I’m not convinced that the term disinformation fully captures the scale or complexity of what we’re now facing, which is weaponized force that is undermining our societal structures, manouvering public perception, societal stability, value systems, markets, and everyday life.
Since much of our information environment has migrated from the physical to the digital sphere (think libraries, newspapers, and face-to-face exchanges to search engines, social media, and personalized feeds), the means of accessing and organizing information have also changed.
The tasks of surveying, collecting, and structuring knowledge have been transferred from human inquiry and interpretation to algorithmic systems built to manage vast amounts of data and make them consumable. In doing so, we have decoupled the epistemic process of knowing; from direct, lived experience to mediated algorithmic inference. This separation has opened a gap in which manipulation and distortion thrive, eroding public trust and destabilizing the institutions meant to preserve truth.
What we call disinformation is only the visible symptom of this deeper structural shift.
The real transformation lies in how knowledge is now produced, filtered, and legitimized. It is no longer grounded in shared reality and human interpretation, but filtered through algorithmic intermediaries that shape our experience of reality, and it is sustained by corporate infrastructures that have replaced public knowledge institutions.
What we face is not only an epidemic of falsehoods but a reconfiguration of how reality itself is constructed and contested, a transformation in what we might envision as the grammar of truth.
Disinformation names only a fragment of this larger shift in the human relationship to knowledge.
This structural shift in our information environment is something I’ve been studying since I first began working on information retrieval and recommendation systems nearly twenty years ago. Over the past decade, as the manipulation of public perception has become a defining challenge for democratic institutions, I’ve led several public and private initiatives focused on countering disinformation across digital media—text, images, video, and audio alike. Despite growing awareness, this remains one of the most complex and consequential societal problems of our time.
Recent writing on this: