Reframing misinformation as informational-systemic risk in the age of societal volatility – Misinformation Review, December 22, 2025, Nuurrianti Jalli – “When a bank run, a pandemic, or an election spirals out of control, the spark is often informational. In 2023, rumors online helped accelerate the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. During COVID-19, false claims about vaccines fueled preventable harms by undermining public trust in health guidance, and election lies in the United States fed into the broader dynamics that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack. These events reveal that misinformation is not just about false or misleading content, but about how degraded information can destabilize entire social systems. To confront this, we must reframe misinformation as an informational-systemic risk that amplifies volatility across politics, health, and security…

Despite growing concern over misinformation’s effects, most institutional responses remain narrow, focused on content removal, media literacy, or identifying “bad actors.” Prior work has examined how misinformation threatens democracy (Tenove, 2020) and how systemic risks cascade across domains (Schweizer, 2021). Yet risk governance frameworks from finance and climate science remain underused for mapping information cascade mechanisms. This commentary bridges that gap, arguing that misinformation should be recognized as an informational-systemic risk, in which degraded or manipulated information flows can destabilize multiple interdependent social, political, and institutional systems, producing effects that cascade beyond the information environment itself…”