A flowchart showing Joseph Heller's original catch-22
A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations. The term was first used by Joseph Heller in his 1961 novel Catch-22.
Catch-22s often result from rules, regulations, or
procedures that an individual is subject to, but has no control over,
because to fight the rule is to accept it. Another example is a
situation in which someone is in need of something that can only be had
by not being in need of it (e.g., the only way to qualify for a loan is
to prove to the bank that you do not need a loan). One connotation of
the term is that the creators of the "catch-22" situation have created
arbitrary rules in order to justify and conceal their own abuse of power.
Origin and meaning
Joseph Heller coined the term in his 1961 novel Catch-22, which describes absurd bureaucratic constraints on soldiers in World War II.
The term is introduced by the character Doc Daneeka, an army surgeon
who invokes "Catch-22" to explain why any pilot requesting mental
evaluation for insanity—hoping to be found not sane enough to fly and
thereby escape dangerous missions—demonstrates his own sanity in
creating the request and thus cannot be declared insane. This phrase
also means a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no
escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions.
"You mean there's a catch?"
"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a
concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and
immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr
was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon
as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more
missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't,
but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy
and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
Different formulations of "Catch-22" appear in the novel.
The term is applied to loopholes and quirks of the military system,
always with the implication that rules are inaccessible to and slanted
against those lower in the hierarchy. In chapter 6, Yossarian is told
that Catch-22 requires him to do anything his commanding officer tells him to do, regardless of whether these orders contradict orders from the officer's superiors.
In a final episode, Catch-22 is described to Yossarian by an old woman recounting an act of violence by soldiers,
"Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Yossarian shouted at her in
bewildered, furious protest. "How did you know it was Catch-22? Who the
hell told you it was Catch-22?"
"The soldiers with the hard white hats and clubs. The girls were
crying. 'Did we do anything wrong?' they said. The men said no and
pushed them away out the door with the ends of their clubs. 'Then why
are you chasing us out?' the girls said. 'Catch-22,' the men said. All
they kept saying was 'Catch-22, Catch-22.' What does it mean, Catch-22?
What is Catch-22?"
"Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress. "Didn't you even make them read it?"
"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to."
"What law says they don't have to?"
"Catch-22."
According to literature professor Ian Gregson, the old
woman's narrative defines "Catch-22" more directly as the "brutal
operation of power", stripping away the "bogus sophistication" of the
earlier scenarios.
Other appearances in the novel
Besides referring to an unsolvable logical dilemma,
Catch-22 is invoked to explain or justify the military bureaucracy. In
the first chapter, it requires Yossarian to sign his name to letters he
censors while he is confined to a hospital bed. One clause mentioned in
chapter 10 closes a loophole in promotions, which one private had been
exploiting to re-attain the attractive rank of private first class after any promotion. Through courts-martial for going AWOL,
he would be busted back to private but Catch-22 limited the number of
times he could do this before being sent to the stockade.
At another point in the book, a prostitute explains to
Yossarian that she cannot marry him because he is crazy, and she will
never marry a crazy man. She considers any man crazy who would marry a
woman who is not a virgin. This closed logic loop clearly illustrated
Catch-22 because by her logic, all men who refuse to marry her are sane
and thus she would consider marriage; but as soon as a man agrees to
marry her, he becomes crazy for wanting to marry a non-virgin, and is
instantly rejected.
Captain Black attempts to press Milo into depriving Major Major
of food as a consequence of not signing a loyalty oath that Major Major
was never given an opportunity to sign in the first place. Captain
Black asks Milo, "You're not against Catch-22, are you?"
In chapter 40, Catch-22 forces Colonels Korn and Cathcart
to promote Yossarian to Major and ground him rather than simply sending
him home. They fear that if they do not, others will refuse to fly, just
as Yossarian did.
Heller originally wanted to call the phrase (and hence, the
book) by other numbers, but he and his publishers eventually settled on
22. The number has no particular significance; it was chosen more or
less for euphony. The title was originally Catch-18, but Heller changed it after the popular Mila 18 was published a short time beforehand.
Usage
The term "catch-22" has filtered into common usage in the
English language. In a 1975 interview, Heller said the term would not
translate well into other languages.
