Digital elections have transformed political communication from a bounded system of parties, journalists and broadcasters into a networked ecosystem in which citizens, political actors, influencers, automated accounts and platforms simultaneously produce and circulate electoral narratives. This article examines how information disorder — the interaction of misinformation, disinformation and mal-information — negatively impacts cultural behaviour in the digital age, using elections as the empirical lens through which cultural chaos becomes visible. It adopts a structured desktop research design, synthesising peer reviewed scholarship and authoritative institutional evidence on political misinformation, social-media diffusion, voter cognition and electoral integrity, anchored in Kenya‘s 2022 general election and read comparatively against Sierra Leone‘s 2023 election and other West African cases. The analysis is guided by an integrated conceptual framework linking the production of false or misleading content to platform amplification, exposure, perceived credibility, emotional and identity-based processing, interpersonal endorsement and cultural-behavioural outcomes. The paper argues that the deepest danger is not that voters believe an isolated false claim, but that repeated, strategically distributed falsehoods reshape the cultural environment in which political judgement occurs: they normalise ethnic and partisan stereotyping, intensify affective polarisation, erode trust in electoral institutions and credible journalism, and encourage conspiratorial reasoning that outlives any single election cycle. In Kenya, disinformation before, during and after the 2022 polls moved from foreign-linked operations toward a domestic influencer economy, with coordinated Twitter manipulation, WhatsApp-based rumour, and falsified violence narratives shaping how citizens interpreted candidates, institutions and one another. Comparable dynamics in Sierra Leone‘s 2023 election and Ghana‘s 2024 election show that these are not isolated national anomalies but a regional pattern of cultural erosion. At the same time, the literature cautions against deterministic claims that misinformation alone dictates behaviour or election outcomes; exposure and sharing are often concentrated among specific users, and direct causal effects on vote choice remain difficult to establish. The paper therefore conceptualises cultural chaos as a cumulative process in which information disorder interacts with pre-existing identities, institutional distrust, media ecologies and platform design to reshape everyday norms of trust, discourse and civic behaviour. The article concludes that protecting cultural behaviour from information disorder requires shifting from episodic fact-checking toward a continuous information-integrity ecosystem combining credible electoral communication, rapid verification, media and information literacy, platform accountability, researcher access to data, and proportionate regulation that protects freedom of expression. Its principal contribution is a cross disciplinary framework connecting information disorder to cultural and institutional outcomes while retaining a cautious distinction between correlation, influence and causation. Methodologically, the article demonstrates how a structured, single-country case study — Kenya‘s 2022 election — can be read against a wider regional comparator set without collapsing into either uncritical generalisation or purely local description, offering a template for future comparative research on information disorder and cultural behaviour across African democracies with differing institutional histories, media ecologies and conflict legacies.

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