Where does trusted information come from? In a world of misinformation, where everyone is skeptical of everything, at least we can rely on expert, authoritative government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, the Patent Office, and the Food and Drug Administration, right? Right

Price, Nicholson, II

English

University of Michigan School of Law

University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Reviews Faculty Scholarship 2023 Trust, Trustworthiness, and Misinformation Shared by the Government Nicholson Price II University of Michigan Law School, wnp@umich.edu Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/reviews/204 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/reviews  Part of the Administrative Law Commons Recommended Citation Price, W. Nicholson, II. "Trust, Trustworthiness, and Misinformation Shared by the Government." The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) (2023). This Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Reviews by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact mlaw.repository@umich.edu. Technology LawThe Journal of Things We Like (Lots)https://cyber.jotwell.comTrust, Trustworthiness, and Misinformation Shared by theGovernmentAuthor : Nicholson PriceDate : April 19, 2023Janet Freilich, Government Misinformation Platforms, __U. Pa. L. Rev. __(forthcoming 2023), draftavailable at SSRN (Feb. 27 2023).Where does trusted information come from? In a world of misinformation, where everyone is skeptical ofeverything, at least we can rely on expert, authoritative government agencies like the EnvironmentalProtection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, the Patent Office, and the Food and DrugAdministration, right? Right!?Not so fast, Professor Janet Freilich persuasively but depressingly argues in the smart, eye-opening,“why didn’t I think of that” Government Misinformation Platforms. Freilich’s central point is fairlystraightforward (although the article is rich with nuance and detail): We usually laud the government’ssharing of information because government-provided information is usually pretty trustworthy anduseful for all kinds of things, and because transparency is usually a good goal. There’s a whole law (theFreedom of Information Act) about getting government to share information on request, supplementedby various transparency efforts. But there are also many government-run platforms that shareinformation that the government itself didn’t produce—and in fact, that share unvetted, frequentlyincorrect, sometimes deliberately misleading information. When people see information on theseplatforms and think “government information = trustworthy,” then the problems start.But is this really a big problem? Isn’t it just a couple of examples? In Part II, Freilich convincinglydismantles that resistant questioning. She recounts a disheartening parade. Let’s say people want toknow who’s releasing toxins into the environment. The first obvious step would be to visit an EPA site tofind out…but the data are compiled by companies and unvetted. What about a government-run list ofongoing clinical trials? Not vetted by NIH or FDA! Patents are examined, so they must surely be correct,at least. Nope, pronounces Freilich, relying on some of her terrific earlier work showing that patents arefull of fictional experiments (with results laid out!) that the patentee never actually conducted. Maybethe most prominent example is the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), run by CDC. Itlists thousands of people who died after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. You guessed it—those reportsare self-uploaded, unvetted, and have absolutely nothing even pretending to demonstrate causation.But there the data are, on a CDC website.This information both matters and misleads. Freilich persuasively shows that people do rely oninformation on these government-run platforms, and at least some treat it as authoritative. Scientistsread patents, even when the contents aren’t accurate or are based on totally fictitious experiments (Didyou know that the difference between an experiment that happened in a patent versus one that didn’t iswhether it’s described in the past or present tense? Lots of patent-reading scientists don’t!). People relyon clinical trial listings as some sort of imprimatur. And VAERS data are trumpeted on news sites,despite big disclaimers on the website about the unreliability of the information.So that’s one big problematic consequence: People believe things that are wrong because they seethem on government websites and mistakenly think they’re government vetted.                                                1 / 2Technology LawThe Journal of Things We Like (Lots)https://cyber.jotwell.comThe opposite problem also occurs: People start to mistrust the government because it’s sharing badinformation. If there’s garbage on CDC and FDA and EPA and PTO and NIH websites, how can people besure that those agencies are worthy of trust—or at least that the things on their websites are worthtrusting? That decrease in trust is awfully problematic for those agencies, especially in a time whentrust in government agencies is declining.On a broader level, Freilich exposes the fascinating, troublesome, and unstable gap between “trusted”and “trustworthy.” It’s a space where con artists live, one that research hospitals have struggled with inthe bioethics space, one the government seems to have wandered unwittingly into—and one thegovernment needs to exit expeditiously.The problem of government misinformation, alas, is easier limned than solved. Freilich presents a menuof options—including increased disclaimers, hurdles to posting information, correcting incorrectinformation, and more—but they’re all partial palliatives limited by capacity, will, or law. There’s nosilver bullet here.In a sense, the complex tangle of partial potential solutions is unsurprising. This paper exemplifies areally fun genre of legal scholarship, what we might call the “Hey this problem is actually widespread”paper. Freilich has deep expertise in the foibles of the patent system, and some of that work hasfocused on how patents aren’t so reliable, even though one might reasonably think they are a high-quality source of technical information (that’s part of the point of the patent system, after all). There’sthe aforementioned issue of fictitious experiments. Even worse, when patents are based on experimentsthat are so wrong the associated scientific papers are actually retracted, the patent systemseems…unconcerned. (Not great!). Government Misinformation Platforms steps back to show that thisinformation quality problem is disturbingly widespread across many contexts. But while there might beat least quasi-straightforward solutions in the limited context of patent examination and publication, thenuances of how those solutions work, or don’t, changes quite a bit from context to context. Freilichdeftly and clearly recognizes this complexity, but it’s an ongoing challenge.A particularly fun thing about the paper is that it lends itself to exploration and further work bothconceptual and applied. On a broad theoretical level, how should the government perform its weirdlymixed role in developing, promulgating, aggregating, and sharing information going forward? Where’sthe right balance between easy, quick access and maintaining trust and accuracy? Is information-provision trustworthiness distinct from other-stuff trustworthiness, or are they inextricably intertwined?And on the nitty-gritty practical level, after Freilich has unearthed so many spheres of government-enabled misinformation, what’s the right solution for each? Should EPA treat misinformation differentlythan FDA? CDC versus NIH? How might one practically taxonomize them and link effective interventionsto contextual cues? There’s so much to be done! Freilich has opened a new and tremendouslyinteresting door in how we think about information and the government; I look forward to seeing whatgrows on the other side.Cite as: Nicholson Price, Trust, Trustworthiness, and Misinformation Shared by the Government,JOTWELL (April 19, 2023) (reviewing Janet Freilich, Government Misinformation Platforms, __U. Pa. L.Rev. __(forthcoming 2023), draft available at SSRN (Feb. 27 2023)), https://cyber.jotwell.com/trust-trustworthiness-and-misinformation-shared-by-the-government/.                                                2 / 2

Trust, Trustworthiness, and Misinformation Shared by the Government

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Trust, Trustworthiness, and Misinformation Shared by the Government

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