James E. Combs and Dan D. Nimmo suggest that the idea of a
"catch-22" has gained popular currency because so many people in modern
society are exposed to frustrating bureaucratic logic. They write of the
rules of high school and colleges that:
This bogus democracy that can be
overruled by arbitrary fiat is perhaps a citizen's first encounter with
organizations that may profess 'open' and libertarian values, but in
fact are closed and hierarchical systems. Catch-22 is an organizational
assumption, an unwritten law of informal power that exempts the
organization from responsibility and accountability, and puts the
individual in the absurd position of being excepted for the convenience
or unknown purposes of the organization.[5]
Along with George Orwell's "doublethink", "Catch-22" has become one of the best-recognized ways to describe the predicament of being trapped by contradictory rules.[9]
It is time for the scientific
community to stop giving alternative medicine a free ride. There cannot
be two kinds of medicine—conventional and alternative. There is only
medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not,
medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work. Once a
treatment has been tested rigorously, it no longer matters whether it
was considered alternative at the outset. If it is found to be
reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted. But assertions,
speculation, and testimonials do not substitute for evidence.
Alternative treatments should be subjected to scientific testing no less
rigorous than that required for conventional treatments.
This definition has been described by Robert L. Park as a logical Catch-22 which ensures that any complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) method which is proven to work "would no longer be CAM, it would simply be medicine."
U.S. Circuit Judge Don Willett referred to qualified immunity,
which requires a violation of constitutional rights to have been
previously established in order for a victim to claim damages, as a
Catch-22: "Section 1983 meets Catch-22. Important constitutional
questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet
unanswered. Courts then rely on that judicial silence to conclude
there's no equivalent case on the books. No precedent = no clearly established law = no liability. An Escherian Stairwell. Heads government wins, tails plaintiff loses."
Logic
The archetypalcatch-22, as formulated by Joseph Heller, involves the case of John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forcesbombardier, who wishes to be grounded from combat flight. This will only happen if he is evaluated by the squadron's flight surgeon and found "unfit to fly". "Unfit" would be any pilot who is willing to fly such dangerous missions, as one would have to be mad to volunteer for possible death. To be evaluated, he must request
the evaluation, an act that is considered sufficient proof for being
declared sane. These conditions make it impossible to be declared
"unfit".
The "Catch-22" is that "anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy". Pilots who request a mental fitness evaluation are
sane, and therefore must fly in combat. At the same time, if an
evaluation is not requested by the pilot, he will never receive one and
thus can never be found insane, meaning he must also fly in combat.
Catch-22 ensures that no pilot can ever be grounded for being insane
even if he is.
A logical formulation of this situation is:
1.
For a person to be excused from flying on the grounds of insanity (E),
he must both be insane (I) and have requested an evaluation (R).
The philosopher Laurence Goldstein argues that the
"airman's dilemma" is logically not even a condition that is true under
no circumstances; it is a "vacuousbiconditional" that is ultimately meaningless. Goldstein writes:
The catch
is this: what looks like a statement of the conditions under which an
airman can be excused flying dangerous missions reduces not to the
statement
(i) 'An airman can be excused flying dangerous missions if and only if Cont' (where 'Cont' is a contradiction)
(which could be a mean way of disguising an unpleasant truth), but to the worthlessly empty announcement
(ii) 'An airman can be excused flying dangerous missions if and
only if it is not the case that an airman can be excused flying
dangerous missions'
If the catch were (i), that would not be so bad—an airman would at least
be able to discover that under no circumstances could he avoid combat
duty. But Catch-22 is worse—a welter of words that amounts to nothing;
it is without content, it conveys no information at all.
Disinformation is false or misleading information deliberately spread to deceive people, or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through coordinated campaigns that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."
In contrast, misinformation refers to inaccuracies that stem from inadvertent error. Misinformation can be used to create disinformation when known misinformation is purposefully and intentionally disseminated. "Fake news" has sometimes been categorized as a type of disinformation, although scholars distinguish between the two concepts. Some researchers have cautioned against using the term in academic
writing have because of its lack of precision and its contested use in
public and political discourse regarding news coverage or information. Others note that it continues to be used both in reference to
demonstrably false or misleading information and more broadly in
political communication, where its meaning and implications remain
debated.
Etymology
The Etymology of Disinformation by H. Newman as published in The Journal of Information Warfare in 2021. Elements of the word disinformation have their origins in Proto-Indo-European
language family. The Latin 'dis' and 'in' and can both be considered to
have Proto-Indo-European roots, 'forma' is considerably more obscure.
The green box in the figure highlights the origin 'forma' is uncertain,
however, it may have its roots in the Aristotelian concept of μορφή (morphe) where something becomes a 'thing' when it has 'form' or substance.
