Disinfolklore vs Disinformation: Why Fact-Checking Alone Cannot Win

The information warfare literature talks about “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.” These categories focus on the truth value of individual claims. Disinfolklore analysis goes deeper: it focuses on the narrative structures that make those claims emotionally irresistible — regardless of whether they are true or false.

Distinguishing Disinfolklore from Disinformation

Disinformation and Misinformation: Traditionally, Disinformation and Misinformation together, are used to describe the totality of what today I call Disinfolklore. Both Disinformation and Misinformation as terms do not exist independently in the vocabulary of most researchers into information manipulation techniques. Conventionally, Disinformation and Misinformation are defined relative to one another on the basis that Disinformation is intentionally misleading information. The main problem which my Look-for-the-Mana-in-the-Meme! dictum solves is that the same item of information — the same meme/unit of information — may be labelled as “misinformation” or “disinformation” depending on the spectator’s opinion on the intention (Mens Rea means ‘intention’ in Common Law systems — literally, the “mind/Mana in the thing”). However, in practical reality it doesn’t matter if you accidentally misinform or intentionally disinform me by repeating an item of Disinfolklore/troll. If I believe that unit of information/troll is so true that it deserves being repeated and I do so, then I keep the troll alive and enable it to hack the mind of someone else when I repeat it. I’m acting in good faith. I’m not a Disinformationist. Yet, the effect of my action — trolling someone into a false belief — is the same as if I had intentionally done it. Distinguishing Disinformation from Misinformation on the basis of intentionality sounds like a satisfying distinction. It’s repeated so frequently among researchers it has taken on the quality of conventional wisdom. Yet, if we’re seeking to stem the flow of manipulating data in our communications’ environment, whether or not we’re being intentionally misled, when we are being misled by trolls, doesn’t really get us very far. It wastes our energy on investigating the intent of the troll, meanwhile the troll has taken on a life of its own and continues ripping through our communities while we’re engaged in esoteric intention-investigating activity that even the best criminal lawyers find hard to conclusively prove. Disinfolklore, by contrast, as an analytical method only looks at the quality of the meme itself when it seeks to categorise it as Disinfolklore or Infolklore. The intention of that meme’s purveyor is interesting, but it does not bear on how we characterise the meme/troll/unit of information. The focus on identifying the Mana in the meme, rather than the Mens Rea of the person conveying that meme brings us back to the point of looking at misinformation, disinformation and disinfolklore. It sidesteps the problem that the same item of information/troll/meme may have the same manipulative and brain-hacking power whether its communicator intentionally broadcasts it to disinform us or does so accidentally.

Disinfolklore: Disinfolklore is not a new phenomenon in our Indo-European culture. However, the extent to which it is being used by those who wish to roll-back the legal and social advances since the end of World War Two is unprecedented. So unprecedented that this previously immanent but relatively rare existent in our culture has now become obvious to all who get their eye in. To speak about previously unidentified phenomena, it has always been necessary to invent new words and meanings. Once I named Disinfolklore, this enabled me to identify what it was.

Russia’s framing of Disinformation: Our inheritance of Russia’s own term for its Combat Propaganda technique of deliberately using false information to divide communities (Disinformation) traps us inside Russia’s perspective. Unless we escape and look at what Disinformation describes as an object from outside the concept, we risk becoming a part of the linguistic and semantic system Russia created that we want to escape. Disinfolklore as a new term enables us to do this. Given that Russia first populated the meaning of Disinformation and is the main propagator of mind-hacking Disinformation today, it is impossible properly to critique what that term (Disinformation) signifies and address the problems it is creating in our communities, unless we escape the strictures of Russia’s own framing. In other words, unless we use new language and meanings, we’ll forever be trapped inside Russia’s Disinformation-created Disinfolklore Galaxy.

Infolklore: Disinfolklore’s divine twin, Infolklore, wasn’t necessary to coin, until algorithmic and OCEAN-optimised messaging created the MAGA and Russian Disinfolklore Galaxies in 2015. This is because most successful instances of folklore in Indo-European communities carried immanent within them the sense of “formation” or teaching. Today, however, we must distinguish between Infolklore that is true and teaches us in conformity with the Code of Positive Trolls and Disinfolklore, which violates that code. Our civilisation’s persistence and our post-WWII legal and social inheritance’s survival depends on us being able to identify whether the Mana in Memes is Positive (Infolklore) or Negative (Disinfolklore).

The Core Distinction

We fool ourselves into thinking that we can fact-check, rationalize, litigate, moderate, transparency or media-literacy our way out of the miasma that is contaminating our communities and our minds.

Source: Book Proposal

Disinformation asks: Is this claim true or false? Disinfolklore asks: What archetypal structure is being used to bypass my rational faculties entirely?

A fact-check can debunk a specific claim. But when a community is enmeshed in a self-sustaining narrative ecosystem — a Disinfolklore Galaxy — debunking individual claims is like bailing water from a sinking ship with a teaspoon. The narrative structure generates new claims faster than they can be debunked.

Why Fact-Checking Fails Against Disinfolklore

Fact-checking assumes the problem is false information. But the most effective Disinfolklore often contains true facts arranged in a false structure:

When the same archetypes and archetypal structures are immanent in “news” or opinion about international affairs, that we might be consuming purposely constructed Disinfolklore might never occur to us.

