2009_Don-Fallis_A-Conceptual-Analysis-of-Disinformation.pdf

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A Conceptual Analysis of Disinformation
Don Fallis
University of Arizona
1515 East First Street
Tucson, AZ 85719
(520) 621-3565
fallis@email.arizona.edu
ABSTRACT
In this paper, the serious problem of
disinformation
is discussed.
It is argued that, in order to deal with this problem, we first need
to understand exactly what disinformation is. The philosophical
method of conceptual analysis is described, and a conceptual
analysis of disinformation is offered. Finally, how this analysis
can help us to deal with the problem of disinformation is briefly
discussed.
techniques that work for inaccurate and misleading information in
general. Indeed, it will often be more difficult to identify
disinformation since the source of the information does not want
us to realize that the information is inaccurate or misleading.
Disinformation is nothing new, of course. Forged documents,
doctored photographs, deceptive advertising, deliberately falsified
maps, and government propaganda have been around for years.
The standard example is the
disinformation campaign,
known as
Operation Bodyguard, used during World War Two to hide the
intended location of the D-Day invasion (cf. [4], pp. 71-75).
Among other deceits, the Allies sent out fake radio transmissions
in a successful attempt to convince the Germans that there was a
large force in East Anglia that was ready to attack Calais (rather
than Normandy). However, disinformation has recently become a
much more pressing threat to information quality.
New information technologies are making it easier for people to
create and disseminate information that is intended to deceive.
2
For example, people are able to deceive Internet users by creating
websites that “impersonate” the websites of reputable sources of
information (cf. [5]). Also, people are able to convincingly
manipulate visual images (cf. [6]). In fact, it now requires very
little technical skill to create and widely disseminate
disinformation. For example, anyone with Internet access can
anonymously insert misleading information into Wikipedia (cf.
[7]).
Moreover, the problem of disinformation is a critical one for
information science (cf. [2], [7], p. 1665, [9], [10], [11], [12]).
Libraries and other information services can easily end up being
unwitting (and sometimes witting) conduits for the spread of
disinformation. In addition to the disinformation that patrons may
access over the Internet, many library collections include
government propaganda and historical fabrications (cf. [13]).
Recognizing the problem of disinformation, the American Library
Association has recently issued a “Resolution on Disinformation,
Media Manipulation & the Destruction of Public Information”
[14].
Keywords
accuracy, conceptual analysis, disinformation, epistemology,
information quality, lying, misinformation, philosophy
1. INTRODUCTION
Accuracy
is a critical dimension of information quality (cf. [1]).
People can easily acquire false beliefs about the world as a result
of inaccurate and misleading information. And such false beliefs
can often lead to significant emotional, physical, and financial
harm.
Inaccurate and misleading information can have such bad
consequences whether the source of the information made an
honest mistake (misinformation) or actually intended to deceive
(disinformation).
1
But how we deal with the problem of
inaccurate and misleading information
can
depend on the
intentions of the source. For example, effective techniques for
identifying disinformation are likely to be different from the
We might hold that disinformation and misinformation are
mutually exclusive categories (cf. [2], p. 134). Alternatively, we
might hold that disinformation is a proper subset of
misinformation. In other words, misinformation would simply be
inaccurate information in general (cf. [3], p. 201). I do not take a
position in this paper on the best way to analyze the concept of
misinformation.
1
There was the same sort of opportunity for deception when new
printing technology first made books widely available. In
particular, there was often a question of whether you held in your
hands the authoritative version of a given text (cf. [8], pp. 30-31).
Techniques eventually developed for assuring ourselves of the
authority and reliability of books. But such techniques are not
always immediately available with new information technologies.
2
In order to deal with this threat to information quality, information
scientists need to find answers to several important questions
about disinformation. For example:
•
•
•
•
•
Why is disinformation as prevalent as it is?
Under what circumstances is disinformation most prevalent?
How can we deal effectively with the problem of
disinformation?
How can disinformation be identified?
