2.3.1 Before the Printing Press

Perhaps the earliest known example of misinformation can be found in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh (written about 2100–1200 BC). In his book Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story (2019), Martin Worthington, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin, claims to have found an example of “fake news” in the ancient Mesopotamian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh. In 1872, the Assyriologist George Smith discovered that the eleventh tablet of the Epic (produced in the seventh century BC) contained a passage very similar to the Flood story from the Book of Genesis. In the story, the God Ea (known as the “trickster god”) warns Uta-napišti, the Babylonian version of Noah, that a huge flood is coming, and instructs him to build a boat and take in birds and beasts of every stripe. Once the boat was finished and Uta-napišti shut its doors, rain began to fall, and all the rest of mankind perished. After six days the rain stopped, and on the seventh day Uta-napišti sent out birds to go find land. The third bird, a raven, didn’t return, indicating that it had found land and that the waters were receding (British Museum, 2022; University of Cambridge, 2019).

Worthington argues that Ea’s warning to Uta-napišti about the oncoming flood was a verbal trick, designed to be understood in multiple ways. One interpretation of Ea’s message to Uta-napišti is that of a promise of abundant food if humans would help him build the Ark. Another translation of the same words, however, warns Uta-napišti of impending disaster. The words “ina šēr(-)kukkī, ina lilâti ušaznanakkunūši šamūt kibāti” can be interpreted both as “At dawn there will be kukku-cakes, in the evening he will rain down upon you a shower of wheat,” and “By means of incantations, by means of wind-demons, he will rain down upon you rain as thick as (grains of) wheat” (taken verbatim from University of Cambridge, 2019).Footnote ¹ In other words, Ea manipulates Uta-napišti by making him believe that building the Ark will bring him great rewards, even though his words could just as easily mean that disaster is afoot. Why exactly Ea decided to be this duplicitous is a matter of debate. Worthington (Reference Worthington2019, pp. 325–327) offers several explanations. For one, Ea was bound by an oath to the other Babylonian gods not to reveal the flood to humans. By being ambiguous to Uta-napišti, he didn’t technically violate his oath while still helping mankind survive the deluge. Another possibility is that Ea was acting out of self-interest. In Babylonian theology, the gods relied on humans to feed them. If all of mankind died in a flood, all the gods would starve. Tricking Uta-napišti into building an ark that would allow him to survive would therefore not only be beneficial to Uta-napišti and all the others on the Ark, but also to himself.

During the last war of the Roman Republic (32–30 BC), right after the death of Julius Caesar, his potential successors, Mark Antony and Octavian (Augustus), both made use of common misinformation techniques to win over the hearts and minds of the public. These are sometimes referred to as the “Info-wars of Rome” (Kaminska, Reference Kaminska2017). Octavian claimed that Antony was “bewitched” by his new wife, Cleopatra (then queen of Egypt). To undermine Antony’s campaign, Octavian allegedly produced a fake document claiming to be Antony’s final will, which revealed his true commitment to Cleopatra and Egypt rather than Rome (MacDonald, Reference MacDonald2017). As depicted in Shakespeare’s famous rendition of the story, Antony and Cleopatra both died by suicide. Octavian is often regarded as a true master of manipulation: he even had coins minted with catchy slogans to help spread his propaganda (Sifuentes, Reference Sifuentes2019).

Skipping ahead a few years, misinformation and harmful rumors were common throughout medieval Europe, often with negative consequences. For example, think of the many witch trials (Boudry & Hofhuis, Reference Boudry and Hofhuis2018) and the persecution of minorities based on false information (Terrell, Reference Terrell1904). In 1475, rumors began to spread around Trento, Italy, about a missing boy who had supposedly been abducted and killed by some of the city’s Jews, who were said to have drunk his blood as part of their Passover celebration. The Prince-Bishop of Trento, Johannes IV Hinderbach, called for the arrest and torture of all of Trento’s Jews and had several of them burned at the stake (Hsia, Reference Hsia1992). The Pope in Rome tried briefly to intervene through a mediator (apparently aware that the stories were false), but Hinderbach refused to back down, and tried to have the boy canonized as Saint Simon of Trento (Soll, Reference Soll2016). Anti-Semitic stories of “blood libel” and the supposed ritualistic killing of Christian children by Jewish communities have been common throughout Europe since at least 1144, with the death of a twelve-year-old boy from Norwich, England. As recently as 2014, the Anti-Defamation League petitioned to have a Facebook page called “Jewish Ritual Murder” taken down (Teter, Reference Teter2020).

