Disinformation Fighters

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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July 15, 2026

Disinformation Fighters work to reduce the influence of deliberately deceptive information campaigns while strengthening the circulation of reliable information. Disinformation differs from ordinary error because it is created or spread with the intent to mislead. Political movements, governments, commercial actors, and individuals may use it to inflame fear, discredit institutions, deepen social divisions, or overwhelm the public with so many conflicting claims that people give up trying to determine what is true. The Rand Corporation named that strategy the Firehose of Falsehood.)

Disinformation Fighters respond through research, fact-checking, public education, investigative journalism, platform design, and efforts to expose coordinated influence operations. Their goal is not to enforce agreement on disputed political questions. It is to make deliberate deception harder to produce, spread, and exploit.

Governments have increasingly become involved in this work, especially when disinformation is connected to foreign interference, elections, public health, or national security. The European Union’s Code of Conduct on Disinformation establishes commitments for online platforms, advertisers, fact-checkers, and other participants in the information system. It emphasizes transparency and risk reduction, while formally affirming freedom of expression. In the United States, agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have produced guidance on recognizing and responding to foreign influence operations. These efforts can help institutions identify coordinated manipulation, but they also raise difficult questions about the proper role of government in determining what information is unreliable.

Those concerns became especially contentious during the Biden administration. Republican lawmakers, civil-liberties advocates, and writers at publications such as Public argued that federal officials pressured social-media companies to remove or restrict lawful speech labeled false, misleading, or harmful. The dispute reached the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. The Court dismissed the plaintiffs’ case because they had not established standing; it did not settle the broader question of when communication between government and private platforms becomes unconstitutional coercion. That question remains crucial. Government officials may provide accurate information, identify foreign influence operations, and publicly criticize false claims. They should not be able to evade constitutional limits by informally pressuring private companies to silence lawful criticism or contested viewpoints.

Disinformation is not confined to one ideology or political party. People are more likely to accept and circulate dubious claims when those claims reinforce their identities, fears, or preferred political narratives. Effective responses must therefore be applied consistently to deception from the left, right, and other sources. They should also rely less on simply removing content and more on helping citizens become resistant to manipulation. Finland has incorporated media literacy and critical evaluation of sources into education from an early age, while Estonia has combined media literacy with broader efforts to strengthen resilience against foreign information operations. Such programs teach people to examine who created a message, what evidence supports it, which emotions it is trying to provoke, and whether independent sources confirm its claims. This kind of education strengthens citizens rather than asking them to trust a single authority to determine the truth.

Other Disinformation Fighters evaluate the information system and the available countermeasures. Comparitech’s global map of internet censorship documents restrictions on online content and reminds us that campaigns ostensibly directed against harmful information can become tools for suppressing dissent. The International Panel on the Information Environment’s systematic review of misinformation countermeasures examines evidence on approaches such as fact-checking, media-literacy education, warning labels, and changes to platform design. The Carnegie Endowment’s evidence-based policy guide similarly emphasizes that no single intervention will solve the problem and that every approach has limits and trade-offs. Responsible Disinformation Fighters must therefore defend both information integrity and freedom of expression. Their task is to expose intentional manipulation, increase transparency, and help citizens judge evidence for themselves without creating a censorship system that can be captured by whichever political faction happens to hold power.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.