Soft Launching a Lie
Like a new partner on an Instagram story, sometimes, misinformation is soft launched
Recently, I was spending time with an acquaintance who clearly needed to vent. It wasn’t angry or demanding, but a slow release. They’d been having an experience with someone that I know and love, and they were not pleased.
In the moment, I listened with very little feeling. It came up organically; I had the time and space. Everyone is different. How we experience the world around us differs. That we’d all have different perspectives and opinions on situations and people is an uninteresting fact of life.
But this particular conversation became striking as it went on. A slow build of dread began in my belly. A type of feeling that creeps in and lingers, refusing to budge until you look at and hold it long enough. So I looked, and I held, and only found myself more confused by what I had heard.
So much of it was phrased as a question; a curious digging. What was my experience? How did I feel about these things that, really, didn’t have much to do with me and weren’t my experience? Could I validate them? If not, could I deny them? No.
For a few hours, I created my own narratives and stories, and I became truly upset. Not upset because I felt I had learned something absolute and concrete that would change anything; upset because I felt I was having to question something that it had never occurred to me to question; my faith in someone I love and respect.
Like most things, none of this was all that difficult to resolve with clear communication.
I journaled, and then, when I was ready, I had the conversations I needed to have, and it was all very explainable. From top to bottom, all players involved in the story, and the story itself, were assumption-riddled and not even really truth-adjacent.
But that’s exactly why it worked the way it did. What I heard didn’t arrive shouting. It didn’t demand belief. In many ways, it wasn’t even technically a claim. But it was convoluted and compelling in its considerations, and that is emotionally persuasive.
A few years ago, you couldn’t open up a social media platform without being yelled at; as you scrolled, endless videos of commentators and journalists and grifters trying desperately to be heard beneath the noise. We lived in a culture of fear-mongering, genuine fear, and people willing to capitalize on all of it.
You’ll notice that many of those people have gotten quieter. And I don’t mean they’ve stopped talking, I mean they have quite literally softened the volume on the messaging. As we all became fatigued with high emotions and debilitating questions, those same grifters took note. Maybe they got tired too.
What I see now is that a lot of misinformation doesn’t arrive shouting. It doesn’t demand belief, and it doesn’t always make a claim.
It arrives gently.
A question. A hesitation. A tone that signals concern rather than certainty. I can’t say for certain this is true… Has anyone else noticed… Just asking.
This is the soft launch of a lie. And it works precisely because it doesn’t ask very much of you at first.
A soft launch, gentle and curious, lowers the stakes. It creates a feeling of openness. No one is being persuaded, allegedly. No one is being told what to think. There’s no call to action, no manifesto, no explicit force. Just a suggestion that something might be off. Just enough uncertainty that you might feel clever for noticing or considering.
What matters here isn’t the content of the question but the experience of encountering it. The tone is casual, plausible, and noncommittal. It doesn’t sound like authority. It sounds like curiosity. Curiosity, unlike a conclusive claim, is hard to challenge.
This is not accidental.
I’d like to acknowledge that it’s hard to hold what I’m about to say alongside the many times I’ve encouraged you as a reader to be curious. I won’t rescind that. I uphold that genuine curiosity is one of the quickest paths to connection and one of the simplest ways to mitigate unnecessary conflict. Etc., etc., someone call Brené Brown, blah, blah.
That said.
Performed curiosity has become one of the most effective delivery systems for misinformation because it’s essentially socially protected. You can’t fact-check a question the same way you can fact-check a statement. If you push back too hard, you’re seen as stifling important conversation and leaving both bias and systems unchecked. You’re the one who looks unreasonable, overreactive, and ironically, suspicious.
The questioner, meanwhile, remains clean. They haven’t crossed the line into responsibility. If the idea spreads, it spreads on its own through the power of others. If it’s challenged, the questioner can retreat into innocence. I was just wondering.
This is how ideas begin to circulate without ever quite belonging to anyone.
Once the seed is planted, you have the hand off to a familiar refrain: Do your own research.
Doing your own research sounds empowering. Democratic, even. It shrugs toward independence and skepticism, toward thinking for yourself rather than deferring to institutions or experts. And in a vacuum, that instinct isn’t wrong. Critical thinking matters. Blind trust doesn’t serve anyone.
But “do your own research” is rarely an invitation as much as it’s a necessary redirect.
By the time you hear it, the conclusion has already been implied. The research you’re being encouraged to do is not open-ended. It is suggestive and curated. The reality is that many people are not equipped to do their own research, which is not a failing of intelligence or morals; it’s simply true that we are not experts in what we’re not experts in. When you can’t perform your own studies and research on complex topics, you find resources. In a conversation where someone asks this of you, their sources are suggested implicitly through tone, community, and repetition.
The work you’re being asked to do is not discovery, it’s confirmation.
This is the trick. The person receiving the message feels autonomous while being gently funnelled. You’re not being told what to believe, you’re being guided toward what to find. What emerges feels self-generated. I looked into this. I came to this conclusion myself.
And because the journey feels personal, the conclusion becomes harder to dislodge. This is why soft-launched misinformation scales so well. It flatters the ego. It offers the emotional reward of skepticism without the discipline of verification. You don’t need to evaluate sources, timelines, or incentives. You just need to notice what “feels off” and follow that feeling wherever it leads.
Modern misinformation is built around how people actually move through information: quickly, socially, emotionally.
Not every question is dangerous. Not every skeptic is wrong. But when curiosity is used as cover and research is reduced to our ability to shop for a conclusion that fits well, we are no closer to truth or systemic accountability.
The most effective lies invite you to participate. They let you do the work of spreading them. They make you feel like you found something. And once that happens, the lie no longer needs to be actualized and defended.
It’s already living and breathing as your truth.