EverydaySpy Podcast - The Two Lies You Will Remember From This Day Forward

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Spies are taught that not all lies are equal. The thing that separates lies is the intention behind the lie; was the lie intentional, or was the lie not intentional. In this episode, Andrew describes the relationship between lies, intent, and how the two impact the current political climate and your everyday life. For anyone out there feeling lied to... you will never forget this. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. I've had a lot of folks ask me to talk about the difference between misinformation and disinformation. And this is such an interesting subject for me. It's an interesting subject for me as an intelligence professional. It's an interesting subject for me as I watch the 2020 elections right now. It's an interesting topic for me as I live my everyday life as a parent, as a spouse, and as a professional, because misinformation and disinformation are cousins, but they are not the same thing. So let me give you an example.

The other day, I was tired. It had been a long day. I was stressed out. The kids had been a handful. Gee, he and I were not getting along on everything. So about 9.30 at night, which is like an hour and a half after when the kids were supposed to go to bed, I had just stuck them in their room. I had just shut the gate.

I had given the kisses on the forehead. I had done all of the things that Dad is supposed to do to call it a night. And I left their room behind, shut the gate behind me, and went to the kitchen where I reached into my little secret stash of candy and I grabbed myself a Kit Kat. Now, if you go out and buy a Kit Kat, I have no formal affiliation with Nestle or with KitKat, so they're not going to give me like any kind of sidekick or whatever. They're just my personal guilty pleasure on the end of a stressful day. Now, I had done a lot of things wrong, and this was one more wrong thing I did because I know that the kids never go to sleep the first time.

And the kitchen is within direct line of sight to their bedroom. So even though I had shut their gate, even though I had shut their door, even though I had the light still off, I was so sneaky. When I reached up and grabbed that Kit Kat, as soon as I opened it and took the first bite, I heard a little voice. coming from the bedroom that said, can I have a Kit Kat? And it was my little girl. Now, I looked at her straight in the face with a full Kit Kat bar in one hand and a secret stash of Kit Kat bars above my head. And I told her, this is the last one.

I'm sorry. That is disinformation. I lied to her face. There were more Kit Kat bars sitting right there with an arm's reach. I just didn't want to give one. tour at 9.30 at night, and I wanted to shut the conversation down as quickly as possible, so I used disinformation. I lied. I said, this is the last one, and there are no more. Therefore, use your own logic, three-year-old, and go back to sleep. That is disinformation.

Now, in comparison to that, consider the other day when I came home late because I was out working late. And my wife asked me where I was. And I told her that I was out late working with one of our business colleagues and we had lost track of time. Now, that is all accurate. Now, inside of all of that lost track of time, part of the reason that we lost track of time was because we got distracted talking about sports. We got distracted talking about guns. We, you know, had a griping session about whatever was going on in politics. So it's not, that we were just working late. It's that we were working late and getting distracted, which all and all led to everything being late, pushing the clock back. Nothing about what I was saying to my

wife was intentional deceit. I wasn't trying to lie to her, if anything, I was just summarizing the events of the evening into one kind of short pithy statement that explained why I was out late. That is misinformation. Those first three letters, miss information versus disinformation the first three letters tell you everything you need to know the d i s in disinformation means intentional it means not the opposite of do not does not did not that is what dis means it means lie distrust when someone distrusts someone they do not trust when someone disrust when someone dissuades. It means that they do not persuade. The opposite of persuade. The dis means the world to the word. It means does not. It shows that it was never true. In the first place, it was never

supposed to happen. It was intentional in the fact that it was discouraging. But miss means that it was possibly intentional, but also possibly unintentional, like a mistake or a misrepresentation. That miss, MIS, means that it could have been intentional, it could have been unintentional, whatever it is, it is certainly ambiguous as to the intention. Even as simple as the one letter, the difference between the M and the D sounds to an average person, it means the world of difference in the intelligence world, and of course in the legal world as well. When we look at information coming at us in headlines, in the news, from friends, on social media, we have to keep our eyes and our thoughts very focused on the difference

