Lori Falce: The dangerous spread of misinformation

The American Psychological Association has an entire section of its website dedicated to the dangers of misinformation and disinformation and how the not-so-slow creep into our daily lives is hurting us all.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also concerned. So is the Department of Health and Human Services, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Increasingly, it is getting hard to find any agency that isn’t battling the constant spread of lies dressed as truth.

Well, that’s not quite fair. Misinformation isn’t a lie. It’s a wrong answer or incorrect assumption. Disinformation is the deliberate falsehood. There is also malinformation, which is a lie with negative intent.

For example, if someone posted — or more likely, shared — on Facebook that a celebrity died based on a completely accurate story about a non-celebrity with the same name, that is misinformation. If you do that even though you know the celebrity in question is still among the living, that’s disinformation. If you do it to get more money for your autographed picture of that celebrity, that’s malinformation.

All of those examples seem fairly harmless. Mark Twain was the subject of a death hoax in 1897, leading to his famous quote that “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The most recent may have been in July, when former president Jimmy Carter erroneously was reported to have died. Now 100, Carter, who has been on hospice care since February 2023, is still among the living.

But amid the response to two back-to-back hurricanes, incorrect information is dangerous, whether deliberate or not.

Some of what is being shared on social media may be well intended but if spread without checking could hurt people by the simple act of confusion. If you tell people they aren’t getting help, for example, they won’t ask for it. The Federal Emergency Management Agency spends a lot of its time connecting people to the help they need. People shouldn’t unravel that blanket while it’s being knitted.

Some is deliberate. Republican governors have attested to the help they are receiving from the federal government for hurricane response. Yet people still say it isn’t happening.

And that is where we get to malinformation. If you know it’s a mistake or a lie and you share it to achieve an objective, that’s malinformation. It can ruin lives, and when we are talking about severe weather, it could even end them.

In the event of emergencies, it is critical that we trust the information we are being given. We need to know where to go to be safe. We need to know when to flee the hurricane or when to hunker down against a tornado or blizzard. We need to believe that the road we are told is flooded is unsafe to traverse. And we need to know we can ask for help.

To make people in the midst of danger question the outstretched hands offering help — indeed, to make them deny those hands are there at all — is not just un-American. It’s inhumane.