The Anatomy of Disinformation

This module builds the vocabulary and the analytical kit everything else runs on: misinformation, disinformation and malinformation defined against the EU information disorder report, the CDC and RAND, with Bernays on propaganda as a separate phenomenon. You then pick up four working frameworks, SWOT, the white-grey-black psyops spectrum, Facebook's actor-versus-content quadrants and RAND's Truth Decay structure, and apply them across two thousand years of technique, from Sun Tzu and Octavian's forged will through the 1688 bedpan rumour, yellow journalism, radio, television and the hashtag. It closes on information asymmetry, McLuhan, micro-targeting and the question of what counts as real when consensus reality breaks.

• You will retire "fake news" and work instead with misinformation, disinformation, malinformation and propaganda, comparing how the EU, CDC and RAND draw their lines
• You will apply SWOT to a viral health claim, sort operations as white, grey or black psyops, and map content into Facebook's authentic-versus-inauthentic actor quadrants
• You will trace the narrowing of the target from defaced Roman coins to Cambridge Analytica's "movable units" and the audience of one
• You will work a three-phase scenario, the newsroom Slack, the long view and the audience of one, making analytical calls at each stage
• You will separate objective from subjective reality and use the Overton window to explain how altered realities drove January 6 and the Brasilia storming

Here you learn the anatomy of a conspiracy theory: the alleged plot, the conspirators, the apparent evidence, and the tell that nothing happens by accident and everything is connected. The module separates a real conspiracy from a false one, introduces synthetic folklore and the cocktail and fourth wall model, then runs you through live material including a practical on how a film's fiction leaked into Iraq war reporting, a Spike Lee quotation taken apart line by line, and the journalism that follows flat earth into antisemitism by asking one question: who is doing the lying. It closes on why conspiracism is not a mental illness, how pareidolia and the pattern-finding mind feed it, and what salad-bar extremism looks like.

• You will apply the cocktail model's three diagnostic questions to decide which part of a claim is the factual kernel and which is the false framing
• You will identify the features of conspiratorial thinking and distinguish healthy scepticism from conspiracism
• You will trace how individual theories lock into self-reinforcing belief systems, using David Icke and Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy
• You will take a specific celebrity conspiracy claim apart as a worked mini case study
• You will explain why treating conspiracy belief as mental illness is both wrong and analytically useless

This module gives you criteria for separating science from pseudoscience and then stress-tests them on real material: the suggestion of injecting bleach, Jacob Chansley's online university and its neurolinguistic programming claims, and Samuel Rowbotham's role in manufacturing modern flat earth belief. You then assemble the disinformer's toolkit as a diagnostic checklist, covering "do your research", tech speak, appeals to volume, cognitive jumps, fringe over-representation and frame-shifting, before working through possibility versus probability, correlation versus causation, and the alternative platform infrastructure that carries this material when mainstream sites will not.

• You will apply the criteria for scientific legitimacy in order, and explain why a lab-leak question is not automatically pseudoscience
• You will spot tech speak used to shut down scrutiny and name exactly what is missing from the claim
• You will separate possibility from probability and break correlation-as-causation arguments of the ice cream and shark attack type
• You will follow the fringe voice amplification cycle from obscure claim to mainstream repetition
• You will map the platforms and infrastructure that host pseudoscientific content off the mainstream internet

Using Stanley Cohen's four-stage model, this module teaches you to recognise a moral panic while it is still forming and to see how community anxiety is converted into folk devils. The worked case is the Satanic Panic: the McMartin preschool trial, the Michelle Remembers phenomenon, Patricia Pulling's campaign against Dungeons and Dragons, and the role of the questionable "expert", read alongside Laycock's Dangerous Games. It closes by bridging to extremism, showing how the blur between fantasy and reality turns synthetic folklore into real-world harm.

• You will apply Cohen's four-stage model to identify a panic in its early stages
• You will analyse how folk devils are manufactured and who benefits from naming them
• You will examine the McMartin case, Michelle Remembers and the Dungeons and Dragons scare as a single structural pattern
• You will assess how self-appointed experts lend authority to claims with no evidence behind them
• You will connect the fantasy-reality blur to the political violence examined in the next module

This module draws the lines between protest, direct action, violent protest, violent extremism and terrorism, then uses Moghaddam's staircase to explain how people climb towards violence and where disinformation does its work on the lower steps. Case material includes Christopher Pohlhaus and the Blood Tribe, the chilling effect of legal-but-threatening displays and the matchsticks model of escalation, the Boogaloo movement's Hawaiian shirts and igloo memes as loose-network signalling, and stochastic terrorism amplified through parasocial relationships with online figures. It ends on what happens when the fantasy collapses and the identity cost that follows.

• You will distinguish protest, direct action, violent protest, violent extremism and terrorism using clear criteria
• You will place behaviour on Moghaddam's staircase and identify where disinformation is seeded
• You will explain stochastic terrorism and how rhetoric incites violence while shielding the speaker
• You will analyse why extremist movements abandoned hierarchy for loose networks, and what memetic branding does for them
• You will assess the chilling effect of legal-but-threatening displays on communities and institutions