Defining Dysinformation

Happy Holidays – our last issue of the year is out, and it’s all about Disinformation or, as we like to put it: Dysinformation. Download it here: https://cyberprotection-magazine.com/magazines?swcfpc=1

Dysinformation is a scourge of society, fueled by social media and malicious actors, but you may not have heard the term spelled this way. Dysinformation simply means “damaging information.” It puts misinformation and disinformation in the same bucket, but what is the difference?

Disinformation

Disinformation is intentional. The authors know it is false and distribute it with the desire to defraud, destabilize and delegitimize issues and individuals. It is often defended as, “Hey, I’m just asking questions.” The first recorded instance of disinformation occurs in Genesis. After Eve explains to the serpent why she should not eat forbidden fruit, the serpent replies, “Has God really said…?”

Disinformation authors do not need to prove an allegation. They just need to get a small credulous audience to wonder if what they say is true. If the allegation reflects a particular opinion of the audience, they are more likely to accept the allegation as true. Every piece of disinformation may contain an element of truth to establish the author’s qualifications, but the majority is sheer speculation.

A good example is the moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The author of the allegation, Bill Kaysing, was a contractor to Rocketdyne, which made the booster rockets for the Apollo missions, writing technical manuals for NASA. He had no knowledge of the entire breadth of technology, but claimed the ability to return the astronauts from the moon did not exist. This in spite of a decade of capabilities developed by the Mercury, Gemini and early pre-lunar Apollo missions. He claimed the Apollo 1 fire and the Challenger explosions were, in reality, assassinations of astronauts that planned to expose the hoax.

Buried in his expose was the admission that he had no proof of his allegations. He called them were merely a “hunch” based on his own distrust of government. While Kaysing died in 2005 his disinformation lives on in government conspiracy groups and Hollywood productions because dysinformation is a profit center.

Misinformation

The purpose of disinformation is to get people to share it without spending time to ask the most important question: Is this true? Disinformation needs human gullibility to succeed. H.L. Mencken wrote in 1926, “No one in this world…. has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby”.

Social media companies (Meta, Alphabet, LinkedIn, TikTok, X (and several smaller competitions like Next Door and Truth Social) build audiences on the backs of disinformation, somewhat innocently, by their mostly uniformed users. Disinformation captures rage. Rage impairs judgment. Bad judgment produces impulse buying. Companies spend advertising dollars on social media to reach the enraged audience.

That’s when disinformation becomes misinformation. Angry social media users share disruptive and false information making them angry and susceptible to the influence of the disinformation. However, they do so without a desire to damage. That makes them gullible, not malicious.

Dysinformation

Combined, disinformation and misinformation are dysinformation. It encourages distrust of government, institutions, and individuals. That is not to say that there is good reason to distrust them. Dysinformation always includes a nugget of truth, wrapped in a tasty layer of lies and innuendo. The corruption of information poisons attitudes against those asking, honestly, if the allegation is and research the answer.

Over the next few weeks, Cyber Protection Magazine will explore the world of dysinformation and the efforts being made to combat it.