‘They don’t want you to know – The pitfalls of misinformation’

Sylvia Moretzsohn, a retired researcher and CECS contributor, has just published the book *They Don’t Want You to Know: The Traps of Disinformation*, a work that exposes the accelerating spread of disinformation mechanisms and the role of artificial intelligence technologies in today’s communication ecosystem.

“Ever since researchers at the University of Washington presented a video in 2017 in which the facial movements and voice of former U.S. President Barack Obama were manipulated by this mechanism—which has come to be known as ‘artificial intelligence’—it became clear that it would be only a matter of time before the development of this technology made it impossible, at least at first glance, to distinguish the true from the false.

The book They Don’t Want You to Know: The Traps of Disinformation takes this crucial issue as its starting point to propose a broader perspective on the process of disinformation, which points to the very industrial process of news production, in which speed takes precedence over rigor in fact-checking. It presents, in simple language, the essential points of this approach, which draws on critical studies predating the internet, highlights various strategies of discursive manipulation, and emphasizes the need to better understand the issue of credibility, which is linked to the tendency to confirm already established beliefs. Finally, it revisits the discussion on generative AI and argues that this technology, controlled by large corporations without any public scrutiny, leads us to the most radical form of alienation.”

[Posted: June 22, 2026]