2.3.2 After the Gutenberg Printing Press

There’s little doubt that Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, brought about a revolution in mass communication with the creation of his “movable type” printing press (the use of movable blocks, such as pictographic or alphabetic characters, to reproduce a document), around 1440 AD. However, Gutenberg probably shouldn’t be called the “inventor” of the printing press. There is evidence of printing (with large wooden blocks rather than individual metal ones) being used in Zhejiang, China, as early as 800 AD (Newman, Reference Newman2019). Bi Sheng, a Song dynasty engineer, invented the earliest known movable type technology (using Chinese porcelain) somewhere between 1039 and 1048 AD (He, Reference He1994). The first movable type that used metal (the type that Gutenberg perfected) probably originates from Korea: some accounts claim that a thirteenth-century Korean civil minister named Choe Yun-ui invented movable metal type printing to print a lengthy Buddhist text (Newman, Reference Newman2019), and the oldest surviving book that was printed using this type is the Buljo-Jikji-Simche-Yojeol (or Jikji for short), which dates back to 1377 (Park & Yoon, Reference Park and Yoon2009).

In an interesting example of misinformation, the Dutch city of Haarlem once also claimed to be the cradle of the printing press. Laurens Janszoon Coster, a sexton (or parish clerk) who supposedly lived in the city in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, was long said to have invented metal movable type printing and run a successful printing company in the 1420s, about twenty years before Gutenberg (van der Linde, Reference van der Linde1870). However, the only source for this claim is the book Batavia by Hadrianus Junius, published in 1588, and no contemporary records of Coster’s invention appear to exist. Junius is said to have made this claim “not to convey facts, but to deliver a deliberate mythologization of an already well-established legend about the invention of printing in Haarlem” (Robbe, Reference Robbe2010). In other words, he made it up for clout. Tragically, the city of Haarlem remained devoid of further noteworthy achievements until a New York City neighborhood was named after it in the year 1660.

Nonetheless, Gutenberg’s printing press undoubtedly made reading materials much more accessible to the masses. This had several important consequences both in Europe and worldwide. For example, Jeremiah Dittmar (Reference Dittmar2011) argues that European cities where printing presses were established grew about 60 percent faster between 1500 and 1600 than similar cities without a printing press. In the first few hundred years after Gutenberg’s innovation, Europe and then the rest of the world witnessed the rise of mass-printed books, novellas, essays, pamphlets, and newspapers. Writing and publishing, previously beholden mostly to religious institutions (Copeland, Reference Copeland2006), soon became widely available as tools designed to not only inform but also to persuade, frighten, and mislead. The famous Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, frustrated with the fraught political climate of his time, published an essay called The Art of Political Lying (1710). He writes:

Swift, for his part, was no stranger to publishing works that veer into misinformation territory, although, like the example of Kim Jong-Un from the previous chapter, these works were satirical. He’s best known for Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a famous work of satire that lampooned popular adventure books such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and whose first edition was published as if it were a factual account of the author’s travels under the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver, “first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships.” Another example is A Modest Proposal (1729), in which Swift ironically suggests that poor Irish people could sell their children as food to the rich to earn some extra cash (even going so far as to suggest different ways the children may be prepared and served).Footnote ³

In some countries, the widespread availability of printing gave rise to the development of mass media and a free press. In his book The Idea of a Free Press: The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy, David Copeland argues that in early seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century America, the first printed newssheets were “published by authority,” and fit the needs of people who held political power. Alongside such government-directed publications, a public desire for information and competition among political and religious actors opened up the way for a press that printed despite authority (Copeland, Reference Copeland2006, p. 8). Eventually, this process (along with the increasing popularity of Enlightenment ideas about freedom of expression and liberty of conscience) led to the establishment of the free press as we know it today.

