Capturing our attention

What are the harms of misinformation? It’s widely believed that it causes false belief, including false beliefs in quite bizarre claims. I argue that this threat is greatly exaggerated: while plausible misinformation is often believed, the implausible misinformation that is often the focus of discussion is genuinely believed relatively rarely. It doesn’t follow that implausible misinformation is harmless. I argue that it has the capacity to capture attention, and in doing so it thwarts or hijacks debates. I argue that we possess sophisticated capacities of epistemic vigilance, which work reasonably well to distinguish reliable from unreliable information, but for a variety of reasons we do not have and are unlikely to be able to develop parallel defences against attentional capture. I conclude by arguing that we need social and institutional responses to attentional capture.