In his book Christian Harbulot (Spin Partners and School of Economic Warfare director) highlight how the spread of false or misleading information has become a widespread phenomenon. With the information society and Web technologies, actor games are disturbed and do not correspond to the commonly widespread Manichean vision. The “good”, “usually presented as representatives of civil society in the fight against injustice and mismanagement of economic and political world“, are sometimes hoax manufacturers. The “bad guys“, represented as “the powerful who do not hesitate to manipulate, deceive and misinform to defend their interests” are more and more frequently destabilized by the hoax.

In this context, the information (true or false) is now used by everyone as a weapon “sometimes more efficient than the gun, diplomacy, justice or law”. Faced with such informational confrontation in the information society, the ordinary citizen, “once exposed to gossip and rumor, now operates in a much wider scope of threat”.

For his part, François-Bernard Huyghe, research director at IRIS, decrypts in detail the “scope of threat” in his book titled “Misinformation : fake weapons”.

He returns to the origins of the term of misinformation, appeared during the Cold War as a weapon of the secret services. It is more than a lie, since it uses forgery, its staging and dissemination in order to lose an enemy or an opponent. François-Bernard Huyghe then shows how this weapon of misinformation has extended from the 90s in the political and media fields, especially to create legitimacy for military action (against Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, for example).

Finally, as Christian Harbulot, he explains the generalization of this phenomenon with digital and social media, that he calls “technologies of illusion”. In this context, he particularly highlights the role played by the “conspiracy syndrome”, which opposes on the one hand those who see conspiracy theories everywhere and, in the other hand, those who reject any critical thinking.

In this context, it is necessary to “learn to recognize the methods and established practices of false, at the price of distrust and effort” according to François-Bernard Huyghe. It is starting to be the case since, in the information society, disinformation is finally “become a weapon increasingly conspicuous”, says Christian Harbulot.

For further information:« Fabricants d’intox, la guerre mondialisée des propagandes », Christian Harbulot
« La désinformation : les armes du faux », François-Bernard Huyghe