When Did Everything Become "Disinformation"?

National security speak creeps into public use

During a press briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned videos portraying President Biden as frail or confused, calling them “disinformation.” I wondered when this cumbersome, five syllable word became so ubiquitous, replacing simpler ones, like “false” or “misleading,” or my personal favorite, “bullshit.”

Disinformation differs in a crucial way: it’s a national security term used for decades by the U.S. intelligence community to refer to foreign government-backed propaganda. That has now crept into general public use, from cable news pundits to Facebook grandmas. It can now mean anything from clandestine messaging to fabrications to just stuff the mainstream finds annoying.  But the tendency to label what is political use of speech as a threat illustrates the national security state’s remarkable success at getting ordinary Americans to see the world the same way they do: as dominated by shadowy, hostile actors, even domestic ones.

Originating in the Cold War era, disinformation’s earliest known use was in 1955, derived from the Russian word “dezinformacija,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. 

The OED defines “disinformation” as:

“The dissemination of deliberately false information, esp. when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media, with the intention of influencing the policies or opinion of those who receive it” (emphasis mine). 

The less erudite Dictionary.com also emphasizes the government component, as well as the term’s national security connotations, defining disinformation as:

“false information, as about a country’s military strength or plans, disseminated by a government or intelligence agency in a hostile act of tactical political subversion” (emphasis mine). 

Countering foreign intelligence services is a big part of the intelligence community’s job, so it makes sense that they’d be interested in disinformation in this context. There is, after all, abundant evidence of government-backed influence operations targeting the American public, like the kind Russia undertook in 2016, or to take a more recent example, that undertaken by Israel. But the emergence of words like disinformation as a verbal tic in the public lexicon is symptomatic of people’s sense that they’ve been deputized into the national security field. Instead of volunteer firefighters, they’ve become volunteer James Jesus Angletons, with an attendant paranoia as corrosive as battery acid to civic society.

If you think I’m exaggerating, just try searching your preferred social media platform for words like “Russian bot.” I searched the term while writing this and the most recent post from seconds ago was someone accusing someone else of being a “Russian bot” for cheekily using the word “offspring” to describe their child’s voting preferences.

In many cases online, people can’t even heatedly disagree anymore because of the schizophrenic suspicion that the other person is a fake Russian or Chinese account, or, most ominously, some American dupe caught up in someone else’s covert operation. 

It’s not that people are dumb. They’re just taking their cues from a government that relies on a national security framework to explain the society’s problems. In many cases, the officials themselves don’t even know when they’re using national security terminology accurately, and Jean-Pierre’s White House press briefing on Monday is no exception. 

After decrying the “disinformation” videos of Biden — despite there being no evidence of foreign government responsibility for them — Jean-Pierre mistakenly called them “deep-fakes,” doctored media that replaces one person’s likeness with another, another recent attempt by the mainstream (government and media) to police the free flow of communication that doesn’t meet their approval.

Except the video wasn’t a deepfake.

Jean-Pierre later clarified that she had meant “cheap fakes.”

Cheap fakes is an unnecessary term as well. Why not just “cheap shots,” plain English that dispenses with the AI/cybersecurity industry’s adjudication of everything that is and isn’t valid.

Which gets us back to the whole point of applying the “disinformation” label – it is to attempt to preserve government control of the flow of information. In that endeavor, the mainstream media, struggling to preserve its own hegemonic perch, is just an annex of government. Check out this AP piece challenging another Biden video, quoting as evidence Biden administration and campaign officials.

“Video from a star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles for President Joe Biden on Saturday is circulating on social media with claims that he froze up onstage as he exited the event,” the AP article begins, before citing his own officials. “Members of his campaign and administration say the Democratic president stopped to take in cheers and applause as he left a sit-down with former President Barack Obama and comedian Jimmy Kimmel that helped raise more than $30 million for his reelection campaign.”

Not exactly a disinterested party!

Examples like these have cropped up repeatedly as the 2024 presidential draws near and there are sure to be more. Many of the videos are patently misleading.

Just don’t call them “bullshit.”

— Edited by William M. Arkin