Brandolini’s law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, states that “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it “.[a]The Oxford English Dictionary describes bullshit as meaning “Trivial, insincere, or untruthful talk or writing”.[1] While lying is an attempt to conceal the truth,[2] bullshit is to talk without reference to the truth.[3][b]“An order of magnitude” can broadly be interpreted mathematically as ten times greater. It was formulated by the Italian software developer Alberto Brandolini in 2013, in an attempt to explain what is happening in the contemporary world of social networks, the media, and the spread of misinformation.[3] It contrasts the considerable effort of debunking misinformation with the relative ease of creating it in the first place, which also entails the challenge of defying and confronting one’s community.[4]
Inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the law has its origins in a tweet that Brandolini made after watching a televised political debate between the former prime minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi and Marco Travaglio. During the exchange he saw Berlusconi “spew a firehose of misleading claims”, while Travaglio “struggled, to correct even a fraction of them”.[5]
But Brandolini was by no means the first to have this insight. In 1845 the French economist Frédéric Bastiat admitted that:[6]
Examples
The persistent claim that vaccines cause autism has been cited as an example of Brandolini’s law. In 1998 the British anti-vaccine activist Andrew Wakefield wrote a fraudulent research paper which claimed to find a relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. The article was retracted, and Wakefield’s UK medical licence was revoked.[7] Despite extensive investigation showing no such relationship, the false assertion has had a disastrous effect on public health, contributing to vaccine hesitancy. Decades of research, and attempts to educate the public, have failed to eradicate the misinformation.[8]
Jeff Yates, a disinformation journalist at Radio-Canada, described the experience of debunking a popular YouTube video spreading COVID-19 medical misinformation during the pandemic of 2020–2023, presented by a pineapple importer: “He makes all kinds of different claims. I had to check every single one of them. I had to call relevant experts and talk to them. I had to transcribe those interviews. I had to write a text that is legible and interesting to read. It’s madness. It took this guy 15 minutes to make his video and it took me three days to fact-check.”[9]
Notes
| a | The Oxford English Dictionary describes bullshit as meaning “Trivial, insincere, or untruthful talk or writing”.[1] While lying is an attempt to conceal the truth,[2] bullshit is to talk without reference to the truth.[3] |
|---|---|
| b | “An order of magnitude” can broadly be interpreted mathematically as ten times greater. |
