Disinformation; What Makes PR Different?


Purveyors of disinformation think of their services as a kind of strategic communication. But it is a fundamentally different practice.

Greg Byrne
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(Image from Security and Human Rights Monitor)

 How Is PR Different From Other Strategic Communications? 

 There is nothing inherent to human brains or human perception that distinguishes between true information and false information. Information is information; what distinguishes true information from false information is whether the other people we interact with agree that it is true or false. Whether that distinction lines up with objective reality has only tenuous relevance. What matters is that while advertising and marketing take that paradigm and run with it; creating whatever information they wish and using it as they see fit; public relations restricts itself to taking information that exists, determining its veracity, and presenting that information in a way that shapes a narrative to the organization's benefit. Public relations does this because, like journalism, it starts from the assumption that there is an objective, capital-T Truth that exists, and that even if it doesn't have to draw attention to it, it has an obligation to not deliberately lead the public away from that truth.

It is said that Winston Churchill once said that "a lie gets around the world before the truth can put its pants on". He didn't actually say it; historians disagree about who, if anyone, did, but it contains a truth; the truth has to be tied to reality and reality is often boring. That public relations distinguishes between true and false makes it substantively different from other strategic communications, but it paradoxically makes it less immediately available to the public. Advertising and marketing go directly to the target publics, but in many cases public relations is mediated through journalism to reach the public. Most people do not read press releases, if they encounter them at all it will be because they see them quoted in the news media. But the ads next to the story in that same newspaper; the audience will see those because they're right in front of them.

The World Is Different Now

That immediacy, that uninterrupted contact with the audience, is a valuable thing. And that leads into a new trend in strategic communication; disinformation. Because the brain does not care about true and false; because that distinction only matters to us when the people around us have collectively made one, it is possible for nefarious actors to take advantage of that part of our psychology by injecting deliberately false information into the system. In the old world, propaganda was used by totalitarian states to mobilize support into a frenzy and crush dissent into a spiral of silence. That tactic does not work anymore, because cable and then the internet have greatly increased the sheer quantity of information in our lives. It is impossible for one actor to effectively serve as a gatekeeper to what information reaches the public.

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This is what modern disinformation aims to make you think.
It does not aim to persuade.(Image from GIPHY)
But that amount of information can also serve as a fog that lets nefarious actors get away with things while everyone is distracted. In the new world, doing what Trump strategist Steve Bannon called "flooding the zone with shit"; injecting so much false noise into the system that no consensus reality can be achieved, is far more effective. We collectively decide what is true, but because it is hard for any one individual to decide what is true, that collective process takes a lot of work. The more conflicting information is in circulation, the more work that process takes. If there is enough conflicting information; if the whole processes has been made deliberately confusing because there is simply too much noise to sift through, most people will simply give up on trying to find a signal.

Disinformation Is Not PR

Some disinformation specialists like to present their product as "black PR", but I think that distinction is misleading. Modern disinformation does not seek to persuade; it is far easier to make people apathetic by making the processes of finding what is real too confusing to keep up with. Because of that fundamentally different aim, I would argue that disinformation places itself in a separate category from traditional strategic communication such as marketing, advertising and public relations. Marketing and advertising assume that the products they are promoting will eventually be available for purchase, disinformation does not care. Public relations is closer, because both involve shaping information to a given end, but it is different because public relations aims to convince the audience of an idea of the truth. Disinformation does not care; it does not aim to persuade. Strategic communication aims to engage the public and spur them to some activity; disinformation aims to do the opposite. In a working, democratic society there is no legitimate role for deliberately confusing the public into a state of apathy.
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About the Author

 Greg Byrne is a public relations student at the Mayborn School of Journalism. He likes cycling, fantasy transit planning and electronic music. Sometimes, he does all of them at once.


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