The Difference Between Lying and Bullshitting
How Bullshit Became More Dangerous Than Lies in the Attention Economy
Your neighbour pockets your delivered package and looks you straight in the eye: "Never arrived." That's a lie.
Your uncle posts that drinking bleach boosts immunity, gets people hospitalized, then shrugs: "Just sharing what's out there." That's bullshit.
In a world drowning in bad information, this distinction is no longer a word game. It's the roadmap to why truth itself feels optional today.
A lie requires knowing the truth, then deliberately saying something else. The liar acknowledges reality before rejecting it. Lying takes effort and, ironically, a respect for what's real.
Bullshit operates differently. The bullshitter doesn't care about truth or falsehood. Their goal is an effect based reaction. Bullshiters aim to sound smart, win arguments, generate clicks, or stir emotions. Truth becomes irrelevant collateral damage.
Harry Frankfurt identified this distinction in his 2005 book "On Bullshit." His key insight? Liars still navigate by truth's compass. Bullshitters toss the compass overboard entirely and keep sailing.
This matters because bullshit arrives wrapped in absolute confidence. It sounds reasonable and contains just enough facts to hook you. But unlike lies, bullshit isn't trying to relate to truth at all.
And that's why bullshit isn't just winning online arguments. It's breaking our shared reality.
3 Types of Bad Info You've Definitely Seen Online
Not all falsehoods are created equal. Researchers studying information pollution identify three distinct categories that contaminate our feeds. Each functions and spread differently. Each also requires different countermeasures.
Misinformation is incorrect content shared without malicious intent. When your grandmother forwards that hoax about a missing child from 2003, she genuinely believes she's helping. The information is wrong, but her intentions are pure.
Disinformation combines falsehood with deliberate intent to mislead. When fake accounts spread fabricated health studies about food additives causing cancer, they're strategically undermining public trust. These bad actors know what they're sharing isn't accurate.
Malinformation takes factual content and deploys it harmfully. When someone leaks private medical records without consent, the information itself may be authentic, but its release serves only to damage.
What makes this taxonomy particularly powerful is understanding how bullshit, in Frankfurt's philosophical sense, operates across all three categories. It functions as a cognitive binding agent, allowing contradictory ideas to adhere together despite logical incompatibility. Like semantic superglue, bullshit creates resistance to correction by loosening our grip on whether statements need to be true at all.
These categories form the core of the "information disorder" framework pioneered by researcher Claire Wardle in 2017. What makes this taxonomy valuable is recognizing that bullshit operates across all three categories. It functions as a binding agent, allowing contradictory ideas to stick together despite logical incompatibility.
When we fail to distinguish between these forms, our solutions will fall short. Fact-checking catches obvious lies but has no effect on bullshit. Media literacy focused only on spotting fake news doesn't prepare people for authentic information deployed maliciously.
Bullshit in the Wild: Where It Lives and Spreads
Bullshit thrives in certain corners of the internet, often cloaked in phrases we hear so often.
"Do your own research."
"The mainstream media won't tell you this."
"I'm just asking questions."
These common refrains act like Trojan horses for bullshit: they sound reasonable while shifting the burden of proof. As Carl Sagan warned, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." But bullshit artists demand you do the work.
The online ecosystem provides fertile ground. Health "experts" on TikTok deliver medical advice with confidence despite lacking qualifications. Commentators present speculation as analysis with phrases like "Some people are saying..." Cryptocurrency promoters and political pundits use impressive-sounding jargon that hides the absence of substance.
Consider the famous line of "I'm not saying the moon landing was fake, but isn't it weird the flag waved with no atmosphere?" It plants doubt through insinuation rather than evidence. The bullshitter isn't evaluating whether the flag moved. They just want to appear informed and cast doubt, making you seem less than you know.
Facts ask for your brain. Bullshit wants your gut.
MIT research shows false information spreads significantly faster online than truth because it triggers stronger emotional reactions. Algorithms optimized for engagement create perfect conditions for bullshit to outcompete nuanced information. Content that provokes outrage travels further than content that informs with complexity.