The English word disinformation comes from the application of the Latin prefix dis- to information
making the meaning "reversal or removal of information". The rarely
used word had appeared with this usage in print at least as far back as
1887. Some consider it a loan translation of the Russian дезинформация, transliterated as dezinformatsiya, apparently derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department. Soviet planners in the 1950s defined disinformation as "dissemination
(in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended to mislead public opinion."
Disinformation first made an appearance in dictionaries in 1985, specifically, Webster's New College Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary. In 1986, the term disinformation was not defined in Webster's New World Thesaurus or New Encyclopædia Britannica. After the Soviet term became widely known in the 1980s, native speakers
of English broadened the term as "any government communication (either
overt or covert) containing intentionally false and misleading material,
often combined selectively with true information, which seeks to
mislead and manipulate either elites or a mass audience."
By 1990, use of the term disinformation had fully established itself in the English language within the lexicon of politics. By 2001, the term disinformation had come to be known as simply a more civil phrase for saying someone was lying. Stanley B. Cunningham wrote in his 2002 book The Idea of Propaganda that disinformation had become pervasively used as a synonym for propaganda.
Operationalization
The Shorenstein Center
at Harvard University defines disinformation research as an academic
field that studies "the spread and impacts of misinformation,
disinformation, and media manipulation", including "how it spreads
through online and offline channels, and why people are susceptible to
believing bad information, and successful strategies for mitigating its
impact". According to a 2023 research article published in New Media & Society, disinformation circulates on social media through deception campaigns implemented in multiple ways including: astroturfing, conspiracy theories, clickbait, culture wars, echo chambers, hoaxes, fake news, propaganda, pseudoscience, and rumors.
Glossary of key terms related to disinformation and misinformation
Moral tales featuring durable stories of intruders incurring boundary transgressions and their dire consequences
In order to distinguish between similar terms, including
misinformation and malinformation, scholars collectively agree on the
definitions for each term as follows: (1) disinformation is the
strategic dissemination of false information with the intention to cause
public harm; (2) misinformation represents the unintentional spread of false information; and (3) malinformation is factual information disseminated with the intention to cause harm, these terms are abbreviated 'DMMI'.
In 2019, Camille François devised the "ABC" framework of understanding different modalities of online disinformation:
Manipulative Actors, who
"engage knowingly and with clear intent in viral deception campaigns"
that are "covert, designed to obfuscate the identity and intent of the
actor orchestrating them." Examples include personas such as Guccifer 2.0, Internet trolls, state media, and military operatives.
Deceptive Behavior, which "encompasses
the variety of techniques viral deception actors may use to enhance and
exaggerate the reach, virality and impact of their campaigns." Examples
include troll farms, Internet bots, astroturfing, and "paid engagement".
In 2020, the Brookings Institution proposed amending this framework to include Distribution, defined by the "technical protocols that enable, constrain, and shape user behavior in a virtual space". Similarly, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proposed adding Degree ("distribution of the content ... and the audiences it reaches") and Effect ("how much of a threat a given case poses").
Comparisons with propaganda
Whether and to what degree disinformation and propaganda overlap is subject to debate. Some (like U.S. Department of State)
define propaganda as the use of non-rational arguments to either
advance or undermine a political ideal, and use disinformation as an
alternative name for undermining propaganda, while others consider them to be separate concepts altogether. One popular distinction holds that disinformation also describes
politically motivated messaging designed explicitly to engender public
cynicism, uncertainty, apathy, distrust, and paranoia, all of which
disincentivize citizen engagement and mobilization for social or
political change.
Disinformation is primarily carried out by government intelligence agencies, but has also been used by non-governmental organizations and businesses. Front groups are a form of disinformation, as they mislead the public about their true objectives and who their controllers are. Most recently, disinformation has been deliberately spread through social media in the form of "fake news", disinformation masked as legitimate news articles and meant to mislead readers or viewers. Disinformation may include distribution of forgeddocuments, manuscripts, and photographs, or spreading dangerous rumours and fabricatedintelligence. Use of these tactics can lead to blowback, however, causing such unintended consequences such as defamation lawsuits or damage to the dis-informer's reputation.
Disinformation can spread with greater ease in situations
where there is a lack of credible information on a topic, such as a
crisis. The implications of this were seen after the 2024 Southport stabbings,
where the spread of disinformation regarding the killer's background
was fuelled by reporting restrictions, meaning that there were no facts
to counter the disinformation. This then led to the 2024 United Kingdom riots.
