Disinformation: why I care about it (and you should as well)

I was a pupil in a Southern Italian high school when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. More and more people around me started repeating that everything was NATO’s fault or that the US had broken an alleged promise made to Russia not to expand NATO further and so on. Then came Bucha. One day a teacher remarked that to her, Bucha felt like it was staged, that Russian soldiers were just boys, incapable of such atrocities. But Bucha was real. So was the attack on the Mariupol theatre. So are the countless strikes that are leaving Ukraine in the dark and without heating. Another war had started in the meantime, but actually it had been going on covertly for years already: the war of information. The war which is fought through disinformation. The battleground is our perceptions, our thoughts, our minds.

Since joining the YEAs’ network in 2023, I’ve been part of the YEAvsDisinfo Working Group, a team dedicated to spreading awareness about the harm caused by disinformation and how to recognise it to protect ourselves. Today I am the coordinator of this Working Group and I still keep learning a great deal about it. The threat landscape is constantly and fastly evolving. AI-generated disinfo is on the rise and in the future it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish genuine from fake content produced by AI. But it is not just the tools that have changed. It is also the behaviour of disinformation actors, to the point that a new expression has been coined to define a pattern which is much broader than just disinformation: FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference). And these are not the only terms that are used to define such a complex phenomenon. That’s why, before going on talking about the damage that disinformation can do, I would like first to clear out any sort of confusion that may arise from the terminology.

For some time the expression “fake news” was everywhere; in 2017 it was chosen as “word of the year” by the Collins Dictionary. However, journalists and academics studying the phenomenon had already started questioning its use for two main reasons: first, they considered it too vague, ambiguous and inadequate to capture the complexity of the problem posed by misinformation and disinformation (there is no shared definition of “fake news”); secondly, politicians had begun appropriating the term to dismiss contents they found disagreeable. 

Currently, we mostly speak of misinformation, disinformation and FIMI. Let’s see what the differences are.

Misinformation describes “false or misleading content shared without harmful intent though the effects can be still harmful”.

Disinformation is defined as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain, and which may cause public harm”. 

The basic difference between the two lies in something a criminal lawyer would call mens rea, that is the mental element: contrary to what happens with misinformation, a disinformation actor is knowingly and willingly spreading false or misleading information.

There is also another term, which is perhaps less common, but can still be useful: malinformation. This defines“information that is based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country”. This includes leaks and some forms of harassment and hate speech.

The European External Action Service’s Stratcom Task Force uses a much broader expression, Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), that includes disinformation as one of its forms. FIMI describes “a pattern of behaviour that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures and political processes. Such activity is manipulative in character, conducted in an intentional and coordinated manner, by state or non-state actors, including their proxies inside and outside of their own territory. FIMI often seeks to stoke polarisation and divisions inside and outside the EU while also aiming to undermine the EU’s global standing and ability to pursue its policy objectives and interests”.

Real harm

The part of the definition which talks about “harm” is not just a theory put forward by some academics. FIMI in general (including disinformation) is designed to sow division, create chaos, foster polarisation, to the point that it is now considered a form of hybrid threat. Think about all the false claims that circulated about Covid-19 vaccines, or around climate change. They have concrete effects: misinformation about vaccines has been shown to have negatively impacted the immunisation process (keep in mind that a low vaccine coverage is associated with higher infection rates). Or think about the role that misinformation and disinformation played in the UK riots in summer 2024.

Elections, at the very core of the functioning of a democracy, are another sensitive target for FIMI and disinfo threats. Threat actors may try to undermine trust in the system through false allegations of frauds, manipulate the public debate by flooding the infosphere with fake or distorted news, try to discredit some political forces or promote abstention. 

We have witnessed major FIMI incidents of this sort in Moldova, both during the presidential elections and EU referendum in 2024 and the parliamentary elections in 2025. Journalistic investigations have uncovered massive covert networks funded by Russia in order to disrupt and delegitimise the electoral processes, on the one hand, and to push for Russia-friendly candidates, on the other. Some key figures of these networks have been sanctioned by the EU over the last three years.

These are but drops in the ocean of disinformation that we’re surrounded by. Everyone could be spreading misinformation, just like my school teacher. It could be our closest friends, who just saw an alarming news and thought it good to share it with us. What we can do is try to learn as much as possible about the inner workings of disinformation. Learn media literacy and fact-checking skills and share them with others. This is the work we do in the YEAvsDisinfo Working Group. We keep learning even if we think we already know a great deal, because most mistakes come when we’re overconfident. Because we are convinced that knowledge and awareness are the most powerful weapons we have in order to combat manipulation and protect our freedom, our autonomy and our democracy.

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Sources

Council of the EU, Hybrid threats, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/hybrid-threats/

Council of the EU, Moldova. Sanctions in response to actions destabilising Moldova.https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/moldova/#sanctions

Ed Thomas & Shayan Sardarizadeh, How a deleted LinkedIn post was weaponised and seen by millions before the Southport riot, BBC, 25 October 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c99v90813j5o

European Commission, Delaying or refusing COVID-19 vaccines: The effects of misinformation, https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/436591-delaying-or-refusing-covid-19-vaccines-the-effects-of-misinformation

European Commission, Final report of the High Level Expert Group on Fake News and Online Disinformation, 12 March 2018, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/final-report-high-level-expert-group-fake-news-and-online-disinformation

European Commission, Tackling online disinformation, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/online-disinformation

European External Action Service, 1st EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats. Towards a framework for networked defence, 2023, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/1st-eeas-report-foreign-information-manipulation-and-interference-threats_en

European External Action Service, Information Integrity and Countering Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference (FIMI), https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/information-integrity-and-countering-foreign-information-manipulation-interference-fimi_en

J. Bayer et al, Disinformation and propaganda – impact on the functioning of the rule of law in the EU and its Member States (European Parliament, Feb. 2019), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2019/608864/IPOL_STU(2019)608864_EN.pdf

Marianna Spring, Did social media fan the flames of riot in Southport?, BBC, 31 July 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y38gjp4ygo

Marianna Spring, The real story of the news website accused of fuelling riots, BBC, 8 August 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y38gjp4ygo

Oana Marocico, Seamus Mirodan and Rowan Ings, How Russian-funded fake news network aims to disrupt election in Europe – BBC investigation, BBC, 21 September 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g5kl0n5d2o

Reuters, Explainer: Why are there riots in the UK and who is behind them?, 7 August 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/why-are-there-riots-uk-who-is-behind-them-2024-08-07/

Tom Singleton and Graham Fraser, Ofcom: Clear link between online posts and violent disorder, BBC, 24 October 2024,https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70w0ne4zexo

Wardle C. and Derakhshan H., Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making, Council of Europe, report DGI(2017)09, 2017, https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-researc/168076277c