Ask most people what to do about disinformation and the answer involves technology: better algorithms, stricter platform rules, smarter detection tools. Those things matter. But framing disinformation as fundamentally a technology problem quietly assumes the hard part is the delivery mechanism. It isn't. The hard part is us.
False information is old; the speed is new
Rumour, propaganda and manufactured outrage long predate the internet. What platforms changed is not the existence of falsehood but its velocity and reach — and, crucially, the economic incentive to produce it. Content that provokes strong emotion travels further, and content that travels further earns more attention. The machinery is new; the human appetite it feeds is not.
Why fact-checking alone isn't enough
Fact-checking is necessary and valuable, but it runs into a stubborn wall: people don't primarily believe false things because they lack facts. They believe them because the false claim fits a story they already hold about how the world works, or about who is trustworthy. You can debunk a specific claim and leave the underlying narrative — and the distrust that feeds it — completely intact.
The trust vacuum
Disinformation thrives wherever legitimate trust has collapsed. When people no longer trust institutions, experts or mainstream media, they don't become sceptics of everything equally — they go looking for alternative sources of certainty, and disinformation is happy to supply it. This is why rebuilding accountability in legitimate media isn't separate from fighting disinformation. It's the same fight.
What actually helps
Platform design and regulation have a role. But the more durable defences are human: media-literacy education that teaches people how to evaluate sources, local journalism that gives communities trustworthy information about their own lives, and transparency from mainstream media that earns back the trust the disinformation ecosystem exploits. None of these is a quick fix, and none can be automated.
The uncomfortable conclusion
Treating disinformation as a technology problem is comforting because technology problems have technology solutions — someone else's job, fixable by a better tool. Treating it as a human and institutional problem is harder, because it implicates the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding trust. But that's where the real leverage is.
Sources & further reading
- European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), research briefings on disinformation in Europe.
- Academic literature on the "backfire" limits of fact-checking.
- Reuters Institute, studies on the relationship between institutional trust and misinformation.