Can we liberate ourselves from disinformation?
It's more important than ever before to at least try.
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CREON What is it, elder Teiresias? What news do you bring?
TEIRESIAS I will explain. Now, obey the prophet.
CREON I would not stray from your wisdom at a time like the present…
[a few moments later, after Teiresias tells Creon to change course and bury the body of his enemy]
CREON I won’t trade insults with a prophet.
TEIRESIAS And yet you do, in saying that I prophesy falsely.
CREON All prophets love money.
When I taught high school English and research courses, we often started by discussing the differences between misinformation and disinformation1.
The working definition of disinformation my students and I used often included an intentional element. But just as importantly, it included the idea that disinformation campaigns exist not only to intentionally spread wrong or misleading facts, but to create a sense of confusion around what is real and what is not.
A former KGB agent, speaking to New York Times reporters a few years ago, described disinformation as “deliberately distorted information that is secretly leaked into the communication process in order to deceive and manipulate.”
But I would argue an even more effective version of disinformation, used by authoritarian rulers throughout the modern era, isn’t secret all. It involves some variation of “Don’t believe you’re lying eyes” (or “It it didn’t rain at my inauguration, or “My opponent didn’t win the election”). I have seen it argued, convincingly, that when leaders do this, the goal is less about lying and more about demonstrating a kind of rhetorical power: Look how brazenly I can contradict objective reality and have people get away with it.
Lying and confusing the public become signals of a deeper kind of power.
Overt, consequential, and brazen lying can also be used to twist perceptions of reality on a mass scale. Merriam-Webster defines this kind of “Big Lie” as “a deliberate gross distortion of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic”.)
Historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and On Freedom, told CNN in 2022,
“the idea that Mr. Biden didn’t win the election is a big lie. It’s a big lie because you have to disbelieve all kinds of evidence to believe in it. It’s a big lie because you have to believe in a huge conspiracy in order to believe it. And it’s a big lie because, if you believe it, it demands you take radical action. So this is one way we have really moved forwards towards authoritarianism and away from democracy. It’s coming to a peak right now.”
This is not to be confused with the kind of misinformation that comes from not caring enough about a topic, or not being willing or able to do basic due diligence.
For example, when Rep. Tim McGinnis (Horry County) recently claimed during a South Carolina House Education and Public Works Meeting that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” had only existed for “about five years”.
This kind of claim is hard to take seriously on any level, considering affirmative action programs have existed at least since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It could certainly be an example of McGinnis trying to deliberately mislead the public.
But given that much of the meeting, which centered on the amended version of South Carolina’s latest anti- diversity, equity, and inclusion bill, consisted of McGinnis saying “I’ll get back to you” concerning questions about whether any of the supposed evils the bill purported to address had actually happened or were actually happening, it seems plausible that McGinnis really just doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and didn’t bother to do his research before the meeting.
Teaching “Credibility”
Even prior to the post-truth era, teaching research was hard. In my experience, by the end of high school, students had experienced very little exposure, in or outside of the school setting, to either the idea that we are being subjected to intentional disinformation, or to strategies for recognizing and evading campaigns to confuse our sense of reality.
What often takes the place of this kind of authentic exploration of credibility and bias are general, unhelpful, and often inaccurate “rules” for finding “unbiased” information. A common example: telling students that websites ending with .org or .gov are “credible” while those ending with .com are “biased”. This approach ignores several important features of media:
Everyone and everything is “biased” in some way. Peer-reviewed research often requires authors to state their ideological lenses upfront, and to disclose sources of funding or other conflicts of interest that could contribute directly to this bias. These acknowledgements can make research more credible.
The white supremacist organization Stormfront has held the ___domain name “martinlutherking . org” for many years. Under pressure from the current presidential administration, many .gov sites are currently promoting misleading, incomplete, or factually incorrect information (more on this below). On the other hand, while The New York Times, like all sources, has had its issues with bias, it would be absurd to claim that it’s less credible than Stormfront, or an ideologically compromised government page. The idea that its url makes an online resource more “credible” is obviously a problematic generalization. (As, to be fair, is the idea that the New York Times, or any other news agency, is “unbiased”.)
Bias is an inherent feature of the human mind, and it isn’t always a negative thing. Presenting the analysis of credibility and bias through a false binary of “good” and “bad” sources doesn’t equip students to deal with the real world.
“Digital Natives”
Another mistake I think we make with young people is believing they are automatically “tech-savvy,” that they are “digital natives” who, because they more or less constantly use social media and other internet technologies, must necessarily understand how they work.
This is a little like assuming that someone who flies regularly can automatically operate a plane.
In my experience, including over a decade at a “one-to-one” school where all students were given laptops and internet access throughout the day, this is a misguided view. Students were “good” at relying on the internet, “good” at playing games, “good” at getting around district internet restrictions by using VPNs, and generally very “bad” (because no one has taught them) at understanding how anything worked beneath the user-friendly interfaces of social media networks and search engines like Google.
When I asked students about basic media literacy concepts, like Who funds the news in America? they often responded that the government must fund it. When tasked with finding resources, they struggled to go beyond choosing the first hit from a Google search.
