Misinformation and Disinformation

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

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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At first glance, “misinformation” and “disinformation” can look like two words for the same problem: false or misleading information moving through our communication systems. The crucial difference between them lies not in the content of the information, but in the intent of the person spreading it.

Misinformation is inaccurate or false information shared by people who do not realize it is wrong and who mean no harm — the relative who passes along an alarming, but bogus, health claim, or the well-meaning friend who reshares out-of-date information during a breaking-news event. Disinformation, by contrast, is false content that is deliberately created and spread in order to deceive, manipulate, or cause harm.

Researchers Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, in an influential 2017 framework written for the Council of Europe, grouped these problems under the umbrella term “information disorder,” and added a third category — malinformation — for genuine information that is leaked or taken out of context specifically to hurt a person, group, or institution. It is worth noting that these labels are contested at the edges (critics argue that calling true-but-inconvenient information “malinformation” can be used to suppress legitimate dissent), and Wardle herself has since cautioned that this tidy framework can oversimplify a messy reality.

People create and spread disinformation for many reasons. Political leaders and advocacy groups may use it to mobilize supporters, damage opponents, excuse failures, or make compromise seem dangerous. Foreign governments may use it to weaken rival societies by deepening existing divisions; a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that Russia used social media in 2016 to sow discord and erode confidence in democratic institutions. Media personalities, websites, and influencers may spread exaggerated or false claims because outrage attracts attention, clicks, followers, and money.

A defining feature of the problem is that the two phenomena bleed into one another: a deliberately fabricated claim (disinformation) becomes misinformation the moment a sincere person, believing they are being helpful, forwards it to friends and family. Social-media platforms accelerate this dynamic because their engagement-driven algorithms tend to reward content that is novel and emotionally charged, regardless of whether it is true.

The mechanics of that spread are now well documented. A landmark MIT study of roughly 126,000 stories on Twitter found that false news travels significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth — false stories were about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted, and true stories took roughly six times as long to reach the same number of people. The researchers concluded that the falsehoods were more novel than accurate reporting and that they provoked stronger emotional reactions — fear, disgust, and surprise — which made people more inclined to share them. One practical consequence is that corrections and fact-checks almost always lag behind the falsehoods they are chasing, and they rarely reach the same audience.

Misinformation and disinformation are especially damaging in intractable conflicts because they feed enemy images. If people believe false claims about what the other side has done, wants, or secretly controls, then fear and anger begin to feel fully justified. Rumors about elections, crime, immigration, race, religion, public health, schools, war, or political violence can quickly become part of a larger “us-versus-them” story. Research summarized by the American Psychological Association shows that people are often more likely to accept and share misinformation when it aligns with their identities and pre-existing beliefs. Once a falsehood becomes tied to group loyalty, correcting it is no longer just a factual matter; it can feel like an attack on the group itself.

The effects on democracy can be severe. False election claims can undermine trust in voting, election officials, and peaceful transfers of power. War propaganda can make aggression look defensive. Hate-filled rumors can help justify discrimination or violence against vulnerable groups. For instance, Amnesty International concluded that Facebook’s algorithms helped amplify anti-Rohingya hate speech and misinformation in Myanmar before and during atrocities there. Public-health misinformation can turn practical risk-reduction measures (such as vaccines and masks) into identity battles. Surveys find that the majority of people across many countries believe disinformation is damaging their nation’s politics, and the research consistently links it to declining trust in media, governments, courts, and elections.

Disinformation and political polarization tend to reinforce each other in a vicious circle: manipulated narratives deepen division, and a more divided public becomes easier to manipulate. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project finds that autocratizing governments substantially increase their spread of disinformation, this, then, heightens the risk of political violence, and that generally works to strengthen autocracies while weakening democracies.

Another danger is that constant misinformation and disinformation can produce cynicism rather than belief. People may become convinced that all sources are biased, all experts are corrupt, all institutions are lying, and no shared truth is possible. RAND calls this broader decline in shared facts and trust “Truth Decay.” The “firehose of falsehood” strategy described by RAND does not require people to believe every lie. It can succeed by overwhelming them with so many conflicting claims that they give up trying to sort truth from falsehood. That is disastrous for democracy, because self-government depends on citizens having enough shared reality to debate what should be done.

Reducing the damage requires more than debunking one false claim at a time. Societies need trustworthy journalism, transparent fact-finding, accountable experts, rapid rumor correction, media literacy, and public officials who do not exploit falsehoods for short-term advantage. Citizens also need to recognize that misinformation is not only something that happens to “the other side.” All groups are vulnerable when a claim reinforces their fears, grievances, or hopes. Constructive conflict depends on people being able to argue fiercely about values and policies while still respecting evidence, correcting mistakes, and refusing to spread claims they have not checked.

This page was created by combining essays written by Claude and ChatGPT in response to this prompt. (I was curious to see which AI system would write a better essay, and it turns out I really liked both. So I took pieces of each and combined them into this one, editing both, and reviewing and approving the final project.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.