That is how modern disinformation tends to work: start somewhere obscure, launder it through seemingly independent voices, and let ordinary people do the rest. The good news is that the tricks are old and learnable, and so are the defences.
This piece describes techniques, not sides. Every political camp, in every country and era, has produced propaganda, and every camp's supporters have fallen for it.
Three kinds of bad information
In 2017 the researchers Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, in a report for the Council of Europe, proposed a now widely used vocabulary:
| Term | Is it false? | Is there intent to harm? | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Misinformation | Yes | No | Your relative shares a wrong health tip, believing it |
| Disinformation | Yes | Yes | A fabricated story planted to discredit someone |
| Malinformation | No, it's genuine | Yes | Leaking someone's private records to hurt them |
Propaganda is broader and older: communication designed to shape opinion for a cause, usually by appealing to emotion and identity rather than evidence. It isn't always false. It can be entirely accurate and still be one-sided, selective and manipulative.
The old toolkit
In 1937, as propaganda was becoming a mass industry, a group of American educators founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis and listed seven common devices. They still describe much of what fills a feed today:
- Name-calling: attach a frightening label so people reject an idea without examining it.
- Glittering generalities: wrap a cause in vague, warm words such as freedom, family or the people.
- Transfer: borrow the prestige of a respected symbol (a flag, a religion, science) for something it has nothing to do with.
- Testimonial: get a celebrity or authority to endorse it, whether or not they know anything about it.
- Plain folks: "I'm just like you," from someone who isn't.
- Card stacking: present only the facts that help, and bury the rest.
- Bandwagon: "Everyone is joining; don't be left behind."
States have built whole machines around these. Nazi Germany created a Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in March 1933 to control the press, radio, film, literature and the arts. Most propaganda, though, comes from much smaller players: campaigns, companies, activists, and individuals with an audience.
Why it works on smart people
Repetition feels like truth. Since a 1977 study by Lynn Hasher and colleagues, psychologists have repeatedly found the illusory truth effect: people rate statements as more believable simply because they have heard them before. A 2015 study found it works even on people who know the correct answer. Each time a claim is repeated, even to debunk it, it becomes a little more familiar.
The brain uses "I've heard this before" as a shortcut for "this is probably true." Propagandists know it.
Falsehood travels faster. A 2018 study in Science by researchers at MIT followed about 126,000 stories shared on Twitter between 2006 and 2017. False stories were about 70 percent more likely to be reshared than true ones, and true stories took about six times as long to reach 1,500 people. Bots didn't explain the gap; people did. False stories tend to be more novel and more emotional, which is exactly what makes us click and share.
Identity beats evidence. We are far more critical of claims that threaten our group than of claims that flatter it. That's why the most effective propaganda is aimed at people who already half-believe it.
How to resist it
1. Pause on strong emotion. Outrage, fear and triumph are the feelings disinformation is built to trigger. If a post makes you furious or gleeful, that's the moment to slow down, not to share.
2. Read laterally. Researchers at Stanford who watched professional fact-checkers at work found they behave differently from most of us. Instead of studying a website closely to judge it, they quickly open new tabs and ask: Who is behind this? What do other sources say about them? Checking what the rest of the web says about a source is faster and more reliable than judging it by its own appearance.
3. Find the original. Screenshots, clips and quotes are easy to crop and strip of context. Look for the full speech, the actual study, the original photo (a reverse image search often shows a picture is years old or from somewhere else entirely).
4. Ask what's missing. Card stacking only works if you don't notice the cards that aren't there. What would someone on the other side say? What number or comparison is left out?
5. Don't amplify by debunking. Because repetition breeds familiarity, lead with the truth rather than the myth when you correct something, and don't reshare a false claim even to mock it.
6. Get inoculated. Psychologists have found that, as with a vaccine, a small dose of manipulation, shown and explained in advance, builds resistance. In a 2022 study, researchers working with Google showed short "prebunking" videos explaining tricks such as scapegoating and false dichotomies; viewers became better at recognising those tricks. The effect was modest and fades after some weeks without a "booster," but it works across political lines because it teaches techniques rather than telling people what to believe.
The hard part: who decides what's false?
Any serious response faces a real dilemma. Platforms and governments can label, remove or down-rank false content, and some countries have passed laws against "fake news." Supporters argue that unchecked disinformation can incite violence and undermine elections and public health. Critics point out that such powers can be, and have been, used to silence journalists, dissidents and inconvenient truths, and that yesterday's "misinformation" is occasionally today's accepted fact. Most democracies are still searching for the balance, and reasonable people disagree about where it lies. That's one more reason the most durable defence is a public that can spot manipulation for itself.
The takeaway
Misinformation is false but innocent, disinformation is false and deliberate, and malinformation is true but weaponised. Propaganda uses old, nameable tricks, and it works because repetition feels like truth, falsehood is more novel and emotional, and identity outweighs evidence. You can resist it by pausing on strong emotion, reading laterally, finding originals, asking what's missing, and learning the techniques in advance. Deciding who gets to label something false is a genuine democratic dilemma, which makes individual skill all the more important.
Try this: play Bad News, a free browser game built by Cambridge researchers in which you play a disinformation producer using the classic tricks. Fifteen minutes on the other side of the screen makes the techniques hard to miss afterwards.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Operation INFEKTION / Operation Denver: the 1983 Patriot letter, KGB, Stasi and Bulgarian involvement, and the 1992 admission by Yevgeny Primakov, head of Russia's foreign intelligence service (historical accounts summarised in standard references).
- Claire Wardle & Hossein Derakhshan, Information Disorder (Council of Europe, 2017).
- Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937–1942) and its seven devices.
- Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, established 13 March 1933.
- Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino (1977) and Fazio et al. (2015) on the illusory truth effect.
- Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, "The spread of true and false news online," Science (2018).
- Stanford researchers' studies of how professional fact-checkers evaluate sources (Wineburg & McGrew), the basis of the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum.
- Roozenbeek et al., "Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media," Science Advances (2022); research on the decay of inoculation effects.
Go deeper
- 🌐 Bad News (the inoculation game)
- 🌐 Civic Online Reasoning (free lessons in lateral reading and source evaluation)
- 🌐 MIT News — "Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories"
- 📘 Foolproof — Sander van der Linden (the psychology of misinformation and how inoculation works)