Despite Kenya’s transformative and progressive 2010 Constitution, it is still grappling with a hybrid democracy, displaying both authoritarian and democratic traits. Scholars attribute this status to several factors, with a prominent one being the domination of the political order and wielding of political power by a few individuals and families with historical ties to patronage networks and informal power structures. The persisting issues of electoral fraud, widespread corruption, media harassment, weak rule of law and governance challenges further contribute to the hybrid democracy status. While the 2010 Constitution aims to restructure the state and enhance democratic institutions, the transition process is considered incomplete, especially since the judiciary’s role of judicial review is mostly faced with the difficult task of countering democratic regression. Moreover, critical institutions such as the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) have faced criticism due to corruption scandals and perceptions of partisanship, eroding public trust in their ability to oversee fair elections effectively.

The structure of society is heavily dependent upon its means of producing and distributing information. As its methods of communication change, so does a society. In Europe, for example, the invention of the printing press created what we now call the public sphere. The public sphere, in turn, facilitated the appearance of ‘public opinion’, which made possible wholly new forms of politics and governance, including the democracies we treasure today. Society is presently in the midst of an information revolution. It is shifting from analogue to digital information, and it has invented the Internet as a nearly universal means for distributing digital information. Taken together, these two changes are profoundly affecting the organization of our society. With frightening rapidity, these innovations have created a wholly new digital public sphere that is both virtual and pervasive.

State responses to the recent ‘crisis’ caused by misinformation in social media have mainly aimed to impose liability on those who facilitate its dissemination. Internet companies, especially large platforms, have deployed numerous techniques, measures and instruments to address the phenomenon. However, little has been done to assess the importance of who originates disinformation and, in particular, whether some originators of misinformation are acting contrary to their preexisting obligations to the public. My view is that it would be wrong to attribute only to social media a central or exclusive role in the new disinformation crisis that impacts the information ecosystem. I also believe that disinformation has different effects depending on who promotes it – particularly whether it is promoted by a person with a public role. Importantly, the law of many countries already reflects this distinction – across a variety of contexts, public officials are obligated both to affirmatively provide certain types of information, and to take steps to ensure that information is true. In contrast, private individuals rarely bear analogous obligations; instead, law often protects their misstatements, in order to prevent censorship and promote public discourse.

The 2024 presidential election in the USA demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that disinformation (intentionally false information) and misinformation (unintentionally false information disseminated in good faith) pose a real and growing existential threat to democratic self-government in the United States – and elsewhere too. Powered by social media outlets like Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X), it is now possible to propagate empirically false information to a vast potential audience at virtually no cost. Coupled with the use of highly sophisticated algorithms that carefully target the recipients of disinformation and misinformation, voter manipulation is easier to accomplish than ever before – and frighteningly effective to boot.

The issue of mass disinformation on the Internet is a long-standing concern for policymakers, legislators, academics and the wider public. Disinformation is believed to have had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. Concern about the threat of foreign – mainly Russian – interference in the democratic process is also growing. The COVID-19 pandemic, which reached global proportions in 2020, gave new impetus to the spread of disinformation, which even put lives at risk. The problem is real and serious enough to force all parties concerned to reassess the previous European understanding of the proper regulation of freedom of expression.

The ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor tends to dominate US discourse about the First Amendment and free speech more generally. The metaphor is often deployed to argue that the remedy for harmful speech ought to be counterspeech, not censorship; listeners are to be trusted to sort the wheat from the chaff. This deep skepticism about the regulation of even harmful speech in the USA raises several follow-on questions, including: How will trustworthy sources of information fare in the marketplace of ideas? And how will participants know whom to trust? Both questions implicate non-regulatory, civil-society responses to mis- and disinformation. This chapter takes on these questions, considering groups and institutions that deal with information and misinformation. Civil society groups cannot stop the creation of misinformation – but they can decrease its potential to proliferate and to do harm. For example, advocacy groups might be directly involved with fact-checking and debunking misinformation, or with advancing truthful or properly contextualized counter-narratives. And civil society groups can also help strengthen social solidarity and reduce the social divisions that often serve as fodder for and drivers of misinformation.

