Most polluted information is not wholly invented. It is true fragments placed in a false frame. This page sets out the filter to run before you share something: three types, seven patterns, four moves and a printable checklist.
During a disaster, official sources come first. The method on this page is for when you have time. In the first hours after a shock, do not stop to verify: call 112 or 101 Civil Defence, and rely on the announcements published by the Civil Defence Organisation and the Meteorology Department. Run the filter below in the calmer moments before you pass something on.
Definition
Information pollution is the umbrella term for content that contaminates an information environment — degraded, distorted or deliberately twisted.
It behaves like water pollution. Drinking water is not entirely poison; a small amount of the wrong substance makes it unsafe. That is why “is it a lie or not?” is usually the wrong question. The real one is: which part is true, and what frame has it been placed in?
A disaster accelerates all of this. Uncertainty is high, people are searching for news of their relatives, and everyone forwards what they have in good faith. In the field the cost is concrete: a team sent to the wrong address, fuel spent for nothing, a road needlessly congested, aid paid into a fraudulent account.
Distinctions
They differ along two axes: whether the content is true, and what intent sits behind it. Verification tools can only catch the first two; the third passes straight through.
Misinformation
The person sharing it intends no harm. Good faith is precisely what drives it: “people should know, it might help.” This is the most common type in a disaster.
Disinformation
It has a target, and often a budget and a schedule. After a disaster its most frequent form is a fake appeal for donations using the name of a real association.
Malinformation
The information is genuine; the harm comes from stripping it of context or releasing it without consent. This is the most insidious type, because no verification filter stops something that is not false.
A “verified” stamp does not mean something was presented honestly. The third type lives in exactly that gap — and the harm it does to someone already living through trauma is often greater than the other two.
Field notes
Beside each pattern is the verification move that catches it. The moves themselves are in the next section.
Lifted out of the surrounding talk, a sentence can end up saying the opposite. Most “official says X” headlines work this way. It is the most common pattern because it requires no invention at all.
Move 4 · Trace it back
With earthquakes, fires and floods this happens almost automatically. The same clip of destruction may have been attributed to five different countries over a decade.
Move 4 · Reverse image search
Percentages confused with absolute counts (“the risk doubled” may mean one person became two), charts whose axis does not start at zero, correlation presented as cause. Figures work because they switch off intuition.
Move 4 · Trace it back
Site A runs the story, B says “according to A”, C says “according to B”. Four steps later the original source has evaporated, yet the story now looks “widely reported”. Repetition is not verification.
Move 2 · Investigate the source
“Experts say”, “scientists have announced”, “sources report”. With no name, no institution and no link to the study, what you hold is a claim, not evidence. In the Eastern Mediterranean the most widespread version gives a date and a time: no scientific method today can state in advance the place, time and magnitude of an earthquake.
Move 2 · Investigate the source
The headline is categorical; the sixth paragraph says “it was claimed that it may”. Most readers never reach the sixth paragraph, and the systems that distribute content know it.
Move 1 · Stop and read to the end
Fake images, audio and video are now cheap and easy to produce. Audio is the most dangerous: it raises less suspicion than video, is harder to detect, and is very easy to quote.
Move 3 · Find independent coverage
Method
The SIFT framework, widely used in verification training, has four moves. The order matters: doing the third before the second means hunting for the right answer among the wrong sources.
Move 1
Did it make you angry, frightened, or say “oh my God”? That is exactly the moment to stop. Polluted information does not spread at random: because content that provokes emotion travels further, content is produced to provoke it. Make a strong reaction the trigger for your verification reflex.
Move 2
Do not judge the content from inside the content. The crucial point: research the site from outside it, not from its own “About us” page. This is called lateral reading. Open a new tab and search the publisher's name — who publishes it, and what has it got wrong before?
Move 3
Focus on the topic, not the claim. Are independent outlets reporting the same event? Ten accounts repeating the same sentence is not independence; independence means separate people looking separately and reaching the same conclusion.
Move 4
Get to the thing the story rests on: the institution's own announcement, the full report, the uncut recording, the first publication of the image. Usually the original turns out to be less dramatic than the story about it. That flatness is the normal result of verification.
In practice
This list is for one piece of content. Tick it on screen or print it for the team noticeboard; nothing is saved, so each new item starts clean.
When you meet it
Toolkit
Turkish-language
International
Images and video
Identity of the source
Closing
The effort needed to refute nonsense is many times the effort needed to produce it. Trying to refute everything, one item at a time, is simply exhausting. What works is being selective about sources in the first place: defence is always cheaper than cleanup.
The most successful outcome of polluted information is not making you believe a particular lie — it is making you believe nothing at all. Arriving at “they all lie anyway” is the moment information pollution wins, because from there people hold on not to evidence but to whatever their own circle says. In a disaster, the price of that is an evacuation call nobody follows.
The healthy position is not “trust none of them” but trust in degrees, according to the quality of the evidence. You do not have to be certain; you do have to know how certain you are.
Training
Information pollution and verification is one module of the preparedness training we deliver to institutions. It can be adapted for schools, local authorities, workplaces and volunteer teams.
References
The concepts and methods below are adapted from the information disorder and verification literature. The field examples and communication choices on this page are the association's own; those are not sources but decisions.
Links point to the publisher of each source; last accessed 10 September 2026. If you spot an error in a citation, tell us and we will correct it.
