Misinformation vs. Disinformation vs. The Telephone Game vs.?

Off Topic
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Reading through the board today, I rejuvenate my curiosity at the…flow of information, especially erroneous information, through a population. In my job, I hold certain knowledge as ‘original’. This is to say, I was there when it was founded. When the process was implemented, I literally helped write down the steps to be passed along through training and other channels to users of said process. Then, as I observed the flow of information from pure source to point of use, even though the original documentation is available, and the originator of that documentation is available for questioning, like the Telephone Games of our youth, I could literally observe the morph from fact, function, and implementation to rumor, dysfunction, and confusion. I have never understood WHY it seems like the spreaders of good, sound, documented information get plowed under by spreaders of bad, unfounded, and, especially, CONTRARY to documented information. I am certainly NOT well-versed in psychology, psychiatry, nor any other venue of understanding humans and their motivations, but it seems like some one of those occupations, having as many subscribers as they do, would have coined a phrase to describe this…dystopian destruction of “truth” by rumor; replacement of documentation with misinformation. Ah. Misinformation. What a nifty word. what a nifty concept. “Oh, sorry. I did not mean to MISINFORM you. I just didn’t bother referring you to canon, and instead chose to insert my own [malevolent?] incorrect interpretation of the proceedings…” But, when misinformation (oopsy!) is done intentionally [evil laugh], it’s called “disinformation” (interestingly, I learned, a concept made concrete by Joseph Stalin, originally named by the same “dezinformatsiya” to make it sound French and Western, in a certain recursive irony.)
This post has little point but to ask you, in your stumblings through life (or, perhaps your path is a beeline; it’s not terribly important here), have you discovered a name for the phenomenon of rumor, gossip, and implication displacing actual documented information? Do we assume it’s out of ignorance?
I mean, if the spreader is questioned, and admits they had no idea there was a document, that makes sense. What if they know of the document, but haven’t actually read it? What if they read it, but recall improperly? What if they simply didn’t understand (maybe they read at a 12th grade level, but it’s written for post-grad doctoral candidates, which they might some day become, but are not yet)?
Does that change when it’s due to lack of intellect equal to understanding what is documented?
What if it’s due to malice?

This seems like a good place to put this. Apropos, I’m sure, in some way…

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Maybe bec spreaders of bad information are paid to be louder. :smiley:

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I find it’s rarely due to malice.

It usually comes from a mistaken confidence in one’s grasp of the material.

This over-confident person thinks they’re being helpful when they share their bad information.

Until you have evidence that a person is acting malevolently you really should act as if they mean no harm, because if you jump to the other conclusion first you may create a self fulfilling prophecy.

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When you do intelligence gathering and analysis, you rate the source as to previous accuracy before you accept that information.

Another thing I’ve observed is that if people hear something from more than one source they consider it to be accurate. They don’t do the secondary trace to determine if all of those people heard it from the same person initially.

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How fake news spreads thru social media.

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Just stashing this here, to help lend an air of gravitas.

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I’ve worked in Telecom for nearly 15 years and have come to accept that obfuscation is a depressing norm. Digging down to the actual truths of some function, some process, some system behavior, some little bit of underlying cut-the-crap why is excruciatingly difficult. It’s easy to blame bittervet individuals for this at first - the industry is full of clockpunchers on both the hourly and managerial side of things. But it’s really an organizational and cultural problem that defies a satisfying bumper sticker explanation - because those tend to be self-flattering yet ultimately dishonest. No, ultimately the directives given - explicit and implicit - direct this behavior.

And I think it’s the implicit directives that matter the most because they matter more than explicit directives. Sure, you might be expected to have current and accurate processes available for everyone inside your little org as well as outsiders. But with the reality of telecom drawing roots as a regulated monopoly utility, a unionized workforce that thrives on an overly granular job classification scheme, lower-level management that eagerly colludes with the unions to indulge in empire-building, and the arcane nature of this sort of information there’s immensely more negative implicit directive to make accurate and current process documentation available inside the organization, to say nothing about outside the organization. Throw in inter-organization silos, personal empire-building, each organization devising its own terminology for everything, and traditional labor-management hostility and it becomes almost impossible to actually produce this documentation in the first place.

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It’s a good day for Non-Sequitur…

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It happens all day every day at DMS. Notably it’s almost always the same people that have wrong information so wherevever they are getting ther information is probably the source of MisInformation. My view is very simple I want to see it in writing off a source document any verbal communication is speculative and should not be spread.

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Indeed it is. This came up going down the “random” rabbit hole:

A more up to date title would be " How faKeBk/social media works"

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Regardless of one’s motives:

Misinformation

Information misinterpretation (both verbal and nonverbal cues)

Incomplete communication transmission (sender AND receiver)

Inability to communicate effectively (language/writing/grammar, etc.)

Subtext and emotional baggage obfuscating information being transmitted (e.g., passive-aggressive language)

External ‘noise’ interrupting the flow of communication (everything from dialects to actual noise to disfluencies…aka “umm” and “uhh” inserted into verbal communications)

…and fricking acronyms. I hate those hellish, overused critters 99% of the time.

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Finally! A name for my stock-in-trade…

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Very, very interesting observations.

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My ‘Experimental Communications’ professor introduced me to that term back in 1992 when I was in the Business Communications program at The University of Texas at Austin.

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And yet verbal communication has been used as a primary (if not exclusive) means of passing information and heritage in several cultures over the millennia

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