Can the problem of disinformation be dealt with in a way
that does not violate rights to free speech and intellectual
freedom?
years old. As a result, the meaning of ‘disinformation’ may not be
quite as fixed as the meaning of these other terms. However, we
must have somewhat stable, shared intuitions about the use of the
term. Otherwise, we would not be able to communicate
effectively with each other using the term. Moreover, even if
there is some disagreement about whether the term applies to
certain cases, the method of conceptual analysis can still yield a
useful taxonomy of deceptive phenomena in the vicinity of
disinformation.
3. THE VARIETIES OF DISINFORMATION
Before we start trying to identify necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions for disinformation, it will be useful to lay out the main
varieties of disinformation with some examples.
(1) Disinformation is usually taken to be a
governmental
or
military
activity (as with Operation Bodyguard). As George
Carlin put it, “the government doesn’t lie, it engages in
disinformation.” In addition, the standard dictionary definition of
disinformation is “deliberately misleading information announced
publicly or leaked by a
government
or especially by an
intelligence agency.”
3
However, other organizations can also
produce “deliberately misleading information.” In particular,
news services are frequently sources of disinformation (cf. [4], pp.
23-53). In fact,
single individuals
are often the source of
disinformation. For example, individual reporters (e.g., Jayson
Blair of the
New York Times
and Janet Cooke of the
Washington
Post)
have simply made up stories. Also, there have recently been
some high-profile cases of purported memoirs that turned out to
be fictional creations (cf. [18], [19]).
(2) Disinformation is often the product of a carefully planned and
technically sophisticated deceit (as with Operation Bodyguard).
For example, hackers have intentionally disseminated inaccurate
information by directly modifying the websites of news services
such as
Yahoo! News
and the
New York Times
(cf. [20]).
However, creating disinformation can be as simple as telling a lie.
For example, when President Clinton said to the American people,
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss
Lewinsky,” he was disinforming them. In fact, even manipulating
the contents of a website does not always require sophisticated
hacking skills. Anyone can purposely (and anonymously) add
inaccurate information to Wikipedia. For example, the entry on
the journalist John Seigenthaler was famously modified to falsely
claim that he was involved in the Kennedy assassinations (cf. [7],
p. 1665).
(3) Disinformation does not always come
directly
from the
organization or the individual that intends to deceive. For
example, news services have often been tricked into disseminating
inaccurate or misleading information created by someone else. A
few years ago, an investor created a fraudulent press release
stating that the CEO of Emulex Corporation had just resigned (cf.
[5]). When this fraudulent press release was subsequently
published by several news services (including
Bloomberg, CBS
Marketwatch,
and
Dow Jones),
Emulex stock lost over half its
value in just a few hours.
This definition comes from the
American Heritage Dictionary of
the English Language
(2006, 4
th
edition). The
Oxford English
Dictionary
provides almost exactly the same definition.
3
Before we can address these questions, however, we need to
understand exactly what disinformation is. In other words, we
need a
conceptual analysis
of disinformation.
2. THE METHOD
ANALYSIS
OF
CONCEPTUAL
Several years ago, the information scientist Christopher Fox gave
an influential conceptual analysis of
information
and
misinformation
[3]. But he did not consider disinformation. This
paper will provide a conceptual analysis of disinformation and
will briefly indicate how such an analysis can help us to address
the aforementioned questions.
The goal of the method of conceptual analysis is to find a list of
necessary
and
jointly sufficient
conditions that correctly classify
things as falling under a given concept or not (cf. [15], section
2.1). Plato famously used this method in his dialogues to try to
understand such concepts as
justice, knowledge,
and
love.
For
example, according to the “Platonic” analysis of knowledge,
something is knowledge if and only if it is
justified, true,
and
believed.
That is, if something is knowledge, then it is justified,
true, and believed (the necessity condition). Also, if something is
justified, true, and believed, then it is knowledge (the sufficiency
condition). In our case, we need to find a list of conditions that
are necessary and jointly sufficient for something to count as
disinformation.
