Information Manipulation: The Gap between Disinformation, Misinformation, & Malinformation

In today’s generation, social media has been at peak stardom, and that popularity gave the masses the opportunity to distinguish information more efficiently. However, netizens do not have the assurance that the data they have obtained from social media is accurate or not. Disinformation, misinformation, and malicious information hold control of social media that can take advantage of people’s ignorance and lack of fact-checking.

Disinformation has been coined as false information with the intent to cause harm to the subject matter. A perfect example of its impact is the shooting incident in Washington D.C when a man from North Carolina wanted to save the children who were said to be trapped in a pizza shop called Comet Ping Pong. The man brought a rifle to raid the place to find the child from the so-called child sex trafficking but got arrested before he could find the children. The pizza shop owner then claims that all allegations are based on a tweet that their pizza was the base of a pedophile sex ring.

Fortunately, no one was hurt in the shooting incident. The impact of misinformation can create events where innocent people suffer and using the information to manipulate society can result in chaos.

On the other hand, misinformation is unintentional false information with no intent to cause harm to the subject matter. An example of misinformation is the activity on Twitter of the former President. Donald Trump is in his first year as president. It has been found that on January 16, 2018, over 522 tweets were on the account of the Former President. Trump was indeed misinformed. Most of it is about immigration and immigrants dealing with drugs, human trafficking, and violent crimes for their nation. Based on his tweets, he wanted to have a travel ban from certain countries for they will cause danger to the people and the country.

Such crucial actions can gradually cause a change in the environment, especially the immigrants. The false information changed the society’s perspective of the immigrants for they have been manipulated by the false tweets of the Former President. Trump.

Malinformation is factual information with the intent to cause harm to the subject matter. For example, this generation who are technologically inclined with social media can already create chaos. Some experience blackmailing of sexual scandal for personal purposes. On social media platforms, some take it as humorous content to gain popularity. Some are just curious about

the viral concepts and others are willingly watching such activity. However, on one end, the victim of such malinformation could cause tremendous trauma, social anxiety, and/or depression.

This action is purposely done to destroy someone’s reputation and deliberately produce the information to abuse the information. This phenomenon can give access to the author or the creator enough power to manipulate someone or threaten someone to bend to his/her will. This could be secrets, past, and background, so keeping your privacy safe is much better.

Disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation, in general, are the different usage of information in a way to gain the power to manipulate either purposely, or unintentionally, whether to cause harm or not. Information should be produced by individuals with the capability to produce a quality of information that is beneficial for society and not for themselves only. Since disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation have been dealing damages to all social media platforms, may these incidents be our references as the result of being unaware of misused information, false information, and abusive information.

As a sum, though misinformation is an unintentional mistake it can still be taken seriously. The producer of the information is still responsible for the damage it may cause. Disinformation is an act with the intention to produce chaos, people must know how to fact-check and not believe everything they read especially on social media. Lastly, Malinformation may produce facts but if those facts are just negative, then we must know how to respect this information and not use this as a weapon to attack someone. These three phenomena can be a source of power for someone who has the desire to use the information to gain power and manipulate the netizens who are fond of social media platforms. Let us be careful about what we share, thoughtful about what we say, and knowledgeable about what we think.

Sources:

https://bit.ly/3cvcEpC https://bit.ly/3BhFDYw https://bit.ly/3OEgTwu

by Masheil Rose Dango