There soon came a period where journalists and other media content producers tried to test the limits of the media landscape. Sensationalist stories became hugely popular, often at the expense of accuracy. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured a series of famous hoaxes and journalistic pranks. A good example is the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, when The Sun, a New York-based newspaper, published a set of articles describing a series of alleged discoveries on the moon, such as moon bison, trees, oceans, and even a new species called “vespertilio homo” or “man-bats.” So many people are said to have believed the story that religious groups were starting to prepare for missionary work on the moon, although it’s very difficult to find independent verification of this (Matthias, Reference Matthias2022). The author of the hoax articles, Richard Adam Locke, later said that it wasn’t his goal to fool anyone but that he had “underestimated the gullibility of the public” (Zielinski, Reference Zielinski2015). The well-known writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe also wasn’t happy with the story, not only because he knew it was made up but also because he believed that Locke had plagiarized a previous story of his about a man who travels to the moon in a hot air balloon. Poe later retracted this accusation, but he did publish a hoax article of his own a few years later (and in the same newspaper), about a man who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon (Goodman, Reference Goodman2008).

Another amusing example of how heated early journalism could get is that of two competing newspapers from West Virginia, the Clarksburg Daily Telegram and the Clarksburg Daily News. Suspicious that Daily News editors were stealing their stories, the Telegram published an article in 1903 about a man with the unlikely name of Mejk Swenekafew, who had been shot after a fight with a friend of his over a pet dog. The next day, the same article appeared in the Daily News as well, after which the Telegram revealed that they’d made the story up and that Swenekafew’s name spelled backwards read “we fake news.” The Daily News was forced to publicly admit their wrongdoing (Starmans, Reference Starmans2019).

The hilarity of these hoaxes and pranks notwithstanding, the rise of modern journalism was not without hurdles. Misinformation has been rife throughout its existence, sometimes with serious consequences. Throughout the nineteenth century, US national media often painted lynchings of black Americans in a positive light, and portrayed racist lynch mobs as “chivalrous knights who were defending the honor of their race” (Wasserman, Reference Wasserman1998). These lynchings were often triggered by false stories of African-Americans committing crimes such as rape and murder against white people (Terrell, Reference Terrell1904).

Perhaps one of the most consequential examples of deliberate misinformation is the forgery known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (original title: Програма завоевания мира евреями, or “the Jewish program for conquering the world”). This document, created in 1903 by the Russian secret service under Tsar Nicholas II, alleges a massive Jewish conspiracy to control the global economy, the press, and international politics (Whitfield, Reference Whitfield2020). It was based on a variety of anti-Semitic sources, such as the 1868 novel Biarritz by the Prussian postal worker and agent provocateur Hermann Goedsche. One chapter in the book describes a nightly meeting in a cemetery in Prague where Jewish leaders discuss their plans for world domination (Cohn, Reference Cohn1966). Despite being exposed as a forgery as early as 1921, the Protocols found massive uptake especially after World War I and the Russian revolutions of 1917 (Bronner, Reference Bronner2007). The Protocols continue to influence conspiracy theorists even today (Whitfield, Reference Whitfield2020), which shows the limitations of debunking misinformation after it has spread, something we will get back to in Chapter 7.