In order to determine if such an analysis is correct, the method of
conceptual analysis has us appeal to the
intuitions
of competent
speakers of the language about whether particular (often
hypothetical) cases fall under the given concept (cf. [3], pp. 24-
25). As the philosopher of language John Austin pointed out in
[16], leveraging intuitions in this way can help us to understand
important phenomena in the real world. For example, to test the
Platonic analysis of knowledge, we look at things that our
intuition tells us are instances of knowledge and check them
against the proposed conditions (i.e., are they justified, true, and
believed?). Also, we look at things that satisfy the proposed
conditions (i.e., things that are justified, true, and believed) and
consider whether our intuition says that they are instances of
knowledge (cf. [17]). In our case, we need to appeal to intuitions
about whether specific pieces of information count as
disinformation (given that we know certain things like whether
the information is accurate, who created the information, why
they created it, etc.).
Admittedly, ‘disinformation’ is a relatively new term compared
with terms like ‘knowledge’ and ‘lying’. It is only about fifty
(4) Disinformation is often written or verbal information. But
other types of inaccurate information (e.g., doctored photographs)
can also be disinformation (cf. [6]). For instance, Stalin and Mao
each had people who had fallen out of favor removed from
photographs.
4
Also, during the Cold War, the Soviets deliberately
falsified maps in an attempt to fool their enemies about where
important sites were located (cf. [21], pp. 115-118).
(5) Disinformation is often distributed very widely (e.g., to
anyone with a newspaper subscription, to anyone with a
television, to anyone with Internet access). But disinformation
can also be targeted at specific people or organizations. For
example, Jeff Danzinger (of the
Los Angeles Times)
has a cartoon
that shows a couple working on their taxes. The caption is “Mr.
and Mrs. John Doe (not their real names) hard at work in their
own little Office of Strategic Disinformation.”
Such
disinformation is presumably aimed directly at the
Internal
Revenue Service.
(6) The intended victim of the deception is usually a person or a
group of people. But disinformation can also be targeted at a
machine. As Clifford Lynch points out in [22], managers of
websites sometimes try fool the automated “crawlers” sent out by
search engines to index the Internet. For example, suppose that
you have just started selling a product that competes with another
product
Y.
When an automated crawler asks for your webpage to
add to its index, you might send it a copy of the webpage for
product
Y.
That way, when someone uses the search engine to
search for product
Y,
the search engine will return a link to your
webpage.
possible to lie without disinforming. First of all, in order to
disinform, you have to intend to deceive someone (cf. [2], p. 134,
[23], p. 231). But it is possible to lie to someone even if you do
not intend to deceive her (cf. [24], p. 289, [25], [26]). For
example, suppose that you are guilty of a crime that everyone
knows that you committed. However, there is not enough
evidence to convict unless you confess. So, you say to the police,
“I am innocent,” even though you know that they will not believe
you. In this case, you have lied to the police. But you have not
disinformed them because you do not intend them to believe
something false (i.e., you do not intend to deceive them). As Roy
Sorensen points out in [25], such “bald-faced lies do not fool
anyone. They are no more a threat to truth telling than sarcastic
remarks.”
Of course, most lies are intended to deceive. And these are
arguably the most important type of lies. For example, these are
the lies that we build lie detectors to detect. In addition, these are
the lies that most philosophers (especially moral philosophers) are
interested in. In fact, the standard philosophical analysis of lying
requires an intention to deceive (cf. [27], section 1.4). James
Fetzer probably intended to equate disinforming with such
deceptive lying.
(D
1
) You
disinform
X if and only if:
1. You say that
p
to X.
2. You believe that
p
is false.
3. By saying
p,
you intend X to infer that
p.
It is worth noting that, while you have to intend to deceive
someone, disinforming does not require that she actually ends up
being deceived. It is also worth noting that you must intend to
deceive and not just intend to disseminate false information. For
example, every map is inaccurate to some degree and the
cartographer who made the map knows it. If certain features,
such as roads, were really drawn to scale, they would be too small
to see (cf. [21], p. 30). But despite such inaccuracies, it is clearly
not the case that all maps are disinformation. Furthermore, the
cartographer is not disinforming people even if they happen to be
misled by such features.
