How to Beat Disinformation: A Practical Guide for 2024

Disinformation spreads like wildfire, but it doesn’t have to fool you. Learn how to spot the fake news before you hit ‘share’ and help break the cycle.

It turns out all we needed to make reality itself disappear was a paid-for blue checkmark and a semi-plausible fake username.

Seriously, that’s all it takes to start rumours, incite riots and fool progressive commentators into sharing breathless bullshit fabricated by two-bit far right hacks who would have been laughed off Something Awful in 2005.

That doesn't make the disinformation war any less dangerous. In fact, it's almost worse. The bar for propaganda and outright lies is lower than any of us thought.

We've entered an era where misinformation is both cheap and potent. A few keystrokes, a dash of audacity, and voilà - you've got a viral lie spreading faster than truth can tie its fucking shoelaces.

This accessibility has democratized deception. Anyone with a grudge, an agenda, or just a twisted sense of humor can now play puppet master with public opinion. It's turned social media into a minefield where each step could trigger an explosion of fabricated outrage or manufactured consensus.

The real danger lies in the cumulative effect. Each small lie chips away at our collective grip on reality. It's death by a thousand cuts for truth, leaving us in a world where skepticism borders on paranoia and trust becomes a luxury we can't afford.

So what the fuck do we do?

The Anatomy of a Lie: Understanding Mis/Disinformation

Disinformation behaves like a virus.

It evolves, adapts, and spreads through the body of society. It preys on our cognitive biases, exploits our emotional vulnerabilities, and hijacks the mechanisms we've built to disseminate information.

Disinformation can be a doctored image shared on social media, a bluntly jump-cut edited video that distorts context, or a seemingly credible news article that omits crucial facts. The most dangerous forms of misinformation are the ones that contain a kernel of truth, wrapped in layers of distortion and manipulation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine crackpots seized on real data about rare side effects, blowing them out of proportion and weaving them into narratives that played on people's fears and uncertainties. Cherry-picked statistics. A few photoshopped tweets.

The result was a perfect storm of disinformation that led to vaccine hesitancy and, ultimately, preventable deaths.

And it became misinformation as soon as it hit Facebook and was shared and reshared by often well meaning, frightened, isolated people. By the time it was even on the radar of folks who were capable of debunking it, it had spread too far and wide, through too many channels.

That’s the basic anatomy of mis/disinfo. And understanding it is the first step in developing immunity against it.