Sander van der Linden’s webpage at Cambridge University says he is an esteemed academic with prior positions at Princeton and Yale, and has published studies on social influence misinformation and fake news that place him among the top 1% of all social researchers and the top 2% across all of science.
Pretty much every major media outlet—the New York Times, BBC, CNN, the Economist, NPR, the Washington Post and NBC Nightly News — has interviewed van der Linden about his research, while his book Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity received wide praise.
But a month back, he climbed down from his lofty academic perch and picked a fight on X with writer Nate Silver and… Professor van der Linden got crushed: exposed as a liar and a quack who spreads misinformation while editing his personal Wikipedia page for the last decade through various single purpose accounts (SPAs) or sock puppets, to burnish his credentials and promote himself and his research.
“We are still getting numerous SPAs on this topic,” one Wikipedia editor noted about Sander van der Linden’s biography. “Nothing has changed, except they’ve gotten better at not getting caught.”
Examined in detail, the van der Linden episode highlights growing evidence that ‘“’misinformation research’ is just politics dressed up in academic garb to suppress and censor dissent on controversial topics.
The kerfuffle kicked off a few weeks back when Sander van der Linden whipped up a brawl on X with Nate Silver, perhaps because Silver has 3.3 million followers and van der Linden has around 15,000 and was hoping to attract some attention to himself. Days after the spat began, van der Linden was exposed for having edited Wikipedia pages to promote himself and his research. But more on that later.
In the first round, van der Linden promoted an article from years back, calling the possibility of a lab accident a racist conspiracy theory. Virologists and disinformation ‘experts’ promoted this line for years, until too much evidence squirted out showing that it never made sense. Plus, why is it “racist” to say the pandemic started in a Chinese lab and not in a Chinese market that sells wild animals?
It’s a narrative that never made any sense and was obviously designed to shut down discussion by labeling people “racist”.
“Misinformation has become a completely incoherent concept,” Silver wrote. “A game of ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue’.”
Oh, but it goes on.
Van der Linden then argued there was a “consensus” that the pandemic started naturally, as opposed to a “conspiracy” that it began in a lab. Again, this highlights how much of disinformation ‘research’ is slapping labels on ideas for reasons that are never really explained. It’s rhetorical magic.
And van der Linden ignores bounties of evidence that virologists ran a propaganda campaign to shout down anyone asking questions about a lab accident by planting papers in the Lancet Emerging Microbes and Infections and Nature Medicine.
“The ‘broad’ definition of misinformation is incoherent,” Silver noted. “What it signifies now is an effort to suppress dissent and launder partisan opinions into a false consensus on matters of legitimate controversy. It’s a cynical enterprise, aimed at the gullible.”
Van der Linden then doubled down with the “this is all a racism” argument.
“Half the reason Team Misinformation people bug me,” Silver responded, “Is because it’s just so obvious what they’re doing, taking genuinely contentious discussions and stigmatising the positions that don’t match their politics with the thinnest imaginable reeds of expert authority.”
Oh, but it continued – for several days. (This guy needs attention, no?)
Van der Linden then put out a tweet to drag others into the fight, including Peter Hotez, who was caught funding gain-of-function studies in Wuhan, researcher Angela Rasmussen and Arizona’s Michael Worobey, whose research on the pandemic’s origin has been noted for “careless and unprofessional handling of statistical methodology”.
At this point, it became pretty clear that van der Linden was trolling Silver to bring attention to himself — and he got that attention.
Digging through van der Linden’s Wikipedia page, the X account @triplebankshot noted that Wiki editors had caught van der Linden editing his page for the last decade through various sock puppets to create a suite of promotional material.
This guy is a complete fraud and pathological liar. He’s been repeatedly banned from Wikipedia over the last 10-plus years for using an army of sock puppets to create articles about himself with self-promotional material.
In the talk section of Sander van der Linden’s Wikipedia page, editors discussed how various purportedly unrelated accounts kept adding entries to promote Sander van der Linden, his research and his book. Here’s some of their findings:
- In 2019, two weeks before this paper was published, Whatdoyouknowanyway created an article about the journal it was published in.
- In July 2020 Meerkat2020 created Bad_News_(video_game) – his only contribution. That contained screenshots which have since been deleted on commons that were originally uploaded by Tony_gladstone1 who was blocked as part of the SPI.
- In September 2020 Jibberjabber20 made various unsourced changes to the biography which wouldn’t have been known publicly.
- In late 2020/early 2021, Youshallnotpass001 made two major edits to the biography which created a substantial section on his research contributions. He also argued against merging Gateway belief model (which had been redirected to the biography in 2018).
- In February this year, AntiMusk added promotional information about his newly-published Foolproof book and also removed information which would not have been known to the casual independent observer (Director of Studies in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences…)
- In May this year, Booklover 2023 created Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity with his first edit after being auto-confirmed. It contains a glowing biography of van der Linden and he also uploaded a high-resolution (1500 x 2300) version of the book cover which is not present in the source that he linked to, nor am I able to find it through reverse image searches. He was explicitly asked whether he had a conflict of interest by Jimfbleak and stated “There is no conflict of interest”. (Note that he refers to Against Empathy in that same post, which AntiMusk also edited.)
