When it comes to disinformation, misinformation, and fake news, there are many similarities that make it hard to tell all three of them apart. Disinformation is false information that is deliberately spread to influence people. It is meant to purposely fool the public and people in general. Misinformation is false news being spread without the intent of it to mislead anyone. This can be accidental in some cases as rumors are spread around about certain topics and each person says the information slightly differently. Fake news is purposely created to invoke emotion and attention that mimics the form of mainstream news. This is used to sway people's opinions about certain topics. All three of these actions are bad because none of it is telling the truth and lying out of tricking people and putting fake information out is the wrong thing to do. All of this has been going on for many years as early as the Spanish-American war in 1898. After the ship called Maine blew up on February 15th, 1898, the papers at the time came up with a story that claimed the ship was hit by a Spanish torpedo, they even showed pictures of an explosion. This story was meant to make people think that the Spanish were the enemy and to spread lies about them to make them look bad. This was both disinformation and fake news because, the story was very much intentional to be spread and the papers wanted a reaction out of people and since it was from the papers reporting news, it was more likely to be believable since it was mimicking a trusted news source. This obviously affects society greatly as people want to trick people into thinking what they believe is right which can start major fights and problems. This can cause trusted news sources to not become trusted anymore and anger will cause people to do stupid things and divide as a whole which isn’t a good thing.
In more recent times, disinformation, misinformation, and fake news are still a huge part of the headlines. Especially in President Donald Trumps' presidency, he spoke about these topics greatly in an open manner. During the 2016 presidential election, there were claims being made that Trump was colluding with Russia and just involved with them in general. He kept claiming ‘fake news’ about the whole topic and said he did nothing of the sort. This ended up being true and the Steel Dossier got in trouble for lying to the FBI by claiming Trump was involved with Russia and that they had compromising material against Trump. This is disinformation and fake news due to the nature that people were spreading false information about President Trump to make him look bad so he wouldn’t get elected and even after that to get him impeached and in trouble. Spreading false information does end up backfiring later on as Mr. Steele got in huge trouble for lying to the FBI which is very serious. Also when it comes to Covid-19, as it is still new, it is easy to spread misinformation about it as well as be sneaky and spread disinformation about the serious topic. Some people spread misinformation or disinformation whichever way you want to think about it, that the U.S. government created the virus. Also, some people say sipping water every 15 minutes cures the virus which is not true. The person who starts the spreading is the source of disinformation, and after the news blows up, people who spread it after that are spreading misinformation. It can really get tricky when trying to separate the two terms and arguing if what was being spread was intentional or not. None of the three terms really affect different segments in a different way, it affects each individual person differently because no one thinks the same way therefore there will be different opinions about topics, and people will either take the information they hear seriously or lightly with a grain of salt. Especially with the newest generation being focused on social media, it is very easy to get disinformation, misinformation and fake news spread around everywhere. These things will never stop as they have been a problem since the 1800s, but it is very important to keep an eye out and not believe everything that is on social media and in the news as well.
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