4. DISINFORMING = LYING?
Just as Fox began his analysis of information by analyzing the
activity of
informing,
this paper begins by analyzing the activity
of
disinforming.
In the following section, I will consider the
phenomenon of disinformation itself.
A plausible suggestion that philosophers (e.g., [23], p. 231) have
made is that disinforming is essentially the same as lying. This
equivalence is also suggested by the very title of Russ Kick’s
You
Are Being Lied to: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion,
Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths.
In addition, George
Carlin’s comment suggests that disinformation is just a
euphemism for lying.
This characterization of disinforming is very illuminating and
reasonably close to being correct. As noted above, lying often
does count as disinforming. But there are several important
respects in which lying is not the same as disinforming. These
complications need to be considered in order to give a precise
analysis of disinforming.
4.2 Actual Falsity
However,
D
1
is still not restrictive enough. In order to disinform,
you have to intend that someone infer something that is actually
false. But it is possible to (deceptively) lie to someone even if
you intend her to infer something that (unbeknownst to you) is
actually true. For example, suppose that the police ask you about
your friend Ramon’s whereabouts and that you want to mislead
them about where he is. You believe that he is staying with his
cousins outside the city. So, you say to the police, “he is hidden
in the cemetery.” However, without your knowledge, Ramon has
actually hidden himself in the cemetery. In this case, you have
lied to the police (cf. [26], [27], section 1.2). But you have not
disinformed them because what you intend them to believe is not
actually false. It is clear, for example, that librarians are primarily
worried about their patrons getting information that actually is
inaccurate (cf. [2], p. 134). Thus, it might be suggested that you
disinform if you say something that actually is false with the
intent to deceive.
(D
2
) You
disinform
X if and only if:
4.1 Intending to Deceive
To begin with, there are a couple of respects in which
disinforming is a more restrictive concept than lying. That is, it is
4
Similarly, in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
functionaries in the Ministry of Truth continually altered historical
records to insure that the government was always right.
1.
2.
3.
4.
You say that
p
to X.
You believe that
p
is false.
By saying
p,
you intend X to infer that
p.
p
is false.
falsified map. Things like photographs and maps do not have
propositional content.
In other words, they are not descriptions of
the world that are either true or false. These things only have
representational content.
That is, they can simply be more or less
accurate depictions of the world.
5
But we can easily fix both of these problems with
D
3
simply by
replacing the communication requirement with the requirement
that you simply disseminate some information.
(D
4
) You
disinform
X if and only if:
1. You disseminate information
i.
2. You believe that
p
is false.
3. By disseminating information
i,
you intend X to infer
that
p.
4.
p
is false.
Now, to give a full account what it is to disinform, we really need
to say exactly what
information
is. And, in fact, there are many
different (often conflicting) theories of information to choose
from (cf. [3], pp. 39-74). But
D
4
arguably provides a useful
analysis of disinforming even if we simply assume a common
sense understanding of what information is. We just need to
stipulate one substantive, and somewhat controversial, thing about
the nature of information. Namely, information need not be true
or accurate (cf. [3], p. 160, [32]).
While you can disinform by saying something true, in the
prototypical cases of disinforming, you say something false. For
example, when the President said to the American people, “I did
not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he
seemed to be disseminating
false
information.
However,
according to several philosophers (e.g., [33], pp. 45-46, [34], pp.
887-90, [35], 360-365), the President did not disseminate any
information
in this case; false or inaccurate information is not
information at all. As Fred Dretske puts it in [36], “false
information, misinformation, and (grimace!) disinformation are
not varieties of information—any more than a decoy duck is a
kind of duck.” But even for these philosophers, there is a broader
category of stuff that encompasses both information and
“inaccurate information.”
Namely, there is stuff with
representational content. And the term ‘information’ in
D
4
should
simply be understood as referring to stuff with representational
content.
