Misinformation is increasingly functioning as a systemic risk—a hazard capable of destabilizing entire social, political and financial systems rather than merely fooling individual users—according to a new analysis by Nuurrianti Jalli, a scholar at Oklahoma State University’s School of Media and Strategic Communications. The commentary argues that recent episodes, including the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, vaccine falsehoods during the COVID-19 pandemic, and election lies that preceded the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, should not be treated as isolated cases of bad information. They are symptoms of a degraded information environment that can amplify volatility across health, politics, security, and even disaster response. Jalli draws on concepts from finance and climate governance, where systemic risk refers to disturbances that spread through interconnected networks and produce disproportionate, cascading failures. Just as a shock to one bank can threaten global markets, or a climate event can trigger runaway ecological change, viral rumors and manipulated content can exploit political distrust, financial fragility, and public health vulnerabilities, turning points of weakness into larger disruptions. The analysis warns that conditions for such shocks are worsening. Trust in institutions is falling globally; platform regulation is uneven, ranging from structured rules such as the European Union’s Digital Services Act to environments shaped by censorship or heavy-handed state control; and cheap, widely available generative AI tools are flooding the information environment with synthetic text, images, audio and video. Resilience—the capacity of information systems, including platforms, institutions, and publics, to withstand shocks without critical failure—has therefore become a pressing concern. But most current responses, narrowly focused on content removal and individual media literacy, are insufficient for the scale and complexity of the problem. Instead, Jalli argues, misinformation must be recognized as an informational-systemic risk and governed with the same seriousness applied to financial contagion or climate breakdown.
Traditional approaches to misinformation have tended to treat it as an episodic error rooted in bias, poor judgment, or manipulation. While useful, those framings struggle to explain how misinformation spreads in environments where institutional, technological, and social systems are deeply interdependent. Systemic risk analysis helps capture these dynamics by showing how disruptions propagate through networks and interact with hidden vulnerabilities. The defining feature of systemic risk is not simply its scale but its relational dynamics: its ability to spread through networks, combine with latent weaknesses, and push stable systems toward crisis. Misinformation fits this model, Jalli writes, because its danger lies less in single falsehoods than in its capacity to undermine the informational foundations that sustain democratic function, including confidence in science, the legitimacy of elections, and shared historical narratives. The commentary offers several cross-domain examples. In Myanmar, false narratives and hate speech circulated on Facebook in 2017 and helped justify attacks against the Rohingya minority, escalating into real-world atrocities. In the aftermath, platform bans on military accounts prompted state retaliation that blocked civilians’ primary communication tools while the military continued using the platform for propaganda. That sequence illustrates how responses to misinformation crises can themselves become catalysts for systemic vulnerability. Misinformation has also disrupted disaster response: during Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, false rumors about shelter policies and mandatory ID checks spread widely, discouraging vulnerable groups from seeking safety and forcing officials to divert resources to debunking false claims. During Australia’s 2019–2020 bushfires, coordinated online narratives exaggerated the role of arson, using the hashtag #ArsonEmergency to distract from climate drivers and weaken support for mitigation measures. These examples show misinformation cascading across environmental hazards, complicating emergency management and climate governance, and contributing to the escalation of natural risks into systemic crises. The Myanmar case, in particular, demonstrates a feedback loop: platform moderation failure escalated to mass atrocities, triggering platform bans, state retaliation, and ongoing internet shutdowns that have continued to restrict civilian access. Such cycles, the analysis argues, make misinformation a structural vulnerability rather than an episodic anomaly.
Understanding misinformation as a systemic risk requires looking beyond individual bad actors and examining the infrastructures that produce and amplify falsehoods. The commentary adopts a sociotechnical perspective, showing how platform architectures and design incentives make misinformation not an anomaly but a predictable feature of today’s information environment. Algorithms optimized for engagement systematically privilege attention-grabbing content, regardless of accuracy. Recommendation systems on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter promote emotionally charged and polarizing material, often elevating misinformation above verified information. Advertising and monetization models reward divisive content that keeps users active, embedding misleading claims into everyday communication flows. Far from being neutral conduits, these systems normalize the circulation of misleading content by making it a routine part of how people experience the digital world. The analysis distinguishes between infrastructures and systems: infrastructures are the shared technical and organizational substrates—platforms, networks, protocols—that enable diverse local operations, while systems are locally bounded processes and institutions that function within and through those infrastructures. This distinction matters because it shifts the focus from individual posts and user behavior to the foundational architecture that governs what gets seen, shared, and amplified. Research cited in the commentary shows that attention-driven architectures are a major driver of misinformation, and that engagement-based ranking often rewards outrage over accuracy. As these architectures evolve, the rapid integration of generative AI into content production and distribution is increasing existing risks. Synthetic text, images, and video, produced at scale and often indistinguishable from authentic material, can intensify misinformation campaigns, outpace detection systems, and exploit uneven moderation practices. The concern is not only that people may believe false claims, but that digital systems themselves are structured in ways that enable, incentivize, and monetize misinformation. Effective governance, Jalli argues, must therefore address both the technical architectures that accelerate falsehoods and the broader social conditions that allow them to persist.
