Battling the Infodemic: How Misinformation Spreads and How to Combat It

In 2020, amid the convergence of a global pandemic, widespread protests, and a contentious presidential election, misinformation has become nearly inescapable in everyday life. False information intertwines seamlessly with facts in our social media feeds, political discourse, and even in printed materials delivered to our homes. The World Health Organization has aptly termed this phenomenon an “infodemic” – a contagion of disinformation that threatens both individual well-being and democratic institutions.

The Technology and Social Change team at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Policy has responded to this crisis by launching the Media Manipulation Casebook, a comprehensive database documenting how misinformation campaigns develop and spread. The project offers a structured framework for analyzing manipulation campaigns through a five-stage “media manipulation life cycle” designed to help researchers, journalists, policymakers, and technology companies identify and counteract these harmful efforts.

“Like a virus, disinformation is contagious and potentially deadly—to individuals and democracy itself,” notes the research team in their introduction to the Casebook. Their work represents three years of research examining how various stakeholders confront media manipulation campaigns, both domestic and international.

The early internet era promised unprecedented opportunities for connection and knowledge-sharing. Scientific communities, advocacy groups, and independent media initially flourished with advances in networked communication. However, that techno-utopian vision has given way to something far darker: platforms now scramble to contain the radicalization they’ve enabled, while vital institutions face ransomware attacks, authoritarian regimes deploy cyber-troops, and conspiracy theories rooted in anti-Semitism and medical misinformation flourish unchecked.

The Casebook’s media manipulation life cycle breaks down this phenomenon into five distinct stages, each requiring different interventions from different stakeholders.

In Stage 1, “Campaign Planning,” small groups of motivated actors develop strategies to exploit technology platforms. This stage often occurs in obscure online spaces, making attribution and detection challenging. Researchers note that uncovering evidence at this stage requires domain expertise and often specialized research methods like “Investigative Digital Ethnography,” which combines ethnographic, sociological, and anthropological approaches to understand online communities.

Stage 2, “Seeding the Campaign,” marks the transition from planning to execution. Here, manipulators spread memes, hashtags, forgeries, and misleading information across social media, fringe news sites, blogs, and forums. Civil society organizations play a crucial role at this stage due to their domain expertise and connections to affected communities. Their early monitoring can prevent dangerous influence operations from gaining traction through pre-bunking and counter-messaging.

Stage 3, “Responses by Industry, Activists, Politicians, and Journalists,” represents a critical turning point. How high-profile individuals and institutions react determines whether a campaign gains widespread attention or fizzles out. Journalists face particular challenges at this stage, as media manipulators deliberately create “traps” to gain attention.

“Journalists must carefully balance the need to report on true events with the need not to fall prey to a manipulation campaign,” the researchers emphasize. “Sometimes it is not in the public interest to report on nascent campaigns.” When reporting is necessary, journalists should employ “strategic amplification” – leading with truth, quickly debunking falsehoods, then returning to verified information without directly linking to manipulative content.

By Stage 4, “Mitigation,” campaigns have reached critical mass, requiring coordinated responses. Fact-checking and debunking become essential, though they drain resources that could otherwise support original reporting. Social media platforms hold significant power at this stage through content moderation, deplatforming, and policy enforcement – yet their responses often come too late or not at all.

“We know platforms like Facebook have knowingly allowed radicalization to fester with deadly results,” the researchers note. “Though they have policy departments focused on minimizing harm…they often do not take action until civil society and journalists have forced them to.” The researchers point to regulatory gaps that allow platforms to design their own inconsistent policies.

In Stage 5, “Campaign Adaptation,” manipulators evolve their tactics to circumvent platform restrictions. They employ anonymity, coded language, and edited materials to avoid detection. The case of the “Plandemic” film and its less successful sequel “Indoctrination” demonstrates how proactive cross-sector coordination can reduce the impact of such campaigns, even as their creators adapt.

The Media Manipulation Casebook serves as both warning system and roadmap for those working to preserve information integrity. By providing a common framework for understanding how misinformation spreads, the project aims to foster more effective collaboration among journalists, researchers, technology companies, and policymakers.

“Keeping track of this ecosystem is hard,” the researchers acknowledge. “But we introduce this model, open to many disciplines and research practices, as a means to detect, document, and debunk misinformation in all its forms.”