I can’t, for the life of me, shake the feeling that the person writing this is Captain Beatty.

Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine.

The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of the important things the article is talking about… but this is almost exactly the kind of justifications Captain Beatty uses in Farenheit 451 for the justification of burning of books. Boiled down to the basics, what Beatty preached was that all books disagreed with each other, and it made things confusing, and people didn’t know what to believe, and people were in constant argument and disagreement, so the best way to solve it all was to burn all the books so people couldn’t find differing ideas and disagree anymore.

This article makes no such prognosis, in fact, it’s not making a prognosis at all other than “this is happening and you should know” (making it good journalism), but I do worry about the way it’s framed and how that could lead people down the path Captain Beatty traveled.