Disinformation

Disinformation is false or misleading information deliberately spread to deceive people, or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through coordinated campaigns that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies." Misinformation can be used to create disinformation when known misinformation is purposefully and intentionally disseminated. "Fake news" has sometimes been categorized as a type of disinformation, but scholars have advised not using these two terms interchangeably or using "fake news" altogether in academic writing since politicians have weaponized it to describe any unfavorable news coverage or information.

Etymology

thumb|The Etymology of Disinformation by H. Newman as published in The Journal of Information Warfare in 2021. Elements of the word disinformation have their origins in [[Proto-Indo-European language|Proto-Indo-European language family. The Latin 'dis' and 'in' and can both be considered to have Proto-Indo-European roots, 'forma' is considerably more obscure. The green box in the figure highlights the origin 'forma' is uncertain, however, it may have its roots in the Aristotelian concept of μορφή (morphe) where something becomes a 'thing' when it has 'form' or substance.]]

The English word disinformation comes from the application of the Latin prefix dis- to information making the meaning "reversal or removal of information". The rarely used word had appeared with this usage in print at least as far back as 1887. Some consider it a loan translation of the Russian , transliterated as dezinformatsiya,

Disinformation first made an appearance in dictionaries in 1985, specifically, Webster's New College Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary. In 1986, the term disinformation was not defined in Webster's New World Thesaurus or New Encyclopædia Britannica.

By 1990, use of the term disinformation had fully established itself in the English language within the lexicon of politics. By 2001, the term disinformation had come to be known as simply a more civil phrase for saying someone was lying. Stanley B. Cunningham wrote in his 2002 book The Idea of Propaganda that disinformation had become pervasively used as a synonym for propaganda.

Operationalization

The Shorenstein Center at Harvard University defines disinformation research as an academic field that studies "the spread and impacts of misinformation, disinformation, and media manipulation", including "how it spreads through online and offline channels, and why people are susceptible to believing bad information, and successful strategies for mitigating its impact". According to a 2023 research article published in New Media & Society, (2) misinformation represents the unintentional spread of false information; and (3) malinformation is factual information disseminated with the intention to cause harm, these terms are abbreviated 'DMMI'.

In 2019, Camille François devised the "ABC" framework of understanding different modalities of online disinformation:

Manipulative Actors, who "engage knowingly and with clear intent in viral deception campaigns" that are "covert, designed to obfuscate the identity and intent of the actor orchestrating them." Examples include personas such as Guccifer 2.0, Internet trolls, state media, and military operatives.
Deceptive Behavior, which "encompasses the variety of techniques viral deception actors may use to enhance and exaggerate the reach, virality and impact of their campaigns." Examples include troll farms, Internet bots, astroturfing, and "paid engagement".
Harmful Content, which includes health misinformation, manipulated media such as deepfakes, online harassment, violent extremism, hate speech or terrorism.

In 2020, the Brookings Institution proposed amending this framework to include Distribution, defined by the "technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space". Similarly, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proposed adding Degree ("distribution of the content ... and the audiences it reaches") and Effect ("how much of a threat a given case poses").

Comparisons with propaganda

Whether and to what degree disinformation and propaganda overlap is subject to debate. Some (like U.S. Department of State) define propaganda as the use of non-rational arguments to either advance or undermine a political ideal, and use disinformation as an alternative name for undermining propaganda, while others consider them to be separate concepts altogether. One popular distinction holds that disinformation also describes politically motivated messaging designed explicitly to engender public cynicism, uncertainty, apathy, distrust, and paranoia, all of which disincentivize citizen engagement and mobilization for social or political change. Studies on disinformation are often concerned with the content of activity whereas the broader concept of FIMI is more concerned with the "behaviour of an actor" that is described through the military doctrine concept of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Front groups are a form of disinformation, as they mislead the public about their true objectives and who their controllers are. Most recently, disinformation has been deliberately spread through social media in the form of "fake news", disinformation masked as legitimate news articles and meant to mislead readers or viewers. Disinformation may include distribution of forged documents, manuscripts, and photographs, or spreading dangerous rumours and fabricated intelligence. Use of these tactics can lead to blowback, however, causing such unintended consequences such as defamation lawsuits or damage to the dis-informer's reputation. The implications of this were seen after the 2024 Southport stabbings, where the spread of disinformation regarding the killer's background was fuelled by reporting restrictions, meaning that there were no facts to counter the disinformation. This then led to the 2024 United Kingdom riots. It often spreads rapidly online — frequently outpacing accurate information — and contributes to political polarisation; empirical research also links disinformation to democratic erosion and to regime resilience in authoritarian contexts.

