Disinformation is a dirty business

My fantabulous co-authors Andrew Frank, Richard Hunter and I published the book World Without Truth (with the help of dozens of great colleagues) a couple of months ago, and have been presenting it around the world and discussing it with hundreds of Gartner clients in the public and private sector, journalists, politicians and others ever since. It is clear to us that the disinformation deluge is coming, it is a trillion dollar problem for the global economy, everyone we talk to buys that story, no one we talk to feels prepared. Disinformation is a very different problem to cyber-security and needs different governance, processes, tooling, metrics. It also seems clear that where the ‘1’s and ‘0’s of computing are clearly true or false, yes or no, right or wrong, disinformation is a much murkier business. Firstly, we actually have three types of information issue – Misinformation = accidental bad information, like an uninformed social media influencer spreading what they think is the truth, e.g. about vaccines. Disinformation = deliberate bad information, like campaigns to besmirch the products, reputations, executives of companies, governments etc. Malinformation = the use of accurate information without context in order for it to be misinterpreted. Then we note that skilled disinformers use very sophisticated tactics, like polluting our mental models so we make our own bad information, polluting AI training data to build disinformation creation into an LLM, sometimes bombarding us with too much information, sometimes starving us of information, sometimes distracting us with ‘informational honeypots’ about other topics, sometime working to damage the credibility of accurate sources of information. At our Barcelona IT symposium recently, a client raised the topic of the recent BBC issue with their editing of Donald Trump’s speech, and asked whether it could be considered disinformation or malinformation. Soon after a doctored video of UK politician David Lammy becoming a clown in parliament was never meant to be seen as real, but instead as satire. Disinformation is a dirty, dirty business. And it is coming to get us all. We need to get ready. The AI-generated picture associated with this post may happen to accidentally imply that our book World Without Truth may make an excellent Christmas/ Chanukkah/ Holiday gift. 😊 (Link in the first comment below.) #unthink #unask #unlearn #WorldWithoutTruth