Analysis

Political Disinformation: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Erodes Public Deliberation

By Daniel Sardá · Published on May 28, 2026

Political disinformation is not simply a mistake about politics. It is the deliberate use of false, misleading or decontextualized information to influence public perceptions, electoral decisions, reputations, institutional conflict or citizen trust.

The distinction matters. In an open society, politics includes disagreement, error, exaggeration, propaganda, interests and debatable judgments. Calling everything that bothers one’s own side “disinformation” weakens the concept and can become an excuse for censorship. But ignoring fabricated falsehoods also has a cost: it contaminates the factual ground that allows people to discuss, vote and hold power to account without sacrificing freedom of expression.

In simple terms: political disinformation occurs when a falsehood or deception is used strategically to gain advantage in the struggle for power, votes, reputation or public trust.

What political disinformation is

A working definition can be this: false or misleading information created, adapted or spread deliberately to influence people’s judgment within a political, electoral or institutional dispute.

That definition has three parts.

First, there is a factual dimension: a made-up statistic, a false quote, a manipulated image, a video presented out of context, an accusation without basis or a narrative that leaves out an essential fact to push the listener toward the wrong conclusion.

Second, there is intention or strategic use. Someone may share a false claim because they do not know it is false; that is still a problem, but it is not the same as fabricating a lie or pushing it while knowing it misleads. The Council of Europe report by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan on information disorder distinguishes misinformation, disinformation and malinformation precisely by truthfulness, harm and intent.

Third, there is a political goal. The falsehood does not circulate in a vacuum: it seeks to affect trust, preferences, fear, outrage, reputation or acceptance of outcomes. It can attack a candidate, discredit an institution, seed doubts about an election process or turn a complex controversy into a story that is emotionally useful for one actor.

What it is not: error, opinion, propaganda and fake news

To use the term well, it helps to separate it from nearby concepts.

An error is a false statement without a clear intention to deceive. It can come from bad memory, incomplete data or a rushed reading. It should be corrected, but it does not always reveal a manipulation campaign.

An opinion or political interpretation can be debatable, biased or exaggerated without being disinformation. Saying that a public policy is unjust, inefficient or dangerous belongs to the realm of judgment. Saying that a law contains a non-existent article is already in the realm of verifiable fact.

Political propaganda is organized communication designed to persuade in favor of a cause, party, government or movement. It can use emotion, symbols, selective facts and repeated messaging. Sometimes it includes disinformation, but not all propaganda depends on verifiable lies. A partisan poster can be one-sided without being false.

The expression fake news is more imprecise. It can refer to invented news, viral rumors, satire mistaken for information, partisan content or accusations against inconvenient media outlets. For that reason, it is better to speak of disinformation when the problem is a deliberate falsehood or a verifiable deception with political purpose.

Manipulation can also exist without direct falsehood. A campaign may use demagoguery, fear or a false dichotomy without inventing data. That can impoverish debate, but it should be distinguished from factual disinformation.

How it works in practice

Political disinformation usually combines content, timing and distribution channels. It is not enough for a lie to exist; it needs to circulate in an environment where it finds predisposition, reward or little verification.

The actors can be parties, governments, consultants, partisan media, influencers, organized groups, anonymous accounts or citizens who amplify messages without knowing where they came from. Sometimes there is coordination; other times a falsehood becomes useful to different people and spreads through emotional affinity.

The incentives are clear. Politics rewards messages that are simple, fast and memorable. A lie that confirms prejudice can travel more easily than a technical correction. A scandalous accusation can set the agenda even if it is later disproved. An out-of-context image can spark outrage before anyone asks when, where and why it was taken.

Social networks and private messaging accelerate this process, but they are not the only cause. A CIDOB study on the anatomy of the electoral hoax in Spain’s 2019 election cycle shows relevant patterns on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, but that case does not prove a universal rule. Traditional media, political elites, pre-existing trust in institutions and partisan identities also matter.

For that reason, it is wise to avoid technological determinism. A Nature Human Behaviour review on digital media and democracy notes that effects can be positive or negative depending on context, institutional design, exposure and user behavior. Technology changes speed and scale; it does not remove the responsibility of political actors or citizens.

Where it becomes most intense

Political disinformation appears especially strongly when there is high uncertainty, concentrated public attention and clear institutional consequences.