Soviet disinformation

Russian disinformation

Chinese disinformation

American disinformation

thumb|How Disinformation Can Be Spread, explanation by [[United States Department of Defense|U.S. Defense Department (2001)]]

The United States Intelligence Community appropriated use of the term disinformation in the 1950s from the Russian dezinformatsiya, and began to use similar strategies, starting during Cold War, and in conflict with other nations. White House representative Larry Speakes said reports of a planned attack on Libya as first broken by The Wall Street Journal on August 25, 1986, were "authoritative", and other newspapers including The Washington Post then wrote articles saying this was factual. Reuters said the ChinaAngVirus disinformation campaign was designed to "counter what it perceived as China's growing influence in the Philippines" and was prompted by the "[fear] that China's COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing". The campaign primarily targeted people in the Philippines and used a social media hashtag for "China is the virus" in Tagalog. On April 18, 2025, citing an Executive Order signed by Trump, the US National Science Foundation released a statement cancelling funding for disinformation research, saying that it does not fit with the NSF priorities, "including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation."

Disinformation in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum

The 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum saw figures from the Leave campaign spread disinformation on social media. Many of these arguments played on voters' emotions and attachments, such as the claim that the £350 million that the UK sent to the EU each week could be allocated to the NHS instead, which made them highly effective. Ofcom requires news broadcasters to remain neutral, yet this adherence to neutrality created false balance in the Brexit debate, causing broadcasters to inadvertedly promote disinformation.

Response

Responses from cultural leaders

Pope Francis condemned disinformation in a 2016 interview, after being made the subject of a fake news website during the 2016 U.S. election cycle which falsely claimed that he supported Donald Trump. He stated that the worst thing the news media could do was spread disinformation and said the act was a sin, comparing those who spread disinformation to individuals who engage in coprophilia.

Ethics in warfare

In a contribution to the 2014 book Military Ethics and Emerging Technologies, writers David Danks and Joseph H. Danks discuss the ethical implications in using disinformation as a tactic during information warfare. They note there has been a significant degree of philosophical debate over the issue as related to the ethics of war and use of the technique. The call to formally classify disinformation as a cybersecurity threat is made by advocates due to its increase in social networking sites. Despite the proliferation of social media websites, Facebook and Twitter showed the most activity in terms of active disinformation campaigns. Techniques reported on included the use of bots to amplify hate speech, the illegal harvesting of data, and paid trolls to harass and threaten journalists.

Whereas disinformation research focuses primarily on how actors orchestrate deceptions on social media, primarily via fake news, new research investigates how people take what started as deceptions and circulate them as their personal views. As a result, research shows that disinformation can be conceptualized as a program that encourages engagement in oppositional fantasies (i.e., culture wars), through which disinformation circulates as rhetorical ammunition for never-ending arguments. Current research suggests right-wing online political activists in the United States may be more likely to use disinformation as a strategy and tactic. The 2016 European Union referendum in the UK also saw British politicians supporting the Leave campaign spread disinformation on Twitter. Governments have responded with a wide range of policies to address concerns about the potential threats that disinformation poses to democracy, however, there is little agreement in elite policy discourse or academic literature as to what it means for disinformation to threaten democracy, and how different policies might help to counter its negative implications.

