Disinformation in the Digital Age
In the era of digital social networks and messaging apps, disinformation has gained new momentum and expanded its reach.
In the previous text, I presented a brief history of disinformation since its baptism by Stalin and its use as negative propaganda by the KGB in the 1920s. Invented by a left-wing authoritarian regime that had a single party, the Communist Party, and its newspaper as the sole information vehicle, Pravda (truth in Russian), it is understandable why information manipulation was a greater possibility in the Soviet Union than in Western democracies, which were more open to plural perspectives and fact-checking.
Disinformation was also used in the West, in liberal and democratic regimes, but in more sophisticated ways. Examples include publicity campaigns developed by public relations firms with the aim of defending interests that, in the eyes of many, could be considered vile. The campaign by the tobacco industry to delay as much as possible the establishment of a causal relationship between smoking and cancer—and the inevitable regulation of cigarette advertising—became paradigmatic.
Arms manufacturers, producers of carcinogenic products, and the anti-climate-change-regulation lobby still act in ways that are more or less recognizable. Unlike what the press insists on calling denialism, support for polluting industries and fossil fuels stems more from these sophisticated and powerful campaigns, which effectively gain the support of politicians, governments, and even part of public opinion.
In the digital age, especially since the mid-2010s, the media landscape has changed radically, creating new conditions for disinformation. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the past decade marked a turning point comparable only to the spread of radio in the 1930s, or television in the 1960s and 1970s. What characterized it was speed, since even though the internet has existed commercially since 1995, it was the lowering of smartphone costs and the access they provided that effectively connected the majority of the population.
Just over ten years ago, we began to relate socially through platforms that allow instant messaging and social networks where we share content according to our own interests. The fact that this description sounds obvious shows how much it has become naturalized, to the point where we almost no longer remember life before the connectivity that Manuel Castells called perpetual.
The informative and disinformative effects of life in this new media ecology were quick to make themselves felt, and it is possible to identify the year 2016 as an international watershed: the year of Brexit, Trump’s first election, and—before these events that are always remembered in the specialized literature—the protests that led to Rousseff’s impeachment in Brazil.
Disinformation in the digital age has its own characteristics, the main one perhaps being the amplified power of creation and distribution of content through electronic means. Not just due to technological ease, but mainly because of the absence of curation regarding what is posted, shared, and sent.
Without professional gatekeepers, any content—true, false, or imprecise—can now be created and circulate. Furthermore, the very conception of news has changed: instead of prioritizing timeliness, it can prioritize the confirmation of an old, deep-rooted, or revived belief, according to each individual’s interests.
If information serves the majority, disinformation usually has a target. As part of more or less articulated persuasion strategies, it shapes itself to an audience as a form of propaganda that is harder to recognize. The radical segmentation created by electronic social media has amplified and renewed it, so that—even though it is an old phenomenon—it requires new research to be understood.
While professional press organizations attempt fact-checking, sociology must place it within more complex dynamics and flows, which are less suited to mere rebuttal.