Misinformation, spread by exploiting our eagerness to share content without thinking, has created a “new world disorder” that we need to safeguard against
Our willingness to share content without thinking is exploited to spread disinformation By Claire Wardle | Tweets: @jenlschwartz , @dgwbirch , @sciam , @monaelswah , and @carnage4life Tweets: Jen Schwartz / @jenlschwartz : If you want context for Chinese disinformation efforts in the Hong Kong protests, start here. I was thrilled to have online manipulation expert @cward1e write about disinformation for our special issue on Truth, Lies & Uncertainty. https://twitter.com/... @dgwbirch : This is why we can't have an Edwardian democracy in a world of social media. One of them has to change. https://www.scientificamerican.com/ ... Scientific American / @sciam : Digital disinformation is not just about Twitter bots. Our willingness to share content without thinking is being exploited by bad actors to sow division and spread chaos. https://www.scientificamerican.com/ ... @monaelswah : “Ahead of platform moderation, they are relabeling emotive disinformation as satire so that it will not get picked up by fact-checking processes. In these efforts, context, rather than content, is being weaponized. The result is intentional chaos.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/ ... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : I'm reminded of the dueling trending topics when Epstein died blaming Trump then the Clintons. At first people blamed bots but when Twitter investigated the hash tags were being shared by real users. Easier to blame bots or Russians than concede humans are gullible & cliquish https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing in Scientific American's 'Truth, Lies & Uncertainty' special issue, disinformation researcher Claire Wardle framed the core vulnerability as human rather than technical: bad actors exploit users' eagerness to share content without thinking, producing what she called a 'new world disorder.' The related coverage reads as the case file proving her point — from the worldwide disinformation-for-hire industry selling fake accounts and pseudo news sites, to pandemic conspiracies kept alive through Wayback Machine links to content fact-checkers had already debunked or gotten deleted.
First-order effects
- Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are pushed into labeling and removal as their default defense, but researchers found Trump tweets carrying fact-check labels spread further than unlabeled ones, meaning the primary mitigation can amplify what it targets.
Second-order effects
- As platforms police obvious fakes, professional PR and marketing firms fill the gap with disinformation-as-a-service — false narratives and pseudo news sites that look organic — while deleted content resurfaces through archives like the Wayback Machine, outflanking takedowns.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, trust itself becomes platform infrastructure: the binding constraint shifts from hosting content to verifying it at scale, and the 2020 cascade of pandemic, protest, and election disinformation shows the cost of failing that shift is societal cohesion, not just brand safety.
The trend: Disinformation is industrializing faster than platform moderation can verify content, turning user sharing behavior into the attack surface of record.