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.