There’s a moment in a lot of these fights when someone on the project side reaches for the word.
What we’re dealing with here is a misinformation problem.
Sometimes it’s a developer. Increasingly it’s an elected official who has decided the project is fine and is frustrated that the room won’t accept the studies. And the frustration is often legitimate — there are genuinely false claims circulating, some of them recycled from other fights, some of them invented outright.
But the moment that word gets deployed, three things happen, and none of them are what the speaker wanted.
What the word actually communicates
First, you’ve told a room full of your own residents that you think they’re gullible. Not that a specific claim is wrong — that they, collectively, have been fooled. People hear that distinction perfectly.
Second, you’ve changed the subject from the project to their competence. Whatever they were worried about is now secondary to defending their own judgment. You have handed them a reason to dig in that has nothing to do with the merits.
Third, you’ve signaled that the appropriate response to concern is correction rather than engagement — which means anyone with a real, well-founded concern now expects to be corrected too, and stops raising things.
Tisha Schuller wrote a short piece called “Stop Calling It Data Center Misinformation.” It’s the best corrective I know to the industry’s worst instinct, and it’s worth reading in full. Her point isn’t that false claims don’t exist. It’s that “misinformation” is a diagnosis about the audience, and it’s almost never the correct one.
Why the impulse is understandable and still wrong
The impulse comes from a model of persuasion that feels obviously true: people disagree because they lack information; provide it and they’ll converge.
Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition research found that on identity-loaded risks, polarization is often greatest among the most scientifically literate participants. Reasoning capacity gets deployed in service of identity, not against it. The most numerate person in the room will find the most sophisticated way to dismantle your study.
So the 500-page noise report doesn’t land as clarification. It lands as an assertion of authority in a dispute that was never really about acoustics — and every additional document reinforces the frame that this is being done to the community by people with more resources.
I call this a values dispute wearing a technical costume. The technical questions are real and worth answering. But if the underlying disagreement is about what kind of place this is going to be, no amount of technical work resolves it, and pretending otherwise burns six months.
What to do with a claim that’s actually false
Because some of them are, and letting a false claim stand unchallenged isn’t neutrality either — it’s a different failure.
The debunking research is clearer than you’d expect, and the structure matters more than the content:
Lead with the fact, not the myth. State the true thing first, in plain language. Don’t open by repeating the false claim as a headline — repetition builds familiarity, and familiarity gets mistaken for truth.
Warn before you repeat. If you must state the myth to address it, flag it first: “you may have heard X — that’s not accurate.”
Explain the mechanism. Don’t just deny; explain why the false version is wrong and how the error arose. A correction with no replacement explanation leaves a hole, and the original claim fills it back in.
Close on the fact again. Fact, warning, mechanism, fact.
And one piece of good news for anyone who’s been avoiding corrections entirely: the “backfire effect” — the idea that correcting a false belief strengthens it — has largely failed to replicate. One study covering around ten thousand subjects found corrections working across the board. Correcting the record generally works. It’s the framing that determines whether it lands.
The two rules I hold myself to
Corrections run in both directions, in the same session. If I correct an opponent’s claim about property values but never correct the applicant’s job numbers, I am an advocate with better manners, and every person in that room will have noticed by the second meeting. The correction log I keep is public, dated, and symmetric — the developer’s errors and the opposition’s errors on the same page, in the same format.
That symmetry is what makes any individual correction survivable. A neutral who has publicly corrected the applicant three times has standing to correct the opposition on the fourth. A neutral who hasn’t, doesn’t.
Where the evidence is thin, say it’s thin. This is the harder discipline, because both sides want a verdict.
Fence-line property values are the clearest example. Every available study measures at the county or 1.5-mile scale. The concern residents actually voice is about the fifty to three hundred homes on the property line — within a few hundred feet, in the noise contour, facing a windowless wall. No published study isolates that population with a credible control group, and a county average cannot detect an effect concentrated on a fraction of a percent of the housing stock.
So the honest formulation has three parts, in this order, every time:
- “Data centers tank property values” is not supported by current research — which is not the same as refuted, and I won’t claim it is.
- “Studies prove data centers raise property values” overstates what county-level correlational work can establish, particularly since these facilities locate where infrastructure already exists, which is also what raises home values.
- “My house, four hundred feet from the fence line, will be harder to sell” is neither confirmed nor refuted. It’s an open empirical question that nobody has properly studied.
Being the person who says all three, in that order, is worth more than being right about any one of them.
The tenet underneath this
The CommonWatts version is four words: don’t educate — facilitate.
Gather information. Seek answers to the unknowns. Help connect the dots so good decisions can be made. That’s a different posture from correction, and it produces a different room.
The distinction isn’t that facts don’t matter. It’s about who scopes the question, who carries the answer, and whether the person delivering it has ever visibly corrected their own side.
If the answer to that last one is no, it won’t matter how good your study is. And reaching for “misinformation” is just the moment everyone finds out.