Disinformation. A rather unpleasant and unsettling word, isn’t it?
We all know what it means. Right?
Let’s go to Webster’s dictionary: false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.
It does not mean information that I don’t want to hear, or that damages the credibility of my argument or that of my preferred political candidate.
Disinformation is another modern word for something old: deceit. Though it may be carried out on a large scale, as in the influence of public opinion, it is not a new phenomenon. But it is easier to spread in our day, with the reach of the internet.
Here’s just one example of disinformation, one you may not have heard much about.
In the early part of Donald Trump’s presidency, a non-profit organization, along with the help of an ex-FBI agent, created a Twitter “dashboard” that supposedly tracked efforts by Russia to spread disinformation on the platform.
Again, disinformation meaning false or misleading statements to influence public opinion.
The dashboard, called Hamilton 68, was made up of over 600 accounts the organization claimed were primarily Russian bots, meddling in U.S. politics.
Major media outlets and even well-known universities cited the dashboard as credible, and used its findings to attack the President along with conservatives in general. They pointed out these Russian accounts were suspiciously agreeing with and amplifying what the right was saying.
It was an attempt by the dashboard’s creators to influence public opinion, to make it seem like one of America’s enemies was trying to interfere in our political process. In essence, it was meant to discredit speech one side of the political aisle did not like.
Literally hundreds of news stories cited the dashboard, as the press took it as trustworthy.
But there was a problem: It was all a sham.
Independent journalist Matt Taibi exposed that reality in “The Twitter Files,” showing internal communications from Twitter employees that they knew the list of accounts was neither predominantly Russian nor bots.
Of the 644 accounts tracked, only 36 had any connection to Russia. The rest were mostly ordinary citizens in the U.S., Canada, and Britain.
Twitter employees knew this, because they reverse engineered the list, using Hamilton 68’s API. Internal communications show them acknowledging to one another that it was fraudulent. They even reached out to journalists to warn them, but were ignored.
Instead, the press and even elected politicians continued to use what we now know as actual disinformation to advance their cause.
Disinformation is an unfortunate reality we must deal with, especially in our digital age. But just because someone claims disinformation does not make it so.
Be on guard and check things out for yourself. Don’t be deceived into believing things that aren’t true.
