Community Contribution #5- Information Disorder

Digital media can really impact the ways that we think. Sometimes we realize what’s happening and other times we cannot tell. This is especially scary considering how often there is “information disorder” out there. Information Disorder includes these 3 different types: Dis-information, Mis-information, and mail-information. Dis-information is false and created specifically to harm people, social groups, organizations, or countries. Mis-information is false but unlike dis-information it is not meant to cause harm. Mal-information is based on reality and like dis-information is created specifically to harm people, social groups, organizations, or countries. There are three elements and three phases within information disorder. The three elements include: agent, message, and interpreter, and the three phases are: creation, production, and distribution. 

The article Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making (2017) made a great point that when talking about information disorder it is incredibly important to think about the three types and then also each of their elements and phases. In the article they wrote “it’s important to consider the different phases of an instance of information disorder alongside its elements, because the agent that creates the content is often fundamentally different from the agent who produces it” this is something that is becoming increasingly important especially in the world of AI (Council of Europe, 2017). AI creates so much mis-information so we can’t necessarily hold the person who sends out the message accountable since they likely didn’t know it was mis-information. Also as sharers of information we need to be more critical about doing more digging to find out the truth about information rather than just blindly trusting whatever we read. Dis-information is especially bad and something that I am getting incredibly scared of. With AI becoming so accessible people are finding it so much easier to share and spread this false information that is harming all sorts of people, but especially minority groups. This is horrible and minorities are continuing to see more and more hate due to dis-information being more and more accessible to everyone.

This really shows why it is so important to think critically about what we are seeing. There are so many instances of information disorder out there and we need to be careful to not get caught up in it. When you read something on the internet you must think critically about why this may not actually be true and who this may be intending to harm. If you suspect something seems off you need to do more research about it and find out what the truth actually is. Especially before sharing with someone else as this is exactly how these types of information disorder are able to spread so rapidly. I think as I go about my days I will be thinking more and more about the three types of information disorder and about the elements and phases. Before I share things I hear with my friends and family I will do a little more research into the information to make sure they are entirely true. This was something I tried my best to do but it’s getting increasingly harder and harder to do so with the increasing amount of false information that is being spread. Even though it is hard I will continue working hard to research and watch for false information to avoid the ongoing spread.

Council of Europe. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making (pp. 20–29). https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html