Human emotions and responses like fear, anger, loathing and frustration are hot merchandise. Advertisers and politicians are bidding for your attention by firing up our worst nature.

The marketplace is the world wide web where social media platforms often pitch exciting but phony “facts.” Global corporations and even local “influencers” are reaping vast profits by appealing to our visceral instincts, our unthinking reactions.

“Harnessing existing public discontent” is one of the keys for unlocking and mobilizing human responses that can work to our detriment, Dr Benjamin Horne told The Rotary Club of McMinnville at its weekly luncheon Thursday at First Presbyterian Church.

An assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Horne is a founding fellow of the school’s Information Integrity Institute and an affiliate of the Center for National Security and Foreign Affairs in the Baker School for Public Policy and Public Affairs.

Joining him for the Rotary program was Dr Matthew Craig, postdoctoral research associate in the UTK Information Integrity Institute.

The practice of disinformation, often in the service of authoritarian and undemocratic governments, has a long history, Horne told the local Rotarians and their guests.

In recent times, the purposeful and systematic promulgation of falsehoods was developed in Communist Russia before the fall of the Iron Curtain, he said, referring to Stalinist-era propaganda machinery.

Disinformation agents in the KGB—the feared and ruthless secret service of the former USSR—learned their lessons well, later refining them for attacks on democracy in the United States, Western Europe and elsewhere.

A case in point: the respected CBS journalist Dan Rather went on national television in 1987 with a report claiming that AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) was created in a US biological weapons laboratory.

A normally trustworthy news source had been tricked into repeating lie concocted by Soviet disinformation specialists, who planted the false story in an unimportant and barely noticed newspaper in India. The Russians then cited the phony reporting, giving it new life and the patina of credibility. It didn’t take long for this lurid tale to infiltrate the American media mainstream.

The was an example of “trading up the chain,” as Horne described it, as uncritical news outlets and consumers take the bait and are duped.

Much the same thing happened early in the Covid pandemic, he recalled.

Hydroxychloroquine, a drug that had proven useful in treating malaria, was cited as a defense against the deadly coronavirus. The scam gained credence when a reported “physician” extolled the anti-Covid powers of the drug. What presented itself as doctor with relevant scientific credentials was eventually unmasked as a salesman with no education in medicine.

“Elon Musk re-tweeted the [false] report to his 40 million followers,” Horne said. Within six days after the fraud first surfaced “a US president was talking about it from the White House.”

As part of their efforts to undermine the American democracy, Russian disinformation professionals targeted conversative voters in Tennessee.

In the 2016 presidential election “inauthentic accounts across multiple social media posed as Americans” when, in reality, they were Russian operatives working from Moscow in the mildly-named Internet Research Agency, Horne explained.

“One of the fake accounts--@TN_GOP--turned out to be Russian.”

Even if the scammers don’t aspire to sway their victims to a particular opinion or action, they work to sow doubt and discord, the UT professor continued.

Such disinformation campaigns aim “to create uncertainty and confusion.” The agenda is to discredit valid sources of information and even to insinuate there is no such thing as objective truth, no material difference between fact and fantasy.

“I want to assure there is truth,” the Rotary speaker insisted. He pointed to a number of legitimate, professional sources of information. Examples, he said, include PolitiFact, PBS (Public Broadcasting System television) and NPR (National Public Radio), as well as his own institution, UTK.

Horne and Craig discuss those and related issues in the weekly FOCUS interview program on McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI. The half-hour conversation will be on the air Tuesday at 5 p.m. and again Saturday at 9:35 a.m.