Disinformation

How Disinformation Can Be Spread — explanation by U.S. Defense Department (2001)

Disinformation is intentionally false or misleading information that is spread in a calculated way to deceive target audiences.

Quotes

• We must constantly encourage Western journalists to write precisely the opposite of our real intentions and anyone who writes or speaks about our real intentions accurately or impartially in the Western sense of these words must quickly be dismissed and ridiculed as someone of the Right or a fascist, someone who wants to bring back McCarthyism.
  • Ivan Agayants Explaining the benefits of disinformation. Quoted in "KGB" - Page 142 - by Brian Freemantle - Social Science - 1982.

• "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)"
  • William J. Casey, quoted by NAACP on its website, October 5, 2020.

• As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.
  • Yuri Bezmenov, 1983 interview, as quoted in 38 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America (18 July 2018), Big Think.

• The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
  • Carl Bernstein. An A-Z of cultural terms, The Guardian (1992)

• The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus.
  • Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent; Non-Conspiracy Analysis of Propaganda System(24 October 1986)

• The "Democrats" have learned from the unlamented KGB, whose primary weapon of desinformatsiya, or disinformation, was a million agents whose job was to ruin the reputation of every key opponent of worldwide Communism by making up vicious rumors and peddling them via a plethora of front organizations. The left have done their best to trash my reputation because I have dared to question the climate scare with which they had hoped to bully the West into shutting itself down without a shot being fired. Just look at my CreepyMedia page. I know what it is like to be on the receiving end of artful lies told over and over again by a host of paid trolls and useful idiots.
  • Christopher Monckton, 7 steps that'll land Obama in jail WorldNetDaily, December 31, 2013.

• Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.
  • Newton Lee, Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition) (Springer, October 20, 2014)

• While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations.
  • Newton Lee, Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

• While we claim to live in an information age, disinformation has become the order of the day.
  • Farid A. Malik, It is about sharing and caring (January 23, 2020), Daily Times.

Cooper: You don't believe we went to the Moon?

Ms. Hanley: I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda, that the Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines...

Cooper: Useless machines?

Ms. Hanley: ..and if we don't want to repeat of the excess and wastefulness of the 20th Century then we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it.

Cooper: You know, one of those useless machines they used to make was called an MRI, and if we had one of those left the doctors would have been able to find the cyst in my wife's brain, before she died instead of afterwards, and then she would've been the one sitting here, listening to this instead of me. Which would've been a good thing because she was always the ... calmer one.

• Interstellar, written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, as interpreted by Matthew McConaughey and Collette Wolfe

• And do not mix the truth with falsehood or conceal the truth while you know (it).
  • Quran 2:42

• The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks. … "Winston Churchill said "The first casualty of War is always Truth." Churchill also said "In wartime, the Truth is so precious that it should always be surrounded by a bodyguard of Lies." That wisdom will not be much comfort to babies born last week. The first news they get in this world will be News subjected to Military Censorship. That is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information." That is routine behavior in Wartime — for all countries and all combatants — and it makes life difficult for people who value real news. Count on it.
  • Hunter S. Thompson, "When War Drums Roll" (17 September 2001)

See also

• Brainwashing
• Censorship
• Confusion
• Control
• Dishonesty
• Fake news
• Fallacy
• Freedom of the press
• Freedom of speech
• Lies
• Manipulation
• Mind control
• Prejudice
• Propaganda
• Public opinion
• Sensationalism
• Yellow journalism