The two modes
When you set out to counter a piece of Disinfolklore, you have two distinct modes available. Both are needed. Most counter-disinformation practitioners use only one, and that is why most counter-disinformation work fails to shift anyone.
Mode 1 — Dismantling from within. Show that the Disinfolklore’s own premises contradict each other. Russia claims to be liberating Ukrainians while killing them and forcibly transferring their children. MAGA claims to defend the Constitution while leading an insurrection against it. Putin claims Russia is peaceful while boasting about nuclear threats. You do not need to assert a counter-story to fire this mode — you just need to point at the contradiction in the original, carefully, in the target audience’s own terms. This is cheap, fast, and defensively devastating.
Mode 2 — Replacing with a better story. Dismantling a lie leaves a hole in the listener’s narrative world. If you do not fill the hole with something better, the lie re-grows, or a worse lie moves in to occupy the vacated space. Rearchetyping is the replacement move: Zelenskyy’s “I need ammunition, not a ride” does not refute anything, it inserts a positive alternative image that is more compelling than the archetype it displaces. The old archetype cannot survive proximity to it.
Why most counter-disinfo efforts fail
Most existing efforts to counter Disinfolklore lean heavily on one mode and ignore the other.
Fact-checkers are stuck in Mode 1. They can only refute. Their entire professional toolkit is oriented toward showing that a claim is false. When they succeed, they have created a hole. They do not have institutional permission or trained practice to fill it. So the hole stays open, and the listener — who still needs a working picture of reality — fills it themselves, usually with whatever the next loudest voice is offering. Which is often more Disinfolklore.
Western strategic communications and public-information efforts are often stuck in Mode 2. They assert positive narratives — democracy, shared values, the rule of law — without first dismantling the Disinfolklore that has already taken up residence in the listener’s mind. This makes their positive stories look like just-another-narrative competing in a marketplace of equals. The listener has no reason to prefer the new story over the one they are already inside.
Real counter-Disinfolklore uses both modes, in sequence, in the right order. Dismantle first — create the hole in the listener’s story. Replace second — fill the hole with something more compelling than what was there before. Skip either step and the work does not land.
How the twelve-tool method covers both modes
The method Stephen teaches covers both modes explicitly, and assigns them to different sub-practices:
- Detection (Tools 1-5) + Adjudication (Tools 7-12) = Mode 1 (dismantling). The detection tools teach you to see the Disinfolklore’s premises. The adjudication tools teach you to show how those premises fail.
- Rearchetyping (Chapter 15 of the book; Rearchetyping mechanism in the vault) = Mode 2 (replacing). Rearchetyping is, definitionally, the offering of a counter-reality so compelling that the old archetype cannot survive contact with it.
- The Code of Positive Trolls = the evaluative instrument that tells you which mode to deploy when, and ensures that the positive mode does not itself slide into Disinfolklore.
This is why the twelve-tool method is not just another counter-disinformation toolkit. It is the first one that covers both modes explicitly and gives the practitioner a reliable way to choose between them.
Worked example: Russia’s “denazification” narrative
Mode 1 (dismantling): Russia justifies its invasion of Ukraine by labelling Ukraine a “Nazi regime” and claiming “denazification” as the war aim. The premise fails on its own terms the moment you check: Ukraine’s president is Jewish, his family was murdered in the Holocaust, and Russia itself is the state currently mobilising the ethnonationalist apparatus the “Nazi” label names. The Disinfolklore’s own premise contradicts the reality it claims to describe. Naming this contradiction, patiently and repeatedly, is dismantling work.
Mode 2 (replacing): Ukraine’s Kursk incursion (August 2024) was a replacement move at civilisational scale. It did not refute the “Don’t poke the bear” narrative that had paralysed the West for three years. It inserted a counter-reality that the old narrative could not survive: Ukraine crossed into Russia, the bear did not end the world, and the archetype of Russian territorial invulnerability collapsed in real time. The new story — Ukraine can do this and we can watch — displaced the old story without ever needing to argue against it.
Both moves happened. Neither would have worked alone. The dismantling work created the opening; the replacing work filled it.
A cross-cultural footnote for curious readers
The two-modes distinction is not new. It is ancient. In Indian philosophical tradition, the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism split historically between two methodologies: the Prāsaṅgika approach (pure reductio ad absurdum — refuting opponents’ positions without asserting any of your own) and the Svātantrika approach (independent positive argumentation — asserting claims of your own alongside the refutation). Nathan Katz (1976, Philosophy East and West) argues that both together represent the “middle way” — neither alone is sufficient. The same structural distinction appears in Greek philosophy between Socratic elenchus (dismantling by questioning) and Platonic dialectic (building toward positive knowledge). You do not need the philosophical vocabulary to use the distinction — but it is reassuring to know that the pattern is old, cross-cultural, and has been working for over two thousand years.