4.3 Communicate Deceptively
However,
D
2
is too restrictive. You can disinform someone even
if you know that what you are saying is true. In order to
disinform, you must intend to bring about a false belief. But the
actual information that you provide does not have to be false. For
example, suppose that a murderer asks about your friend Joe’s
whereabouts and that you want to mislead him about where he is
(cf. [28], pp. 437-38). You believe that he is hiding in the
basement. So, you truthfully say to the murderer, “he’s been
hanging around the drugstore a lot” intending that the murderer
draw the false conclusion that he is at the drugstore now. In this
case, you have disinformed the murderer without saying anything
that you believe to be false.
Most philosophers think that you are not lying in such a case
because you are saying something that you believe to be true (cf.
[27], section 1.2). But several people (e.g., [29], [30], [31]) have
a broader notion of lying that counts such
false implicatures
(or
“half-truths”) as lies. These people think that it is the intention to
deceive that really determines whether someone is lying. Thus,
according to these people, a liar does not have to say something
that she believes to be false. She just has to
communicate
something that she believes to be false. Similarly, it might be
suggested that you disinform if you
communicate
something false
that you believe to be false.
(D
3
) You
disinform
X if and only if:
1. You communicate that
p
to X.
2. You believe that
p
is false.
3. By communicating
p,
you intend X to infer that
p.
4.
p
is false.
4.4 Disseminate Misleading Information
However,
D
3
is still too restrictive. First, you can only
communicate
to
someone. But you can disinform someone
without communicating anything directly to him. For example,
suppose that you want to trick your friend Benedick into believing
that Beatrice is in love with him. So, you say to a companion
(who is in on your little scheme) that Beatrice is in love with
Benedick when you know that Benedick is eavesdropping on your
conversation. In this case, you have disinformed Benedick. In
fact, this is the same sort of disinforming that happened with the
fake radio transmissions during World War Two. But you have
not communicated
to Benedick
that Beatrice is in love with him.
In order for you to do this, it would have to be completely
open
between the two of you that you have said that Beatrice is in love
with him. In other words, communicating has a
common
knowledge
requirement that disinforming does not (cf. [31],
section 3).
Second, you can only communicate
that
some state of affairs
obtains. In other words, you must be expressing a proposition
(e.g., that Beatrice is in love with Benedick). But you can
disinform without expressing any particular proposition. For
example, you can disinform with a doctored photograph or a
4.5 Reasonable to be Deceived
However, even once we stipulate that information need not be
true,
D
4
is still not quite right. Even if you intend to deceive X,
you have not disinformed X if it is not reasonable to infer
p
from
the information that you have disseminated. For example, if you
say to the murderer, “Joe has been under the weather,” intending
that he come to believe that Joe is at the drugstore now, you have
not disinformed him. In order for you to disinform someone, it
has to be reasonable for her to draw the false conclusion that you
intend them to draw. In a similar vein, according to the Federal
Trade Commission, in order to count as deceptive advertising,
Even for people who endorse a narrow analysis of lying, lies do
not have to be verbal utterances (cf. [27], section 1.1). For
example, you can lie by writing a letter or sending smoke signals.
But you can disinform without using language at all.
5
“the representation, omission or practice must be likely to mislead
reasonable
consumers” (quoted in [37], p. 188).
(D
5
) You
disinform
X if and only if:
1. You disseminate information
i.
2. You believe that
p
is false.
3. You intend X to infer from information
i
that
p.
4.
p
is false.
5. It is reasonable for X to infer from information
i
that
p.
More concisely, what is required for disinforming is that you
disseminate some information (condition 1) that you intend to be
misleading (conditions 2 and 3) and it actually is misleading
(conditions 4 and 5).
6
It is worth noting that condition 5 rules out the articles in
The
Onion
as cases of disinforming. These articles are intended to be
humorous rather than misleading. But even if the editor of
The
Onion
did hope to deceive her audience with a particular article,
she would still not be disinforming them. It would not be
reasonable for people to infer that “Al Gore Places Infant Son in
Rocket to Escape Dying Planet” from the fact that
The Onion
says
so.
