The war over information warfare and free speech isn’t being fought in Moscow or Beijing. It’s being waged in federal agency conference rooms, Silicon Valley content-moderation dashboards, and the comment sections of platforms that answer more to government pressure than to the First Amendment. Call something “misinformation” and you can make it disappear. Call someone a “disinformer” and you can end a career, kill a business, or invalidate a court case without ever proving a single allegation in open court.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s the documented operating model of the last four years in American politics.
Background and Context: Misinformation, Disinformation, and Why the Difference Is Everything
Most people use “misinformation” and “disinformation” interchangeably. That’s a mistake the people exploiting both terms are counting on.
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information spread without deliberate intent. It’s the uncle who shares a misleading statistic because he didn’t read past the headline. It’s a news organization that gets a fact wrong and issues a correction. Intent is absent. Disinformation is the opposite: deliberately false content designed to deceive a specific audience toward a predetermined conclusion. The Chinese Communist Party’s early claim that COVID-19 originated at a U.S. Army base wasn’t a mistake. It was a calculated deflection — a textbook case of state-sponsored disinformation designed to shift blame and buy time.
Information warfare pulls both of these tools together and adds a third: denial. That’s the deliberate suppression of accurate information. Deny the public timely facts, flood the zone with conflicting narratives, and control which questions get labeled “dangerous.” The result is a population that can’t make informed decisions, not because it lacks intelligence, but because the information supply itself has been corrupted.
Understanding that three-part structure — misinformation, disinformation, and denial — is essential to recognizing when you’re inside an information operation rather than a legitimate public health or national security response.
The Government That Cried “Misinformation”: When Labeling Becomes a Weapon
Here’s the uncomfortable question Americans aren’t asking often enough: who gets to define what counts as misinformation?
For the better part of four years, that authority rested with a coalition of federal agencies, legacy media outlets, and social media platforms operating in close coordination. A federal judge in Missouri described the arrangement in terms that should alarm everyone regardless of party: the Biden administration’s effort to direct social media censorship amounted to, in the court’s words, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Missouri v. Biden court findings
The pattern repeated consistently. The Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis was flagged as misinformation and suppressed on social platforms in 2021. By 2023, the FBI, Energy Department, and Congressional intelligence committees all acknowledged it was a credible theory. The Hunter Biden laptop story was labeled Russian disinformation by 51 former intelligence officials two weeks before the 2020 election. It was real. The “settled science” on COVID masks and vaccine efficacy shifted repeatedly, but anyone who raised questions in real-time got their account suspended, not a nuanced response.
On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order specifically addressing this pattern, stating that the federal government had infringed on constitutionally protected speech rights under the guise of combating misinformation, disinformation, and what agencies had classified as “malinformation.” That last category is the most telling. Malinformation, by the government’s own definition, isn’t false information. It’s true information the government believes is being used in the wrong context. In practice, it means a bureaucrat can label an accurate, sourced, factual claim as a national security threat because it doesn’t support the preferred narrative.
That’s not information protection. That’s information control.
Information Warfare and Free Speech: A Two-Way Street Nobody Admits Exists
The standard media framework treats information warfare as something that happens to America from outside. Russia runs bot farms. China floods TikTok. Iran floods the zone before elections. All of that is true and documented.
The 2024 presidential election saw AI-generated disinformation campaigns including synthetic speech robocalls and fabricated images designed to shift voter sentiment, with foreign influence operations from Russia, China, and Iran using deepfakes and AI-generated content to sow discord. These are real threats and they deserve serious policy responses. DISA
But the framework collapses the moment you apply it symmetrically. The same mechanisms used to combat foreign disinformation were deployed against domestic political speech. Accounts discussing vaccine hesitancy were suppressed. Stories about border security were flagged. Content questioning 2020 election integrity was removed, in some cases before any fact-check had been completed.
Congressional testimony from journalist Michael Shellenberger detailed what he called a “censorship industrial complex,” in which the federal government pressured social media companies to remove lawful speech, and a district court’s findings described the arrangement as an “almost dystopian scenario” resembling an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. Yale Journal on Regulation
When the government controls which information is labeled dangerous and which is left alone, it is no longer a neutral referee in an information ecosystem. It becomes the most powerful disinformation actor in the room, because it can make its version of events the only version available.
