Misleading Ourselves: How Disinformation Manipulates Sensemaking

TL;DR

This paper examines how disinformation manipulates online sensemaking during U.S. elections by disrupting narratives and shaping perceptions, leading to long-term impacts on public understanding of election processes.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of manipulated sensemaking, highlighting how disinformation influences deep stories and frames, affecting perceptions beyond individual events.

Findings

Disinformation disrupts online sensemaking during elections.

Deep stories shape how audiences interpret information.

Disinformation influences perceptions of multiple future events.

Abstract

Informal sensemaking surrounding U.S. election processes has been fraught in recent years, due to the inherent uncertainty of elections, the complexity of election processes in the U.S., and to disinformation. Based on insights from qualitative analysis of election rumors spreading online in 2020 and 2022, we introduce the concept of manipulated sensemaking to describe how disinformation functions by disrupting online audiences ability to make sense of novel, uncertain, or ambiguous information. We describe how at the core of this disruption is the ability for disinformation to shape broad, underlying stories called deep stories which determine the frames we use to make sense of this novel information. Additionally, we explain how sensemakings orientation around plausible explanations over accurate explanations makes it vulnerable to manipulation. Lastly, we demonstrate how disinformed deep stories shape sensemaking not just for a single event, but for many events in the future.