A Brief History of the Disinformation Age:
Information Wars and the Decline of Institutional Authority
Bennett and Livingston
Disinformation: intentional falsehoods or distortions, often spread as news, to
advance political goals (such as discrediting opponents)
- A crisis of legitimacy of authoritative institutions lies at the heart of the
disinformation disorder
Confirmation bias: tendency to privilege information aligned with prior beliefs
Conventional Explanations for Disinformation
- While blaming social media addresses one element of a larger problem, this
account misses the breakdown of institutional authority, which has undermined
trust in official information
- Misses deeper erosions of institutional authority (elected officials)
- Looking at how individuals process (dis)information seems to fit better with
fact-checking and media-literacy than with broader systemic explanations
- Popular explanations point to the well-documented efforts of the Russians and
other foreign governments to disrupt elections and amplify social conflicts in
Europe and the US
- Unclear how hackers, bots, and sock-puppets can be prevented from
spreading fabrications
- Foreign disinformation often amplifies narratives promoted by
domestic sources
- Understandings of disinformation problems, along with the related solutions,
tend to focus on the symptoms and not the causes of communication disorders
- Bennett and Livingston examine capture and erosion of governing institutions
by wealthy interests and aligned political elites, unable to sell their actual
agendas to the public without increasing levels of disinformation
- Spread through think tanks, corporate deception, partisan political
organizations, election campaigns, and government officials
, A Deeper Institutional Explanation
- The current information disorder is the result of the erosion of liberal
democratic institutions (independent judiciaries, apolitical civil services, and
political parties)
- Decades of corrosive political and economic pressure have eroded public
confidence in institutions
- Institutions that were once able to vet truth claims and defined a more cohesive
public sphere have fractured
From Spin to Disinformation
- As a result of broad changes in both global and national economies over the last
half-century, along with business pressures to shield economic choices from
voters, the center-left and center-right parties in many democracies have lost
touch with their traditional voters
- Information credibility in democracies depends on authoritative sources offering
a resonant mix of value positions, supported with varying degrees of evidence
and reason about why those positions make sense and how they could happen
- A rupture of communication spheres (bounded by citizens, parties, press,
and public institutions) opens up communication spaces for ever-greater
departures from conventional reason and established civic norms
- Citizens are in search of emotionally affirming alternative facts
- The regulatory challenges of digital platforms and social media (deception,
propaganda, and divisive speech) are in part due to the claims by movements and
elected parties that such communication is legitimate
- Communication enters mainstream public spheres that were once
bounded by institutional gatekeepers
- When large publics become detached from conventional norms of reasonable
discourse and elected politicians abandon facts that prove inconvenient to policy
objectives, the rising volume of disinformation becomes impossible for the
conventional press to ignore
Early Twentieth Century Origins: Public Relations and Democratic Management
- Elites discussed strategies for managing popular passions to prevent further
disruptions of political and economic systems (particularly in the US)
Information Wars and the Decline of Institutional Authority
Bennett and Livingston
Disinformation: intentional falsehoods or distortions, often spread as news, to
advance political goals (such as discrediting opponents)
- A crisis of legitimacy of authoritative institutions lies at the heart of the
disinformation disorder
Confirmation bias: tendency to privilege information aligned with prior beliefs
Conventional Explanations for Disinformation
- While blaming social media addresses one element of a larger problem, this
account misses the breakdown of institutional authority, which has undermined
trust in official information
- Misses deeper erosions of institutional authority (elected officials)
- Looking at how individuals process (dis)information seems to fit better with
fact-checking and media-literacy than with broader systemic explanations
- Popular explanations point to the well-documented efforts of the Russians and
other foreign governments to disrupt elections and amplify social conflicts in
Europe and the US
- Unclear how hackers, bots, and sock-puppets can be prevented from
spreading fabrications
- Foreign disinformation often amplifies narratives promoted by
domestic sources
- Understandings of disinformation problems, along with the related solutions,
tend to focus on the symptoms and not the causes of communication disorders
- Bennett and Livingston examine capture and erosion of governing institutions
by wealthy interests and aligned political elites, unable to sell their actual
agendas to the public without increasing levels of disinformation
- Spread through think tanks, corporate deception, partisan political
organizations, election campaigns, and government officials
, A Deeper Institutional Explanation
- The current information disorder is the result of the erosion of liberal
democratic institutions (independent judiciaries, apolitical civil services, and
political parties)
- Decades of corrosive political and economic pressure have eroded public
confidence in institutions
- Institutions that were once able to vet truth claims and defined a more cohesive
public sphere have fractured
From Spin to Disinformation
- As a result of broad changes in both global and national economies over the last
half-century, along with business pressures to shield economic choices from
voters, the center-left and center-right parties in many democracies have lost
touch with their traditional voters
- Information credibility in democracies depends on authoritative sources offering
a resonant mix of value positions, supported with varying degrees of evidence
and reason about why those positions make sense and how they could happen
- A rupture of communication spheres (bounded by citizens, parties, press,
and public institutions) opens up communication spaces for ever-greater
departures from conventional reason and established civic norms
- Citizens are in search of emotionally affirming alternative facts
- The regulatory challenges of digital platforms and social media (deception,
propaganda, and divisive speech) are in part due to the claims by movements and
elected parties that such communication is legitimate
- Communication enters mainstream public spheres that were once
bounded by institutional gatekeepers
- When large publics become detached from conventional norms of reasonable
discourse and elected politicians abandon facts that prove inconvenient to policy
objectives, the rising volume of disinformation becomes impossible for the
conventional press to ignore
Early Twentieth Century Origins: Public Relations and Democratic Management
- Elites discussed strategies for managing popular passions to prevent further
disruptions of political and economic systems (particularly in the US)
