Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better
Cambridge University Press, 2024, ISBN: 978-1009523578, 185pp) RRP $57.00AUD (paperback)
Editors: Daniel Silverman
Reviewed by: Matthew Jones
Misinformation in war is usually discussed as a production problem—propaganda systems, platform dynamics, bot networks, state messaging, and the latest label (‘hybrid,’ ‘cognitive warfare,’ and so on). In Seeing is Disbelieving, Associate Professor Daniel Silverman of Carnegie Mellon University offers an alternative viewpoint. Rather than concentrating only on how falsehoods are produced and circulated, he asks why some audiences believe them and others do not. His answer turns on a deceptively simple variable: distance from violence. Those closest to the fighting are often less likely to believe false accounts of what is happening because they possess some capacity to verify events through lived experience and because accuracy matters to survival. Those further away are more vulnerable because they cannot verify through their own observations; they also do not need accuracy to survive, and default to motivated reasoning inside partisan networks.[1] This is a valuable corrective for military professionals because it clashes with a comfortable assumption embedded in a lot of discussion on the contemporary ‘information environment’: that misinformation is uniformly corrosive across the battlespace and population. Silverman argues it is corrosive unevenly, and that unevenness has operational implications.
Seeing is Disbelieving is not Silverman’s first foray into this area. The book’s logic was first elaborated in 2021, where he formalised the distance mechanism.[2] To Silverman, war creates the conditions for both directional motives (identity, grievance, partisan media) and accuracy motives (survival). Where survival and local knowledge dominate—close to violent events—accuracy motives can discipline bias. Where they do not—distant publics, diasporas, or rear areas—directional motives and information diets dominate. In Silverman’s earlier study, he tested this mechanism through a case study on Iraq where, using strike location data, he found that proximity and exposure to the strike area reduced false beliefs and dampened the influence of prior orientations and media streams. In his new book, Silverman generalises his central thesis across additional case studies including on drone warfare in Pakistan (Chapter 3), air operations and perceptions in Iraq (Chapter 4), and Syrian refugee interviews (Chapter 5), building an accessible monograph around a clear claim.
Within Seeing is Disbelieving Silverman forces the reader to think more carefully about audience prioritisation. If his argument holds, the population most vulnerable to believing falsehoods about war is often not the population living under fire, but the population watching from a distance in other regions, international observers, and diaspora communities who care deeply about a crisis or conflict yet lack direct means of verification. Silverman’s theorisation offers empirical data to a topic saturated with unverified assertion. ‘Misinformation’ is frequently treated as a universal solvent that degrades everything, everywhere, all at once. Silverman instead offers a clear mechanism and tests it against hard wartime data—most notably the earlier Iraq work linking survey beliefs to strike proximity—which anchors the argument in causal reasoning rather than intuition. For military professionals, the value is not merely that misinformation exists, but that its belief and effects can be anticipated, bounded, and targeted—if we stop assuming the information environment is flat.
While Silverman’s case studies are focused on the Middle East, his framework is applicable to contemporary challenges in the Indo-Pacific. One salient observation is that refugees and diasporas—once removed from the front—become vulnerable to deception because they remain partisan but lose the verifying power of lived proximity.[3] Australia is a diaspora nation with dense information ties into the region. In a regional contingency, this creates a predictable seam: high-interest communities consuming conflict narratives at distance, often via transnational platforms, encrypted messaging, and home-country media ecosystems. If Silverman is right, those communities may not be best treated as passive recipients of ‘public affairs,’ but as a decisive audience in the legitimacy contest.
Coercion in the Indo-Pacific is also ambiguous, with maritime harassment, cyber intrusion, political interference, economic pressure used by a variety of actors. Such operations are designed to keep violence low while keeping stakes high. This ‘grey zone’ warfare is a stress test for Silverman’s framework, because even proximate actors may see effects without seeing causes. His own discussion about climate change and pandemics is relevant here: proximity to harm does not guarantee accurate belief when causality is difficult to perceive.[4] In the ‘grey zone’ (where attribution is deliberately designed to be contested) proximity alone may not generate the same accuracy motive that operates in overt violence. In that sense, the Indo-Pacific does not invalidate Silverman’s theory, but it does reveal one of its boundary conditions: seeing is not always enough when causality itself is obscured.
Australia does not fight alone. Silverman’s emphasis on distance implies that in coalition operations, the decisive misinformation battle may be fought not ‘in theatre’ but across multiple home fronts—where political constraints and public narratives shape rules of engagement, basing access, and sustainment. Australian Defence Force planners should consider this book as an argument for treating domestic and regional narrative management as a core enabling function, not an adjunct.
Beyond the above, readers will be able to identify three key takeaways from Silverman’s thought-provoking book. Firstly, the book suggests that we should treat distance as an intelligence variable. Information/misinformation analyses should explicitly incorporate proximity, not just demographics, ideology, or platform usage. ‘Who is far enough away to be persuadable?’ becomes as important as ‘who is persuadable?’ Secondly, it should be assumed that the main fight is over legitimacy among the unexposed. In many conflicts, the most dangerous misinformation effects are those that shape coalition cohesion, domestic constraints, and regional alignment—audiences for whom the conflict is primarily mediated through screens. Lastly, collection should be designed to preserve ‘local witnessing’. If proximity can discipline belief, then operational reporting, public affairs access, and partner-enabled local testimony are not merely transparency virtues; they can be instruments that reduce belief in falsehood among key audiences—especially when adversaries seek to sever access (censorship, intimidation, blackouts).
In Seeing is Disbelieving, Silverman has produced a compact, readable, and conceptually sharp book that should be on the shelf of anyone working where operations, media, and legitimacy collide. It aims to provide a clean, testable proposition with real operational bite: misinformation’s effects are conditional on distance, incentives, and the availability of local truth. For Australia, the most useful extension is to treat Indo-Pacific contingencies as contests where the decisive audiences may be watching from afar, including in our own domestic information space and across connected regional diasporas.
Endnotes
[1] Daniel Silverman, Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/011E4EDB68BB057FB5DBDC918FCD816B.
[2] Daniel Silverman, Karl Kaltenthaler, and Munqith Dagher, "Seeing Is Disbelieving: The Depths and Limits of Factual Misinformation in War," International Studies Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqab002, https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=1bf28aa8-0398-36a2-b9c1-98464decb162.
[3] Thomas Colley, "When Misinformation Means the Difference Between Life and Death," Lawfare (2026), https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when-misinformation-means-the-difference-between-life-and-death.
[4] Silverman, Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better. Figure 6.1 p133
