In 2016, a fabricated story about a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant harboring a child trafficking ring spread so widely that a man drove six hours and walked in with a rifle. It felt like something uniquely modern—a product of social media algorithms and digital echo chambers. But the mechanics behind that story are older than the printing press.

Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, once spread a forged document claiming his rival Mark Antony had secretly willed Rome's eastern territories to Cleopatra. It worked. Public opinion turned, and Antony's support collapsed. The technology changes. The playbook doesn't. Understanding why disinformation works—across centuries and civilizations—matters more than cataloging where it appears.

In 1475, the small Italian city of Trent was gripped by a rumor: a Christian toddler named Simon had been murdered by the local Jewish community in a ritual sacrifice. The story was a complete fabrication. But it spread across Europe with breathtaking speed, carried by preachers, pamphlets, and word of mouth. Within months, it had sparked violence against Jewish communities hundreds of miles away. The truth—that the child had likely drowned—was boring. The lie was vivid, terrifying, and morally charged.

This pattern repeats with eerie consistency. A 2018 MIT study analyzing 126,000 stories on Twitter found that false news reached 1,500 people roughly six times faster than true stories. The researchers found that the key driver wasn't bots or algorithms—it was human emotion. False stories triggered stronger feelings of surprise, disgust, and fear. True stories tended to produce sadness or mild interest. Our brains are wired to prioritize threats and outrages. A calm correction simply cannot compete with a story that makes your blood boil.

Roman politicians understood this instinctively. When Octavian wanted to undermine Antony, he didn't publish policy critiques. He spread stories about Antony's drunkenness, his supposed enslavement to Cleopatra, his betrayal of Roman values. These narratives were emotionally complete—they had villains, victims, and moral stakes. The truth about Roman-Egyptian diplomacy was complicated and dull. The lie was a story people wanted to tell each other.

Takeaway

Disinformation doesn't succeed because people are stupid. It succeeds because false stories are crafted to feel important, while the truth often feels like homework. The emotional packaging matters more than the factual content.

During the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s and 70s, both Catholic and Protestant communities circulated wildly exaggerated accounts of atrocities committed by the other side. Catholic pamphlets described Protestants desecrating communion wafers and feeding them to animals. Protestant broadsheets depicted Catholic priests conducting secret orgies. Many of these stories had no basis in reality whatsoever. But that wasn't the point. Believing the story became a way of proving which side you were on.

This is the mechanism that makes disinformation truly sticky. Once a false claim becomes associated with group identity, questioning it feels like a betrayal. In 1920s America, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a fabricated document alleging a Jewish conspiracy for world domination—was promoted by Henry Ford's newspaper to millions of readers. Scholars debunked it almost immediately. But for those who already distrusted Jewish communities, the debunking was irrelevant. The document confirmed what they already felt, and rejecting it would mean rejecting their community's shared worldview.

Social media hasn't invented this dynamic—it has simply made it visible and accelerated it. When someone shares a dubious political claim today, they're often not making a factual assertion. They're performing membership. They're signaling to their tribe: I'm one of you. The Roman Senate saw identical behavior. Senators would repeat rumors about political enemies not because they'd verified them, but because repeating them demonstrated loyalty to a faction.

Takeaway

The most dangerous misinformation isn't the kind people fall for accidentally. It's the kind they embrace deliberately, because believing it tells the world—and themselves—who they belong to.

In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote something that still stings: "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it." He was commenting on the political pamphlet wars of early 18th-century London, where rival factions churned out fabricated scandals faster than anyone could refute them. Swift noticed something critical: by the time a correction appeared, the false version had already shaped how people understood the situation. The correction didn't replace the lie—it just became a footnote to it.

Modern psychology has given this a name: the continued influence effect. Even when people accept a correction as true, the original false information continues to shape their reasoning. A classic 1994 study showed participants a news story about a warehouse fire, initially attributed to arson with carelessly stored paint. When a correction stated no paint was found, participants acknowledged the correction—but still cited the paint when explaining why the fire spread. The first story had built a mental framework, and the correction couldn't dismantle it.

This is precisely what happened with the forged Donation of Constantine—a document fabricated around the 8th century claiming Emperor Constantine had granted the Pope authority over Western Rome. It was conclusively exposed as a forgery in 1440 by Lorenzo Valla. Yet the Catholic Church continued to reference it for decades afterward, and its influence on European politics persisted for centuries. First impressions, even false ones, create the scaffolding on which all subsequent understanding is built.

Takeaway

Correcting misinformation after it has spread is like trying to unbake a cake. The ingredients have already transformed into something new. Prevention and media literacy matter far more than after-the-fact debunking.

From Octavian's forged documents to algorithmically amplified conspiracy theories, disinformation follows the same three-step pattern: it hijacks emotion, it bonds itself to identity, and it resists correction once established. The medium evolves—stone tablets, pamphlets, newspapers, feeds—but the human vulnerabilities remain constant.

Recognizing this pattern won't make anyone immune to manipulation. But it does shift the question from "How could people believe that?" to the more honest and useful one: "What makes all of us susceptible?" The playbook is ancient. Understanding it is the first step toward not being played by it.