  The breakdown of trusted sources of information is probably one of the most
serious problems today, since in the absence of a common ground, it will be
impossible to address the problems that trouble our contemporary world. The
Covid-19 pandemic is just a recent situation where the lack of agreed stances
has led to failure and hopelessness. In fact, disinformation surrounding the
Covid-19 has been a distinctive feature of this pandemic since its very
beginning and has hampered what is perhaps the most important initiative to
prevent the spread of the coronavirus, viz., an effective communication between
scientifically-minded health authorities and the general public. To investigate
how disinformation threatens epistemic security, here we propose and solve
analytically an evolutionary game-theoretic model where the individuals must
accurately estimate some property of their hazardous environment. They can
either explore the environment or copy the estimate from another individual,
who may display a distorted version of its estimate. We find that the
exploration-only strategy is optimal when the environment is relatively safe
and the individuals are not reliable. In this doomsday scenario, disinformation
erodes trust and suppresses the ability of the individuals to share information
with one another.
