"What happens online within a matter of minutes transfers to the streets. People are acting on information that isn't true". That is how Prince Harry summarised the problem of disinformation last week.

He was speaking in the Colombian capital of Bogota, where he is helping host a summit on digital responsibility.

Harry has more reason than most to fear the spread of disinformation and the misinformationIncorrect or misleading information unintentionally presented as fact. It can be contrasted with disinformation or deliberate lies. it generally engenders. Last year he sued the publisher of the Daily Mirror, alleging that the paper and other news outlets had used illicit phone-hacking to gather information on him and then publish it alongside speculation and falsehoods.¹

Even while he was speaking, social media accounts in India were hard at work spreading dangerous disinformation about events in neighbouring Bangladesh, where a peaceful revolution recently brought about the fall of a longtime autocrat, Sheikh Hasina.

The accounts have manipulated photos and videos to claim that Muslims in Bangladesh are attacking Hindus and destroying their temples.

While there have been some attacks on Hindu-owned properties, observers say these were politically rather than religiously motivated, and Muslim supporters of the deposedRemoved from a position of power. regime have been attacked as well.

They fear radical Hindu nationalists in India may use these false stories to stoke further hatred of Indian Muslims, who have been subjected to growing violence.²

How can we fix this problem? Harry suggests the answer is education. People should be taught to be able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.

A model attempting to do just this has been pioneered in Finland, which has long been the target of Russian disinformation farms. Students are taught how fake troll accounts fool their readers by manipulating media, telling half-truths, and hounding unwanted critics away from websites.

They learn how to spot such accounts: how they use stock photos for profile pictures; post obsessively for hours at a time; feature inconsistent translations and display little or no personal information.

The result is that Finns now have the highest rate of media literacy in Europe.³

But others are not sure that education alone is enough. They point out it can be tricky to teach people how to distinguish "good" facts from "bad" information.

The most basic way of understanding "truth" is to define it as "what corresponds to the facts". This is known as the "correspondence theory".⁴

But this is problematic because reality can be interpreted in different ways, making it hard to agree on what is "true". Moreover, some things seem to be true even if we cannot absolutely prove them with facts.

Another approach is "coherence theory". This states that things are true if they add up to a coherent whole. Truth is not a question of relating to objective reality, but relating to other facts, like assuming a puzzle piece belongs if it seems to complete a picture.⁵

However, for sceptics, this kind of truth makes us oversimplify reality in the name of coherence. Reality, they say, is messy, and truth is messy too.

That is why some people think that what should be taught is not how to spot truth and falsehood, but how to be critical. They say real knowledge must equip us to pick apart what appears to be true and devise other options.

Is he right?

Yes: The only way to resist disinformation is to build up media literacy. That way people will not be taken in by bad-faith actors. We can only do this through education.

No: Disinformation does not lead people to violence. It simply triggers an existing sense of alienation and resentment. We cannot deal with online lies without tackling our deep social problems.

Or... Before we can teach people about truth and falsehood we need a much stronger sense of what those things actually are. There is no hope for societies that cannot learn to think critically.

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