This book has come about at a peculiar time in social history. Humans have long thrived from sharing information and narratives with one another, in familial and social groups and networks. Discovering and sharing information— that which is both known to be true and able to be transferred—has helped people heal from disease, build societies together, and coexist. Narratives, or stories, wrap that information up in immersive, memorable bundles. This method of bundling and sharing information has likely benefited humans for as long as we have existed.

A great deal of storytelling has blended information based in reality with other elements. Subjectivity, emotions, made up examples, and even outright fantasy can be part of storytelling, with the core information conveyed by the story still true. It has also long been possible for stories to spread harmful content including disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theory. We will learn about each of these more later in this book.

What is peculiar today is that we are in an era in which narratives spreading in groups are more and more likely to be found eroding the same human projects they once helped build, like democracy, public health, and scientific advancement. While damaging narratives have always been part of history, in the past those with the broadest reach were likely to be created and spread by governments. Popular narratives would spread more gradually, often through populations that would mix skeptics and believers. The moment we are in now may be unprecedented for the speed with which a bad narrative can crackle across a vast network of believers.

Narrative, Group Identity, and Online Affordances: The Disinformation Triad

There is a powerful triad behind the disinformation spreading in online networks today: The three elements of what we will call the Disinformation Triad are narratives, group identity, and activation of online affordances. None of these elements is inherently bad, and this triad can also work together in ways that benefit social cooperation. But when the elements of this triad are deployed driven by harmful intent, this triad’s power to weaken social institutions is formidable.

Let’s meet these elements by imagining them on a theater stage.

Enter the Narrative, stage left.

We all know the Narrative, and have since the dawn of human history. In fact, we know her so well we can call her by her nickname: a story. Stories can be structured in many different ways, but typically they involve a sequence of connected events and associated meanings. A story is usually presented using the subjectivity of someone who witnessed or participated in those events, whether that perspective is first person (“I”, “We”), or second person (“They”,”She”, “He”, “It”.)

Are stories still transmitting good quality information in societies today? Yes! In the United States where this book is focused, parents, schoolteachers, librarians, and all manner of content creators share essential information through stories. Some important histories are only available through stories, such as oral histories. While other forms of information sharing exist—think of a written list, or a bus schedule— stories have been found to be uniquely effective both at convincing people to believe information and then helping people remember it. This is the upside of using narratives to teach: Stories are sticky.

Enter Group Identity, stage right.

Group identity gives narrative a strong point of view, and also the motivation to believe and spread the story. Consider for a moment only stories that are true, or based primarily on evidence. True stories we know and share are so important in our lives that they help define us, like signatures on our minds, even as we coexist with people who have different signatures on their minds. For example: How was the nation where you were born created? Your answer to this question will be based on a story, and that story will say a lot about your identity group, including whose stories you believe and ultimately who you are. This subjectivity in history is not new. A look at conflicts among historians reminds us that some conflicts around evidence and interpretations of the past are never fully resolved, and each conflicting accounts is believed and championed by an identity group.

Disinformation can often begin with true stories championed by an identity group, whose members are motivated to believe and emphasize parts of the story that reinforce their beliefs. Those who identify with one another may communicate in echo chambers least in part because of the group identities those narrative express and create. People are motivated to believe what others they identify with believe, to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with people they value and relate to. They quickly accept or invent new stories that help them avoid feelings of aloneness, or fear, or cognitive dissonance. Some of those stories use scapegoating, blaming easily targeted “others” or agencies instead of accepting more complex, depressing realities.

Enter Online Affordances, backstage.

Disinformation circulating in online networks is also driven by the sense that people should “do their own research” rather than trust the institutions that have historically promoted public health and reliable information. This popular research then meets up with features of the internet that further influence what people do online, or affordances. Search engines are designed to respond to prompts whether or not they have true answers, and they have so much content that if you “do your own research,” you can use them to find anything you’d like to be true.

In short, there is a powerful triad that fuels the rapid, deep, and broad spread of disinformation online. The good news is that this triad can work for true and beneficial information too, if we understand how the triad works.

We can take out the disinformation, but leave in those powerful dynamics. That is the premise of this book, and of the project this book invites you to join in.

What is Immersive Truth?

Immersive Truth is a project designed to find appealing strategies in problematic content and then redeploy them in messaging in support of truth and healthy social dynamics. We are rotating team of students working with Professor Diana Daly of the University of Arizona.

What you are reading is also Immersive Truth, our open textbook created with contributions and direction from students at the University of Arizona. This book is our report on the Immersive Truth project, including examples of disinformation we studied and media we produced in response, including “prebunking” efforts that are now being circulated in research to understand their impacts.

As an Open Educational Resource (OER), this book is licensed and intended for broad reuse. Below we present the steps our team went through not only to inform you, but to encourage other teams to follow our path.

1. Locate disinformation spreading online.

We began this project by locating online content that causes problems. We focused in particular on pervasive problems including climate change denial, misogyny, and election misinformation. Our teams reported on what they were seeing and what they cared about.

2. Analyze disinformative content using existing theory and individual reflection.

Our analyses relied on existing literature as well as techniques derived from qualitative research methods including naturalistic inquiry and grounded theory. We relied in part on scholarly and popular sources you’ll see attributed throughout this book to understand techniques were were seeing. Along the way we also studied recent projects by disinformation scholars, some of whose writing is included in our Guest articles section and in our Glossary of Immersive Misinformation Strategies. We also used our own understandings of why the content was appealing, as participants in social networks and online communities.

3. Report on and debunk findings.

In writing up our analyses, we considered in particular narrative strategies, group dynamics, and online affordances—the Disinformation Triad. The section Online lies and the strategies that spread them shows some of what we found. Each of our analyses includes a section on the truth, debunking the disinformation spread in the content.

4. Translate findings into Prebunking Media through arts-based techniques.

We used techniques from sketch and improvisational theater and audio and video production to create media carefully designed to appeal to audiences’ love of narrative, need for community, and potential for healthy social involvement. Check these out in our Taking action: Prebunking Media section.

We hope you enjoy and learn from this book.

Storytelling about a nation

Let’s try an exercise.

1. Write or record yourself telling the story of how the nation where you were born or that you most identify with was created, for one minute.
2. Now, review your story and reflect on what it says about you.
   1. Who is/are the protagonist[s] or main character[s]?
   2. When does the story start and when does it end?
   3. What is the main action that happens in the middle, and what emotion[s] does it evoke or cause?
3. Next, tell the story with each of those elements changed.
   1. Make the protagonist[s] or main character[s] someone culturally different than who they were before.
   2. Recreate the story in that character’s perspective, including not only the time period of your original story but also events before and time after.
   3. How do the above changes impact the main actions and emotions in this new telling of this story?

Teachers, this exercise may look very different for students who are not part of the dominant culture represented in the class than it does for most of the rest of the class. Please consider carefully before collecting or sharing this exercise.