Disinformation Is Dead, Long Live Disinformation

Michael Khoo is the Climate Disinformation Program Director at Friends of the Earth and policy co-chair at Climate Action Against Disinformation.

In 2003, environmental activists in the United States got hold of a private memo instructing Republican politicians to ditch “global warming” and instead use the term “climate change.” That major narrative shift echoes the current debate in the tech community over the term "disinformation," and the history of that move offers a warning about the trade-offs of rebranding.

The memo, by GOP communications consultant Frank Luntz, said climate change was preferable because it sounded like “a more controllable and less emotional challenge,” helped them “challenge the science” and would blunt environmentalists' growing power on an increasingly popular issue. This is normal consultant advice: reframe to cut the opposition's power.

What was not normal was the environmental community's quick embrace of the phrase as they attempted to win centrist voters, which they were especially attuned to in the wake of Al Gore’s 2000 loss to George W. Bush. Out of fear of being out of touch, environmentalists decided to help popularize the opposition's messaging and, along the way, paid a steep price.

This new language deprived the environmental movement of an important asset. First, the word "global" signaled something with wide significance for everyone. Second, the word "warming" signaled the danger of a planet cooking. Instead, they were left with the word "climate," a less clear term, and "change,” which is neutral and could be either good or bad. The new term also separated out the effect from the cause, blunting accountability. Last, and most relevant to today, the shift wiped out the public recognition that environmentalists had spent at least 15 years developing, even turning it into the No. 1 issue on Gore’s platform.

This shift took an urgent, value-laden, and popular term and made it less urgent, more vague, and less powerful. It diminished the cultural capital they had spent years developing on a false promise of bipartisan support.

The term “climate change” quickly became just as toxic to Republican politicians, likely because so much of their campaign contributions came from the fossil fuel industry. The only lasting result was a reduction in environmentalists’ power.

Today, the progressive tech community faces a similar challenge with the term “disinformation.” Critics from across the spectrum say the term has become a lightning rod—too politicized, too pointed, and laden with dangerous baggage.

There is certainly evidence of this baggage: Disinformation has been used as a framework by journalists, advocates, and academics to expose the nefarious acts of tech CEOs, Russian networks, climate deniers, election manipulators, and child predators. Because of their efforts to hold wrongdoers and the powerful accountable, these communities have been repeatedly targeted by GOP Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee, which has smeared them as the “censorship industrial complex,” Elon Musk has filed expensive lawsuits against the nonprofits that documented the harms on Twitter/X, and an academic center at Stanford looking at election disinformation has been effectively shut down.

In response to these attacks, our global community is now exploring terms such as ”information integrity,” “information sovereignty,” “ecosystem health,” or ”information resilience.” Broader frameworks like integrity or nationalist ideas like sovereignty are not bad, per se, but they suffer the same problem the environmental movement experienced with the shift to climate change. These new terms are less well known, and don’t point attention toward the companies and individuals who are deliberately misleading others. Given the rise of this term’s popularity—should it be abandoned now?

Disinformation is a helpfully accurate term. Its premise is that one group (usually small) deliberately misled another group (usually large) with lies, usually for profit, political gain, or both. The term comes from Russian campaigns dating from the 1920s that produced “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” This tracks the fossil fuel industry’s 50-year campaign to deceive the public about the science of climate change. “Lies” is a simpler term and universally regarded in a negative light, but “lies” does not connote the coordinated and inauthentic nature of“disinformation,” where the noise makes the fringe seem far more powerful than they actually are and conceals their motives.

Broader frameworks are helpful, but these terms will not improve the political fortunes of counter-disinformation work. They will not win over Jordan, who continues with Orwellian hearings, or Musk’s X—which, in the words of US District Judge Breyer, filed a lawsuit “punishing the Defendants for their speech” —or President Trump, who insists the Associated Press use the term “Gulf of America” while shutting down Voice of America.

This narrative shift to quell dissent against Big Tech happened once before. In the early 1800s in England, the Luddites spawned widespread uprisings against the first Big Tech titans, the garment factory owners. These protests captured the nation's attention and swept up working-class people from almost every profession who feared the tech because it was controlled only by the rich. The government response at the time was brutal: The ideology of Luddism itself was criminalized under penalty of death, and the Crown brought home 10,000 troops from the Napoleonic wars to suppress and kill Luddites. They publicly hung 15-year-old boys for protesting while 12-year-old orphan girls were still being dismembered in the dark factories. The tech lords and political leaders knew the dangerous power in Luddism—to expose the horrors, to unite people against power—and took rational, if extremely inhumane, steps to destroy it and its legacy.

The real challenges to free expression and speech today are the Big Tech oligarchs and the new administration. This year alone, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg canceled the company’s third-party fact-checking program in the United States and tried to squash a tell-all book alleging illegal activities at Facebook; Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos silenced dissent against the government on The Post’s op-ed pages; Elon Musk canceled X’s trust and safety teams while giving paid “blue-check” amplification to Nazi accounts; and President Trump fired the FTC commissioners investigating Amazon and Google while appointing an FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, who is promising to investigate the speech of the media.

This isn’t a debate; it’s a power struggle, and we’re arguing about which knife to bring to the gunfight.

People must stop trying to win by wordsmithing and instead continue the focus on uniting the majority of Americans who already believe that Big Tech is threatening democracy, targeting children, and spreading hate. A preemptive shift in language will only deprive the progressive tech movement of the cultural capital it built over the last 10-15 years.

The term is not perfect, but it is a very good gateway for discussion. People knew global warming was a threat in the 2000s, just as they know disinformation is a threat now. If advocates give in and let disinformation die, the other side will surely and silently cackle: “Long live disinformation.”