Mis and Disinformation: Mission to Mitigate

Welcome to the Allegiance Against Misinformation blog!

Here we will provide information about mis and disinformation and provide tips and tricks to help you see whether or not what you are reading online is true or false.

For our first blog post, we felt that it would be nice to explain who we are and define the meanings of misinformation and disinformation.

Allegiance Against Misinformation was created by a group of university students at the University in Glasgow, Scotland, with the hope of spreading knowledge about the harms of misinformation and disinformation whilst providing ways to mitigate the issue. As social media usage for news reading and gathering information increases greatly, helping users understand that what they are reading online may not be the full truth is very important to us.

Firstly, it is important to define what we mean by misinformation and disinformation and what harms they pose. Misinformation and disinformation is information which contains false information either by mistake or on purpose.

Misinformation is when information found online is false and is usually posted with no intent of deceiving readers. These kind of posts are usually spread across a wide audience on different social platforms. An example of misinformation is the stories around the 5G network being a cause of cancer. There was no scientific evidence to prove this. This false information came from the belief that 5G waves can be harmful to humans however, this information was exposed as false and the truth that 5G waves cannot get through the skin’s barrier to cause such illnesses and diseases was brought to light. There was also misinformation spread about the Covid-19 vaccine and how it poses harm to human life.

Disinformation is essentially similar to misinformation but the false information is spread deliberately to deceive those who read it. Again, disinformation posts can be spread widely across different social platforms and people truly are vulnerable to these kind of posts. It is also worth noting that misinformation posts can be classed as disinformation when people sharing the posts do so knowing that they are false and therefore are deliberately sharing false information. An example of disinformation is Russia’s interference with the 2016 Presidential Election. Russian interreference was conducted through Facebook Ads, pages and groups to spread false ‘propaganda’ against Hilary Clinton, the Presidential nominee for the Democrat Party, across swing states and specifically targeted regions.

To end this post, we are going to leave you with some simple, basic ways of identifying these kinds of posts and also how to check sources of information with the help of Meira Gebel, Insider Reviews.

Things to look for which may make you suspicious:

o Does it seem to good to be true?

o Does it appear as though you see posts solely based on what you are interested in?

o Does it evoke extreme positive or negative emotions?

o Does it appear out of date or sourced incorrectly?

How to check a source:

o Look at the author

o Look at the organisation

o Look at the date it was published

o Look at the evidence it presents

o Look at what other sources say about the issue