Why Not Just “Disinformation” or “Misinformation”?

“Disinformation as a subset of Disinfolklore…Disinfolklore: A more advanced form of manipulation, disinfolklore distorts cultural narratives and symbols to foster division. By manipulating archetypes and myths, it evokes emotional responses tied to identity, pride, or nostalgia, often leading to guilt or shame. This manipulation fosters cognitive dissonance and undermines collective identity (Douglas, 2024)…” ¹

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

“Disinfolklore” captures what “disinformation” misses:

• Folklore structure: Disinfolklore works like folklore did in the nineteenth century — as a culture-forming medium, not merely as false claims
• Emotional mechanism: It deploys archetypes that hack our minds at a level deeper than fact-checking can reach
• Systemic scope: It describes not just individual lies but entire self-sustaining narrative ecosystems — Disinfolklore Galaxies
• Disinformation: Requires us to determine the intention (Mens Rea) of the sharer of a meme or unit of information. If the sharer intended to mislead us, according to conventional definitions that distinguish misinformation from disinformation, we can brand that meme Disinformation. However, even criminal lawyers have difficulties determining the Mens Rea (literally “the mind in a (criminal) act”)! Besides, if our concern is to prevent harmful memes from being amplified, why should it matter what the sharer of a meme intended? If you shared the meme without meaning to mislead, yet I shared it meaning to mislead, the effect is the same: the meme was shared and along with it its manipulative nature. Disinfolklore focuses on the story the meme communicates, rather than any aspect of the people who share it onwards. Furthermore, instead of looking at the meme and trying to decide what the intention of the sharer was/is, our Look for the Mana in the Meme! dictum focusses our mind on the Mana / energy inside the meme itself, regardless of the intentions of those sharing it onwards.
• Misinformation: Disinfolklore’s relationship to misinformation was set out in a recent publication by Maurice Yolles, Professor Emeritus in Management Systems at Liverpool John Moores University, where he writes: “disinfolklore (misinformation embedded in persuasive cultural myth: Douglas, 2023)” in “Restoring coherence in an age of fragmentation: informational realism and systemic viability”.

‘Disinfolklore’ initially described the mind-hacking stories that Russia was propagating through its information apparatus in the parts of Ukraine it was occupying. Gradually, though, I realised that the scope of Russia’s falsification of reality extended from the micro / quotidian to the macro / deep history.

Source: Book Proposal

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).

For the full analysis including the Claims vs Structures comparison table and why fact-checking fails, see Disinfolklore vs Disinformation: Why Fact-Checking Alone Cannot Win.

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