The editors concluded that these accounts were being generated just to promote Sander van der Linden, meaning van der Linden was orchestrating these accounts to craft propaganda about himself.
Some final thoughts from Silver about the whole Sander van der Linden episode and the silly academic discipline of ‘misinformation research’.
First published in Paul D. Thacker’s Disinformation Chronicle.
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“Misinformation” ——-Information that goes against current orthodoxy that is the governments preferred world view. ——I used to think that people only had to fear having an opinion or speaking freely in nasty regimes like Russia and China etc where citizens were (and still are) whisked off to the gulag for daring to spread their “misinformation”. ——The only difference in the western world today is that we have to manage the censoring without the gulag. We still manage it though as “climate deniers” are forced to quit their university positions, those questioning the usefulness of masks will be leaving their health profession jobs to “spend more time with my family” and anyone daring to question multi cultural dogma is branded a “racist” and ends up sitting on back benches like the Braverman.
Misinformation is defined as: True but wrong. True but unhelpful to the narrative.
No – that’s malinformation. You’re peddling misinformation about the disinformation, for your information. Or vice versa.
LOL well done. So many prefixes to align with formation. A tad confusing.
The responses of this Sander fellow remind me of replies I got from the Google AI bot. Has a lot to say but there is no actual thinking going on. It’s all just programming spewing out text according to a predetermined agenda.
Mindless compliance and zero humility. Full of arrogance and confidence because he thinks he was taught The Truth. A product of the “education” system.
Looks like a lovely, humble chap.
The Cambridge page starts with
Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society
It could as well state that he’s the foremost expert on dilithium crystals in the world for all that really means.
Quackademic. Quackademia. He couldn’t get a real job so studied psychobabble for 12 years. Can’t fix a door, repair a clock, or probably wash his own clothes. But he is of course the world’s foremost expert in bullshit, bafflegab, lying and deceit. Many of these Charlatan-Quacks can claim the same.
One way to build immunity to misinformation is Maths. Logic dictates that during the mixed messaging about masks that falsehoods were told. Realizability, a.k.a. common sense, says that epidemics cannot grow exponentially to exceed the size of the population.
Yes. That’s rather the basis for the SIR models which the likes of Prof Neil Ferguson (ab)use. A basic SIR model starts from the assumptions that everyone is susceptible and that nobody will self-isolate. Both assumptions being utter bunkum.
Ferguson even co-authored a paper in which he explored the way people self-modified their behaviour during the 1918/19 “Spanish ‘flu”. In contrast he also started the ‘Results’ section of the infamous Report 9 with ‘in the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect…‘. So that report was bunkum too as it assumes no spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.
The standard SIR model doesn’t make the assumption that everyone is susceptible, that’s just a common initial condition. It does, however, assume that the population is well mixed which is never really the case.
My SIR model assumes well mixed but then is extended to a sparse social network to show the comparative effect of flattening the curve. i.e. kicking the can down the road then a subsequent wave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4kWbYlopN4
Fair point. The Susceptible figure is a starting parameter. If you assume everyone is susceptible then that’s what you tell the program to start with.
Ferguson’s ‘Results’ go on to say:
With an end stage of 81% becoming infected it is not unreasonable to assume (oops) that he started with 100% susceptible. Note also a declared assumption of R 0 (the number of people an infected person will go on to infect, on average) of 2.4.
Your video is brilliant – thank you.
Fool.
Proof.
Sounds like this person is ideal for Cambridge in many ways.
You put a prat in charge and it might work well for you following the agenda. We live in the time of revelation. Some people think that the Apocalypse of John is a current affairs manual with geostrategic trends. Obviously it was always far more than that. Apocalyptic literature contains a truth that does not belong to the temporal realm. Wouldn’t be very Apocalyptic if it didn’t. It is true that events described in Revelation might come to pass but these are physical manifestations of the passage of the anthropos through time. If you know how to read the Apocalypse of John then the truth is far more beautiful because it describes the movement of the human soul through evolution.This individual is nothing. Don’t let your mind be occupied by tawdry things. You are doing a disservice to yourself and humanity.
“Misinformation researcher” = liar with a hidden agenda.
And – sorry to bring the tone down – that is one of the most punchable faces I’ve seen in recent times.
For a full understanding of misinformation follow Li Pang on substack. He recently joined Dr Jay Battacharya in a discussion on this topic. The other person to follow is Michael Benz, a former US gov’t employee, who was recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson.
Sander Van der Linden, Is that a made up name? or is he again one of the posh boys who are incapable of being anything else but twats.
Short for Alexander, perhaps? For those too posh to simply use Alec/Alex. E.g like von Tulleken and Armstrong.