Disinformation
As 2024 winds down, we hope you find our final newsletter for this year informative and helpful as our thoughts turn to the beginning of a new year. We expect a federal election in 2025 (exact date unknown as of December 15, 2024). The latest it likely to be held is October 2025. Rumours are extremely strong that an Ontario provincial election will be called early in 2025. With this in mind…on with the newsletter!
Pinocchio, and his nose growing longer with every falsehood he told, is a favourite childhood story. Sports teams place high value on fair play and following the rules.
What happened to truth telling, fair play and social norms in politics?
Certainly exaggerations, unfulfilled promises and conflicts of interest have plagued the political class for generations; however, the current level of deliberate disinformation, manipulation, and rewarding lobbyists and donors has reached levels that require critical evaluation of everything politicians write and say.
First we explore disinformation, what it is, what it does, how it does it and why… we can think in a shorthand of the 7 Ds: deception, distortion, disorientation, distrust, demonization, destabilization and distraction.
The 7 Ds of Disinformation
1. Deception
As opposed to misinformation, disinformation is a conscious act of deception – a “deliberate attempt to deceive its recipients, with the intent to confuse fact and fiction,” in short what we used to call a lie, perpetuated in bad faith for some kind of personal gain. Misinformation by contrast is the inadvertent spread of false information. Learn more
2. Distortion
Disinformation often ‘works’ because it contains some tiny kernel of truth – it functions as a distortion of what we know.
3. Disorientation
Disinformation campaigns are not only intended to confuse and mislead but to dominate the airwaves – to overwhelm and disorient the consumer to the point that it is difficult for the news consumer to focus on much less absorb other information. Steve Bannon notable right-wing strategist made this clear in a 2018 interview with Micheal Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
A concise summary by journalist Brian Stelter: This is the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
4. Distrust
A core intention of disinformation – or when state sanctioned, what has historically been termed propaganda – is to create distrust at such a level that it erodes the boundaries between fact and fiction.
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
Additionally, disinformation seeks to create distrust of government institutions setting up a vicious circle of underfunding, delays in treatment, ignoring the advice of government sought experts, holding public consultations without acting on feedback, and the like.
5. Demonization/Defamation
Disinformation campaigns often seek to defame individuals or demonize social groups, creating a moral panic, as a way of directing anger and frustration away from the actual cause of a problem or to discredit individuals with false information.
6. Destabilization
Disinformation is designed not to inform the population, but to destabilize them – to keep them in a perpetual state of panic and overwhelm. The end goal is not to encourage them to organize to solve an issue but to turn continually to the leader as the only person who can fix things. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted the way disinformation is designed to foster an almost irrational loyalty to the leader (a strategy and an end result that bear an uncanny resonance with the strategy of the Trump administration in the US):
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
7. Distraction
Disinformation is often used to control the narrative and to distract away from real issues, or alternately to divert opposition from focusing on the actual shortcomings of the government in power.
In Weapons of Mass Destruction a 2019 report produced with the support of the US’ Department of State’s Global Engagement Center, authors Nemr and Gangware note how vulnerable information ecosystems are to spreading disinformation. Several characteristics of social media platforms make users vulnerable to the spread of disinformation:
- preying on the needs of the audience to belong
- a high volume of information that makes it difficult for users to take the time to discern between truth and falsehood
- the need for certainty (typified by overly simplistic memes and slogans) in an increasingly uncertain world
- the ways repetition can make a false statement appear believable
The research has demonstrated that “these techniques for spreading fake news are effective. On average, a false story reaches 1,500 people six times more quickly than a factual story, moreover uncertainty, fear, and anger are the very characteristics that increase the likelihood a story will go viral. Distraction is also a useful tool when right wing parties in power use disinformation to distract from their shortcomings, often by singling out scapegoats to distract the public from their own shortcomings.”
Our Blog

This month we take a look at how the Conservatives are mobilizing the 7 Ds of Disinformation in Canada with our blog “Small Differences”.
Shout Out
Kudos to CAFES Ottawa
for creating a great set of tips to address Climate Misinformation! We would like to recognize the terrific work they are doing with their Climate Misinformation Project. You can find a link to their tipsheet on our Toolkits page.
News from Us
We are very excited to share that we have recently formed an alliance with Not One Seat! We are modelling cooperation by helping to support their amazing work in the City of Toronto which is focussed on flipping seats the Ontario provincial election. We encourage everyone in Toronto to get involved with the Not One Seat campaign!
In addition we are continuing to organize and grow our regional Chapters. Chapters are a key part of our strategy – our members in our chapters are doing our ‘on the ground’ work within a group of neighbouring electoral districts to organize and build support for cooperation between centre/left parties. We are excited and appreciative that we have members who are taking this work on in the Grand River Watershed, the Greater Toronto Area, Ottawa, Hamilton – Niagara, and Kingston.
3 Actions for Everyone to Take
- Sign our voting pledges
- Share our campaign – share those voting pledges, our newsletters, our blog and info about our strategy. Share buttons are at the bottom of every page on our website. Follow us on social media and share our posts. Find us on Bluesky , TwitterX , Threads and Facebook
- Join a team – We need lots of volunteers to help us activate our strategy, to build the momentum that is needed to amplify our messages, to recruit new members and to persuade political Candidates and Party officials to cooperate. Will you help us? There are many different ways you can support our efforts. Complete our quick survey to indicate your interest in joining us.
What’s Coming Up
Having Those Conversations
With holiday gatherings upon us, rather than planning to attend webinars and meetings, you may be anticipating conversations with family members, colleagues, neighbours and others at social gatherings. These can sometimes get tense – reflecting the polarization that is being promoted by politicians that we discussed in our November newsletter. This article, written for Americans before their Thanksgiving celebrations, titled “How to deal with Trump supporters at your Thanksgiving holiday gathering” provides some useful tips for having these difficult conversations. Applied to our Canadian context, the title might just as easily read: “How to deal with Pierre Poilievre/Doug Ford/Danielle Smith supporters at your holiday gathering”.
Here is one example of some great advice from that article:
“Don’t argue with your grandfather. Instead, ask him to tell you a story about a time he did something good for someone else. Listen, and then ask him to tell you another one.”
George Lakoff, Framelab
We also recommend these helpful articles:
Empathy is the antidote to conservative thought
By stimulating a memory of empathy, empathy is activated in the brain and with repetition, people can be changed – for the better.
Empathy is both a trait and a skill. Here’s how to strengthen it.
And…that’s a wrap for this issue. However you choose to celebrate (or not), we hope you will have a safe holiday and that you will have the opportunity to spend time with those you love.
Thank you very much for your support in our first year.
We look forward to a very exciting 2025.
Cheers!
From the Cooperate for Canada team
