I’ve spent more than 15 years making decisions on incomplete information — that’s what trading is, that’s what treasury is — and there’s one thing I learned the hard way: bad information almost never looks bad. It looks urgent. It looks outrageous. It looks like it confirms exactly what you already suspected. That’s why what’s happening with information warfare worries me more than any geopolitical headline this week.
What’s real: from hybrid to cognitive
The battlefield has been shifting for decades. First came hybrid warfare — the blend of conventional military force with sabotage, cyberattacks, and propaganda, formalized as doctrine by organizations like NATO. Then came what parts of the security literature call “molecular warfare”: diffuse, decentralized tactics aimed not at seizing territory but at corroding social cohesion from within, one small group at a time — a more contested term than the others, but pointing in the same direction. And now, with generative AI in the mix, we’ve arrived at cognitive warfare: operations designed specifically to shape how you think, not just what you know. NATO already has formal working groups dedicated to this, and they say it plainly: the target is no longer your territory or your infrastructure. It’s your mind.
What nobody tells you: why fact-checking arrives too late
Traditional fact-checking — debunking a lie after it has already spread — almost always arrives too late. By the time someone “verifies” a claim, the lie has already done its job: it triggered an emotion, confirmed a bias, got shared. Fighting disinformation after it lands is like trying to get vaccinated after you’ve already caught the disease. That’s why serious research in this field shifted toward “prebunking” — psychological inoculation, preventive rather than reactive. The idea, borrowed literally from vaccination: expose yourself to a weakened version of a manipulation technique before it’s used on you for real, so your mind builds resistance. Researchers at Cambridge and Uppsala, working with the UK Foreign Office, tested this on more than 5,000 people across several languages using a game called “Bad News”: players — who practiced spotting manipulation techniques in a controlled setting — came out rating real manipulative content they saw afterward as significantly less reliable. It didn’t make them immune. It made them much harder to fool.
The opportunity: turning prebunking into a personal habit
That’s where the real opportunity lies — not for governments or NATO, but for anyone with a phone: turning prebunking into a habit instead of leaving it as a distant academic concept. This is exactly what we call the CRITERIO Method at ViSFI, applied beyond finance. Understand the Context before reacting to a headline: who benefits from me feeling this way right now? Reason from fundamentals instead of outrage: ask the claim for a source, not an emotion. Integrate AI as a filter — tools now exist that trace the origin of an image or a statistic in seconds; use them before you share, not after you regret it. And above all, make deliberate decisions about what you consume: diversify your sources on purpose, and memorize the most common techniques — false dilemmas, manufactured urgency, “experts” with no verifiable credentials, statistics stripped of context — so you recognize them the moment they show up, not after they’ve already convinced you.
In Colombia this isn’t abstract: every election cycle and every economic crisis brings its own wave of content engineered to make you react before you think. A well-informed judgment doesn’t make you immune to manipulation — nothing makes anyone fully immune — but it does make you far more expensive to fool.
Here’s the question I ask myself, and leave with you: the next time something outrages you in five seconds, are you going to share it — or are you going to ask first who wanted you to feel exactly that?
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