The 3-Step Playbook Bad Actors Use to Spread False News

Insights from Jon Shamah: A Global Perspective on Digital Identity and Transformation

Navigating your social media feed can feel like walking through a maze of conflicting signals. Yet, behind the chaos, there is often a deliberate and surprisingly simple playbook used to engineer and spread false news. This article breaks down that predictable formula for deception, step by step.
The Spark: It Begins with a Bad Actor and a Deliberate Falsehood
The genesis of any false news campaign is deceptively simple: it begins when a bad actor deliberately engineers a falsehood for a specific, manipulative purpose. This is not a misunderstanding or an accident; it is the calculated construction of a lie designed to exploit biases and provoke a reaction. This initial step is critical, as it frames the entire operation not as organic misinformation, but as a premeditated act of digital sabotage.
The Megaphone: How AI and Social Media Amplify the Original Lie
Once crafted, the lie is supercharged through a two-pronged attack designed to make it both believable and unavoidable. First comes substantiation, where bad actors create a thin veneer of credibility by producing fake evidence—forged documents, sham news sites, or phony expert accounts—to support their original claim. This gives the falsehood an illusion of legitimacy.
Simultaneously, social media platforms become the distribution channel for an aggressive amplification campaign. Using technologies like AI amplification, a single lie can be multiplied into thousands of posts, comments, and shares, creating the false impression of a groundswell of organic consensus. This strategy weaponizes repetition, broadcasting the repeat amplified original message across the network. This exploits a psychological vulnerability known as the "illusory truth effect," where our brains mistake familiarity for accuracy. Seeing the lie over and over makes it feel true.
The Impact: An Uninformed Public Makes Influenced Decisions
This digital manipulation achieves its final, damaging goal when the amplified falsehood successfully penetrates the awareness of an uninformed public. Bombarded with a seemingly credible and widely repeated message, people are persuaded to accept the lie as fact. The ultimate consequence is that an individual or group makes an influenced bad decision based on lies, turning a digital fabrication into a real-world action with damaging outcomes.
Breaking the Cycle
This three-step process—calculated creation, dual-pronged amplification, and real-world impact—is a rinse-and-repeat strategy used by bad actors to systematically manipulate public perception. It starts with a deliberate falsehood, uses technology to make it appear credible and ubiquitous, and ends when an uninformed public makes poor decisions.

Now that we can see the blueprint for false news, what is our role in stopping its spread?