Studies by Pennycook and Rand show that people who think critically spot bullshit better than those who rely on gut instincts. Hollow phrases like "Reality is only real if we believe in it" sound deep until you realize they're just clouds of pretty words.
Facts ask for your brain. Bullshit wants your gut.
Platforms reward stickiness, and bullshit is industrial strength.
Truth moves slowly. It's cautious, conditional, sometimes uncertain. It doesn't flatter you with certainty or thrill you with outrage. And for that reason, it struggles to compete.
Why This Difference Actually Matters
Lies can be fact-checked. When someone claims "Vitamin C cures cancer," we can test this against evidence. The claim exists within a framework where truth matters.
Bullshit operates outside that framework. You can't "correct" something that never cared about being right. Why? There is nothing to leverage came from. When someone says "Big Pharma hides natural cancer cures," they're not making a testable claim but creating a zone where evidence itself becomes suspect.
Look at three examples:
In anti-vaccination groups, watch the tactical evolution. First come specific claims: "Vaccines cause autism." When research contradicts this, the conversation shifts: "I just don't trust pharmaceutical companies." The goalposts don't move. They dissolve. Facts become irrelevant because the conversation was never about facts.
Russian information operations, documented by RAND's "Firehose of Falsehood" model, flooded media with contradictory stories about the same events. The goal wasn't to convince people of any particular reality but to create exhaustion and doubt about whether truth existed at all.
When Frankfurt wrote in 2005, bullshit was analogue. It was politicians speaking vaguely, salespeople exaggerating. Today's bullshit is industrial-grade: optimized by A/B testing, framed in clickbait, tuned to trigger outrage and reinforce tribal identity.
This matters because lies provoke resistance, but bullshit breeds fatigue. Lies are often defeated with truth. Bullshit exhausts us until we stop caring whether things are true.
How to Fight Bullshit (Even When You're Not Sure What's True)
Fighting bullshit demands more than checking sources or searching for the source. Here are weapons that you can use.
Map contradictions over time. Create a simple log of what figures or sources actually said. When your uncle claims he "always supported refugees" despite ranting against them last year, pull receipts. Bullshitters count on your short memory which can be defeated.
Interrogate strategic vagueness. Precise lies can be refuted but clever vagueness cannot. When someone uses language that sounds meaningful but resists specific interpretation, they're not being profound. They're hiding. So force specifics on them such as "What exactly do you mean by that?"
Measure the confidence-to-evidence ratio. Bullshit is often louder than truth because it needs to shout over its own emptiness. The more certain someone sounds while offering nothing concrete, the more suspicious you should become. Truth whispers with caveats. Bullshit screams with certainty.
Create shared reference points before argument. In real life, this is brutally simple: "Before we argue about climate policy, can we agree that NASA's data is reliable?" If they won't commit to any authoritative source, you're not having a debate. You're watching performance art. Walk away.
The antidote to bullshit isn't more facts. It's developing a bullshit immune system. Like spotting fake currency, you don't need to know everything about money. You just need to recognize the tell-tale signs of counterfeit thinking.
This isn't about becoming the cynic who thinks everything is lies. It's about becoming the person who demands substance before belief. In a world drunk on smooth nonsense, sobriety is a radical act.
Holding That Line
Lies still respect the truth but they just twist it. Bullshit kills truth and replaces it with something else.
Frankfurt didn't just identify an academic distinction. He spotted an extinction-level threat to collective reasoning. Bullshit thrives not because truth is weak but because truth demands things from us that bullshit never will: intellectual honesty, uncomfortable facts, the admission of uncertainty.
We've romanticized bullshit and it's deliberately severing our connection to reality itself.
The false comfort of "it's all just opinions" is exactly what bullshit wants you to believe. Because if nothing is objectively true, then nothing is objectively wrong. No one can be held accountable. No claim can be judged invalid. Power flows to whoever tells the most appealing story, not who understands reality best.
Make no mistake: this is new territory. What Frankfurt described in 2005 has mutated. Bullshit is no longer just a rhetorical style. It's become industrialized, weaponized, and monetized. It's not just in conversation, it's in our information infrastructure.
Bullshit wins when we surrender to fatigue. Truth wins when we refuse to let convenience trump reality.
The choice is existential.