Worldwide
Disinformation has been identified as a significant challenge, undermining public trust and the factual basis for public debate. Studies have found that false information often spreads faster and more
widely online than accurate information. Empirical research has also
links disinformation to political polarisation, democratic erosion, and
regime resilience in authoritarian contexts.
Use of disinformation as a Soviet tactical weapon started in 1923, when it became a tactic used in the Soviet political warfare called active measures.
Russian disinformation
Russian disinformation campaigns have occurred in many countries. For example, disinformation campaigns led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch, have been reported in several African countries. Russia denies that it uses disinformation to influence public opinion. Often Russian campaigns aim to disrupt domestic politics within Europe
and the United States in an attempt to weaken the West due to its
long-standing commitment to fight back against "Western imperialism" and
shift the balance of world power to Russia and her allies (the Second World during the Cold War era). According to the Voice of America,
Russia seeks to promote American isolationism, border security concerns
and racial tensions within the United States through its disinformation
campaigns.
Chinese disinformation
Spamouflage
(also known under the names Dragonbridge, Spamouflage Dragon, Storm
1376 and Taizi Flood) is an online propaganda and disinformation
operation that has been using a network of social media accounts to make
posts in favor of the Chinese Communist Party and government of the People's Republic of China and harass dissidents and journalists overseas since 2017.Beginning in the early 2020s, Spamouflage accounts also began making posts about American and Taiwanese politics. It is widely believed that the Chinese government, particularly the Ministry of Public Security, is behind the network. Spamouflage has increasingly used generative artificial intelligence for influence operations. The campaign has largely failed to receive views from real users, although it has attracted some organic engagement using new tactics.
The United States Intelligence Community appropriated use of the term disinformation in the 1950s from the Russian dezinformatsiya, and began to use similar strategies, starting during Cold War, and in conflict with other nations. The New York Times reported in 2000 that during the CIA's effort to substitute Mohammed Reza Pahlavi for then-Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mossadegh, the CIA placed fictitious stories in the local newspaper. Reuters documented how, subsequent to the 1979 Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War,
the CIA put false articles in newspapers of Islamic-majority countries,
inaccurately stating that Soviet embassies had "invasion day
celebrations". Reuters noted a former U.S. intelligence officer said they would attempt to gain the confidence of reporters and use them as secret agents, to affect a nation's politics by way of their local media.
In October 1986, the term gained increased currency in the U.S. when it was revealed that two months previously, the Reagan Administration had engaged in a disinformation campaign against then-leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi. White House representative Larry Speakes said reports of a planned attack on Libya as first broken by The Wall Street Journal on August 25, 1986, were "authoritative", and other newspapers including The Washington Post then wrote articles saying this was factual. U.S. State Department representative Bernard Kalb
resigned from his position in protest over the disinformation campaign,
and said: "Faith in the word of America is the pulse beat of our
democracy."
The executive branch of the Reagan administration kept watch on disinformation campaigns through three yearly publications by the Department of State: Active Measures: A Report on the Substance and Process of Anti-U.S. Disinformation and Propaganda Campaigns (1986); Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986–87 (1987); and Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1987–88 (1989).
According to a report by Reuters, the United States ran a propaganda campaign to spread disinformation about the Sinovac Chinese COVID-19 vaccine,
including using fake social media accounts to spread the disinformation
that the Sinovac vaccine contained pork-derived ingredients and was
therefore haram under Islamic law. Reuters said the ChinaAngVirus disinformation campaign
was designed to "counter what it perceived as China's growing influence
in the Philippines" and was prompted by the "[fear] that China's COVID diplomacy and propaganda could draw other Southeast Asian countries, such as Cambodia and Malaysia, closer to Beijing". The campaign was also described as "payback for Beijing's efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic". The campaign primarily targeted people in the Philippines and used a social media hashtag for "China is the virus" in Tagalog. The campaign ran from 2020 to mid-2021. The primary contractor for the U.S. military on the project was General Dynamics IT, which received $493 million for its role.
Since 2023, Republican members of the US Congress have attacked researchers who study disinformation as being against freedom of speech and as a euphemism for government censorship. On April 18, 2025, citing an Executive Order signed by Trump, the US National Science Foundation released a statement cancelling funding for disinformation research, saying that it does not fit with the NSF priorities, "including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation."
