Information laundering is the surfacing of news, false or otherwise, from unverified sources into the mainstream.[1] In advancing
disinformation in such a way that makes it accepted as ostensibly legitimate
information, information laundering resembles
money laundering—the transforming of illicit funds into ostensibly legitimate funds.[2]
In
adversarial machine learning, information laundering refers to a general strategy that purposely alters the information released to adversaries, with the goal of alleviating
model stealing attacks.[3]
Descriptions
Information laundering, as summarized by American
comedian and commentator
Jon Stewart, can happen when relatively reputable
news organizations report on something that a
blog or platform of unknown
credibility has written. These news organizations may attribute the assertion, but another publication may omit its original source. "That piece of information [on where the news came from] has now been laundered," Stewart says, and the original assertion, whether or not its source was credible, gains credibility, especially if it is used by outlets known for high standards.[1]
Pace University's Adam Klein, who developed the theory, argues that information laundering is similar to how criminals
launder illegal funds into financial institutions.[4] In the case of information laundering, illegitimate
exchanges of information flow through social networks, political blogs, and search engines, where they intermix with mainstream ideas, and gradually become washed of their radical origins. According to Klein, "
[c]onspiracies grow in communities like
Reddit or
Twitter, which can act as incubators. Then they graduate onto more respected
websites and political blogs, until sometimes, they're picked up by
mainstream news outlets as 'trusted information'."[5]
Digital platforms can be especially vulnerable to information laundering efforts; faked videos (
deepfakes) and images (
photograph manipulation), for instance, can create media moments and spread disinformation.[6] According to
Karen Kornbluh, director of the
German Marshall Fund's Digital Innovation Democracy initiative, and
Ellen Goodman, director of the
Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law,
bots, fake accounts and
click farms "pretend to be people they're not and create a false sense of
consensus", and commercial platforms, "designed to keep users online to be served ads, end up privileging engagement over truth or the public interest. What drives engagement is often
outrage and
disgust, so this is what the
algorithm rewards."[7]
According to a report by
NATO in 2020,
state actors that engage in information laundering, particularly
Russia, "are generally supported by cyber capabilities that enhance the spread and amplification of a laundered piece, e.g. through the creation of fake personas and burner accounts, and sophisticated for manipulation of information, e.g. through the distribution of
forged letters."[8]
Similar phrases
A similar phrase, idea laundering, has described how
academicians may advance
non-scientific ideas as knowledge or fact.[9][10][11][12] A 2020 paper used the phrase idea laundering to describe
plagiarism "in which ideas are plagiarized and then the plagiarism is hidden in plain sight".[11]
Similarly, citation laundering is a colloquial term used to refer to a number of practices including:[13][14][15]
Hiding a self-citation by citing someone who has referenced one's own work. (Sometimes also called "stealth citation".[16] Individual self-citation is not to be confused with journal self-citation, commonly known as
coercive citation.[17][18])
Citing a number of more recent works that ultimately all pull their information from one flawed source. This can be intentional disinformation or an accidental lack of rigor.
Self-citation practices are usually done with the intent of increasing a scholar's research impact in terms of metrics such as the
h-index; groups of scholars can form "citation farms" or "citation cartels" to aggrandize each other's work.[19][20] Self- or co-citation in this way can also contribute to information laundering as it increases the seeming authority of a claim without rigorously investigating its source.
Examples
In 2013,
WikiLeaks, which publishes secret information from anonymous sources, was said in a commentary by
Jonathan Holmes on
ABC Australia to be information laundering.[21]
Local "
Save the Children" rallies in 2020 by supporters of
QAnon, an American
far-right conspiracy theory, were an example of information laundering, as QAnon hijacked a unifying cause in attempts to attract credulous local television news coverage, according to
Brandy Zadrozny of
NBC News.[28]
According to The Economist, the Independent Online of South Africa "often engages in 'information laundering' designed to make sentiment appear homegrown, says Herman Wasserman at the
University of Cape Town. For instance, it will run a Chinese news-agency story on the biolab conspiracy, then get a left-wing student leader to write an article expressing concern about the supposed biolabs. Chinese news agencies will use that to write about how South Africans are worried, thus manufacturing a 'story' out of nothing at all."[29]
^"Information Laundering in Germany". NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. October 2020.
Archived from the original on March 18, 2023. Retrieved December 19, 2020.
^"How the People's Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global Information Environment". United States Department of State. September 28, 2023.
Archived from the original on September 28, 2023. Retrieved September 29, 2023. PRC officials sometimes attribute relevant content to specific authors under false names, likely to conceal the PRC's role in producing it and falsely purporting to represent legitimate, organic sentiment in a given region. In addition, PRC officials are known in some cases to attribute such manufactured commentaries to "international affairs commentators" and then use other individual, non-official accounts to promote these commentaries. As one example, the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) uses a manufactured persona named Yi Fan, often credited as a "Beijing-based international affairs commentator," to deceptively promote pro-Beijing views on a wide variety of topics and regions.