2.3.3 The Mass Media Era

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the mass media era started: was this after printed materials became available to large audiences in the sixteenth century, after the emergence of newspapers in the seventeenth century, after photography and the telegraph were invented in the early nineteenth century, or even with the rise of the newspaper industry in the late nineteenth century? For the sake of clarity, we’ll put the starting point of the mass media era around 1920, when nonprint media such as radio and later television became broadly available (at least to audiences in industrialized countries). The first commercial radio program in the US was broadcast from Pittsburgh in 1920 (Federal Communications Commission, 2020), and the BBC started broadcasting from London in 1922. Soon, most people who could afford a radio had one in their home.

Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, broadcast on CBS on October 30, 1938, is now widely known as a powerful example of the persuasive power of the mass media. Being the Halloween episode of a longer radio series, its premise was to make an invasion of Earth by Martians sound as realistic as possible, with newsreaders describing the horrors inflicted by the invaders’ heat ray in gruesome detail. People who tuned in during the broadcast had missed the introduction explaining that the show was a fiction, and media outlets reported that so many of them had fallen for the hoax that it evoked “mass hysteria” (Schwartz, Reference Schwartz2015). However, there doesn’t appear to be much evidence for this: investigations by Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow at Slate (2013) and David Emery at Snopes (2016) showed not only that very few people had listened to the broadcast (because it aired at the same time as a much more popular program), but also that reports of mass hysteria were greatly exaggerated. What did happen, according to author A. Brad Schwartz (Reference Schwartz2015), is that The War of the Worlds provoked a nationwide debate about the power of the radio as a tool to mislead people, a debate amplified by the rise of the Nazis in Europe and Joseph Goebbels’ use of radio for propaganda purposes.

Speaking of Goebbels, the Nazi regime was the first to make extensive use of modern media technologies to spread propaganda. Goebbels believed that propaganda should serve as the “background music” to government policy (Goebbels, Reference Goebbels, Baines and O’Shaughnessy1934). In service of this, he made sure that almost every German had a radio in their home to listen to Hitler’s speeches, and directors such as Leni Riefenstahl further popularized the regime through propaganda films such as Triumph des Willens. This policy appears to have had long-term consequences. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth (Reference Voigtländer and Voth2015) conducted a study in which they found that Germans who had grown up in the 1920s and ’30s were two to three times more likely to espouse extreme anti-Semitic beliefs (and generally had more negative attitudes about Jews) than people born earlier or later who hadn’t been exposed to Nazi propaganda in schools, through the media, and in the Hitler Youth. This effect was especially pronounced for people born in regions of Germany that had stronger anti-Semitic attitudes before the Nazis came to power, indicating that indoctrination may be particularly effective when it exploits preexisting prejudices (see Chapter 4).

After World War II came the Cold War between the US and the USSR, which was rife with propaganda and misinformation. Both America and the Soviet Union set up propaganda programs aimed at destabilizing countries in each other’s sphere of influence (Sussman, Reference Sussman2021). Famous are US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s unproven accusations of Communist subversion in the government, media, and entertainment industries. The Soviets, for their part, jammed foreign radio broadcasts, arrested citizens for allegedly listening to them, and tried to spread pro-Soviet narratives through arts and literature, a phenomenon known as Agitprop (Magnúsdóttir, Reference Magnúsdóttir2018). The Cold War came to an end in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved into numerous independent states and the Warsaw Pact, the collective defense treaty of many Socialist countries, ceased to exist. This also put a temporary damper on political disinformation, as Russia and the West became uneasy allies for a while.

The first years after the Cold War marked one of the most notorious examples of misinformation, at least in the Western world. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British medical doctor, published an article in the prestigious journal The Lancet alleging a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism in young children. The study caused a worldwide media uproar, and a significant and immediate increase in vaccine skepticism (Motta & Stecula, Reference Motta and Stecula2021). However, the study soon turned out to not just be a scientific mistake but a deliberate fraud (Rao & Andrade, Reference Rao and Andrade2011): an investigation by journalist Brian Deer (Reference Deer2004) revealed that Wakefield and his lead coauthor John Walker-Smith had misrepresented their data to fit their preconceived conclusions. The Lancet later retracted the publication in its entirety, and most of Wakefield’s coauthors renounced their affiliations with the paper and himself. The BMJ later noted that “the […] paper has received so much media attention, with such potential to damage public health, that it is hard to find a parallel in the history of medical science” (Godlee, Reference Godlee2011).

