As if the challenges of safeguarding public health, national security, infrastructure, personnel and cyber and physical assets during a global pandemic were not enough, security professionals now must manage another form of contagion of perhaps graver long-term concern: a pandemic of viral mis- and disinformation that challenges the stability and future of businesses and economies themselves.
Disinformation is not a modern-day phenomenon. Governments, lobbying groups, issue advocates and political campaigns have long relied on disinformation as a tool for exploitation and control. What has changed is the ease with which disinformation can be generated and disseminated. Advances in technology allow for the increasingly seamless manipulation or fabrication of video and audio, while the pervasiveness of social media enables false information to be swiftly amplified and propagated by responsive audiences. On Twitter, a single post can now send an entire economy, military or local community into chaos.