Misinformation / Disinformation

The hardest form of misinformation to counter is the one that contains no false statements.

Every sentence checks out. The selection does the work. Report the three studies that support a position and omit the twelve that do not, and you have produced something that survives fact-checking while misleading completely.

This is why "is it true?" is a weaker question than it looks. A text can be entirely true and still leave you with a wrong model of reality.

The counter is not verification — verification passes. It is asking what a complete picture would include, and noticing what is absent. That requires knowing the domain, which is why this technique works so well on non-specialists.

I have been reading a lot of press releases lately, and the pattern is consistent: the numbers are accurate, the context is missing, and the missing context is always in the same direction.

For people working on detection: is there any tractable way to flag omission? Everything I can think of requires a ground truth that does not exist.