2.3.4 The Internet Era

It is an uncontroversial fact that the Internet was invented by former US presidential candidate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore. In a 1999 interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, Gore claimed that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet.” His political rivals and the media were quick to exploit Gore’s statement as fodder for ridicule, linking it to previous gaffes and crediting Gore with various other important discoveries such as the :-) emoji and opposable thumbs. Not to be outdone, Gore later also (jokingly) claimed to have invented the environment. Gore’s gaffe is an example of an imprecise statement being taken out of context and beginning to live a life of its own, which is something that often happens in the context of misinformation. Although “taking the initiative in creating the Internet” may be taking things a bit too far, Gore (as a Congressman and later as Senator) had been heavily involved in promoting high-speed telecommunications technology and national network initiatives since the 1970s (Kahn & Cerf, Reference Kahn and Cerf2000). In 1986, he was also the chairman of a senatorial subcommittee that fostered the creation of a series of supercomputer centers which were key in the emergence of the commercial Internet a few years later. All in all, Gore may have been a victim of his own tendency to exaggerate his accomplishments, but it’s difficult to dismiss his claim as false (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins2000). Nonetheless, the meme abides.

As with the Gutenberg printing press, who gets to claim credit for the Internet’s invention is less important than the effects it may have had on the spread of (mis)information. We don’t know exactly when the first person started lying on the Internet, but it’s fairly safe to assume that this happened soon after it became widely available in the mid-1990s. One of the first known examples of email spam is an email titled “Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon” (1994) by someone named Clarence L. Thomas IV.Footnote ⁴ Phishing scams, emails made to look like they were sent by a reputable organization with the intent of extracting money from recipients, date back to about 1995 (San Martino & Perramon, Reference San Martino and Perramon2010). The Onion began publishing satirical news in 1998, and their articles were regularly mistaken for real news and reposted by non-satirical news outlets, as we saw in the previous chapter (Posetti & Matthews, Reference Posetti and Matthews2018).

A hugely influential example of harmful misinformation in the internet era came from one of the world’s foremost media outlets, the New York Times. In the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, journalist Judith Miller published a series of articles alleging the existence of an Iraqi site said to be producing biological weapons. Miller’s accounts, however, were never independently verified (Posetti & Matthews, Reference Posetti and Matthews2018). After the United States invaded Iraq, the US government was forced to admit that the “weapons of mass destruction” that the Iraqi government was said to harbor (a major pretext for the invasion) didn’t exist (Borger, Reference Borger2004). The New York Times later issued an apology, stating that Miller’s reporting had been inaccurate and that its editors had failed to weigh the available evidence against their desire to have Saddam Hussein removed from power (New York Times, 2004). Some argue that Miller’s reporting directly influenced the US government’s decision to invade, highlighting the potential for misinformation to have real-world consequences (Posetti & Matthews, Reference Posetti and Matthews2018). Moreover, research by Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science at Bristol University, and his colleagues showed that the false claims of weapons of mass destruction continued to influence people’s reasoning despite the later retractions (Lewandowsky et al., Reference Lewandowsky, Stritzke, Oberauer and Morales2005).

