Are we really going to do anything about disinformation?

Former President Barack Obama announced that he is devoting time and resources to address disinformation's pressing scourge in our political and cultural discourse. He's right to do so, but there are a few things we should be aware of as we wade deeper into this phenomenon.

I've been fighting disinformation for the better part of forty years, since the birth of the crisis management field. I am launching this Substack to discuss what I know – and what we need to learn – about the "velocity, volume and venom" of news, real or imagined, in the lead up to the publication of the updated edition of my damage control book, Glass Jaw. New chapters will tackle fake news, cancel culture and the rise of corporate "woke-ery."

I plan to use this forum as a regular opportunity to contextualize the larger stories of the day through this lens, provide a running commentary of how different companies and individuals are dealing with these real issues and even some suggestions as to how they can beat back some of the disinformation or misinformation that is flying at them at speeds we have never seen before. 

We now understand disinformation as well as we understood cancer research in the 1930s – we're learning to recognize it but not do much about it because social media has metastasized its speed and impact. Trickery is an ancient phenomenon, addressed aplenty in the Bible: Jacob wears goatskin so he's perceived as the hirsute Esau and Jesus talks about false prophets, to name two. The British spread false propaganda about Napoleon being tiny in an attempt to demoralize the latter's army (Napoleon was normal-sized). The twentieth century gave us Hitler's Big Lie about the Jews being the central cause of Germany's woes and in our current millennium, social media has detonated a disinformation bomb and the residue is everywhere. 

To begin to defuse falsehoods, we need first to understand that there is a difference between disinformation (willfully planted lies such as Obama's being foreign-born); misinformation (inaccurate information that may surface without malice such as the reports about Fidel Castro or Tom Petty's deaths); biased news (the media's tendency to report on homelessness more during Republican administrations); and news we don't like because it conflicts with our worldview, which we all see every day.

If we fail to make these distinctions, we risk even further polarization because algorithms are designed to whip up conflict because it attracts eyeballs, clicks and, therefore, advertising revenues. What happens, for example, if Obama's well-intentioned efforts highlight the racist origins of "birtherism" but downplay the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and the media hibernation during the uncovering of Hunter Biden's cascade of scandals? To this end, Obama will need to appreciate the grievances of those who have never and would never vote for him.

As this chart from Axios shows, the broader media-consuming public (in this case, Twitter) is growing increasingly aware of this misinformation phenomena and there tends to be large spikes during large world events. 

While trying to reverse the effects of disinformation in my crisis management business has been a complicated and often soul-crushing endeavor, any success I have ever had involves two things: risk to the perpetrators and a hefty budget for getting to the taproot of a smear. Put more simply, if there is neither exposure nor sanction for lying, nothing will change. Not only has fake news gone unpunished, the population at large doesn't appear to be outraged beyond chatter at a neighborhood barbecue. Disinformation serves purposes, one of them being that, at some level, we like what we're hearing.

Obama's – and our – first order of business is to address how to punish fake news malefactors and better understand why there is so little outrage. Any solutions will proceed from there.