Dan Brown
We tend to think of disinformation as a content problem — bad information spread by bad actors. But disinformation is something more insidious: the deliberate corruption of information ecosystems, turning even true information into a tool of doubt and confusion.
In this talk, I’ll highlight several structural vulnerabilities that make information ecosystems susceptible to manipulation — from misaligned incentives and hollowed-out institutions to the exploitation of identity, complexity, and our own demand for certainty. Disinformation is more than lies and falsehoods. It instead weaponizes information by exploiting weaknesses in shared information spaces.
But if structure enables disinformation, structure can also resist it. Information architects — the people who shape how knowledge is named, organized, framed, and governed — have a significant role to play. Seeing the vulnerabilities with clarity offers opportunities to correct the vulnerabilities in information ecosystems, and make them more resilient.