The internet era also ushered in a time of information warfare. Leveraging the Internet and social media to spread certain narratives during violent conflict became an increasingly important part of warring parties’ strategies. The goal of such information campaigns is to influence public opinion among target audiences (domestically or internationally): for example, to reduce popular support for a government’s economic sanctions against another country (Jankowicz, Reference Jankowicz2020; Van Niekerk, Reference Van Niekerk2015). Well-known examples of conflicts where information warfare plays a key role are the war in Syria and the Russia–Ukraine conflict, the latter of which we discuss in detail in Chapter 3.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, politicians began to make increasing use of the Internet for their election campaigns. However, social media also proved to be a useful vehicle for political misinformation. This topic became especially salient in 2015 and 2016, when misinformation was said to play an important role in the US presidential elections and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. Although there currently doesn’t seem to be convincing evidence that misinformation directly influenced these elections’ results (Allcott & Gentzkow, Reference Allcott and Gentzkow2017; Bovet & Makse, Reference Bovet and Makse2019; de Waal, Reference de Waal2018; Eady et al., Reference Eady, Pashkalis, Zilinsky, Bonneau, Nagler and Tucker2023; Guess et al., Reference Guess, Nagler and Tucker2019), there has been widespread concern that the spread of misinformation may adversely influence the democratic process (Mackey, Reference Mackey2016). For instance, the Russian government mounted a disinformation campaign during the 2016 US presidential elections, which was primarily aimed at increasing support for the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, and reducing support for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, as well as to undermine Americans’ trust in the electoral system (Ferrara, Reference Ferrara2017; Keller et al., Reference Keller, Schoch, Stier and Yang2020; Timberg & Romm, Reference Timberg and Romm2018). To what extent this was successful is up for debate (considering the billions of dollars in campaign expenditures by both major parties and external donors), but there is some evidence that the impact of disinformation campaigns was low (Eady et al., Reference Eady, Pashkalis, Zilinsky, Bonneau, Nagler and Tucker2023). Others saw political misinformation as a lucrative business. For example, a group of teenagers from the Macedonian town of Veles ran a network of “fake news” websites pushing out nonsense articles about the US elections. Their goal wasn’t to influence politics but rather to make money: the web traffic they managed to attract resulted in significant income from advertising revenue (Kirby, Reference Kirby2016).

Nonetheless, the widespread use of bots and other automated methods to spread misinformation has become cause for concern (Starbird, Reference Starbird2019). One study estimated that around 17 percent of the Twitter user base was made up of bots (Varol et al., Reference Varol, Ferrara, Davis, Menczer and Flammini2017). Social media platforms such as Facebook and Reddit regularly find and remove bot networks, many of which appear to be run by governments (Marineau, Reference Marineau2020). These bot networks do not create misinformation from scratch; rather, they identify narratives that suit a particular political purpose, and amplify them (Badawy et al., Reference Badawy, Addawood, Lerman and Ferrara2019; Broniatowski et al., Reference Broniatowski, Jamison, Qi, AlKulaib, Chen, Benton, Quinn and Dredze2018; McKew, Reference McKew2018).

Of course, no history of misinformation would be complete without mentioning the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, when there was a lot of uncertainty about the origins, causes, and spread of the virus, as well as about how to treat it, there was plenty of room for misinformation to proliferate widely. The World Health Organization (WHO) went so far as to declare this problem an “infodemic” (Zarocostas, Reference Zarocostas2020). COVID-19 misinformation ranged from false information about how to cure the disease to speculation about the virus having escaped from a research lab in Wuhan and, later on, conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines (Brennen et al., Reference Brennen, Simon, Howard and Nielsen2020; Loomba et al., Reference Loomba, de Figueiredo, Piatek, de Graaf and Larson2021).Footnote ⁵ In Iran, hundreds of people died after drinking poisonous methanol in an attempt to cure the disease (Delirrad & Mohammadi, Reference Delirrad and Mohammadi2020). In Great Britain, people set mobile phone masts on fire, believing that 5G radiation was somehow linked to COVID infections (Jolley & Paterson, Reference Jolley and Paterson2020). More amusingly, a group of researchers published an ostensibly serious article claiming that “COVID-19 arrived via a meteorite, a presumed relatively fragile and loose carbonaceous meteorite that struck Northeast China on October 11, 2019” (Steele et al., Reference Steele, Gorczynski, Lindley, Tokoro, Temple and Wickramasinghe2020). We return to the topic of COVID-19 misinformation in Chapter 3.