Telephone
Imagine with me for a moment please.
You are 11 years old, its the first time your mom has ever let you go to a slumber party and she finally thinks you’re responsible and a big kid. You get told its lights out, but of course you and your friends can’t go to bed quite yet, not after having that many pixie sticks and pizza slices earlier. What game do you decide to play in the dark that’s quiet enough not to wake your friend’s parents? Telephone! You all sit in a circle and its decided that the person on your left will pick the phrase and you will take turns clockwise, so for this round you will be the last person and it will be your job to yell out what you heard to see if its accurate to what the person next to you started. You try and fail to hear what was originally whispered, then you watch and wait as each of your friends receives the phrase and giggles or furrows their brows or flat out asks “what’s that mean?”. Eventually the circle makes its way to you and you lean in close to hear them whisper. The friend to you right cups their hands around their mouth creating a tunnel between their lips and your ear. “We all think that you’re a bore”. Confused, you say the phrase out loud and feel a little hurt thinking maybe its just an insult meant for you specifically. Your eyes tear up a little when you look to the friend on your left who started the whole game, seeing their own eyes full of laughter as everyone in the circle giggles or acts confused. “No, silly,” the friend on the left says, “I said ‘she sells sea shells by the sea shore”. Oh. So things got muffled and omitted and changed just slightly to words that sounded similar during the game. This is one of your first obvious encounters with misinformation.
We hear the terms misinformation and disinformation thrown around so regularly these days. One news source claims a competitor is spreading misinformation, your colleague accuses HR of spreading disinformation, everyone is confused and using the two terms interchangeably. This is to clear some of that up and to talk about why misinformation shouldn’t be handled with hostility, but rather with an opportunity to educate and be educated.
Misinformation is the unintentional spread of false information that you yourself believe to be true. Some very common pieces of innocent misinformation are even old wives tales, they’ve just existed socially for so long and are so widely known that the masses accept them as truth even when the opposite can be proven. Not inherently harmful, and certainly not intentionally spread to mislead and hurt people. You can also think of a game of telephone where you start with the truth but with every new mouth spreading the word it becomes more and more muddled until its unidentifiable as the original.
Disinformation is another story. Disinformation is the intentional spread of false or misleading information, typically with an agenda for doing so. Commonly this includes spreading false rumors intentionally to cover a truth of what happened. Fans of The Office might remember the episode where Michael is spreading rumors about everyone in the office to cover up the rumor of Stanley’s affair (sorry for the spoiler but you’ve had over a decade to catch up).
Disinformation is obviously wrong and malicious and I won’t attempt to dictate how your emotions urge you to react to discovering it. Misinformation, however, is too often lumped in with disinformation and met with hostility when it shouldn’t be. Misinformation should be met with education, teaching people how to fact check, teaching people the correct facts to begin with. Denying people education will only make them resentful and more likely to spread explosive misinformation based on emotion instead of fact.