Generative AI is compounding the systemic risk in the information environment, and few developments illustrate this more clearly than deepfakes. Unlike earlier manipulated media, deepfakes can generate audio and video that appear indistinguishable from authentic recordings, creating profound challenges for verification and eroding evidentiary trust. This threat extends beyond individual reputation to courts, newsrooms, and democratic institutions that depend on credible records. By complicating verification processes, deepfakes can amplify the cascading dynamics of systemic risk, potentially weakening institutional legitimacy, undermining governance, and heightening geopolitical insecurity. The commentary highlights real-world examples. During Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election, a fabricated audio clip alleging that a senior politician accused a rival candidate of embezzlement was confirmed as a deepfake. The same campaign used spliced and overdubbed video clips to distort public statements, and the operation was reportedly linked to state-aligned media networks. These tactics show synthetic media being adapted for election interference, straining fact-checking systems and eroding trust in democratic processes. In the United States, the FBI warned in May 2025 that AI-generated voice messages and texts were being used to impersonate senior officials in attempts to harvest credentials and compromise networks. Such incidents suggest that deepfakes are evolving beyond curiosities or isolated hoaxes and are increasingly integrated into the infrastructure of political disruption. Their spread challenges traditional notions of proof, undermines verification norms, and deepens uncertainty in everyday discourse. Detection systems often lag behind innovation, while moderation practices remain fragmented and uneven across platforms, leaving exploitable gaps. The analysis argues that deepfakes may transform misinformation from isolated episodes of deception into a systemic risk that can spread quickly across sectors. By threatening the evidentiary foundations on which institutions and publics rely, synthetic media can accelerate cascades across domains, turning fragile systems in health, finance, and politics into contested arenas over reality itself. The result is an informational arms race in which the tools of deception are becoming cheaper, more sophisticated, and more difficult to counter.
In response to the global misinformation crisis, education and media literacy remain the most common solutions. The assumption is that if people are taught to spot falsehoods, they will be more resilient to manipulation. This approach is appealing because it is scalable, empowering, and politically uncontroversial. Yet in today’s fragmented and fast-moving environment, its limits are increasingly evident. Misinformation, Jalli argues, is not merely about what people believe, but also about the systems that shape those beliefs. Even highly informed individuals are continually exposed to misleading content, some algorithmically prioritized and some synthetically generated, much of it circulating through attention-driven economies. Knowing how to evaluate sources cannot stop an AI-generated video from going viral or an emotionally charged conspiracy from dominating timelines. The challenge lies less in individual capacity than in the structural conditions that overwhelm it. Many interventions rely on a “deficit model” that assumes people fall for misinformation because they do not know better. But research shows that belief in falsehoods is often driven by identity, emotion, and belonging rather than ignorance. People share false claims not simply because they are misled, but because those claims feel true, reinforce loyalties, or signal political alignment. No fact check can easily compete with that kind of resonance, especially when reinforced by algorithmic amplification and social feedback. Moreover, systemic risk does not necessarily require widespread belief in false claims; it can emerge through multiple pathways. Widespread circulation, regardless of individual belief, degrades information quality and increases the cost of discerning truth. Even limited belief among key actors such as policymakers, journalists, or health officials can trigger cascading failures. Endemic uncertainty constrains institutional decision-making, while resources diverted to fact-checking and counter-messaging weaken institutional capacity. Social sharing can amplify rather than mitigate systemic risk by accelerating distribution and saturating information networks. Behavioral interventions remain valuable, Jalli concedes, but they cannot serve as the primary response. They are too reactive, too slow, and overly focused on individuals while neglecting the infrastructures that reward virality over accuracy. Media literacy programs do not change the fact that content moderation remains inconsistent, underfunded, and politicized. If misinformation is a system-wide vulnerability, responses must include regulatory frameworks that address design incentives, algorithmic transparency, and platform accountability, treating information integrity as a public good rather than an individual responsibility.
If misinformation is embedded in sociotechnical systems rather than isolated content, governance responses must evolve accordingly. The challenge, Jalli writes, is not only what people post or believe, but how digital infrastructures are designed, governed, and incentivized. Systemic risks demand systemic thinking, yet current strategies remain misaligned with the scale and complexity of the threat. Governance today is fragmented and often reactive. Content moderation struggles to keep pace with the volume and velocity of falsehoods. Laws targeting misinformation are frequently overly broad, vulnerable to political misuse, or narrowly focused on criminal intent. International coordination remains limited, while the platforms that shape global discourse operate across borders with uneven transparency and accountability. This mismatch creates conditions under which misinformation flourishes not only because it is persuasive but because the environment rewards its circulation. Enhancing resilience begins by recognizing platforms as critical infrastructure rather than neutral conduits. Algorithmic design, moderation, and enforcement policies influence democratic processes, public health, and geopolitical stability. Operationally, platforms could be required to conduct adversarial testing that simulates how false narratives about elections or health might spread through recommendation systems, identifies amplification points, and demonstrates mitigation capacity, similar to financial stress tests. The European Union’s Digital Services Act already requires large online platforms to conduct annual systemic risk assessments and independent audits of their content-governance practices, but comparable obligations remain rare outside the EU. Effective implementation depends on international coordination, because platforms operate across jurisdictions and unilateral regulations risk regulatory gaps. Just as governments regulate financial systems to prevent cascading economic failure, there is a case for meaningful oversight of how information is distributed, ranked, and monetized. Building systemic resilience, Jalli concludes, requires infrastructural reforms, platform accountability, and cross-border cooperation. Without stronger coordination, interventions will remain reactive, leaving societies vulnerable to future informational shocks. The commentary urges policymakers, technologists, and civil society to treat misinformation not as a temporary problem to be cleaned up after the next crisis, but as a permanent feature of the digital age that demands structural, preventive, and system-level responses.