….
Attorney General Ellison concedes that Professor Hancock included citations to two non-existent academic articles and incorrectly cited the authors of a third article. Professor Hancock admits that he used GPT-4o to assist him in drafting his declaration but, in reviewing the declaration, failed to discern that GPT-4o generated fake citations to academic articles.
The irony. Professor Hancock, a credentialed expert on the dangers of AI and misinformation, has fallen victim to the siren call of relying too heavily on AI—in a case that revolves around the dangers of AI, no less. Professor Hancock offers a detailed explanation of his drafting process to explain precisely how and why these AI-hallucinated citations in his declaration came to be. And he assures the Court that he stands by the substantive propositions in his declaration, even those that are supported by fake citations. But, at the end of the day, even if the errors were an innocent mistake, and even if the propositions are substantively accurate, the fact remains that Professor Hancock submitted a declaration made under penalty of perjury with fake citations. . . .

You can read the whole thing. “The irony,” indeed. Permit me to add a personal anecdote: One of my sons is a law student who has worked as an intern/clerk and, as part of his job, was able to detect fake citations in a brief, which were the result of someone else relying on AI research the same way Professor Hancock did. If my 20-something son is more capable of finding AI fakery than this Ph.D. “expert”?

Yeah, your credentials are bullshit, Professor Hancock.



 

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Category: Intellectuals

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