Donald Trump derided any critical news coverage as „fake news“ and his unwillingness to concede the 2020 presidential election eventually led to the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
August 12, 2022
Donald Trump derided any critical news coverage as „fake news“ and his unwillingness to concede the 2020 presidential election eventually led to the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
For years, radio host Alex Jones denounced the parents of children slaughtered in the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newton, Connecticut as „crisis actors.“ On August 5, 2022, he was ordered by a jury to pay more than US$49 million in damages to two families for defamation.
These are in no way isolated efforts to flood the world’s media with dishonest information or malicious content. Governments, organizations and individuals are spreading disinformation for profit or to gain a strategic advantage.
But why is there so much disinformation? And what can we do to protect ourselves?
Three far-reaching reasons
Three schools of thought have emerged to address this issue. The first suggests disinformation is so pervasive because distrust of traditional sources of authority, including the news media, keeps increasing. When people think the mainstream media is not holding industries and governments to account, they may be more likely to accept information that challenges conventional beliefs.
Second, social media platforms‘ focus on engagement often leads them to promote shocking claims that generate outrage, regardless of whether these claims are true. Indeed studies show false information on social media spreads further, faster and deeper than true information, because it is more novel and surprising.
Last, the role of hostile and deliberate disinformation tactics cannot be overlooked. Facebook estimates that during the 2016 U.S. election, malicious content from the Russian Internet Research Agency aimed at creating division within the American voting public reached 126 million people in the U.S. and worldwide.
The many shades of disinformation
This crisis of information is usually framed in terms of the diffusion of false information either intentionally (disinformation) or unwittingly (misinformation). However this approach misses significant forms of propaganda, including techniques honed during the Cold War.