The Asymmetry Problem: Misinformation vs. Disinformation Enforcement Isn’t Neutral
Here’s where the disinformation-versus-misinformation distinction stops being academic and starts being politically decisive.
Consider the summer of 2020. Riots burned cities across America. At various points, corporate media described the scenes as “mostly peaceful protests” while buildings were actively on fire behind reporters. That characterization was, by any reasonable definition, false. Nobody lost their verified status over it. No platform suppressed it. Contrast that with users who questioned the severity of the unrest or challenged the narrative around specific police encounters. Those accounts faced reduced reach, suspension, or removal.
The asymmetry extends to the January 6 Capitol riot. Politicians and major news organizations applied the word “insurrection” to the event from the first day. [As of the time of this writing, no individual arrested from the January 6 events has been convicted of insurrection, sedition, or treason]
Yet the label was deployed instantly, at volume, across every major platform, without challenge.
Compare that to the Summer 2020 interruptions of congressional hearings by protesters, the disruption of Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings by activists who were later arrested, or the physical assault on Senator Rand Paul and his wife following the 2020 Republican National Convention. The definitional standards that transformed one riot into a constitutional crisis simply weren’t applied to the others.
That’s not journalism. That’s information warfare with a press badge.
When Misinformation Becomes Disinformation: The Time Delay Problem
One of the least-discussed mechanisms in American information warfare is the time gap between initial reporting and correction.
A police encounter goes viral. The early accounts are wrong: details are misattributed, context is stripped, witnesses contradict each other. But the emotional response has already been triggered. Slogans form. Protests organize. Careers end. Businesses burn. Weeks later, body camera footage and forensic evidence reveal a different picture, but by then the correction gets a fraction of the original story’s reach.
A 2021 study found that misinformation sources on Facebook received six times more engagement than reputable news sites, and fake news is specifically engineered to drive shares and comments, meaning it spreads faster and farther than corrections ever can. Blackhatmea
This is the mechanism that converts organic misinformation into durable disinformation. Someone with a platform and an agenda picks up the wrong initial report, amplifies it before any correction surfaces, and then never issues a correction when the facts change. The false narrative becomes the public record.
The consequences are real: a 2021 DOJ study found that several high-profile police shooting narratives had to be substantially revised following the release of evidence that contradicted early media accounts. The political damage from those narratives, however, was permanent.
AI and the Next Wave: What Disinformation Campaigns Look Like in 2025 and Beyond
Generative AI has restructured the disinformation threat in ways most Americans haven’t caught up to yet.
In 2024, a Chinese-linked influence campaign used deepfake videos and AI-generated content across platforms to spread divisive messaging about U.S. politics, while synthetic speech robocalls targeting voters were deployed during the presidential election cycle. A separate and more disturbing development emerged in early 2025, when investigators determined that the Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber had used ChatGPT to help plan the attack. DISA
The implications run in two directions. On one side, generative AI lowers the production cost of sophisticated disinformation to near zero. A hostile foreign actor no longer needs a team of linguists and graphic designers. It needs a laptop and an API key. On the other side, AI is accelerating what researchers call the “liar’s dividend”: the phenomenon in which real, legitimate images and recordings get dismissed as AI fakes because the public has been conditioned to distrust all digital media.
Both effects damage the information ecosystem, just from opposite angles. The first floods the zone with false content. The second poisons genuine content by association.
What’s missing from most policy conversations about AI and disinformation is a clear-eyed acknowledgment that AI censorship tools carry the same asymmetry risks as their human predecessors. An algorithm trained to detect “harmful misinformation” will reflect the biases of whoever defined the training labels. If the government influenced those definitions, which the Missouri v. Biden evidence strongly suggests it did, then AI-powered content moderation doesn’t solve the information warfare problem. It automates it.
What Protecting Free Speech in an Information War Actually Looks Like
The solution isn’t to ignore misinformation. It’s to be honest about who is best positioned to correct it.
Historically, the answer isn’t government. Socrates was executed for “corrupting young minds.” Galileo was convicted of heresy for heliocentrism. Ignaz Semmelweis lost his medical career before dying in an asylum because he insisted that doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies. The authority figures of every era have misidentified genuine insight as dangerous speech. There’s no structural reason to believe 21st-century federal agencies are immune to that error. There’s considerable evidence they are not.
