What Working With Disinformation Changes in You

Before I started working with disinformation, I thought the job was mostly about facts.

Find the falsehood.

Debunk it.

Ship the explainer.

Simple.

It is not simple.

Spend enough time inside weaponized narratives, and something subtle shifts in how you see people, institutions, and even yourself. This note is not about the theory of disinformation. It is about what the work does to the worker.

Your Relationship With Trust Changes

Most people move through the world with an implicit assumption of honesty. They know lies exist, but they treat them as exceptions.

Working with disinformation inverts that baseline.

• You start by asking, "Who benefits if this is true?"
• You instinctively scan for framing, omission, and emotional triggers.
• You learn that highly polished stories can be more suspicious than messy ones.

Trust stops being your starting point and becomes something that has to be earned through consistency, transparency, and verifiable patterns over time.

This is useful professionally.

Personally, it can be exhausting.

You See the Machinery Behind Emotion

Disinformation is not built around facts.

It is built around feelings.

Spend enough time analyzing campaigns and you begin to recognize recurring emotional signatures:

• Manufactured outrage designed to short-circuit reflection.
• Manufactured fear designed to push people toward binary choices.
• Manufactured hope designed to redirect legitimate frustration into safe, controlled channels.

At some point you realize: the same tactics that power obvious propaganda also power "normal" advertising, influencer rhetoric, even some forms of political communication you once thought were benign.

You do not stop feeling things.

But you start watching yourself feel, almost from the outside.

Your Sense of Scale Warps

From the inside, a single false claim looks local and isolated.

From the vantage point of repeated analysis, you see patterns:

• The same narratives appearing in different languages.
• The same talking points resurfacing every election cycle.
• The same visual tropes reused across unrelated crises.

Working with disinformation trains your brain to connect distant dots.

You start seeing narratives as infrastructure, not incidents.

The upside: you gain a deep appreciation for how information ecosystems are engineered.

The downside: it becomes harder to treat anything as "just a meme" or "just a joke."

You Develop a Different Kind of Empathy

There is a lazy way to think about people who fall for disinformation:

they are naive, uneducated, or simply "dumb."

You cannot hold that view for long if you are serious about the work.

When you listen closely to those who share and believe false narratives, patterns emerge:

• They are often responding to real pain, real uncertainty, real exclusion.
• The disinformation offers belonging, clarity, and agency that reality is failing to provide.
• Their vulnerability is not a bug of their character; it is a feature exploited by others.

The work forces you to separate:

• Responsibility for harm done.
• Responsibility for the conditions that made that harm attractive.

You end up with a sharper, less romantic, but arguably deeper form of empathy. You see both the human and the handler behind the message.

You Become Intolerant of Lazy Information Hygiene

Once you have seen how quickly a false narrative can move from fringe to mainstream, your tolerance for casual sharing plummets.

You notice when:

• A friend forwards a screenshot from an anonymous account as if it were verified news.
• A community leader amplifies unverified claims because "it feels true."
• A journalist tweets a hot take before reading the underlying report.

To them, it is just conversation. To you, it looks like the beginning of an amplification chain.

This can make you sound pedantic, or overly cautious, or "no fun." It is difficult to unsee the potential downstream consequences once you have spent months cleaning up after similar behavior at scale.

You Feel the Gravity of Cynicism

There is a quiet danger in this work: the slide from healthy skepticism into corrosive cynicism.

If every narrative might be engineered, if every appeal might be manipulative, if every storyline might be a vector, it becomes easy to believe that nothing is sincere and no one is acting in good faith.

That belief is itself a victory condition for some disinformation campaigns.

When you believe no one is trustworthy, you become easier to isolate, easier to manipulate, and easier to exhaust into disengagement.

Part of the discipline of this field is learning to hold two truths at once:

• Many narratives are engineered, amplified, and weaponized.
• Some people genuinely mean what they say and are trying, imperfectly, to help.

Learning to distinguish between the two is work. It is emotional labor, not just analytical labor.

You Need New Rituals to Stay Human

Working with disinformation is not just an intellectual challenge. It is a continuous exposure to anger, fear, hatred, and despair packaged for engagement.

If you are not careful, those emotions do not stay on the screen.

They follow you into your off-hours.

People who last in this field tend to develop their own rituals:

• Strict boundaries around doom-scrolling and "just one more thread."
• Spaces where no one talks about politics, campaigns, or narratives at all.
• Hobbies that involve making tangible, low-stakes things with their hands.

Not because they are running away from reality, but because they need some parts of their life that are not optimised for virality, outrage, or debate.

What the Work Gives You

It would be easy to end here, with cost. But the work also gives you things.

• A clarified sense of what you stand for, not just what you stand against.
• A sharper intuition for how fragile, and how resilient, communities can be.
• A deep respect for those who build media literacy quietly, patiently, without theatrics.

You learn to see information not just as content, but as infrastructure that shapes what people believe is possible.

That realization can be heavy.

It can also be a kind of compass.

A Quiet Conclusion

Working with disinformation changes you.

It alters your default settings around trust, emotion, and narrative.

The goal is not to return to the naive state you had before.

That is gone.

The goal is to build a new baseline:

• Clear-eyed without being paralyzed.
• Skeptical without being cruel.
• Aware of the machinery, still capable of genuine connection.

Because in the end, the point of understanding disinformation is not to win arguments online. It is to protect the conditions under which honest conversation, shared reality, and collective problem-solving are still possible.