Disinformation in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum
The 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum saw figures from the Leave campaign spread disinformation on social media. Many of these arguments played on voters' emotions and attachments,
such as the claim that the £350 million that the UK sent to the EU each
week could be allocated to the NHS instead, which made them highly effective. Ofcom requires news broadcasters to remain neutral, yet this adherence to neutrality created false balance in the Brexit debate, causing broadcasters to inadvertedly promote disinformation.
Response
Responses from cultural leaders
Pope Francis condemned disinformation in a 2016 interview, after being made the subject of a fake news website during the 2016 U.S. election cycle which falsely claimed that he supported Donald Trump. He stated that the worst thing the news media could do was spread disinformation and said the act was a sin, comparing those who spread disinformation to individuals who engage in coprophilia.
Ethics in warfare
In a contribution to the 2014 book Military Ethics and Emerging Technologies, writers David Danks and Joseph H. Danks discuss the ethical implications in using disinformation as a tactic during information warfare. They note there has been a significant degree of philosophical debate over the issue as related to the ethics of war and use of the technique. The writers describe a position whereby the use of disinformation is occasionally allowed, but not in all situations. Typically the ethical test to consider is whether the disinformation was performed out of a motivation of good faith and acceptable according to the rules of war. By this test, the tactic during World War II of putting fake inflatable tanks in visible locations on the Pacific Islands
in order to falsely present the impression that there were larger
military forces present would be considered as ethically permissible. Conversely, disguising a munitions plant as a healthcare facility in
order to avoid attack would be outside the bounds of acceptable use of
disinformation during war.
Research related to disinformation studies is increasing as an applied area of inquiry. The call to formally classify disinformation as a cybersecurity threat is made by advocates due to its increase in social networking sites. Despite the proliferation of social media websites, Facebook and
Twitter showed the most activity in terms of active disinformation
campaigns. Techniques reported on included the use of bots to amplify
hate speech, the illegal harvesting of data, and paid trolls to harass
and threaten journalists.
Whereas disinformation research focuses primarily on how actors orchestrate deceptions on social media, primarily via fake news, new research investigates how people take what started as deceptions and circulate them as their personal views. As a result, research shows that disinformation can be conceptualized
as a program that encourages engagement in oppositional fantasies (i.e.,
culture wars), through which disinformation circulates as rhetorical ammunition for never-ending arguments. As disinformation entangles with culture wars, identity-driven controversies constitute a vehicle through which disinformation disseminates on social media.
This means that disinformation thrives, not despite raucous grudges but
because of them. The reason is that controversies provide fertile
ground for never-ending debates that solidify points of view.
Scholars have pointed out that disinformation is not only a
foreign threat as domestic purveyors of disinformation are also
leveraging traditional media outlets such as newspapers, radio stations,
and television news media to disseminate false information. Current research suggests right-wing online political activists in the United States may be more likely to use disinformation as a strategy and tactic. The 2016 European Union referendum in the UK also saw British politicians supporting the Leave campaign spread disinformation on Twitter. The Conservative Party was also accused of spreading disinformation about the Labour Party in the lead-up to the 2019 General Election. Governments have responded with a wide range of policies to address
concerns about the potential threats that disinformation poses to
democracy, however, there is little agreement in elite policy discourse
or academic literature as to what it means for disinformation to
threaten democracy, and how different policies might help to counter its
negative implications.
Consequences of exposure to disinformation online
There is a broad consensus amongst scholars that there is a
high degree of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda online;
however, it is unclear to what extent such disinformation has on
political attitudes in the public and, therefore, political outcomes. This conventional wisdom
has come mostly from investigative journalists, with a particular rise
during the 2016 U.S. election: some of the earliest work came from Craig
Silverman at Buzzfeed News. Cass Sunstein supported this in #Republic, arguing that the internet would become rife with echo chambers and informational cascades of misinformation leading to a highly polarized and ill-informed society. Later studies have since proven the existence of echo chambers on social media.
