Fake News Menace: The difference between misinformation and disinformation

I am engrossed in a book by Bryan Stevenson when my mobile rings. It is one of my highly excitable friends. “Did you check your messages?” she shrieks. “I just heard that there is a new machine at KEM Hospital that can cure paralysis.” As she launches into a homily on what it means for all those with paralysed limbs, I sigh. Cutting into her diatribe, I say tersely, “It’s not true.” “What?” she gasps. “Don’t believe everything you read on WhatsApp,” I add and hang up.

Welcome to the new world of ‘Gullible’s Travails’, where spreading fake news and believing misleading information has become as common as a child’s unwavering belief in the tooth fairy. The news of the new machine at KEM Hospital was misleading and inaccurate. What the WhatsApp messages got wrong was the fact that the so-called miracle machine was an angiography machine that can treat stroke patients by removing a clot up to 24 hours from the onset of the stroke. But the damage done by a message gone viral resulted in a mad rush of patients racing to the hospital to take advantage of the miraculous cure.

The concept of spreading fake news is as old as the hills. When the first set of cavemen told a neighboring tribe that they had seen a Mastodon 10,000 paces away, it was a neat ploy to clear the area of any competition. Food had to be hunted down and shared and sending someone on a wild Mastodon chase seemed like a devilish idea. In fact, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, on his recent visit to India, alluded to the same when he said fake news is not a new phenomenon in the world and has been going on since the dawn of humanity. But what has got it more scalable is faster and accessible technology on multiple levels.

In recent times, the term ‘Fake News’ shot into prominence with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidential office. The term was first aired when Trump accused CNN of pushing “fake news” during a heated press conference in New York on January 11, 2017. That was it. The two words entered the regular lexicon and the world woke to a word which finally replaced ‘Brexit’.  Fake news was used so frequently in 2017 that the Collins Dictionary ended up citing it as the ‘Word of the Year’ in 2017.

It’s easy to think that everyone knows what “fake news” means: Information which may not have a credible source or may be designed to mislead. But there are two types of fake news and these can cause varying degrees of unpleasant consequences if left unchecked.

The first type of fake news is ‘misinformation’: When people lie or communicate wrong news without realising it is false. The intent may not be to lie, but may rely on the fact that the person actually believes the information to be true. Examples of these are urban legends such as the existence of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’, alien site Area 51 in Nevada in the US, or my personal favorite, the chain letters that come our way ever so often which suggest that if you don’t pass them on to 10 more people, there will be terrible consequences. The WhatsApp message about the KEM paralysis cure machine is just such an example of people lying without realising they are the purveyors of wrong news.

The other kind of fake news is potentially very dangerous. This is ‘disinformation’, which is knowingly and maliciously spreading wrong information designed to skew people’s opinions on a subject in a certain way. A prime example of this is the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda during the days leading up to World War 2. Anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda came in the shape of speeches, publications, music, education and even art, all designed to convince those Germans who were not anti-Semitic. Another example of disinformation is cigarette ads, where the tobacco industry makes considerable effort to confuse the public into thinking the science proving that smoking causes cancer is “unsettled” o r unreliable.

In today’s highly digitised world, anyone with a phone and a social media platform has an opinion they want to air. Everyday technology is getting cheaper, enabling people to consume and distribute data and information whenever they get their hands on a phone. While digital revolution has made people more informed, it has also made it easier to disseminate information without a thought as to its veracity. 
Furthermore, companies like Google, Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter synergise and compile information from millions of sources to distribute it another millions across the globe.

In such a scenario, fake news becomes the norm rather than the exception. As I am mulling this fact, my phone rings again. It is the same friend with the KEM machine information. “You are wrong, you know,” she says accusingly. “I got that information from at least six groups. And they all won’t forward unless it is true.” I groan inwardly and reach for a pen to write this column.

Writer is an author, blogger & journalist