The True Costs of Misinformation: Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

Key Contributions

Definitions and Scope

Donovan emphasizes the importance of precision in terminology:

• Media manipulation: Changing by artful or unfair means to serve one's purpose. Includes activism (e.g., the Yes Men) as well as malicious campaigns.
• Disinformation: Creation and distribution of intentionally false information for political ends. Requires evidence of origin and intent — a high bar.
• Misinformation: False information spread without necessarily knowing its origin or intent. Includes ordinary communication errors.

The distinction matters: misinformation happens in all communication, but what the field studies is misinformation at scale — beyond rumor, with socio-technical components enabling rapid spread beyond initial echo chambers.

Five-Stage Campaign Lifecycle Framework

Donovan's team at the Shorenstein Center analyzes disinformation campaigns along five contact points:

1. Planning: Where is the campaign designed? (Usually hardest to find)
2. Seeding: Who distributes it across platforms and the web?
3. Amplification: When mainstream figures or celebrity voices take it up. (This is the critical stage — scale explodes here)
4. Mitigation: How fact-checkers, institutions, platforms, and other actors respond
5. Adaptation: How manipulators adjust tactics to the new information environment

If all five stages are visible, it's classified as disinformation. Missing stage one suggests media manipulation or misinformation without clear intent.

Case Studies: Who Bears the True Costs

Donovan presents the costs as distributed across multiple institutions:

Journalists:

• A new "disinformation beat" emerged post-2016, consuming resources with fact-checking and moderation work.
• The first impeachment whistleblower case: competing media ecosystems fought over whether to name the whistleblower; right-wing outlets used keyword squatting, fake images (confusing Alexander Soros with the whistleblower), and swarming tactics. Journalists had to spend significant effort unpacking coordinated false claims.
• Journalists are increasingly "glorified content moderators" rather than doing investigative reporting.

Public Health Professionals:

• Record numbers of public health officials quit during the pandemic due to harassment.
• "Cloaked science" tactic: Steve Bannon funded Hong Kong postdoc Li-Meng Yan to write a report claiming COVID-19 was engineered in a Chinese lab. The paper was posted to Zenodo (appearing academic), received ~1 million downloads despite being thoroughly debunked, and was used to justify "investigation" narratives on Fox News and podcasts. Public health officials had to repeatedly counter false origins claims.

Civil Society and Racial Justice Organizations:

• The "It's okay to be white" campaign (2017): 4chan launched a coordinated campaign to post innocuous flyers, designed to bait left-wing responses. Over 140 college newspapers reported on it; a highway banner reached local news. The goal was to set media agendas around white identity politics. Civil society then had to respond, investigate, and mitigate community harm.

Election Infrastructure and Democratic Institutions:

• The "Hammer and Scorecard" disinformation campaign: false claims that Dominion voting machines were hacked via a supercomputer called Hammer and algorithms called Scorecard. The hashtag was designed to evoke "hammer and sickle" (Communist imagery). Used keyword squatting ("voter fraud"), distributed amplification (claims that platforms would remove it), and viral sloganeering. This was part of the broader "Stop the Steal" campaign undermining election legitimacy.

Technology, Platforms, and the Digital Influence Machine

Drawing on Chris Kelty's ethnography of free software, Donovan argues that technologists design not just what works, but also embed assumptions about power, money, and social order. She presents the "digital influence machine": the infrastructure of data collection, audience targeting, and automated amplification built by ad platforms, web publishers, and intermediaries.

Key insight: The web is fundamentally an advertising technology. Information quality suffers because profitable things are often free (supported by advertising or targeting), while quality information requires paywalls or subscription. Misinformation grows like "moss on a stone" in this ecosystem.

From Zuckerberg's January 2020 statement: "In the absence of regulation, Facebook and other companies are left to design their own policies... people should be able to hear from those they wish to lead them, warts and all." This framing elides the distinction between speech rights and amplification mechanisms. Facebook's advertising and targeting infrastructure allows well-funded actors to reach millions, while the same speech from ordinary citizens remains invisible. Speech, under platform infrastructure, is structurally unequal.

Systemic Solutions

Donovan proposes guardrails for the field:

1. Content curation: Hire 10,000 librarians to do platform-wide curation, coupled with transparency about content moderation decisions.
2. Human rights lockers: Because January 6th proved "the internet is a crime scene," platforms must preserve and archive evidence, not just remove it.
3. Distribution plans for truth: Support public media systems to ensure timely, local, accurate, relevant information reaches citizens.
4. Strategic amplification policy: Require platforms to mirror public interest obligations of broadcast media (e.g., radio stations must serve local news; why not social media?)
5. Independent civil rights audits: Technology companies and large infrastructure services must fund external audits with access to data on content decisions (removal, monetization, amplification).

Notes

This lecture is a cornerstone presentation of the Shorenstein Center's research approach: defining terms precisely, mapping campaign lifecycles, and attributing costs to specific institutions and professions. Donovan's framing of misinformation as "secondhand smoke" — a harm distributed across society rather than isolated to individual "believing" — is sociologically grounded and has influenced policy discussions. The five-stage framework is widely adopted in both journalism and academic research.

Two notable absences: she mentions zoom-bombing extensively in the lecture but does not position it as disinformation per se (it's harassment coordinated through platform design failure). And while the "big lie" about election fraud is referenced as a major case study, the full scope of Stop the Steal's coordinate infrastructure isn't elaborated — that became a focus of later work.

The lecture was given early 2021 (references to impeachment, Australia media wars, and pandemic moment), likely February or March.