How to Recognize Disinformation on Social Media

Disinformation (also “disinfo”) campaigns are the deliberate manipulation of information to influence thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of a targeted audience. This is different from misinformation that might be spread on accident. You can read more on this in our article, Misinformation and Disinformation: A Quick Guide.

Disinformation operations (‘“ops” for short) are carefully planned campaigns with goals, implementation phases, and expected outcomes. Although sometimes the goal can just be “chaos”.

And disinformation posts are rampant on social media right now.

When people think about disinformation being spread online, the first thing they think to check is the account to see if it’s a “bot”, thinking that will tell them if what’s being shared is real or not. Let’s not focus on the conversation around “bots” just yet when recognizing a disinformation campaign, because “bots” are only a small tool in the big operation. They’re getting more sophisticated by the day, and disinformation ops also mix in “real” people accounts.

Further, effective disinformation ops also use discourse that is happening between real people already, and stir it up further. Why work hard to create disinformation when people are spreading it themselves?

Crowdstrike defines the mechanisms of disinformation campaigns as (1):

• Creating false narratives: Crafting and spreading stories that are grossly distorted or even entirely false.
• Emotional manipulation: Leveraging content that triggers strong emotions — like fear or anger — to increase engagement and dissemination.
• Exploiting divisions: Sowing discord and confusion by intensifying existing societal or political divisions.

I’ve personally studied various disinformation campaigns that have been active on social media for the past year. One of the many spaces where disinformation runs rampant is within the Epstein investigation space on Substack and Threads. There appear to be a growing number of coordinated accounts spreading false stories in order to discredit real victims of Epstein, confuse the details around the Epstein files by injecting false information, and platform false survivor stories in order to distract from the real investigation.

I’ll share more on my findings at a later date, but that’s a brief example of how disinformation is actively working to muddy the waters of a hot topic on social media.

A Way To Recognize A Disinfo Campaign On Social Media

If you come across information that feels suspicious, ask yourself these questions:

1. Convenient: Does this feel super convenient? Does this make something that I already know suddenly feel explained? Does it conveniently connect dots I didn’t have connected?
2. Emotionally Charged: Does this generate a lot of emotion for people? How engaging/viral is it? If the info feels very convenient and the info feels very graphic/emotional and generates a strong response, it’s likely fabricated to do exactly that.
3. Easily Fought Over, Not Easily Proven: The information is usually really easy for fights to break out with people taking one side or the other, but it can be difficult to disprove the information.

So much of the disinformation that is able to quickly go viral on social media conveniently confirms a bunch of information people already want to believe; it confirms their biases. And it’ll typically be graphic or jarring or exciting information that stirs up emotions.

This is the best kind of disinformation to spread quickly, because it gets quick and easy engagement from social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Threads. Any platform that highly encourages you to just quickly absorb then swipe, absorb, swipe, fosters disinformation campaigns that are trying to get you to feel the emotionality of a post, cling to the tiny bits you learned that helped confirm your already held biases, then keep you moving along so you don’t dig into it too far.

There’s a lot of psychology to it, too. The place where emotion and graphic stories meets in your brains is a great place for subtle memories to be created. Even if you don’t dig into the full story, it’ll help to shape small biases in the back of your head towards the people mentioned.

Think QAnon and Pizzagate.

For a lot of conservatives primed to villify Democrats, it was the right amount of convenient information that confirmed their biases, and it was interesting and graphic and emotional details that stirred people up. And it was condensed easily down into a single shareable quip or name, like “pizzagate”.

So it spread online quickly and because the topic was controversial, it created a lot of chaos, distracting from more important matters.

Operation success.

Another Way to Recognize a Disinfo Campaign: They Double Down

This isn’t a perfect criteria. People unintentionally double down on wrong information all of the time. However, in my experience of profiling disinformation campaigns, when pressed for the truth or that their claims are false, the originators as well as their cult following they grow will double down on the false information with fervor instead of considering the feedback.

And typically, the “doubling down” comes with more emotion rather than more logic and proof.

Disinfo Campaigns Take Advantage of Strong Pattern Recognition

If you’re someone who brags about having “strong pattern recognition”, please be checking in with yourself regularly right now. Strong pattern recognition is easy to manipulate and hijack for disinfo ops.

“Strong pattern recognition” goes hand in hand with “confirmation bias”.

Confirmation Bias, according to Britannica (2), is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values”.