between misinformation and disinformation because the impact is different, but also the intentionality behind it makes a huge difference. When someone is intentionally giving you disinformation, they are lying to you. That has a different level of impact. It has a different level of relational impact. It suggests to you that whoever is the source of that disinformation should not be trusted. But when someone gives you information that is mistaken, when someone gives you information that is errant or incomplete,

then that is misinformation. It's a completely different reaction. It doesn't mean that you should trust them, but it also doesn't necessarily mean that you must distrust them. That's the difference between misinformation and disinformation. Now let me give you a few places where misinformation and disinformation impact us and reach us in our everyday life. So the most important thing to understand is that there are all sorts of people out there using disinformation and misinformation. And we'll start this conversation by focusing on those using

disinformation. Because really, why would someone want to lie? It's seems like it's against human nature to lie. Many of us feel like we deserve honesty, that we want to be honest, that the truth will set you free, that the truth is what good, hardworking, honest people are supposed to share. But just like I used disinformation to try to end the argument early with my three-year-old over a Kit Kat, a lot of us will turn to disinformation when we see a benefit for ourselves. It's no difference in the national security or the business world. The first group that uses disinformation is, you know, the first and largest group, are all the people out there who just want to kind of seed chaos and have an opinion and get a reaction out of you, all those people who are out for their own personal self-interest. They're not organized. They don't have a big budget.

They're not doing anything that's impactful in terms of news and media and even social media. They're just lying for the sake of lying. and we've all known people who lie like that. We all know people who use disinformation because they're trying to make themselves look good or they're trying to cover their own tracks. The first group that we really have to concern ourselves with are the people who use disinformation for profit.

Now, this happens really significantly in financial markets and in the business world. We have actually seen, in the last five to 10 years, multiple examples where competitors have ceded disinformation about other people in the business space specifically to impact stocks. A big example of this actually happened in Southeast Asia. It was a telecom provider named Vietel. And Vietel actually intentionally created fake accounts

and made those accounts pose as customers critical to a competitor. So it created fake accounts and used those fake accounts to basically bomb the customer service rating or the customer rating on one of its competitors. We see this also happened in podcasts. We actually see this also happened in Amazon when bots will be created to create fake accounts that bring down the overall rating of a podcast

or bring down the overall rating of a product. There's even instances where groups and organizations bond together and use genuine accounts but create false negative reviews. So real people with real accounts who are all agreeing to falsely create negative reviews just for the purpose of bringing down a competitor, or bringing down a podcast that's not favorable, or a podcast that speaks about some sort of content or some sort of subject that's contrary to that group's personal beliefs and outputs or beliefs, interests, and ideals.

So those people who intentionally use disinformation as a form of tangible, monetary profit or as a way to profit their cause is the most dangerous group that we have to worry about. And of course, this is the group that includes your extremists. This is the group that includes your terrorist elements of the world. This is the group that includes all of the people out there who are intentionally creating fake news specifically for the purposes of being able to profit off of that fake news. Now, how does that work? How does that happen? Because I'm not talking to talking about the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or independent parties. I'm not even talking about fringe groups. What I'm talking about more specifically is that there are actually

countries, poor third world countries around the world where individuals create websites, create news websites or fake news websites, and their entire purpose behind the website is basically to write fake stories and then share those fake stories on. social media because they know that if they write a story with the right kind of headline that includes the right kind of content that doesn't necessarily have to be tied to anything factual, lessons that we've learned in the past in this season as we talk about dissecting an article and we talk about hacking a headline. They know that if they use the right type of emotional terminology and they drop that on social media, Facebook and Twitter being two of the biggest,

then they can anticipate enough traffic will come to their article that they will make advertising income from the ads that get placed on their article. They make no promises. They never even claim to be an honest-to-goodness news source. There's some great stuff out there. ABC News actually did an article not too long ago on a few of these sites that were located in Macedonia. So here you have a poor third world country and some of the poorest cities in this third-world

country were home to these super high-trafficked news sites that were generated exclusively for the purpose of creating fake news, not organized by any foreign adversary, not organized by any political camp. These are just straight profiteers who recognize that if they created a fake news story that appealed to a certain group of people, they would generate enough traffic that they could actually make money off of that traffic. And you've got examples where disinformation is used for profit everywhere from Desani bottled water and Coca-Cola to Dreamers Day against Starbucks, where there was the hashtag No Borders or Borders Free Coffee, where the idea was that on one day, if you were a non-American