The Supreme Court has held that prohibiting false speech risks chilling more valuable speech by causing people to self-censor, and that the First Amendment ensures a “breathing space” for false statements and hyperbole that are inevitable in free debate. That principle isn’t a loophole. It’s the entire point. The framers understood that government is always the least trustworthy arbiter of which ideas are dangerous, because government has the most to gain from suppressing the ones that challenge it. Scholasticahq
The practical corrective is transparency, competition, and speed. Accurate information, made available quickly through multiple independent channels, is the most effective counter to both misinformation and disinformation. It’s not glamorous policy. It doesn’t give agencies new enforcement powers or platforms new liability shields. But it’s what actually works, and the historical record supports it.
Conclusion
Information warfare and free speech were always going to collide in the digital age. What nobody fully anticipated was that the most sophisticated information operation targeting American citizens wouldn’t arrive via Russian bot farms or Chinese state media. It would arrive through federal agencies coordinating with social media companies to determine which speech was too dangerous to allow. The distinction between misinformation and disinformation matters enormously, but so does the question of who gets to make the call. When government appoints itself that arbiter, the label “misinformation” stops being a diagnostic and starts being a weapon. Staying informed means knowing who’s pulling the trigger.
FAST FACTS
- The Biden administration’s coordination with social media platforms to flag and remove content was described by a federal district court judge as potentially constituting “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.”
- President Trump signed an executive order on January 20, 2025, directing federal agencies to end all programs that had used misinformation or disinformation labels to suppress constitutionally protected speech.
- A 2021 study found that misinformation sources on Facebook received six times more engagement than credible news outlets, underscoring how false content is structurally engineered to spread faster than corrections. Blackhatmea
- During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, foreign actors deployed generative AI tools including synthetic robocalls and deepfake imagery to influence voter sentiment, with Chinese, Russian, and Iranian-linked campaigns all documented. DISA
- The Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis was suppressed as misinformation by major social platforms beginning in 2021; by 2023, the FBI and Department of Energy both assessed it as the most likely origin of COVID-19.
- 73% of Americans believe social media platforms intentionally censor viewpoints they find objectionable, according to polling from the America First Policy Institute.
- The “liar’s dividend” — in which authentic video and images are dismissed as AI deepfakes due to eroded public trust — represents an emerging secondary threat from the proliferation of generative AI disinformation tools.
- Researchers classify disinformation into at least three structural categories: fabricated content (entirely invented), manipulated content (distorted authentic material), and imposter content (real sources misrepresented or impersonated). arxiv
FAQ
Q: What is the difference between misinformation and disinformation in information warfare?
A: Misinformation is false or inaccurate content spread without intent to deceive, usually the result of ignorance or poor sourcing. Disinformation is deliberately false content designed to mislead a specific audience toward a predetermined conclusion. Information warfare combines both with a third tactic, denial, where accurate information is deliberately suppressed to prevent the public from making informed decisions.
Q: How has the U.S. government used misinformation labels to suppress free speech?
A: Federal agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, coordinated with social media platforms to flag and remove content they classified as misinformation. Court findings in Missouri v. Biden concluded this coordination likely violated the First Amendment. A Trump executive order in January 2025 directed agencies to end these programs.
Q: What role is AI playing in disinformation campaigns in 2025?
A: Generative AI has dramatically lowered the cost and sophistication barrier for producing disinformation, enabling foreign actors to generate deepfake videos, synthetic audio, and fake articles at scale. The 2024 U.S. election saw documented AI-driven campaigns from Chinese, Russian, and Iranian-linked networks. Simultaneously, the spread of AI fakes is eroding trust in genuine content, a phenomenon researchers call the “liar’s dividend.”
Q: Is censoring misinformation protected under the First Amendment?
A: Private platforms retain broad legal latitude to moderate content under current law. The constitutional issue arises when government officials direct, pressure, or coordinate with those platforms to remove specific speech. Federal courts have found that such coordination likely crosses the line into government-compelled censorship, which the First Amendment prohibits regardless of whether the targeted speech is accurate.
Q: How can ordinary people protect themselves from information warfare?
A: Verify claims across multiple independent outlets before accepting or sharing them. Be especially cautious of emotional, high-urgency content that demands an immediate reaction. Seek original source documents rather than summaries. Recognize that both delayed corrections and AI-generated media are structural features of the modern information environment, and build habits of skepticism that account for both.
CALL TO ACTION
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