In April 2023, the Government of India amended a set of regulations called the Information Technology Rules, which primarily dealt with issues around online intermediary liability and safe harbour. Until 2023, these rules required online intermediaries to take all reasonable efforts to ensure that ‘fake, false or misleading’ information was not published on their platforms. Previous iterations of these rules had already been challenged before the Indian courts for imposing a disproportionate burden on intermediaries, and having the effect of chilling online speech. Now, the 2023 Amendment went even further: it introduced an entity called a ‘Fact Check Unit’, to be created by the government. This government-created unit would flag information that – in its view – was ‘fake, false or misleading’ with respect to ‘the business of the central government’. Online intermediaries were then obligated to make reasonable efforts to ensure that any such flagged information would not be on their platforms. In practical terms, what this meant was that if intermediaries did not take down flagged speech, they risked losing their safe harbour (guaranteed under the Information Technology Act).

The attentive public widely believes a false proposition, namely, that the race Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) measures unconscious bias within individuals that causes discriminatory behavior. We document how prominent social psychologists created this misconception and the field helped perpetuate it for years, while skeptics were portrayed as a small group of non-experts with questionable motives. When a group highly values a goal and leaders of the group reward commitment to that goal while marginalizing dissent, the group will often go too far before it realizes that it has gone too far. To avoid the sort of groupthink that produced the mismatch between what science now knows about the race IAT and what the public believes, social psychologists need to self-consciously embrace skepticism when evaluating claims consistent with their beliefs and values, and governing bodies need to put in place mechanisms that ensure that official pronouncements on policy issues, such as white papers and amicus briefs, are the product of rigorous and balanced reviews of the scientific evidence and its limitations.

This chapter introduces the reader to the topic studied in the book, factual misinformation and its appeal in war. It poses the main research question of who believes in wartime misinformation and how people know what is happening in war. It then outlines the book’s central argument about the role of proximity and exposure to the fighting in constraining public misperceptions in conflict, and the methods and types of evidence used to test it. After clarifying some key concepts used in the book, it finally closes with a sketch of the manuscript’s main implications and an outline of its structure and contents.

This chapter concludes the book and considers its major theoretical and practical implications. It begins by exploring how the book pushes us to think about fake news and factual misperceptions as an important “layer” of war – a layer that has been largely neglected despite the burgeoning attention to these issues in other domains. This final chapter then examines what the book’s findings tell us about such topics as the psychology and behavior of civilian populations, the duration of armed conflicts, the feasibility of prevailing counterinsurgency models, and the depths and limits of misperceptions more broadly in social and political life. It also engages with the practical implications of the book for policymakers, journalists, activists, and ordinary politically engaged citizens in greater depth, exploring how the problems outlined in the research might also be their own solutions. Ultimately, this chapter shows how the book has something to offer to anyone who is interested in the dynamics of truth and falsehood in violent conflicts (and beyond) – and perhaps the beginnings of a framework for those who would like to cultivate more truth.

This chapter examines issues of factual misinformation and misperception in the case of the US drone campaign in Pakistan. It first shows that, while the drone campaign is empirically quite precise and targeted, it is largely seen as indiscriminate throughout Pakistani society. In other words, there is a pervasive factual misperception about the nature of the drone strikes in Pakistan. Second, the chapter shows that this misperception is consequential. Notably, it shows that Pakistani perceptions of the inflated civilian casualties associated with the strikes are among the strongest drivers of opposition to them in the country. It also provides evidence suggesting that this anti-drone backlash fuels broader political alienation and violence in Pakistan. Finally, the chapter shows that these misbeliefs about drones (and the reactions they inspire) are not shared by local civilians living within the tribal areas where the incidents occur. In sum, the chapter demonstrates that factual misperceptions about US drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan are generally widespread and consequential in the country, but not in the areas that actually experience the violence.