Last week’s issue economist featured several articles defining disinformation as “falsehoods intended to deceive.” More precisely, I define it as the intentional publication or dissemination of factual information that is almost certainly false by individuals or organizations whose self-interest is to spread lies.
article “The truth/lies behind Olena Zelenska’s $1.1 million Cartier” (titled “Anatomy of Disinformation” in the short print version) details recent events. Researchers at Clemson University have retraced the story of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife, who reportedly spent $1.1 million on Fifth Avenue in New York City. This false article, which recycles a previous false article, made its way to African news sites from an Instagram video reposted on YouTube (presumably from someone in St. Petersburg) and was published as “propaganda content” (i.e. (paid advertising) and repeated frequently.Russian press, fake American publications DC Weekly, and repost it as trusted news. It ended up being shared at least 20,000 times on Twitter and TikTok. Many now think this has been proven to be old “news”.
This example of sophisticated disinformation was almost certainly a Russian government operation. Such operations by foreign governments are particularly difficult to uncover. No journalist goes to St. Petersburg to find and interview the woman who supposedly spread lies on Instagram. In freer countries, such operations are riskier and less likely because a free press can more easily uncover and publicize government disinformation conspiracies.
as economist According to the note, disinformation from rulers has always existed, but what has changed is the scope of private disinformation and private amplification of government disinformation. As the cost of creating and distributing disinformation has fallen dramatically, its costs have doubled. Danger comes not only from the right but also from the left, especially from the populist wing. If you are a “citizen,” your lies become truths.
Thirty years ago, an observer of human affairs said that everything you read or hear on television is privately Verified by some gatekeepers. News items and their sources were at least vouched for by journalists and their editors, not to mention media owners with brand names to protect. Similarly, book ideas and authors had to pass through the private gatekeepers of the publishing industry. Self-publishing is very expensive, and the author was identified as anonymous and potentially unreliable (not interesting in the case of novels and poetry). Since Gutenberg, a lot of material of questionable value has been published (think Marxism), but its dissemination costs a lot of money, and readers have to either actually buy the publication or go to a library to read the material. There was a need. Even after the invention of radio and television, which featured many figures like Father McLaughlin, some private gatekeeping services were still provided by station owners and those who financed maverick stations. Although it did not prevent the circulation of ideas and challenges, the cost barrier eliminated much of the snake oil.
Nothing was perfect, of course, but new dangers followed. What the World Wide Web has done since the mid-1990s, and what social media has done in the first decade of the 21st century, is that anyone can share ideas and disinformation at very low cost (at the limit, only the speaker’s or relay’s time). The goal was to make it possible to disseminate it to the world in the same way. ). AI is further reducing this cost. You don’t even need to know how to write (i.e., how to string words one after the other in a coherent discourse) to generate disinformation. From the perspective of readers and listeners, it has become more costly to distinguish between serious heretical ideas and pure disinformation, but AI will also provide tools to expose fakes.
What is the danger? Beyond a certain point, it is no longer possible to maintain a free (or more or less free) society. A self-regulating social order must collapse when a certain percentage of its members become hopelessly confused between truth and falsehood, or come to believe that truth does not exist. Even free agreements between individuals (trade is a prime example) become too costly as the likelihood that someone is a liar and a fraud increases. We don’t know where the tipping point will be. But we also know that it has been achieved in countries like Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and China (despite glimmers of hope after the end of Maoism and its Red Guards). At that point, only an authoritarian, if not a totalitarian, government can coordinate individual behavior. manu military.
*******************************************
Written by Pierre Lemieux and DALL-E
