The spread of rumors poses deep and far-reaching risks to security, cutting across public safety, crisis response, social cohesion, and even national stability. In times of rising tension or fragility, rumors can distort perception and provoke reactive behavior, sparking crises that could have been avoided with calm and clarity. While some arise spontaneously in the absence of verified information, others are deliberately deployed to shape opinion, justify aggression, incite violence, or destabilize societies. In both forms, they function as strategic tools of manipulation, capable of priming populations for conflict and undermining societal resilience from within.
The Fragility of Order in Public Health Crises
Nowhere is the impact of rumors more immediately felt than in public health emergencies. In these high-stress moments, fear and uncertainty make populations especially vulnerable to misinformation.
- Information Gaps Breed Rumors
Rumors often spread faster than the disease itself, especially when official communication is delayed, suppressed, or inconsistent. In the absence of trustworthy information, people turn to alternative sources, where speculation and fear quickly fill the void.
A stark example is the early COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. Local authorities downplayed the threat and silenced whistleblowers—most notably Dr. Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded for raising alarm. This silence created an information vacuum, filled rapidly by private rumors and social media speculation. As credible information lagged behind rising concern, emotionally charged falsehoods—invoking panic and outrage—went viral, exacerbating the situation.
A similar pattern emerged during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in the U.S. Despite only five confirmed cases, misinformation flooded digital platforms, triggering widespread fear. The panic was driven less by the disease than by the emotional intensity of rumor-based narratives.
- Viral Fear
Unlike traditional media, social platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook act as accelerators of mass behavior. In times of crisis, images of empty shelves, exaggerated warnings, and unverifiable claims can spread within hours, sparking chain reactions. Even in unaffected areas, people rush to hoard goods, not because of actual shortages, but because of what they see others doing.
In Wuhan, rumors of looming shortages in food, fuel, and medicine led to chaotic mass hoarding. Pharmacies and supermarkets were emptied within days, and long queues formed at petrol stations.
This is the feedback loop of fear. Social proof—our tendency to imitate collective behavior—can amplify rumors into reality. When people observe others stockpiling, they feel compelled to do the same, fearing they’ll be left behind. This creates self-fulfilling spirals of panic, where the perception of scarcity becomes the cause of it.
Disinformation as Weapons Against Social Cohesion
Rumors and disinformation are not only catalysts for panic—they are often wielded deliberately to divide societies and erode collective resilience. This form of cognitive warfare weakens internal bonds, leaving nations vulnerable to deeper crises and external manipulation.
Destabilization Through Identity Conflicts
Strategic campaigns of cognitive warfare aim first to sow mistrust and fracture social fabric. They do this by amplifying existing social cleavages—ethnic, religious, political—and injecting disinformation to intensify divisions, so internal cohesion collapses from within.
When disinformation is tailored to identity markers, it mobilizes group emotions and leads to disengagement, political paralysis, or even internal collapse. In extreme cases, society can lose the collective will to resist external aggression.
Platforms reinforce identity markers through algorithmic design, creating echo chambers where people see only views that confirm their biases. Inflammatory rumors spread faster than corrections, and in polarized societies, emotionally charged, identity-targeting content gains broad amplification and deepens divisions.
Disinformation as Prelude to War
Before conflicts erupt, rumors or deliberate disinformation are often deployed to psychologically and politically “soften the ground.” Governments and propaganda systems use them to cast foreign or internal opponents as existential threats—vilifying them as inhuman, subversive, or conspiratorial—to condition public acceptance of war or repression. These narratives instill fear, frame aggression as defensive or inevitable, and often allege conspiracy plots or demographic threats from targeted ethnic or religious groups. Scholars argue that dehumanization is a critical precondition for atrocities, as it erodes moral resistance to violence. If you follow the rhetoric long enough—or sometimes right from the start—lo and behold, you hear the terms: “animals,” “cockroaches,” “barbaric,” “snakes.”
Similarly, in Rwanda (1994), media-spread rumors claimed that Tutsis were plotting to overthrow the Hutu-led government—inciting fear and fueling genocide. Simultaneously, propaganda outlets engaged in systematic dehumanization, referring to Tutsis as “inyenzi” (cockroaches), snakes, and vermin—stripping them of humanity to normalize their extermination. Over several months, outlets like Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and the newspaper Kangura repeatedly used this inflammatory rhetoric—urging listeners to “cut down the tall trees,” a euphemism for killing Tutsis, and to treat them as permanent threats.
Securing the Narrative
From public health emergencies to social fragmentation to the path to war, rumors and disinformation are not mere byproducts of chaos—they are instruments for shaping it. In this ever-evolving technological age, where information spreads faster than verification, the danger lies not only in what is said, but in how quickly perception becomes reality.
What may begin as a seemingly minor rumor can morph into justification for repression, violence, or war. Thus, managing information is not simply a technical task, but a central pillar of security and stability.
Countering these threats demands building societal resilience: fostering media literacy, reinforcing social trust, and ensuring that credible information circulates as swiftly and compellingly as falsehoods.
Because in the end, the battle over truth isn’t just about facts. It’s about who controls the narrative, and what we allow that narrative to justify.
