Disinformation panics

Fred Skulthorp has a fine Critic piece on disinformation.


The next great disinformation panic

Journalists gain trust by trusting the public

The first great disinformation panic started roughly around 2016 and lasted right up until the present day. Every time you logged on to your social media, you were at risk. Your vegetative scroll through the timeline became a multi-million pound information defence operation aimed at countering “fake news” and “disinformation”.

In the space of just half a decade, an entire new infrastructure of media was set up to tackle this grave threat to Western societies. “Expert” NGOs signed lucrative contracts with government departments and social media companies. Philanthropic donors, from Google to Bill Gates, pumped money into “not for profit” newsrooms to garner audience trust around issues that were supposedly being wrecked by this age of fake news and misinformation.


The whole piece is well worth reading, as among other aspects it highlights what disinformation has become. Like Net Zero, climate change and sustainability,  disinformation has become a brand, a marketing tool. Connection with physical reality is loose and flexible, manipulating people is the primary purpose. 


Disinformation is no longer really about “fact checking”. It’s a brand — a marketing tool. Since the pandemic, it has lost interest in determining the truth via the methodology of “disinformation”, having found out the task was both impossible and doomed to hypocrisy. Unsurprisingly, a definition of determining wrong information around “information intended to mislead” ended up getting abused by its many practitioners. During the pandemic, the amount of evidence we now have of the inaccurate labelling of perfectly legitimate information as “misinformation” means that the only serious debate is whether this amounted to a form of censorship.