Is it Misinformation, Disinformation or Malinformation?
#newspaperinlearning
The Hindu, Chennai Edition
I happened to read an article in The Hindu Chennai Edition this week, on the Artemis II Mission being clouded by a blizzard of misinformation.
So what pray, is the difference among these three terms - misinformation, disinformation and malinformation?
Well, misinformation is false information that is shared without any intention to cause harm. The person sharing it usually believes it to be true and might even think they are being helpful. It is essentially an honest mistake.
In short, misinformation is False, but not malicious.
For example, a well-meaning family member shares a Facebook post claiming that drinking hot lemon water cures a specific viral infection. The medical claim is completely false, but the relative shared it because they genuinely wanted to keep their family healthy, not to deceive them.
Disinformation is false information that is deliberately created and shared with the intent to deceive, mislead, or cause harm to a person, social group, organisation, or country.
In short, disinformation is False, and highly malicious/manipulative.
For example, a group creates a fake news website that looks identical to a trusted local newspaper. They publish a completely fabricated story claiming a local political candidate embezzled funds, timing the release perfectly to manipulate voters just days before an election.
Malinformation is true or factual information that is used out of context, exaggerated, or leaked with the intent to cause harm. This usually involves moving private information into the public sphere to damage someone’s reputation.
In short, malinformation is True (or mostly true), but malicious.
For example, a disgruntled former employee hacks into a company’s database and publishes the CEO’s private, legally obtained, but highly embarrassing medical records on the internet solely to humiliate them!
Now for the literary takeaways –
These three types of Information Disorder connect to a tee with the concept of Post-Truth in Literary Studies.
So what is Post-Truth?
Post-truth is a term describing a political and public landscape where objective facts and evidence are less influential in shaping opinion than emotional appeals and personal beliefs. In this environment, objective facts become secondary, and false statements are often ignored if they support a desired narrative.
To put it in simple terms, If “post-truth” is the climate we are currently living in, then three types of Information Disorders are the weather events happening within it!
Because a post-truth society prioritises emotion and belief over empirical evidence, it creates a highly fertile ground for misinformation to spread organically.
And when reality becomes highly subjective, people process information through the lens of identity rather than accuracy. A person is much more likely to share a false story (misinformation) if it validates their pre-existing worldview or evokes strong outrage, completely bypassing critical evaluation. The "truthfulness" of the post is secondary to its narrative utility.
Post-truth offers great scope for study within literary and cultural studies.
Instead of just asking “is this true?”, a literary approach asks: How is this “truth” constructed? Whose interests does this narrative serve? What rhetorical devices are being deployed to make this falsehood feel emotionally true?
One famous literary example come to my mind!
It is Quichotte by Salman Rushdie - a modern retelling of Don Quixote!
This novel is an exemplary critique of the contemporary post-truth era. The protagonist’s mind is so saturated by reality TV and internet culture that the boundary between fiction and the actual world dissolves. Rushdie actively explores how society loses its anchor when “truth” becomes nothing more than whoever has the loudest, most entertaining screen presence!
Sample these two paragraphs from Quichotte by Salman Rushdie. But before you sample-taste it, a word on these paragraphs in advance! ๐
These paragraphs - which form the brilliant opening to Salman Rushdie’s 2019 novel Quichotte - are a masterclass in how a writer’s sentence structure can perfectly mirror the themes of their story.
In fact, the enormous length of the sentences hit you hard! Here, Rushdie is deliberately employing a maximalist style, using a massive, sprawling list (a literary device called cataloguing) to describe the protagonist’s addictive “television diet.”
The long and endless sentence structure reflects the endless, overwhelming stream of modern television and internet content.
The reader is bombarded with a mesmerising volume of images - from housewives and zombies to giant carp and plastic surgery - in the exact same way the protagonist is bombarded by his TV screen!
The lack of full stops in these long paragraphs force us to read it in a breathless way, thereby creating a hypnotic effect that pulls the reader directly into the “quicksand” of the “unreal real” that the protagonist is drowning in!
Moreover, these two passages are a brilliant, modernised parallel to the opening of Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 masterpiece, Don Quixote.
In the classic Spanish novel, a nobleman named Alonso Quijano literally loses his mind because he reads too many books about chivalrous knights. His brain “dries up,” and he loses his grip on reality, and hence he sets out to become a knight-errant to win the heart of a woman he imagines to be a noble lady! (Dulcinea).
In like manner, Rushdie brilliantly swaps 17th-century chivalric romances for 21st-century trash TV.
The “traveling man” suffers a “peculiar form of brain damage” not from books, but from binge-watching reality shows, leading him to pursue an unattainable TV star (Miss Salma R, his Dulcinea) into the television screen.
In fact, the extraordinary length of these opening paragraphs isn’t just about wordiness! It is in fact, a highly deliberate, structural tool used to plunge the reader into the media-obsessed, obsessive mind of a modern-day Don Quixote!
You, we and me! ๐
Now for the opening two paragraphs (OMG type!) from Quichotte by Salman Rushdie for us all -
He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.
As a consequence of his near-total preoccupation with the material offered up to him through, in the old days, the cathode-ray tube, and, in the new age of flat screens, through liquid-crystal, plasma, and organic light-emitting diode displays, he fell victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which the boundary between truth and lies became smudged and indistinct, so that at times he found himself incapable of distinguishing one from the other, reality from “reality,” and began to think of himself as a natural citizen (and potential inhabitant) of that imaginary world beyond the screen to which he was so devoted, and which, he believed, provided him, and therefore everyone, with the moral, social, and practical guidelines by which all men and women should live. As time passed and he sank ever deeper into the quicksand of what might be termed the unreal real, he felt himself becoming emotionally involved with many of the inhabitants of that other, brighter world, membership in which he thought of as his to claim by right, like a latter-day Dorothy contemplating a permanent move to Oz; and at an unknown point he developed an unwholesome, because entirely one-sided, passion for a certain television personality, the beautiful, witty, and adored Miss Salma R, an infatuation which he characterized, quite inaccurately, as love. In the name of this so-called love he resolved zealously to pursue his “beloved” right through the television screen into whatever exalted high-definition reality she and her kind inhabited, and, by deeds as well as grace, to win her heart.
Coming back –
Well, in an era where our screens constantly dictate our realities, the line between fact and fiction isn’t just blurred – it’s actively being erased all of the time!
Whether we are facing the innocent ignorance of misinformation, the calculated manipulation of disinformation, or the weaponised facts of malinformation, the responsibility ultimately falls on us.
It is up to us to ensure that our own minds don’t “dry up” from bingeing on the endless scrolls of the post-truth eras that pop up constantly on our mobile screens!
Added, before we share, repost, or accept a sensational narrative as absolute truth, let’s take a step back and ask those essential literary questions: How is this truth constructed? And whose interests does it really serve?
Keep your reality checks grounded, your critical lenses polished, and try not to fall entirely into the addictions of the mobile screen! ๐
Because, as critic Scupin Richards rightly says,
There’s more to life than the mobile! ๐
Stay curious, stay questioning, and see you in the next post! ๐
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