VANCOUVER--Although it’s thousands of years old, the concept of misinformation probably didn’t intrude into most people’s daily lives until quite recently. The Internet has taken the concept, democratized it, and weaponized it, to great effect in both political and more pedestrian situations. But there’s a small group of researchers, data scientists, and security professionals working to build tools and collaborative communities to help organizations and individuals recognize and defeat misinformation campaigns.

“The Internet we have is being manipulated for both money and power, and that’s not fair. There’s been a lot of admiring of this as a problem and not so much in the way of building solutions,” Sara-Jayne Terp, a data scientist and consultant who has been studying the misinformation problem for several years, said during a talk at the CanSecWest security conference here Wednesday.

“I really have a problem with people creating artificial debate for money.”

Misinformation can mean a lot of different things, but in the context of the modern Internet, it’s generally used to describe campaigns that an organization or individual runs to influence another group by providing false or misleading information. That can come in the form of simple social media posts by loosely connected people, or much more sophisticated coordinated efforts by governments or political groups comprising years-long media, social media, and real-world operations. If they’re familiar with it at all, many people probably think of misinformation campaigns in relation to elections, specifically the 2016 United States presidential election and the influence that Russian-affiliated groups exerted leading up to the election.

But misinformation is used much more broadly and is a far older tactic than that. Its use has evolved and expanded tremendously in the last few years, thanks to the dominance of social media as a major form of communication for many people.

“So why is this all suddenly happening now? It’s not. People have been misinforming each other for as long as people have been communicating with each other. The difference is that the things that were once available to nation states as tools of influence suddenly became available to everyone,” Terp said.

“Now, Kim Kardashian can influence national policy because she has the same tools available to her as nation states do. There are people for hire who will misinform you.”