In other words, they were voracious consumers of online content, but hadn’t been given much in the way of tools or awareness about where that content originated, why someone created it, or how it was sorted. (Who does pay for mainstream news? Who pays for “new media,” like podcasts or TikTok influencer campaigns? Who or what decides which of billions of search responses comes first in a Google search? Who or what decides what comes up first on an Instagram feed or a TikTok “for you” page?)
Not incidentally, when the South Carolina House recently attempted to pass media literacy requirements as part of a bill regulating social media, Jordan Pace, leader of the House Freedom Caucus, objected by delving into an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory in which school librarians were being brainwashed by the American Library Association. When questioned about this by colleagues, he said he had “done my own research”; this “research” had not apparently yielded any credible or specific examples.
It isn’t necessarily because educators don’t see the value in media literacy that students aren’t learning it.
And it isn’t just students, of course.
Adults, for their part, seem overwhelmed by the amount of information available online. I’ve seen participants in countless online and in-person debates, on important educational issues like Project 2025 or the gutting of the federal Department of Education, struggle to get past the level of easy talking points.
Factual information is available on these issues, but many can’t or won’t access it. For example, while there are many valid arguments about the pros and cons of a federal Department of Education, many people don’t seem to know what its direct impacts on the states are, with a frequent claim, driven by the claims of politicians, being that the Department of Education “doesn’t do anything” and that “returning education to the states” will automatically result in a better education for students and cost savings for taxpayers.
In 2020 (the most recently-available data), South Carolina received $276,489,982 in Title I funding from the federal government. (Source: the federal Department of Education.) Federal funding accounts for about 14% of South Carolina’s education budget, according to the most current data from the state dashboard. (By at least one measure, from WalletHub, South Carolina is the state most dependent on federal funds, generally, as defined by the ratio of federal dollars it receives to collected. Of course, in order to assess the validity of that claim, we’d have to review WalletHub’s sources and calculations.)
The analysis of these facts can go in many directions. We could even, if we accessed other credible information, perhaps challenge these facts. We could weigh the biases and other factors that go into the overall credibility of each source.
Instead, we often retreat into echo chambers and away from further engagement with whatever pieces of reality we can know and perceive for ourselves. We rely on abstractions of abstractions, a kind of hall of mirrors the philosopher Jean Baudrillard called simulacra— not a simulation of reality, but a false reality created to create the impression of a more real reality (what Baudrillard called hyperreality2) that is, itself, also not real.
The solution?
It seems like the only way to mitigate disinformation, beyond recognizing it for what it is, where possible, is finding and using real information— the things we experience with our own senses (not mediated by a screen), as well as primary and secondary sources information we can reasonably believe are accurate.
At best, that’s not always a user-friendly process. To get the data I shared above about SC’s reliance on federal funds, I had to navigate a federal website, download a spreadsheet, copy the spreadsheet, and then edit it to add a simple formula to sum the expenditures. And to check my math, you would have to follow my links and do the same.
At worst, it can be all-but-impossible to determine the truth on specific issues without prior knowledge. In the early days of the current presidential administration, federal agencies responded to executive orders and actions by censoring content and posting outright disinformation on government websites.
It is, perhaps more importantly, deeply uncomfortable at times to be skeptical of powerful narratives and preconceived notions. There is a hugely emotional component to research that is generally left out of academia. But what good is it to give students (or anyone else) tools for funding information without also providing tools for dealing with the stress, fear, and anxiety that comes from facing hard truths?
Some research has even suggested that people suffering from depression may be able to more accurately engage with “reality” (so-called “depressive realism”).
Access to information is also tied to socioeconomic class. Peer reviewed studies and academic resources are often locked behind paywall, while access to paid advertisements, propaganda, and search engine results are mostly, by design, free.
For example, there are many studies and meta-analyses of the “depressive realism” concept, but most of these are academic articles behind paywalls, so the general public is unlikely to read them.
Whether you choose, then, to buy into the concept that clinically depressed people are clearer seers (which I personally can’t help but find compelling, but which I must also acknowledge I have almost no objective evidence to support) might have less to do with the facts discovered through disciplined research and more to do with your own history and experiences.
Of course, while technology has probably intensified these issues exponentially over the last few decades, these are literally ancient problems. In Sophocles’ Antigone (441 BC), the central and tragic mistake of the ruler Creon is that he fails to listen to the prophet Tiresias, a man Creon himself acknowledges he has never know to be wrong.
Why? Because Tiresias turns his prophetic vision on Creon in a way that is not flattering to the king’s ego or self-conception.
Yet if the tools long used by authoritarians and fascists require our ignorance, our most harmful emotional impulses, and our confusion, I believe we have to find out how to help each other acknowledge and reckon with our own egos, and with the haze of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation around us, to find and use verifiable, or at least trustworthy, information.
Given our current technological situation— particularly the unregulated advance of AI— I’m not necessarily hopeful that we can fully guard ourselves against all of it, but we can at least try, and, more importantly, we can model healthy skepticism and sound research techniques for young people, who have both access to more information than any generation in human history, and access to more disinformation than ever before.
More to read:
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser), 1994 edition.