Abstract
There remains no consensus amongst social scientists as to how to quantify and understand forms of information deprivation such as misinformation. Measures of information deprivation typically employ a deficient conception of truth that should be replaced with measurement methods grounded in certain idealized norms of agreement about what kind of information ecosystem a society’s participants wish to live in. A mature science of information deprivation should include considerable democratic involvement that is sensitive to the value-ladenness of information quality and that doing so may enhance the predictive and explanatory power of models of information deprivation.