citizen, you'd get free coffee at Starbucks. There are all sorts of examples where fake news went out, was something. shared on social media and was propagated with no truth behind it, but because some group or some individual or some cause was trying to profit. So that's disinformation. Misinformation, on the other hand, means that there was no intent, right? We've covered that. The importance here is that misinformation can be an error. It can be a mistake. Misinformation can be an honest mistake just as much as it can be a mistake of ignorance or a mistake of bad sourcing or anything else. So in terms of misinformation, the reason this is so important is because where disinformation is

focused a lot in the first world and it's intentional in terms of trying to impact or drive an outcome, misinformation is much less organized. Misinformation happens oftentimes just because of the push of the 24-hour news cycle. When you have to create that much news, when you have to create a new story and you have a deadline to meet every few hours, every six hours, every day, whatever it might be, it drives the need for journalists and reporters to draft stories where they weren't able to properly source or investigate what they're writing about. That leaves the story prone to mistakes. And once you know that a story has a mistake, it becomes misinformation. If a story is incomplete,

because it hasn't gathered all the facts. This is extremely popular. This is something you see a lot on cable news networks. Why are they talking about the same story all hour long for multiple hours in a row? Because every new update to the story is new information they didn't previously have. Technically, when they reported the information the first time and it was incomplete, technically that is considered misinformation. It was not complete. It was not accurate. It was not researched.

Anytime you see headlines that go back and correct previous headlines or go back and change something from a previous headline, what we're seeing there is the press of the 24-hour news cycle undermining news itself. And where that gets dangerous is not as much in the first world with intentional profiteers or intentional trolls or even intentional foreign adversaries, it becomes really dangerous in other parts of the world where in the developing world especially, where ethnic strife, ethnic tendencies,

long historical context, where the application of misinformation can basically set whole groups, whole communities in the wrong direction or into conflict or into concern or into fear. This has happened many times in places like Sri Lanka or India or Sudan, other parts of Africa and Nigeria, where a simple story or even a piece of information that is emotionally charged, just an opinion piece that comes from either a village elder or it comes from some sort of second or third tier news source, even something like an enthusiast's magazine or an enthusiast's article on a website or some sort of. sort of Facebook group. A post itself that's incomplete or inaccurate can actually send a whole group of people moving in the third world and many developing nations because that is one of their only sources of information. They don't have access to vetted, respectful, journalistic

input. So they rely on social media. They rely on word of mouth. They rely on bloggers. And in many cases, only what they hear from their peers that are in their village with them. And a simple mistake, a simple misstatement can have huge impact in terms of violence, in terms of social ostracizing, in terms of who gets hired, who gets fired, and what trade happens between villages. So misinformation and disinformation are two very different things. They are related. They both have to do with information. And they are related in terms of the fact that neither is factual, neither is true. But the intentionality behind them is what makes them so important. And that is really the takeaway message that I want everyone to understand right now as we talk about mastering information.

Disinformation is intentional lies with some sort of intent on the backside to drive a reaction or drive some sort of monetary profit, whether it be in the market or whether it be between businesses or whether it have to do with the outcome of a political event. Misinformation is ambiguous in terms of its intention. It could just be a mistake. It could be something that people thought they were doing rights, but then only later found out they were doing wrong, which is the case every time you see a headline that says that this article was edited or updated later on after the fact of new information.

So misinformation and disinformation are two very different things. They are often confused as being the same thing. But when you understand that disinformation is intentional information that cannot be trusted, while misinformation is information that should be scrutinized further and does not necessarily mean that the source is someone who should not be trusted, you are one step ahead of everyone else who is still confusing the two. Don't let media, don't let the oversimplification of information in today's world, make you think that disinformation and misinformation are one in the same.

That in and of itself is a bad message, and the person giving you that message is either intentionally trying to disinform you or they are trying to tell you the truth and they don't understand it themselves. Whatever is going on in terms of the information that you're taking in, recognize the difference between misinformation and disinformation, and you will always be one step ahead of everyone else. And that is Everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn.

If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everyday Spy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.