Disinformation

Disinformation refers to false or misleading information that is deliberately created, produced, or spread with the intent to deceive, manipulate, or cause harm. Distinct from misinformation (which may be false but unintentionally spread) and from unintentional errors or satire, disinformation is characterized by deliberate falsity and harmful intent.

The term encompasses a wide range of false narratives: fabricated news articles, conspiracy theories, deepfakes, misleading statistics, selective framing, and out-of-context claims—all deliberately designed to mislead audiences.

Key distinctions

Intent: Disinformation requires deliberate falsity or intent to deceive; misinformation may be spread without such intent.

Actors: Disinformation is typically produced by organized groups, state actors, commercial entities, or ideologically motivated communities with resources and strategic goals.

Mechanisms: Disinformation campaigns often employ coordinated tactics—amplification networks, targeted messaging, influencer partnerships, and exploitation of platform affordances.

Harm: Disinformation is produced explicitly to cause damage: undermining trust in institutions, polarizing communities, influencing elections, or promoting violence.

Types of disinformation

• Fabricated content: Completely false news articles, fake documents, deepfakes
• Manipulated content: Real content taken out of context, edited, or misquoted
• Misleading content: True facts framed to support false conclusions
• Conspiracy theories: False explanations of events attributing them to powerful hidden actors
• Harassment campaigns: Coordinated false claims targeting individuals

Related concepts

• Fake news — false news claims (subset of disinformation)
• Media manipulation — coordinated campaigns to shape discourse
• Misinformation spread and diffusion — how false information propagates
• Social media and misinformation — platform role in spreading disinformation
• Online subcultures — communities producing and spreading disinformation

Key papers in this wiki

• The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation — comprehensive threat analysis of AI-enabled disinformation tactics including deepfakes, automated campaigns, denial-of-information attacks
• Disinformation 2.0 in the Age of AI: A Cybersecurity Perspective — perspective piece framing disinformation as a cybersecurity threat in the age of AI; proposes four attack scenarios enabled by generative AI and defense-in-depth countermeasures across social network, ISP, device, and user layers
• Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations — threat assessment of how generative language models enable automated propaganda and influence operations; proposes mitigation framework across model design, access, content dissemination, and belief formation
• Vaccari & Chadwick (2020) — Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News — empirical study of how political deepfakes affect deception and trust; shows deepfakes increase uncertainty about content, which mediates reduced trust in news on social media; educational interventions can mitigate effects
• Lukito (2019) — Coordinating a Multi-Platform Disinformation Campaign: Internet Research Agency Activity on Three U.S. Social Media Platforms, 2015 to 2017 — empirical analysis of IRA coordinated strategy across Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; demonstrates Reddit as "trial balloon" space before Twitter amplification; shows platform-aware, temporally-coordinated disinformation tactics
• Golovchenko et al. (2020) — Cross-Platform State Propaganda: Russian Trolls on Twitter and YouTube during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election — quantitative analysis of IRA disinformation strategy during 2016 election; examines cross-platform link-sharing to infer ideology of propaganda
• Linvill & Warren (2020) — Troll Factories: Manufacturing Specialized Disinformation on Twitter — analysis of Russia's Internet Research Agency specialization in disinformation production; identifies five distinct types of coordinated disinformation accounts targeting U.S. political discourse
• Wardle & Derakhshan (2017) — Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making — foundational framework distinguishing misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation
• Marwick & Lewis (2017) — Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online — qualitative analysis of disinformation actors and tactics across internet subcultures
• Helmus et al. (2018) — How to Counter Russian Social Media Influence in Eastern Europe — analysis of Russian state-sponsored disinformation campaigns through coordinated social media operations; documents troll networks, bot accounts, and counter-strategies
• Jack (2024) — Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information — practitioner's guide to terminology; clarifies distinctions between disinformation, propaganda, information operations, and related concepts; examines challenges in establishing intent and comparing across cultural contexts
• Wilson & Wiysonge (2020) — Social media and vaccine hesitancy — empirical evidence that foreign disinformation campaigns reduce vaccination coverage; Russian state actors amplify anti-vaccination content targeting Western populations

Open challenges

• How do we measure the prevalence and impact of disinformation across different platforms and populations?
• What are the most effective interventions for countering disinformation campaigns?
• How do state actors and commercial entities differ in their disinformation strategies?
• What role do algorithms and platform design play in amplifying disinformation?