This talk will cover hard truths about the misinformation spiral—between the rise of social media and the fall of trust in our institutions and the weakening of gatekeepers—from a multidisciplinary perspective. How can we even lessen the impact of misinformation when the very tools that are meant to delineate it for us are failing? There are no easy answers, but understanding the intertwined, complicated nature of the problem is the first step towards considering the societal, technological and regulatory actions that can perhaps get us on a positive feedback cycle—a different kind of spiral, one towards a healthier public sphere that can raise our “immunity” against such attacks rather than getting better at playing a necessary but eventually futile game of whack-a-mole against each instance.