Elections are the most visible example. In a campaign, a false accusation against a candidate, a rumor about fraud, a made-up turnout figure or a supposed viral irregularity can affect trust even if it is later corrected. International IDEA describes the electoral information environment as a space of actors, systems and platforms in which trust in authorities, voters, candidates and results is at stake.

It also grows during crises: protests, institutional clashes, corruption scandals, health emergencies, wars or sharp economic changes. When official information is slow, opaque or contradictory, rumors find fertile ground. A lack of trust does not automatically create disinformation, but it makes a lie more plausible.

Another sensitive area is reputation. A false quote attributed to a leader, an old photograph presented as current or a fabricated accusation can damage a person before there is time to investigate. In politics, reputational speed matters: sometimes the goal is not to convince forever, but to plant doubt during the critical hours.

Why it erodes public deliberation

Political disinformation does not just add noise. It affects the minimal conditions for deliberation.

Democratic deliberation assumes that citizens can disagree about values, priorities and solutions, but they need some common factual ground. If people do not know what happened, what a rule says, what data exist or what authority made a decision, debate turns into a fight of suspicions.

The OECD links the spread of misinformation and disinformation to risks for institutional trust, informed decision-making, information pluralism and democratic debate. That claim should be stated carefully: it does not mean that every hoax changes an election or that every citizen is helpless before any message. It means that, when repeated and accumulated, disinformation deteriorates the environment in which people form judgment.

It also damages accountability. If citizens cannot distinguish legitimate criticism from fabricated accusation, power can escape through two doors: by using lies against its adversaries or by denouncing any uncomfortable investigation as “disinformation.” In both cases, the public loses.

From a classical liberal perspective, the central problem is not the existence of hard opinions or inconvenient media. Those belong to a free society. The problem is that deliberate falsehood reduces the citizen’s ability to control power, assess promises, punish abuse and cooperate with others on a minimally shared reality.

Warning signs for readers

No reader can verify every public claim. But it is possible to adopt reasonable habits before sharing or believing an explosive political statement.

Some useful warning signs are:

• The source is opaque. No author, medium, document, date or verifiable institution is identified.
• The message demands immediate reaction. It asks people to share “before they delete it” or treats any doubt as complicity.
• Emotion replaces evidence. Outrage, fear or contempt appear before any checkable data.
• The image does not prove what it claims. It may be old, from another country, edited or presented without context.
• The number has no origin. An exact percentage with no methodology or link deserves suspicion.
• It circulates only among allies. If a serious accusation does not appear in diverse sources, it is better to wait.

Verifying does not mean blindly trusting a single authority. It means asking for evidence, comparing sources, checking dates, looking for original documents and accepting corrections when they appear. UNESCO emphasizes media and information literacy as part of the response to disinformation, together with safeguards for freedom of expression.

How to respond without opening the door to censorship

Fighting political disinformation requires prudence. A response based on broad censorship can become a tool of political control, especially if the state decides which interpretations are acceptable.

Freedom of expression protects the right to criticize, investigate, satirize, disagree and make mistakes. An open society cannot treat every error as a crime or every accusation against power as an informational threat. That boundary is essential.

But freedom of expression does not mean indifference toward organized lies. The responses most compatible with a free society are less spectacular and more demanding: transparency in campaigns and political advertising, independent media, pluralism of sources, public fact-checking, civic education, clear official information, visible corrections and reputational responsibility for those who manufacture deception.

The liberal criterion is twofold: defend the free circulation of ideas and, at the same time, raise the social cost of lying deliberately in order to manipulate citizens.

A free citizenry needs disputable facts, not fabricated ones

Politics will never be a purely technical conversation. It includes values, interests, passions and conflict. That is not a defect: it is part of living with others in freedom.

Political disinformation appears when that conflict is no longer fought only with arguments, interpretations and proposals, and instead starts to rely on falsehoods designed to confuse. Then the citizen is not merely choosing between imperfect options; they are choosing inside a contaminated environment.

That is why the goal should not be to eliminate disagreement or hand an authority control over public truth. The goal is more modest: protect the conditions that allow people to debate freely, test evidence, correct errors and hold power to account. An open society needs intense debate, but it also needs citizens who can tell the difference between a hard criticism and a manufactured lie.