Source: Video Podcast: In the Faery Tale

Consider “Don’t Poke the Bear.” This is not a factual claim that can be debunked. It is an archetypal instruction — a folkloristic meme that installs a logic module in the Inner Realm of whoever receives it. Once installed, it generates behaviour (policy paralysis, refusal to arm Ukraine) without making any checkable claim. See Provocation Logic Cycle.

Claims vs Structures

Disinfolklore Works Like Folklore — Not Like Lies

Disinfolklore works quite as well as folklore did in the nineteenth century. The folklore movement model of creating cohesive national cultures which was launched by German nationalist Herder in 1777 was copied all over Europe.

Source: Counter Disinfolklore ~ Controlling War Magic

Folklore created nations. Herder’s 1777 call to the German tribes, the Brothers Grimm, Wagner’s operas, the Irish Celtic Twilight, Shevchenko’s Ukrainian poetry — these folklore movements did not operate through factual claims. They operated through culture-forming stories that created shared identity. See Folklore Origins.

Disinfolklore uses the same mechanism in reverse: artificial stories designed to destroy shared identity, create dependency, and manufacture consent for authoritarianism. Fact-checking cannot address this because the power does not reside in the facts. It resides in the narrative form.

What Disinfolklore Targets: MIMA, Not Facts

Our Moods/Motivations/Intentions/Attitudes are being formed by what I call ‘Disinfolklore.’ Directly — through whichever media memes we consume. Or indirectly, through our own minds and those of others, influencing us from archetypes created and evolving from Disinfolklore.

Source: Our Disinfolklore Universe

Disinformation changes what you know. Disinfolklore changes what you feel, what you intend, what motivates you, and what attitudes you hold. These are the four targets: Moods, Intentions, Attitudes, and Motivations. They are the wells from which all human activity springs — and they operate below the level of conscious fact-checking.

So we begin to read an article and in our mind is the intention to send some money to Ukraine to help the Ukraine resist the Russian onslaught. But we start reading this article, this example of Disinfolklore. And by the end of the article, we’re thinking, oh, there’s no point. And so we decide to donate to another charity.

Source: How Disinfolklore Communicates Archetypes

No false claim was made. No fact was disputed. Yet your intention was transformed. That is Disinfolklore.

The Galaxy Problem: Self-Sustaining Ecosystems

Disinfolklore doesn’t just look at individual instances of storytelling, it also focusses on the system-wide impact on whole communities being enmeshed in what I call Disinfolklore Galaxies. The cumulative impact on humanity is to create what I now call the Disinfolklore Universe.

Source: Book Proposal

Disinformation is a bullet. A Disinfolklore Galaxy is an atmosphere. You can dodge a bullet, but you cannot fact-check the air you breathe. When MAGA, Russian, Brexit, CCP, and anti-vax Galaxies concatenate into a Disinfolklore Universe, the entire information environment is contaminated. Read more in What Is a Disinfolklore Galaxy?

What Works Instead: The Twelve Tools

If fact-checking addresses claims and Disinfolklore analysis addresses structures, what does the counter-measure look like?

I’ve invented the first analytical method to identify the energy/Mana of Russian manipulative / coercive control memes, in real time: Counter Disinfolklore… By conceiving of trolls as any informational unit that affects our emotions / Mana, Disinfolklore provides a six-point algorithm — the Code of Positive Trolls — that enables us to recognise and to build resilience to being manipulated.

Source: Twitter Note (2024)

The Twelve Tools do not debunk claims. They:

1. Detect the archetypal structure (Tools 1-5)
2. Classify the meme as Positive, Negative, or Neutral using the Code of Positive Trolls (Tool 6)
3. Adjudicate using six criteria: Generosity, Right, Energy, Patience, Mindfulness, Wisdom (Tools 7-12)

The goal is not to prove something false but to render Disinfolklore visible — and once visible, it becomes, as the author says, “quite clumsy.”

The Positive Alternative: Rearchetyping

Now, when I look back at the millions of words I have written on Disinfolklore, I notice a theme running through them. I am consciously setting out to disrupt, alter and reconstruct our existing mental models of phenomena in our information space.

Source: Rearchetyping

Where disinformation analysis offers correction, Disinfolklore analysis offers Rearchetyping — the conscious reconstruction of the mental models that Disinfolklore exploits. You cannot simply remove a false archetype from someone’s mind. You must replace it with a better one.

Key Takeaways

1. Disinfolklore operates below the level of facts — it targets emotions, intentions, and attitudes through narrative structure
2. Fact-checking is necessary but insufficient — it addresses claims while Disinfolklore operates through archetypes
3. The most powerful Disinfolklore contains no false claims — “Don’t Poke the Bear” is not a factual statement
4. Disinfolklore creates self-sustaining ecosystems (Galaxies) that generate new claims faster than they can be debunked
5. The counter-measure is structural — the Twelve Tools detect, classify, and adjudicate narrative structures, not individual claims
6. The constructive alternative is Rearchetyping — consciously rebuilding the mental models that Disinfolklore exploits

Go Deeper

• What Is Disinfolklore? — the complete definition
• Complete Guide to Information Warfare — the full historical and strategic context
• Counter-Disinfolklore — the constructive response
• The Twelve Tools — the analytical method
• Beginner’s Path — start learning the framework