Epistemic Crisis Network Propaganda Manipulation Disinformation

The books in this collection are licensed under open access licenses allowing for the reuse and distribution of each book following the terms described in each license. Researchers should consult the Rights Advisory statement for each title and the accompanying license details for information about rights and permissions associated with each of the licenses. More about Copyright and other Restrictions. Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate. Benkler, Yochai, Author, Rob Faris, and Hal Author Roberts. Network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics.

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/2020719000/. Benkler, Y., Faris, R. & Roberts, H. A.

(2018) Network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2020719000/. The SSRC’s Media & Democracy program has launched a series of workshops that put current controversies and debates into historical and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Here, Mike Miller and James Kirwan provide the key takeaways from a recent event on “A Modern History of the Disinformation Age.” Scholars at the workshop engaged the roots of our “epistemic crisis” regarding... A well-functioning democracy, it is commonly held, depends on an informed citizenry, and that informed citizenry in turn depends on the Fourth Estate—the collection of organizations that constitute the news media.

Alas, in recent years, this pillar of democratic politics has been eroding. A 2018 report by Gallup and the Knight Foundation showed a significant decline in trust in media, with the majority of US adults, and more than nine in ten Republicans, reporting having personally lost... and James L. Knight Foundation, 2018). Indeed, there is an argument that the combination of political polarization, declining trust in media institutions, and asymmetric media ecosystems2Analysis by Benkler et al. found that “While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric.

Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.” “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,”... are the foundation of an epistemic crisis: a state of affairs in which partisans disagree not simply on policy, but on facts themselves.3Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, “Epistemic Crisis,” chap. 1 in Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). In an effort to understand the origins of this crisis of epistemology, the Social Science Research Council’s Media & Democracy program convened a research workshop on December 13–14, 2018, at George Washington University’s School... “There is an argument that the combination of political polarization, declining trust in media institutions, and asymmetric media ecosystems are the foundation of an epistemic crisis: a state of affairs in which partisans disagree...

The workshop cochairs were Lance Bennett, University of Washington, and Steven Livingston, George Washington University. was complemented by an expert panel discussion moderated by SMPA’s director, Frank Sesno. The panel included three scholars from our workshop—Yochai Benkler (Harvard University), Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University), and Paul Starr (Princeton University)—and New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer. Here we highlight and summarize three overarching themes from the workshop, and share an accompanying set of video clips that reflect the breadth of conversation on the expert panel. Over the course of the two-day workshop, three themes emerged as key for understanding the ongoing epistemic crisis: the coordinated efforts of ideologically motivated actors, the failure of traditional bulwarks, such as legacy media,... The coordinated efforts of ideologically motivated networks of actors to cast doubt on the institutions we rely on to generate public knowledge—the academy, the media, and, in perhaps less salient ways, the government—are not...

To give one example, it is now well established that efforts to undermine scientific consensus on the effects of tobacco use were mobilized by lobbyists for the tobacco industry for the purpose of insulating... This goal was achieved primarily by privately lobbying politicians and publicly amplifying marginal scientific claims that sowed doubts about the link between smoking and cancer. Scholars at our workshop argued that the tobacco model of disinformation has been repurposed and augmented in recent years, incorporating extended networks of funders, think tanks, academic research centers, pollsters, marketing agencies, political parties,... The goal, it appears, is not necessarily to prove that one position is more valid than another, but rather to make it too difficult for consumers to judge whether consensus exists at all. Disinformation is false or misleading information deliberately spread to deceive people,[1][2][3][4][5] or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm.[6] Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ... In contrast, misinformation refers to inaccuracies that stem from inadvertent error.[10] Misinformation can be used to create disinformation when known misinformation is purposefully and intentionally disseminated.[11] "Fake news" has sometimes been categorized as a...

The English word disinformation comes from the application of the Latin prefix dis- to information making the meaning "reversal or removal of information". The rarely used word had appeared with this usage in print at least as far back as 1887.[15][16][17][18] Some consider it a loan translation of the Russian дезинформация, transliterated as dezinformatsiya,[19][1][2] apparently derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department.[20][1][21][19] Soviet planners in the 1950s defined disinformation as "dissemination (in... Disinformation first made an appearance in dictionaries in 1985, specifically, Webster's New College Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary.[23] In 1986, the term disinformation was not defined in Webster's New World Thesaurus or New... Over the past twenty years, digital transformation has profoundly reshaped our information ecosystems, shifting control from traditional journalism to a handful of dominant online platforms. As the influential policy report by the Council of Europe (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) illustrates, this shift has given rise to diverse and widespread information disorders, encompassing both the unintentional and deliberate viral spread...

The report categorizes these disorders as mis-, dis-, and malinformation, respectively: misinformation refers to the unintentional dissemination of false information, disinformation to the deliberate creation and sharing of falsehoods, and malinformation to the intentional... As a substantial body of research indicates (e.g., Mansell et al., 2025), online information disorders significantly distort the public discourse on pressing global challenges such as climate change, armed conflicts, and migration. Simultaneously, the platforms that constitute the primary arenas for the spread of false and misleading content initially positioned themselves not as media organizations but as intermediaries, thereby evading editorial responsibility. This stance had posed a significant governance challenge both nationally and internationally. Numerous countries have enacted so-called disinformation laws; however, in many instances, these are used more to suppress dissent than to foster trustworthy information environments (e.g., Lim & Bradshaw, 2023). Member states of the European Union (EU) have sought to address disinformation through a mixture of national and supranational approaches.

Legal responses remain limited and contentious due to concerns regarding freedom of expression. Consequently, non-legal strategies—such as policy guidance and international collaboration—are more prevalent. Despite increasing awareness of the complexity of disinformation, only a few countries—typically those most vulnerable to foreign information threats—have developed robust national strategies, leaving much of the structural regulation to the EU level (Bleyer-Simon,... Indeed, for nearly a decade, the EU has taken a proactive approach in implementing various measures to curtail disinformation and safeguard democratic processes, including the development of regulatory frameworks that require online platforms to... In 2018, it led the creation and adoption of the Code of Practice on Disinformation (CoPD), a self-regulatory instrument designed for technology companies, the online advertising sector, and fact-checking organizations. The CoPD was reinforced in 2022 and further revised in 2024 (see, e.g., European Commission, 2025a), evolving into a co-regulatory tool under the Digital Services Act (DSA) as of 2025.

The DSA is a cornerstone EU regulation that addresses a wide array of risks and harms associated with digital platforms, including illegal content, targeted advertising, and online abuse. It also seeks to make platforms’ terms and conditions more accessible and transparent, while ensuring that content moderation processes are contestable by users. The DSA places particular responsibilities on so-called Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs)—defined as services with more than 45 million users in the EU—including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bing,...

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