Research after the 2016 US presidential election found:
(1) for 14% of Americans social media was their "most important" source
of election news; 2) known false news stories "favoring Trump were
shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring
Clinton were shared 8 million times"; 3) the average American adult saw
fake news stories, "with just over half of those who recalled seeing
them believing them"; and 4) people are more likely to "believe stories
that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have
ideologically segregated social media networks." Correspondingly, whilst there is wide agreement that the digital spread
and uptake of disinformation during the 2016 election was massive and
very likely facilitated by foreign agents, there is an ongoing debate on
whether all this had any actual effect on the election. For example, a
double blind randomized-control experiment by researchers from the
London School of Economics (LSE), found that exposure to online fake
news about either Trump or Clinton had no significant effect on
intentions to vote for those candidates. Researchers who examined the
influence of Russian disinformation on Twitter during the 2016 US
presidential campaign found that exposure to disinformation was (1)
concentrated among a tiny group of users, (2) primarily among
Republicans, and (3) eclipsed by exposure to legitimate political news
media and politicians. Finally, they find "no evidence of a meaningful
relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign
and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior." As such, despite its mass dissemination during the 2016 Presidential
Elections, online fake news or disinformation probably did not cost
Hillary Clinton the votes needed to secure the presidency.
Research on this topic remains inconclusive, for example,
misinformation appears not to significantly change political knowledge
of those exposed to it. There seems to be a higher level of diversity of news sources that
users are exposed to on Facebook and Twitter than conventional wisdom
would dictate, as well as a higher frequency of cross-spectrum
discussion. Other evidence has found that disinformation campaigns rarely succeed in altering the foreign policies of the targeted states.
Research is also challenging because disinformation is
meant to be difficult to detect and some social media companies have
discouraged outside research efforts. For example, researchers found disinformation made "existing detection
algorithms from traditional news media ineffective or not
applicable...[because disinformation] is intentionally written to
mislead readers...[and] users' social engagements with fake news produce
data that is big, incomplete, unstructured, and noisy." Facebook, the largest social media company, has been criticized by analytical journalists and scholars for preventing outside research of disinformation.
Alternative perspectives and critiques
Researchers have criticized the framing of disinformation
as being limited to technology platforms, removed from its wider
political context and inaccurately implying that the media landscape was
otherwise well-functioning. "The field possesses a simplistic understanding of the effects of media
technologies; overemphasizes platforms and underemphasizes politics;
focuses too much on the United States and Anglocentric analysis; has a
shallow understanding of political culture and culture in general; lacks
analysis of race, class, gender, and sexuality as well as status,
inequality, social structure, and power; has a thin understanding of
journalistic processes; and, has progressed more through the exigencies
of grant funding than the development of theory and empirical findings."
Alternative perspectives have been proposed:
Moving beyond fact-checking and media literacy to study a pervasive phenomenon as something that involves more than news consumption.
Moving beyond technical solutions including AI-enhanced fact checking to understand the systemic basis of disinformation.
Develop a theory that goes beyond Americentrism to develop a global perspective, understand cultural imperialism and Third World dependency on Western news, and understand disinformation in the Global South.
Develop market-oriented disinformation research that examines the financial incentives and business models that nudge content creators and digital platforms to circulate disinformation online.
Develop understandings of Gendered-based disinformation (GBD)
defined as "the dissemination of false or misleading information
attacking women (especially political leaders, journalists and public
figures), basing the attack on their identity as women."
The research literature on how disinformation spreads is growing. Studies show that disinformation spread in social media can be classified into two broad stages: seeding and echoing. "Seeding", when malicious actors strategically insert deceptions, like
fake news, into a social media ecosystem, and "echoing" is when the
audience disseminates disinformation argumentatively as their own
opinions often by incorporating disinformation into a confrontational
fantasy.
Internet manipulation
Internet manipulation is the use of online digital technologies, including algorithms, social bots, and automated scripts, for commercial, social, military, or political purposes. Internet and social media manipulation are the prime vehicles for spreading disinformation due to the importance of digital platforms for media consumption and everyday communication. When employed for political purposes, internet manipulation may be used to steer public opinion, polarise citizens, circulate conspiracy theories, and silence political dissidents. Internet manipulation can also be done for profit, for instance, to harm corporate or political adversaries and improve brand reputation. Internet manipulation is sometimes also used to describe the selective enforcement of Internet censorship or selective violations of net neutrality.
Internet manipulation for propaganda purposes with the help of data analysis and internet bots in social media is called computational propaganda.
Studies show four main methods of seeding disinformation online:
Selective censorship
Manipulation of search rankings
Hacking and releasing
Directly sharing disinformation
Recently, concerns have been expressed that AI technology
could enable groups of AI programs, known as 'AI swarms,' to
autonomously coordinate to manipulate democratic discourse, by
maintaining persistent fake identities and mimicking human social
dynamics over extended periods of time.