4.7 Deception Foreseen
However, it is possible that
D
6
is still not quite right. There are
cases where people spread “deliberately misleading information”
but do not intend to deceive anyone by doing so. In fact, in at
least two of our examples of disinformation, it is not clear that the
perpetrator really intended to deceive anyone. For example, the
person who modified the Seigenthaler entry on Wikipedia claimed
that he was just playing a joke on a friend. Also, the hacker who
modified the
Yahoo! News
website apparently did so in order to
alert people to the security vulnerabilities of the website.
Now, it might be suggested that, in these cases, the perpetrator
really did intend to deceive. For example, the joke would not
have been funny (maybe it was not funny anyway) if the friend
had not been taken in. In other words, deception was a necessary
means to the ultimate goal of the perpetrator. Also, if the hacker
had really not wanted to deceive anybody, he could have exposed
the security problem by simply vandalizing the
Yahoo! News
website rather than by posting a false news story.
But there are other examples of “deliberately misleading
information” where there is very clearly no intention to deceive.
For example, many cartographers deliberately falsify their maps.
In order to protect their intellectual property, many cartographers
add a few features to their maps that do not really exist in the
world (cf. [21], pp. 49-51). If these non-existent features show up
in another map of the same area, the cartographer has good
evidence that her work has been copied. But these cartographers
do not intend to mislead map users about these non-existent
features.
Also, people have intentionally placed inaccurate information on
the Internet for educational purposes (cf. [38], [39], p. 10). For
example, a website for the
Oklahoma Association of Wine
Producers
and a website advertising a town in Minnesota as a
tropical paradise were created to teach people how to identify
inaccurate information on the Internet. In fact, people (e.g., [2])
have intentionally placed inaccurate information on the Internet
for research purposes as well. For example, several researchers
have put false information into Wikipedia to see how long it takes
to get corrected (cf. [7], p. 1665).
In all of these cases, the perpetrator has some goal other than
deception that she is trying to achieve (such as teaching people
how to evaluate websites or protecting her intellectual property).
And she may be able to achieve this other goal even if no one is
deceived. In addition, this other goal may often be sufficiently
laudable that it provides an
excuse
for having deceived someone.
But it is important to note that having an excuse for having
deceived someone does not mean that the perpetrator has not
disinformed him.
While disinforming may not require that the source of the
misleading information intend to deceive people, it does at least
require that the source of the information
foresee
that people will
be deceived.
7
In other words, unlike lying, disinforming is always
4.6 Deceptive Content
However,
D
5
is still not quite right. The
content
of the
information has to play a role in the deception. Otherwise, we are
just talking about run-of-the-mill deception. For example,
suppose that you truthfully say to King Arthur in a heavy French
accent, “we’ve already got a Holy Grail” intending that he draw
the false conclusion that you are francophone. In this case, you
have certainly attempted to deceive the King (using information),
but you have not disinformed him (as long as you do have a Holy
Grail). You are no more disinforming him than if you had put on
a beret intending that he draw the false conclusion that you are
francophone. If such cases counted as disinforming, it would
arguably be just another word for deceiving.
(D
6
) You
disinform
X if and only if:
1. You disseminate information
i.
2. You believe that
p
is false.
3. You intend X to infer from the content of information
i
that
p.
4.
p
is false.
5. It is reasonable for X to infer from the content of
information
i
that
p.
While the content must play a role in the deception, it should be
noted that things beyond the content of the information can also
play a role. For example, if you create a map of South America to
look like it was drawn by Europeans in the 17
th
century (e.g., on
old parchment, with ornate lettering) to try to misled people into
thinking that Machu Picchu was discovered in the 17
th
century,
you would seem to be disinforming these people.
7
6
Condition 5 just makes explicit something that is implicit in any
analysis of lying. For example, it goes without saying that, if you
communicate
p,
then it is reasonable for someone to infer that
p.
Philosophers draw a distinction between (a) what a person
intends to do by performing an action and (b) what a person
simply foresees as a likely “side effect” of performing that action
(cf. [24], p. 291). But there is a debate over whether this

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