What is Disinfology?
An introduction and historical retrospective.
Disinfology is the study of disinformation, a field that has exploded in popularity since the double whammy of the Brexit referendum and US presidential election in 2016.
Everyone is scrambling to explain the origins of “disinformation”, a term that has come to include all false assertions whether intentionally or unintentionally spread.
Russia is generally thought to be the source of the problem and to have a hand in most disturbances and divisions in the West.
Where is all this coming from and is this stuff new or have we seen it before?
While curiosity about Russian espionage and attempts to educate the public about subversive activities existed during the Cold War, what is new about disinfology is that it has become cool.
Being an anti-Communist was never cool. Maybe it should have been, but it definitely wasn’t.
Claims to research “fake news” is something every journalist or cybersecurity expert would like to have in their bio and to chronicle on their blog.
In contrast, “anti-Communist” is a badge few journalists would like to wear, even during the Cold War it was considered tacky and reserved for those irrationally imagining Communist or Soviet influence everywhere.
The label was mainly applied to “redneck” nationalist and church groups fearing a decline in Christian and patriotic values in the United States, the opposite of what progressive journalists and left-leaning academics would want to be associated with.
While some prominent anti-Communists had a background in intelligence or were even former Soviet spies having defected from the KGB, these were perceived as grifters preying upon gullible right-wingers and in the latter case as merely repeating what their audience expected to hear.
Whenever the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) or one of the other anti-Communist investigative entities would host a public meeting in a major American city the event would be strongly protested by Liberal university students and faculty members.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) even advocated the HUAC be abolished.1
Disuniting the People
In recent years, there have been growing complaints our society is no longer concerned with truth and that in the past political disagreements were rooted in differences of complicated values, while those today are over basic facts.
This development is often blamed on the Internet which, due to its massive increase of available information, is said to have split the population into separate groups without a common reference point.
In this environment our communities have allegedly become more vulnerable to disinformation, which main purpose is to disunite the people in the countries it targets.
However, this isn’t a new fear, “propaganda is for disuniting the people” is a sentiment dating back at least to World War II.
In 1942, Laura H. Ingalls, a famous aviator and peace activist, was found guilty of failing to register as an agent for Germany and spreading propaganda on its behalf, most notably by dropping pamphlets from her plane above the US congress building.2
In a New York Times piece, D. E. Balch, the prosecutor at her trial, is described as accusing Ingalls of being part of a Nazi fifth column in the United States and having used the Hitler technique “of disuniting the people”.3
“She used her prestige against the American people to disunite them at the paid direction of the German Government,” Balch is directly quoted as saying elsewhere in the same article.4
Understanding the Disinformation Panic
The “anti-war” Left usually presents the disinformation panic as something manufactured by the intelligence agencies in pursuit of national security interests.
While this perspective might hold some value, in actuality the majority of material on Disinfology is produced by journalists, academics and think-tank wonks without military experience.
What all three groups have in common is that they help form the informational foundation of society, and as the Gatekeepers of Truth they have an interest in portraying their opponents as deceitful Sowers of Discord.
The real journalist is of course the logical archnemesis of the “fake” journalist.
Disinformation is a convenient accusation, because it discredits the person or movement it is leveled against without addressing their arguments. It’s like calling on the referee during a soccer game to disqualify the other team, or give a red card to one of their players, for breaking the rules.
The warnings and suspensions handed out on social media makes this analogy particularly appropriate.
Humans are quick to dismiss those expressing conflicting viewpoints as spreaders of propaganda, because we have a poor ability to imagine how someone could reasonably arrive at beliefs different from our own. Believing that the other person is lying or has been lied to removes this tension.
Ultimately, the disinformation panic arose because it feeds off a variety of human needs and weaknesses.
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“A.C.L.U ASKS END TO HOUSE INQUIRY” - by Austin C. Wehrwein. New York Times. April 25, 1960. Retrieved from TimesMachine.
“Laura Ingalls Drops Peace Pleas Over Capital, May Lose License” - New York Times, September 27, 1939. Retrieved from TimesMachine.
“INGALLS JURY GIVES VERDICT OF GUILTY” - by Associated Press, published in the New York Times, February 14, 1942. Retrieved from TimesMachine.
Ibid.