What if everything you know about “disinformation” is wrong? We could soon find out. The once-obscure concept surged to prominence after the 2016 election as analysts tried to explain right-wing and populist movements in Western democracies. But with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and accompanying free-speech pledge, the disinformation bubble may be bursting.
The idea that unsupervised media consumption leads voters to mass political delusion isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of democracy. Yet the “disinformation” theory of the United States’ political woes steadily gained purchase in Silicon Valley, where powerful Internet companies have taken an increasingly active role in scrubbing or suppressing certain speech deemed (often accurately, sometimes not) to be false or misleading. The Department of Homeland Security now even uses the acronym “MDM” — mis- dis- and mal-information — to describe a “terrorism threat to the U.S. homeland.”
Musk’s promise to reverse Twitter’s trajectory toward stricter moderation doesn’t just shake up the company — it repudiates one of the most influential theories of media and society in recent years and sends a shock wave through the institutions erected to promote it. The door is open for fresh thinking on self-government and the information revolution.
The best account of the rise of the disinformation field appeared in a 2021 essay for Harper’s by Joseph Bernstein. Big Disinfo, Bernstein wrote, “emerged during the Trump years at the...
Welcome to Reality Check, NewsGuard’s nonpartisan newsletter that tracks the false claims and conspiracy theories that shape our world — and who’s behind them. Please support us by becoming a premi...