Disinformation

Lying has long been the main topic in the study of deception. For instance, many philosophers discuss why it is wrong to lie, and psychologists study how to detect lying. However, in the information age, disinformation is a much more encompassing threat to individuals' ability to acquire true beliefs and to avoid false beliefs about the world. Examples include government propaganda, deceptive advertising (political and otherwise), Internet frauds, doctored photographs, forged documents, deliberately falsified maps, and manipulated Wikipedia entries.

The term misinformation simply refers to information that is false. False information can mislead people (i.e., cause people to hold false beliefs) whether it results from an honest mistake, negligence, unconscious bias, or just overly subtle sarcasm. The term disinformation (coined during the Cold War) picks out a particularly dangerous subcategory of misinformation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines disinformation as “the dissemination of deliberately false information, especially when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media, with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it; false information so supplied.” More generally, disinformation can be defined as information that has the function of misleading someone. In other words, it is information that is likely to cause people to hold false beliefs and has the function of doing so. In any event, disinformation poses a more serious threat than other types of misinformation because it comes from someone who is actively engaged in an attempt to mislead.

Sources of Disinformation

As the OED suggests, disinformation is commonly associated with government or military activity. George Carlin quipped, “the government doesn't lie, it engages in disinformation.” A standard example is a disinformation campaign known as [Page 300]Operation Bodyguard during World War II, in which the Allies sent out fake radio transmissions and created fraudulent military reports to conceal the intended location of the D-Day invasion from the Germans.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Doug A. Baker listens to radio traffic during an operation conducted by Afghanistan National Army and U.S. forces to thwart a Taliban disinformation campaign in the Shigal Valley in eastern Afghanistan's Kunar province, March 18, 2011. Disinformation varies in how it reaches its target. It can be as technically sophisticated as a carefully planned military strategy, to something as simple as telling a lie. In addition, disinformation is often passed along and indirectly received.

However, many nongovernmental organizations, such as political campaigns and advertisers, also deliberately distribute false information. In fact, individuals are often the source of disinformation. For instance, reporters such as Jayson Blair of the New York Times and Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, have made up news stories that have misled their readers. There are also several high-profile cases of purported memoirs that turned out to be fiction, such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces.