We tend to look at disinformation as a purely modern evil: the weapon of internet trolls, corrupt politicians, and corporate scam artists. By definition, disinformation is a deliberate lie created to manipulate behavior. But what happens when the behavior being manipulated is actually objectively good?
Can a well-intentioned fabrication be a force for positive change?
The Power of the “Noble Lie”
To understand this, we only have to look as far as the local public pool. Almost everyone grew up hearing about the mythical “chemical indicator” that turns the water bright purple or red if you pee in the pool.
It is entirely fabricated. No such chemical exists (and if it did, keeping a pool chlorinated would constantly trigger it anyway). Yet, this piece of disinformation has successfully terrified millions of children into dragging themselves out of the water and using an actual restroom. The intent behind the lie is to manipulate behavior through fear, but the outcome is undeniably positive: a cleaner, safer swimming environment for everyone.
Now, consider a modern hypothetical: an article circulates online claiming that brushing your teeth twice a day releases specific enzymes that prevent facial acne. It sounds vaguely scientific, but it’s completely made up. If thousands of teenagers read this, panic about their skin, and suddenly start maintaining immaculate dental hygiene, hasn’t that disinformation achieved a “good” result?
In the short term, the answer looks like a tempting yes. But playing with fake news to achieve good outcomes is a dangerous game.
The idea is older than the internet
The phrase isn’t new; it’s Plato’s. In The Republic he floats the gennaion pseudos, a “noble lie,” a founding myth the rulers tell the citizens because a society held together by a useful fiction is, in his telling, better than one that comes apart on the truth. Twenty-four centuries later the argument itself hasn’t changed at all. Only the distribution has.
And we keep re-running the experiment. Consider the early-pandemic messaging in 2020, when officials publicly discouraged the general public from buying masks, at a moment when the unstated reason was a supply shortage and the need to preserve stock for health workers. The intent was defensible, the shortage was real, the goal was to save lives. But the statement wasn’t quite true, and when the guidance reversed, an enormous number of people did not conclude “the science evolved.” They concluded “they lied to me once, so why would I believe the next thing?” That inference, once made, gets applied to every message that follows, including the ones that are completely true and genuinely urgent.
The Hidden Cost: The Trust Tax
The problem with using disinformation for good is that lies are fragile. When a benevolent lie collapses, it doesn’t just take the myth down with it; it takes the credibility of the speaker down too.
Imagine those teenagers eventually find out that teeth brushing has zero impact on acne. The psychological fallout rarely stops at “Oh, well, at least my teeth are clean.” Instead, it shifts to cynicism:
“If they lied to me about acne to get me to brush my teeth, what else are they lying about? Do vaccines actually work? Is flossing even real?”
When people discover they’ve been manipulated, even for their own good, it breeds deep institutional distrust. In public health and education, trust is the hardest currency to earn and the easiest to burn. Once a population realizes that authorities use “noble lies” to control them, valid and critical truth gets rejected right along with the fiction.
The Mutation: How Disinformation Becomes Misinformation
The acne example also perfectly illustrates how intentional lies morph into accidental rumors. The lifecycle of a “good” lie usually follows a predictable three-step pipeline:
[ Stage 1: Disinformation ]
An influencer or well-meaning health campaign invents the "Acne-Toothbrush" connection to trick teens into better hygiene. (Deliberate lie)
↓
[ Stage 2: Absorption ]
Well-intentioned parents read the article, believe it completely, and get excited about a solution for their kids.
↓
[ Stage 3: Misinformation ]
Parents share the tip in Facebook groups and group chats: "Hey everyone, make sure your kids brush their teeth, it cures acne!" (Unintentional spread of falsehoods)This is how disinformation mutates into misinformation. What started as a calculated, centralized lie by someone who knew the truth gets absorbed by the public. Everyday people, acting entirely out of love, care, or a desire to be helpful, begin broadcasting the fake data as absolute gospel.
By the time it reaches Stage 3, the original context is lost. The crowd is now policing itself based on an illusion, and correcting the record becomes nearly impossible because the lie has already been integrated into people’s daily routines and belief systems.
What changes when the lie is free to produce
Every argument above was written for a world in which a persuasive fabrication was expensive. Someone had to conceive it, craft it, and push it through a channel with gatekeepers, which meant noble lies were rare, deliberate, and usually authored by a person who could be held accountable for them. That constraint is gone. A language model will now generate a thousand variants of a plausible, well-intentioned falsehood in a minute, each tuned to a different audience, at a cost of approximately nothing.
Two things break at once. First, the noble lie stops being a rare act of judgment by an identifiable person and becomes a content strategy: something you can A/B test for engagement, which is precisely how good intentions get optimized into something unrecognizable. Second, the machines themselves confabulate: a model states a confident falsehood not from malice but because fluent-and-wrong is what it produces when it doesn’t know: the noble lie’s exact psychological signature, with no author behind it at all. We built a technology that manufactures the shape of a helpful untruth at industrial scale, and we are only now deciding what we think about that.
Which is why the trust tax matters more now than when Plato proposed it. In a world where anything can be fabricated cheaply, the scarce resource is the belief that a source is telling you the truth, and every well-meaning fiction spends down a reserve that is already being drained from every other direction.
The Verdict
While a tactical lie like the purple pool dye can keep a community pool clean for a generation, scaling disinformation up to solve larger societal problems is a recipe for disaster.
Using falsehoods as a shortcut to get people to do the right thing is like borrowing money from the mob: it solves your immediate problem, but the long-term interest rate is devastating. True, sustainable behavioral change doesn’t rely on tricks; it relies on trust. And you can’t build trust with a foundation of manufactured myths.