You’re Wrong About Disinformation

Humans get stuff wrong. We do it all the time. We’re biased and blind and overconfident. We’re bad at paying attention and terrible at remembering. We’re prone to constructing self-serving narratives after the fact; worse, we often convince ourselves they are true. We’re slightly better at identifying these distortions in others than we are in our own thinking, but not by much. And we tend to attribute others’ mistakes to malice, even as we attribute our own to well-intentioned error.

All of this makes the very concept of misinformation—and its more sinister cousin, disinformation—slippery at best. Spend 10 minutes listening to any think tank panel or cable news segment about the scourge, and it will quickly become clear that many people simply use the terms to mean “information, whether true or false, that I would rather people not possess or share.” This is not a good working definition, and certainly not one on which any kind of state action should be based.

People believe and say things that aren’t true all of the time, of course. When false beliefs influence the outcomes of major elections or, say, decision making during a pandemic, it’s reasonable to consider ways to minimize the ill effects those false beliefs can create. But efforts by public officials to combat them—and tremendous confusion over how to identify them—may well make things worse, not better.

The battle over the appropriate response to disinformation boiled over in late April, when the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board. There appears to have been astonishingly little thought put into how the public might receive such a declaration, including the board’s rather Orwellian moniker and its equally evocative acronym: DGB.

Several panicked clarifications by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas later, the board appears to be a relatively small-scale operation focused on an odd assortment of topics, including disinformation originating from Russia that might impact the next U.S. election and the dissemination of false information about U.S. immigration policies by border smugglers. This understanding of disinformation as false information purposely incepted for sinister ends by foreign agents is likely the least controversial formulation of the concept.

Still, as an open letter from Protect Democracy, the Electronic Frontier F