Consequences of exposure to disinformation online

There is a broad consensus amongst scholars that there is a high degree of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda online; however, it is unclear to what extent such disinformation has on political attitudes in the public and, therefore, political outcomes. This conventional wisdom has come mostly from investigative journalists, with a particular rise during the 2016 U.S. election: some of the earliest work came from Craig Silverman at Buzzfeed News. Cass Sunstein supported this in #Republic, arguing that the internet would become rife with echo chambers and informational cascades of misinformation leading to a highly polarized and ill-informed society. Later studies have since proven the existence of echo chambers on social media.

Research after the 2016 US presidential election found: (1) for 14% of Americans social media was their "most important" source of election news; 2) known false news stories "favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times"; 3) the average American adult saw fake news stories, "with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them"; and 4) people are more likely to "believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks." Correspondingly, whilst there is wide agreement that the digital spread and uptake of disinformation during the 2016 election was massive and very likely facilitated by foreign agents, there is an ongoing debate on whether all this had any actual effect on the election. For example, a double blind randomized-control experiment by researchers from the London School of Economics (LSE), found that exposure to online fake news about either Trump or Clinton had no significant effect on intentions to vote for those candidates. Researchers who examined the influence of Russian disinformation on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential campaign found that exposure to disinformation was (1) concentrated among a tiny group of users, (2) primarily among Republicans, and (3) eclipsed by exposure to legitimate political news media and politicians. Finally, they find "no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior." As such, despite its mass dissemination during the 2016 Presidential Elections, online fake news or disinformation probably did not cost Hillary Clinton the votes needed to secure the presidency.

Research on this topic remains inconclusive, for example, misinformation appears not to significantly change political knowledge of those exposed to it. There seems to be a higher level of diversity of news sources that users are exposed to on Facebook and Twitter than conventional wisdom would dictate, as well as a higher frequency of cross-spectrum discussion. Other evidence has found that disinformation campaigns rarely succeed in altering the foreign policies of the targeted states.

Research is also challenging because disinformation is meant to be difficult to detect and some social media companies have discouraged outside research efforts. For example, researchers found disinformation made "existing detection algorithms from traditional news media ineffective or not applicable...[because disinformation] is intentionally written to mislead readers...[and] users' social engagements with fake news produce data that is big, incomplete, unstructured, and noisy."

Alternative perspectives and critiques

Researchers have criticized the framing of disinformation as being limited to technology platforms, removed from its wider political context and inaccurately implying that the media landscape was otherwise well-functioning. "The field possesses a simplistic understanding of the effects of media technologies; overemphasizes platforms and underemphasizes politics; focuses too much on the United States and Anglocentric analysis; has a shallow understanding of political culture and culture in general; lacks analysis of race, class, gender, and sexuality as well as status, inequality, social structure, and power; has a thin understanding of journalistic processes; and, has progressed more through the exigencies of grant funding than the development of theory and empirical findings."

Alternative perspectives have been proposed:

Moving beyond fact-checking and media literacy to study a pervasive phenomenon as something that involves more than news consumption.
Moving beyond technical solutions including AI-enhanced fact checking to understand the systemic basis of disinformation.
Develop a theory that goes beyond Americentrism to develop a global perspective, understand cultural imperialism and Third World dependency on Western news, and understand disinformation in the Global South.
Develop market-oriented disinformation research that examines the financial incentives and business models that nudge content creators and digital platforms to circulate disinformation online.

Strategies for spreading disinformation

Disinformation attack

The research literature on how disinformation spreads is growing.

Exploiting online advertising technologies

Disinformation is amplified online due to malpractice concerning online advertising, especially the machine-to-machine interactions of real-time bidding systems. Online advertising technologies have been used to amplify disinformation due to the financial incentives and monetization of user-generated content and fake news. The lax oversight over the online advertising market can be used to amplify disinformation, including the use of dark money used for political advertising.

Notes

References

External links

Disinformation – a learning resource from the British Library including an interactive movie and activities.
MediaWell – an initiative of the nonprofit Social Science Research Council seeking to track and curate disinformation, misinformation, and fake news research.
How Civil Society can Counter Disinformation Commons Social Change Library