Disinformation

Disinformation can be understood as misleading information, intentionally produced and deliberately disseminated, to influence public opinion, harm a target group or advance political or ideological objectives.

By comparison, “misinformation” is information that is factually inaccurate but is passed along by a purveyor who is ignorant of the inaccuracy and does not intend to deceive. “Disinformation,” on the other hand, is information the purveyor knows is false yet deliberatively imparts with the intention of deceiving or misleading.

Disinformation is to communications what a diversion is to a military manoeuvre. It is information which has the semblance of truth, leaked or made available to espionage or to the media, in order to create attitudes or provoke actions favourable to the objectives of the disinformers. In some cases of social statistics, disinformation is provided to international collecting agencies solely to make programmes and policies of incumbent regimes appear progressive and productive. Disinformation is therefore static in the entire international communications network, civil or military, commercial or political.

On Jan. 11, 1923, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to create a Department of Disinformation. Its mission was “to mislead real or potential adversaries about the true intentions” of the USSR. From then on, disinformation became a tactic of Soviet political warfare known as “active measures,” a crucial element of Soviet intelligence strategy involving falsification, subversion, and media manipulation.

During the Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, this tactic was used by numerous intelligence agencies. The expression “disinformation of the masses” came into increasing use in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1980s. Former Soviet bloc intelligence officer Ladislav Bittman, the first disinformation professional to defect to the West, observed in this regard that ”the interpretation [of the term] is slightly distorted because public opinion is only one of the potential targets; [m]any disinformation games are designed only to manipulate the decision-making elite, and receive no publicity”.

Disinformation is mainly orchestrated by government agencies. Government, military and other bureaucracies are organized in such a way that reports from lower echelons must necessarily contain a certain percentage of disinformation in order to meet with the approval of the higher echelons to which they are submitted. Programme reports are written so as to give the best possible interpretation to the actions of those responsible for their implementation and thus further (or protect) their future careers. In intergovernmental organizations writing 'positively' is often encouraged.

In some countries, policymakers may turn to their national history to justify the implementation of certain regulations on information. German politicians, for example, frequently refer to the Nazi past or that of the communist Stasi to justify the regulations they want to put in place. Yet these historical comparisons don’t always hold water. The Nazis, for example, did not come to power because they controlled the then-new technology of radio. Rather, once in power, they used the state control on radio stations that the previous Weimar governments had put in place—in the hope of saving democracy—to their own benefit. This decision by the Weimar governments had the perverse effect of enabling the Nazis to control radio much more quickly than newspapers.