If you’re looking for patterns, it’s very easy for a disinformation campaign to inject false information into a recognizable pattern that confirms biases you were already holding.

People with strong pattern recognition are being manipulated right now by seeding (3) false information into real patterns. Seeing a pattern doesn’t mean it’s all true. And even a small lie in a mix of truth can have devastating affects on the truth in the big picture.

The Trick Of “Corroborating Evidence” With Disinformation

In my above example briefly mentioned about disinfo spread in Epstein investigations, there has been a lot of “verifying” claims made by only “verifying” details and calling it “corroborating evidence” to confirm the claims. Even in a court case, it’s known that just because the details in a story match up to something real does not make the claims true.

Corroborating evidence strengthens the case for the initial claim, but it does not mean it’s true.

The Details of a Claim May Be Real

For a hypothetical: if a plaintiff says they were attacked at a Dave & Busters in Orange, CA, just verifying that there is a Dave & Busters in Orange, CA does not make their claim of being attacked true.

However, many “internet sleuths” are making similar claims of corroborating evidence in their assertions in their Epstein investigations, and I want to caution against doing this or believing this. This is a tactic used in both misinformation (unintentional spread of false information) as well as the disinformation campaigns I’ve been personally investigating.

Disinformation campaigns know that this is an effective method to mislead people on social media to believe their claims. So they craft stories or put out claims where the lies and truths are weaved in cleverly. There will be real people who were in certain places at certain times, so yes, you can dig up that they were there then. That does not automatically mean the story is true; it just adds to its likelihood.

How to Spot the Deception

How you can spot disingenuous uses of “corroborative evidence” like this is when the claims made completely lack evidence to directly verify their truth, so you’re left with a lot of corroborating evidence that is circumstantial for a claim that holds no weight on its own.

The People May Be Real

In these situations, as well, there will often be people who are real and were in these places at that time, but they conveniently have reason to not come forward and tell you the truth about why they were there, or they’re unreliable sources, themselves.

For a hypothetical, a complainant could claim on social media that Donald Trump assaulted them at a wealthy party in the 80s somewhere in Texas.

Claims on social media that I investigate are typically this vague, because it makes it easy for an eager group of sleuths to draw their own conclusions where the details were left out. Trump traveled often in the 80s, so it’s fair to assume he attended wealthy parties in Texas.

But even a viral claim on social media like this could circulate widely, and likely Trump will not ever respond publicly, despite how many say, “He should sue for defamation but he won’t because the truth would come out in discovery.” (An oddly common argument that falls flat in the real world). He has no reason to respond.

So you have a real person, a real place, a vague timeline, so the claim looks like it could hold water to the untrained social media scroller.

Disinformation campaigns love this. Because you may never find that last bit of evidence that proves the claim is true, and you’ll spend all your time fighting with people to prove that it’s true, and all your time saying, “But look, all of these other details are true, so it must be true,” and everyone will spin their wheels, and nothing definitive may ever turn up.

And the passive scrollers will only see the claim that it happened and believe that, no questions asked, and go about their lives with that in their head.

Mission completed.

We All Just Want the Truth

I know that we’re all looking for ways to verify what we do collectively know is true: a lot of very evil people are in power and hurting people at large. But disinformation campaigns serve their purposes more than ours and can have devastating effects on our goals and do major disservice to the real victims.

Stay clear-headed. Trust, but verify. Due your own due diligence before letting anything spin you up emotionally.

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Some examples of disinfo campaigns that are happening on social media right now:

The Hampstead Hoax4

This already debunked hoax is being spread around again. It was already explained years ago, and the lies ruined the lives of the victims of the hoax, so spreading it again is dangerous. The people posting it have often been accounts not based in the US. And they are trying to make it seem like the videos from that event prove the cannibalism that’s being talked about in conjunction with the Epstein Files.

So then you have to ask yourself, why do “they” want so badly to help corroborate the beliefs of cannibalism allegedly found in the Epstein Files?

More on that later.

The Limo Driver

There is an FBI tip that continues to go viral about a limo driver who overheard Donald Trump talking about raping a girl with Jeffrey Epstein on the phone. That man’s biological son and the affected family are begging him to stop spreading lies about their family.

The tip was called into the FBI in October 2020, and recently was released in the December 2025 Epstein file dump. So the limo driver, Dan Ferree, has been actively talking about it again, despite the pleas of the family for him to stop.

 

Have more examples? Drop a comment .

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