Disinformation and End-Relativity

Recent work characterises disinformation in receiver-centred terms, as content that generates ignorance by lowering an audience’s confidence in truths relative to their evidential probabilities. I argue that such accounts face three difficulties. They deliver unstable verdicts in cases where a single signal confirms a truth while disconfirming one of its consequences; they cannot classify the injection of noise as a disinformation tactic even in textbook cases; and they are blind to disinformation by curation, including search engine optimisation, where nothing false is introduced and only the ordering of accurate sources is changed. Each difficulty has a common source: the intervener’s alternatives, and the inquirer’s ends, are invisible to any test framed solely in terms of the receiver’s priors and posteriors. I defend a sender-centred alternative on which disinformation is intervention that degrades the value of an inquirer’s information for the ends they pursue, produced in awareness of that effect. I show how the account handles curation and artificial agents.