Misinformation and disinformation have moved to the centre of public concern over the past few years. Global events drove the shift: the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more recently the escalation between Israel and Hamas.
The pattern is well documented. Several studies have found that false news can travel far faster than factual reporting. That speed is what makes misinformation and disinformation so effective at shaping public opinion before accurate coverage catches up.
From Disinformation to Clarity
The proliferation of misleading or false material is a pervasive and insidious problem, with the crafting or misuse of false narratives often serving as a deliberate tactic to inflame societal trigger points.
In moments of high risk, when reliable, accurate news coverage is paramount, the presence and spread of disinformation erode public trust, undermine confidence in reputable news outlets, and weaken democratic processes.
Defining Disinformation, Misinformation and the Difference Between the Two
While often grouped, misinformation and disinformation differ significantly depending on the motivation behind the spread of the information in question.
As per the European Commission’s definition, misinformation is understood as “false or misleading content shared without harmful intent”, while disinformation is “false or misleading content shared with harmful intent”.
This delineation is critical for accurately identifying and labelling misleading online content, rather than adding to the problem and causing greater confusion through inaccurate labelling.
Both misinformation and disinformation often pull from similar source material. This includes relying heavily on pre-existing popular conspiracy theories to generate greater traction among audiences and key demographics.
The Real-World Impact
False information doesn’t stay online. It has real-world consequences when people act on it. The clearest recent example was the COVID-19 pandemic, when false claims about treatments and vaccine efficacy led many to ignore health advice, with harmful and sometimes fatal results.
One high-profile case was the promotion of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, as a COVID-19 remedy, despite medical consensus that there was no evidence it worked. The claim persisted through 2020 and into the US election campaign.
A 2023 EU Joint Research Centre report on pandemic misinformation found that many false narratives didn’t stay on health topics. They often shifted to political and societal claims, including misleading statements about policy.
The Global Scope of the Problem
Digital platforms are borderless, so misinformation is too. A false claim that starts in one country and one language can gain traction across continents within hours. As it travels, it picks up new framing in each language it enters, which makes it harder to trace back to the source.
This is the part most monitoring misses. A narrative forming in a non-English source can spread for hours before it surfaces in the English-language coverage many teams rely on. By the time it appears in the sources you watch, it has already travelled.
How Media Monitoring Helps
You can’t assess a narrative you can’t see. Media monitoring gives your team visibility of public media content across platforms and languages, so you can understand how a story is spreading and where it started, rather than reacting once it’s everywhere.
Opoint supplies that visibility as structured news data. Your analysts do the assessing and responding. Here is what the data makes possible:
See narratives as they form
Real-time coverage across sources lets your team spot a narrative gaining traction early, while there’s still time to understand it and decide how to respond.
Trace how a narrative spread
Coverage across languages and sources lets you follow a story back to where it first appeared and see how its framing changed as it travelled.
Ground decisions in what was actually published
Structured, sourced data gives your team a factual record of what was said, where, and when, so responses are based on evidence rather than impression.
Support your compliance and reporting
Clear, sourced coverage of how information is spreading helps teams meet reporting and compliance obligations that rely on an accurate record of the public conversation.
Media Monitoring in Practice
- Elections. Officials monitor social and news sources to see which narratives are gaining traction during campaigns, so they can respond with accurate information.
- Public health. During COVID-19, health agencies used monitoring to see where false claims about treatments and vaccines were spreading, and countered them with evidence-based information.
- Brand protection. Companies monitor coverage to detect false claims early, so they can respond before reputational and financial damage sets in.
- Environmental advocacy. Organisations track how climate narratives spread across sources, so they can address inaccurate claims with accurate information.
- Financial compliance. Institutions monitor coverage for signs of market-moving false information, supporting their regulatory and risk obligations.
Where Opoint Fits
- Coverage across languages and sources. 250,000+ sources across 135 languages and 230 jurisdictions, 3.5M+ articles a day. A narrative crossing languages is visible early, not after it reaches the English-language press.
- Structured, not raw. Coverage arrives tagged and filtered, ready to analyse, so your team spends time on judgement, not clean-up.
- Built to integrate. Opoint feeds into the monitoring and analysis systems your team already runs, by API.
Conclusion
Misinformation and disinformation spread fast, across languages and platforms. Media monitoring won’t decide what’s true for you, but it gives your team the visibility to see how a narrative is spreading, trace where it began, and respond on the basis of what was actually published.
Opoint provides that visibility: broad, structured, multilingual news coverage that your team can build its own analysis and response on. The judgement stays with you. The coverage underneath it is our job.
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