2025-01-26
Beyond Lies - Nine Stratagems Disinformers Can Use To Disrupt and Destroy
To be read whilst listening to “Liar”, one of the best songs by Queen, from their best album by far “Queen”
I have been privileged to spend the last four years researching, thinking and writing about the world of accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation with my colleagues Richard Hunter, Leigh McMullen, Andrew Frank, Owen Pengelly and many others. Obviously a super hot topic at the moment. A recent World Economic Forum survey found it to be the most important global risk at the moment, voted ahead of wars, climate issues etc.
Disinformation is fascinating and scary in that it is a meta-issue, making it harder to trust the facts needed to address every other issue. And it is the collision of one of the oldest disciplines in the world - lying – with some of the newest and fastest moving – deepfakes, generative and agentic AI, advanced analytics and behavioural economics. It is also super-interesting in that it has philosophical, ethical, technical and very practical societal and commercial angles.
In this post, I thought I would share one of the aspects that grabbed my attention. Beyond just providing clearly wrong facts, here are nine other stratagems disinformers can use to damage and disrupt countries, organizations, brands and individuals:
1. Corrupt and pollute your mental models so you make up your own bad facts (and ideally pass them on to others)
2. Cherry pick and provide true, but incomplete information, often without necessary context
3. Customize disinformation for each person receiving it based on deep knowledge of their hopes, fears, beliefs
4. Censor what content you receive (if they have the position/ power to do so, like owners of platforms or makers of laws)
5. Deluge you with information which exhausts you, so you can’t process it all (a bounded rationality stratagem)
6. Distract you with titillating information on other topics so you lose focus on an issue they want you to ignore (a kind of informational honeypot)
7. Divide society by providing and amplifying multiple perspectives on a contentious issue (I don't care what you believe, I just want you to disagree with/hate your neighbour)
8. Divert you over time by providing a series of small, slightly wrong facts over time that slip under your cognitive radar
9. Discredit the sources and/ or the motivations of sources of accurate information
Generative and agentic AI, advanced analytics and social media make all of the above not only possible, but scaleable and democratized
Our book “World Without Truth” will be out later this year, but in the meantime, we and lots of our colleagues in Gartner would love to talk to you about disinformation.
#unthink
#unask
#unlearn
#WorldWithoutTruth
#disinformation
#misinformation
#malinformation
#AI
#generativeAI
#agenticAI
#Gartner
The image Dave made for this
A picture created by ChatGPT/Dall-E. It is supposed to represent disinformers having multiple stratagems. there is a scary figure in black in the centre with multiple hands holding various objects by strings, like a puppet master.