“Flooding” using disinformation

Disinformation strategies are often deployed by professionals to elicit confusion rather than to persuade. One key method for this is “flooding”: inserting in the communication environment a large number of incongruent propositions in an attempt to prevent people from identifying reliable information. We assess the effect of this strategy with two pre-registered experimental studies (N = 2607) on the topics of sunscreens and GMOs. We pitted a flooded versus a non-flooded information environment against each other, with varying levels of false and true information. Our findings suggest that flooding makes the perception of reliable information more uncertain, while increasing subjective feelings of information overload. The effect of flooding was observable even in cases when participants had strong positive prior beliefs about the topic. Our results suggest that flooding may spill over to alter the perception of entire communication environments, and the detrimental effect it may have on democratic decision-making.