Disinformation is a buzzword and the source of significant disruption and conflict across the globe. Starting with the Donald Trump presidency — with its accusations of “fake news” — disrupted elections and inauthentic comments flooding social media discussions have become a commonplace, yet very irritating part of online reality. Significantly, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the unintentional spread of disinformation added a burden on health services when the rise of conspiracies was evident beyond the anti-vaccination movement. Governments, activists and scholars invest significant human and financial resources to study the phenomenon of disinformation and find ways to tackle it. There are several arguments currently circulating about what disinformation is and how it works. The first set is attributed to the way social media and other IT platforms operate. Broadly, they argue that social media uses algorithms that favour extreme, divisive and emotionally charged content which often leads to radicalisation and fuels more misinformation. In the same vein, the specifics of data management create opportunities for targeted information campaigns. It is based on the access to large accumulated sets of personal information, which are used to analyse human behaviour and reach out to different religious, ethnic and racial groups. Such data is widely available for sale in the open and on the black market. Promoted posts and paid ads are the tools of targeted communication available across different IT platforms, including search engines, and they have a significant impact when applied to political information. Another set of arguments is often less vocal, but likely more important. The global downfall of the public sphere in the information society is raising the level of mistrust in governments and institutions, which are now unable to provide complete and unbiased information about social processes. What Leah Lievrouw, professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, observed for Pew Research Center report on Future of Truth and Misinformation online back in 2017 is still relevant today: So many players and interests see online information as a uniquely powerful shaper of individual action and public opinion in ways that serve their economic or political interests (marketing, politics, education, scientific controversies, community identity and solidarity, behavioral ‘nudging,’ etc.). These very diverse players would likely oppose (or try to subvert) technological or policy interventions or other attempts to insure the quality, and especially the disinterestedness, of information. At the same time, watchdogs such as journalists and the non-profit sector may not follow public interest, being instead linked to the commodification of information in the information economy. The lack of institutionalised deliberation forums pushes people to social media, which has become an almost exclusive platform for participating in social and political life, as well as the place fostering social polarization, xenophobia and the spreading of false news. Yet, it is not only the problems of the civic context that may amplify the disinformation spread but the citizens’ role in consuming and sharing information. Research on the psychology of misinformation highlights that people, on average, are neither incapable of distinguishing false information from genuine nor willing to share misleading information. One of the drivers that affect the spread of misinformation that scholars acknowledge is the phenomenon of “lazy thinking” — the pattern of thinking that demands less cognitive effort. People, as they are, tend to follow their emotions and intuition when consuming and sharing content, and make their decisions based not only on the content itself but the metadata of the media item, such as the assumed authenticity of the author of the publication or the number of engagements. The disinformation apocalypse today is driven by a mixture of these factors: the degrading political context, the lack of effort from IT platforms and the simple fact of human nature. There is strong concern that even a complex misinformation campaign relying on success in all three directions could encourage a negative attitude change among the people. This is despite the fact that IT professionals dealing with online influence campaigns or marketing report that, on average, the impact of targeted advertising in political and marketing communication has a small effect on targeted groups. In other words, a targeted advertising campaign can convince a person with an already established attitude but is not enough to make a radical change in the way an individual is thinking.