Does disinformation make you feel tired and frustrated? Does it make you angry? Want to cry? Like it or not, campaigners and change-makers will need to manage increasing levels of misinformation and disinformation for the foreseeable future. In this blog, Steve Tibbett, host of the podcast 100 Campaigns that Changed the World discusses what might work and what won’t from his recent event Trust and Truth, Campaigning in the Disinformation Age.
I organised an event to think through a response to these issues and was joined by some great speakers including disinformation expert Charles Kriel, who told the audience that online disinformation is largely based on behavioural design. He also predicted that AI is about to “flood the zone with deep deepfakes, revenge porn and waves of disinformation”.
As one questioner in the audience put it, it’s a “nightmarish” scenario. And now disinformation is being weaponised for everything from big foreign policy changes to moving the stock market.
Campaigners – who rely on evidence and trust to get their point across – will need to adapt. So, what can be done? I think three things probably won’t work and three things that might.
First to what won’t.
There is little evidence that fact checking will reverse or undermine disinformation. While it’s important to have facts checked, we can see from Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent showdown with Donald Trump and JD Vance that the facts don’t really matter, even if they are important to state.
A strategy of countering disinformation by legally clamping down on the perpetrators may be desirable but it won’t necessarily stop disinformation from increasing. We have seen an uptick in online disinformation in the UK since the imprisonment of riot-inciters, post-Southport, and exponential growth in falsehoods in the US space, post-January 6th.
Business-as-usual also won’t work. Some campaigners believe that if you keep stating the facts, and present them over and over again, this will stop the influence of conspiracy theorists and lies. It might be a successful advocacy strategy when you have a reasonable and responsible government, but that can also change when the zeitgeist does, and the disinformation has clearly affected the political tone in the long run.
So, what might help?
One thing that emerged from the event is that disinformation is hard-wired into the system, especially the social media infrastructure. If we can affect the economics of social media, we might be able to influence the prevalence of disinformation. we need government to do this, preferably governments together. In reality, this will need to be driven and supported by a big, joined up advocacy campaign with the full weight of civil society behind it.
Secondly, if you examine social media interactions with the made-up posts and retweeted stories that they like, the engagement is generally emotional and not rational. And so, as seen by the failure of fact-checking, you need to engage people where they are, on an emotional level. Campaigners are good at this, but they don’t do it enough. It means highlighting the human stories and natural justice that underpin so many campaigns and the people that can benefit from them. This will also be about employing more authentic campaign narratives and telling more compelling people-centred stories.
Thirdly, the context is changing fast. Disinformation has always existed, but now it’s smarter and bigger. Most campaigners don’t talk much about it and are struggling to know what to do to combat it. We need many more conversations about our response, and not just stick our collective heads in the sand and hope it will go away. Civil society needs a collective response, and it needs to get organisation organise quickly and with unity and purpose.
Steve tibbett is host of the 100 Campaigns that Changed the World podcast. The event was sponsored by 38 Degrees and the University of Westminster, and supported by Sheila McKechnie Foundation and the Advocacy Hub.