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We have already heard about some terms related to disinformation such as deepfake, fake news, misinformation, bots, fact-checking, all of which are collected in our glossary of disinformation. But the forms, tactics, and strategies of disinformation evolve rapidly, and acquiring new words to describe them is essential. Do you know what “firehosing,” “catfishing,” or a butterfly attack refer to? In this article, we’ve compiled disinformation concepts that you may not yet be familiar with but that affect you and influence your perception of reality.

Many of this concepts described here are part of the “Works of the Forum against disinformation campaigns”, of the Department of National Security. Experts from several Spanish universities have contributed to this comprehensive glossary with 125 key terms that allow us to better understand and combat information manipulation strategies. This initiative seeks to improve the media literacy of journalists, digital platforms, researchers and citizens. The authors and collaborators of the document include Ramón Salaverria Aliaga, professor at the University of Navarra; Astrid Wagner, tenured scientist at the CSIC Institute of Philosophy in Madrid; Beatriz Marín García, data analyst at European External Action Service (EEAS) or Virginia Martín Jiménez, tenured professor at the University of Valladolid (UVA), among others.

Knowing these terms will help you better understand the intricacies of disinformation campaigns circulating on social media, detect them more easily, and, with a bit of luck, avoid their effects.

This term refers to the action of deliberately withdrawing, limiting, blocking or depriving individuals, groups or organizations that infringe use policies of access to online platforms. It is a measure linked to content moderation and seeks to reduce the spread and impact of disinformation or harmful discourses. For example, a social network like X (formerly Twitter) permanently suspends the account of a user who spreads conspiracy theories and hate speech violating its community rules, as happened with US President Donald Trump after the assault on the Capitol in 2021.

Is a fallacy that consists of selecting only the data or evidence that supports a certain posture, discarding those that contradict it. It is a form of information manipulation based on confirmation bias. For example, to deny the usefulness of vaccines, we could find an article that states that vaccines are not effective and that only shows an isolated study with negative results, ignoring dozens of studies that proves their effectiveness.

This is a term imported from the English neologism factoid. It corresponds to a popular belief with no factual basis. A false, imprecise or trivial statement or data that, after being repeated many times in different media, ends up being accepted as if it were true. An example of this would be the following phrase “We only use 10% of our brain.”. This phrase, repeated in media, films and networks, has no scientific basis, but many people believe it is true.

It is a technique that consists of launching large volumes of false or misleading information quickly and continuously, in order to overwhelm the public and prevent verification of the facts, given the amount of misinformation that darkens the truthful information.

This practice consists of creating false profiles in networks to emotionally deceive someone. Currently, this usually happens in dating applications or on social networks, where one person pretends to be another to fall in love with someone and then ask for money.

This term refers to a technique similar to astroturfing, but with a different approach: instead of supporting certain aspects or groups, it is used to infiltrate, divide and deactivate existing communities, campaigns and groups. This infiltration, both in social networks and in real life, is carried out by impostors or trolls that introduce deception and disinformation to provoke internal conflicts. Once inside, the differences and prejudices of the group are identified and exploited, introducing confusion and discrediting it from within. The term was proposed by Patrick Ryan in 2017, inspired by the behavior of butterflies that change their flutter patterns to confuse their predators.

It is a tactic that responds to a criticism by diverting attention with a counter-indictment, which would be a “What about you?” in a discussion. For example, in the event of a corruption complaint, someone responds: “Well, but the opposing party also stole.”.

This expression is defined as saturating people with information (real and false) until they lose the ability to distinguish truth. An example of this could be seen in a political crisis, in which dozens of versions of the facts are published until nobody knows what to believe in.

It is a (generally digital) space where only ideas, beliefs or data are shared that reinforce the same vision of the world, without exposure to contrary opinions. The information, whether true or false, circulates and is disseminated without being questioned. For example, an anti-vaccination Facebook group where all users publish and share content that denies the effectiveness of vaccines, without accepting external scientific evidence.

This consists of a manipulation strategy in which a person is made to doubt about their own perception of reality, making them believe that they are wrong or confused. This technique is used in order to manipulate and control this person. An example of this could be an account on social networks, where fake news is published and, when other users point it out, they respond by saying that “they are crazy” or that “this was never published”, denying the evidence even if it is documented.

This is a disinformation technique that seeks to manipulate generative artificial intelligence (AI) to produce false information as if it were reliable. It involves flooding the internet with large amounts of disinformation content, published on numerous websites, in various languages, and from different locations. The goal is to increase the likelihood that this content will be incorporated into the training data of large language models (LLMs), which form the basis of many generative AI tools. In this way, a disinformation network can ensure that its claims become part of a model’s training data, allowing the model to later reproduce them in response to user questions or prompts. The reliability assessment platform NewsGuard and Virginum, a French government agency that monitors foreign disinformation campaigns, have reported that the pro-Russian network Pravda successfully used this technique to introduce misinformation related to the war in Ukraine into several Western AI systems. This is one of the many reasons why generative AI should not be considered a reliable source of information on its own: its answers may contain errors or false information, so it is important to always check them against reliable and

independent sources.