this and misinformation are essentially two different types of bad information and the difference between the words is the intent behind it so when we talk about disinformation we're talking about bad information that is spread with the intent to deceive or manipulate someone and misinformation is bad information that doesn't necessarily have a bad intent behind it so it's bad information that can be spread naively by somebody who doesn't know that it's incorrect there's a long history for bad information and there are many examples in the 20th century for instance an entire cottage industry for manipulation of
the visual record specifically photographs developed under the soviet dictator joseph stalin at the time it was quite difficult to manipulate photographs so you needed skilled artisans in order to be able to do it and one of the things that they did was literally rewrite the historical record when stalin's great purges of the 1930s meant that his political enemies or anyone who deemed a threat were removed one by one they were also literally unpersoned in these photographs another early manipulation that these craftsmen did they airbrushed his face in these photographs because he famously was plagued by
his pockmarked face the thing that's changed now is that it is much easier thanks to technology to be able to do what took immense expertise and a lot of effort and skill in the 1930s it's important to recognize the crisis of bad information because we are living in the age of information several things have happened that mean that the crisis of bad information is worse than it ever has been before the first of those is the level of sophistication when you look at how easy it is now to create miss and disinformation it's becoming more
sophisticated and with the coming age of synthetic media where ai will be able to generate fake media including video it's going to get worse the second thing is the accessibility of this kind of bad information so whereas in previous decades it was always somebody who had an immense amount of resource whether that was a state actor or a hollywood studio who basically had a monopoly over creating the most sophisticated forms of disinformation because of the democratizing power of technology now increasingly almost anyone can do it and the third reason why it is so important and
different now is because of course the reach we have one global information ecosystem so whereas previously in the analog age you know you were limited in terms of how far your mis and disinformation could spread now you can reach a global audience with immediacy the political use of disinformation in campaigns has existed for a long time however what's different now is the potency and the tools by which it's waged and to take a example of that you can consider soviet disinformation in the 1980s where they used the one myth to undermine america by which they
claimed that the hiv virus was manufactured by the cia to kill african-american people that in the 1980s took 10 years to go viral so the strategy is the same disinformation as a tool to undermine your enemy whereas now the potency has become far more powerful
