A World Without Truth: Building TrustOps for the AI Era

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (0:06)
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Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Karen Stokes-Lockhart. Today, we're diving into one of the most urgent challenges facing leaders, the rise of miss, dis, and malinformation, and how organizations must now operate in what Gartner calls a world without truth. This information isn't new, but the digital era has fundamentally changed its scale, speed, and impact. Deep fakes, global AI-driven reach, and precision-targeted narratives create a risk landscape unlike anything enterprises have faced. And most organizations aren't ready. Two-thirds of executive committees are talking about disinformation, yet only a fraction have defenses in place. Joining me is Gartner Research Fellow, Dave Aron, who recently presented on this very topic at Gartner IT Symposium Expo. We'll explore what's accelerating the threat, why traditional cybersecurity can't contain it, and how leaders can build a new enterprise capability, TrustOps, to ground information, detect harmful narratives, and respond with confidence. Dave, welcome to ThinkCast.

**Dave Aron** (1:51)
Hey, Karen, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (1:54)
Wonderful. Well, let's start big picture. Tell me, why do you call disinformation a meta issue, and what makes this different from past eras of propaganda?

**Dave Aron** (2:05)
Great question. I think the main thing is that when you can't be sure what's true, you can't make progress on any other issue. Let's say it's, you know, global warming, vaccines, or issues inside a company to do with logistics or risks. If you don't know what's true, it's very hard to make progress on any other issue. So this disinformation, it affects every type of decision-making. So it makes it a very high-order strategic risk. You know, we think it's about a $1 trillion global problem, which is about 1% of global GDP.

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (2:48)
Wow. And I did see a great quote you had in your symposium presentation from Voltaire.

**Dave Aron** (2:55)
Oh, yes. Yeah. I'm not sure I can remember it. I think he said, when you can make people believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities, which is scary, very scary.

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (3:08)
It is. And I know we've talked about misinformation and disinformation for years, but you add a third category, malinformation. So tell me more about what does that mean and why does it matter now?

**Dave Aron** (3:22)
Yeah. I think, you know, even people in the field get confused sometimes. It's really important to remember, there's three things.
Misinformation is somebody accidentally providing bad information. So maybe a social media influencer who thinks they know something. So they have no bad intention, but they're passing on something that's wrong. Disinformation, which we tend to use as the collective term, but disinformation specifically is someone deliberately trying to give a company, a government, an individual wrong information in order to achieve an effect, which is normally good for the disinformer, bad for them. But the third one is a relatively new word, malinformation. It's not a Gartner word. We make up some great words as well, but malinformation is a word that means good information and provided out of context, so people misinterpret it. And there's a really great example. Some of the plant protein companies, you know, like Beyond Meats, Impossible Foods, who make the veggie burgers. Those who don't want them to succeed are conducting malinformation against them. One example is, they said, methyl cellulose, the chemical methyl cellulose is in plant burgers and that can be very bad for your health. Now that's actually technically true, but it's malinformation for two reasons. One is, there's only a tiny, tiny amount in a plant burger, maybe 0.001% of what would be harmful. The other reason it's malinformation is methyl cellulose is in lots of other foods as well. Not just, you know, many processed foods. So malinformation, I actually learned there is a traditional English word for malinformation, which is, palturing, P-A-L-T-E-R. But malinformation is a less well-known thing. Good information out of context causing a harmful effect.

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (5:28)
Okay. And digital accelerants really make this moment different too. What are the three accelerants that you see shaping the next few years?

**Dave Aron** (5:39)
Yeah. Another great question. You know, if you were cynical, you might say, hey, what's the big deal? We've had propaganda throughout history. And in fact, in our book, World Without Truth, we have an example from the Roman era of disinformation. That's not new. But there's sort of three digital accelerants and one non-digital. One is the amazing, amazing deep fakes. And I think everyone's seeing that now.