User:MexFin/sandbox

Disinformation research or misinformation research, is an academic discipline that examines areas related to the spread, impact, and potential solutions to disinformation and misleading information, which includes phenomena like fake news, conspiracy theories, and echo chambers. Research on this field provides evidence-based research on the impact of false or misleading information on users the causes of misinformation, how it spreads through offline and online media, why people are susceptible to it, and successful strategies for mitigating its impact.

Disinformation research draws from multiple academic traditions, including the political communication, media studies, health research, marketing research, journalism, cybersecurity, and military science.

Origin

Rapid growth of disinformation research

The study of disinformation as a field of academic research can be traced to information science as research into the epistemology of misleading information.

The academic field consolidated through the emergence of the fake news phenomenon and its seeming capacity to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election. Research after the 2016 election found: (1) for 14 percent of Americans social media was their "most important" source of election news; 2) known false news stories "favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times"; 3) the average American adult saw fake news stories, "with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them"; and 4) people are more likely to "believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks."

On 2020, the field of disinformation research gained momentum through the COVID-19 misinformation, including vaccine hesitancy, the use of face masks, and speculation over the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to research into how to counter the infodemic.

Dedicated scholarly journals have been created in the field like the Misinformation Review at Harvard.

Research

In order to distinguish between similar terms, including misinformation and malinformation, some definitions include: (1) disinformation is the strategic dissemination of false information with the intention to cause public harm; (2) misinformation represents the unintentional spread of false information; and (3) malinformation is factual information disseminated with the intention to cause harm, these terms are abbreviated 'DMMI'.

Research related to disinformation studies is increasing as an applied area of inquiry. It can study multiple related phenomena through which deception campaigns circulate: astroturfing, conspiracy theories, clickbait, culture wars, echo chambers, hoaxes, fake news, propaganda, pseudoscience, and rumors.

Activities that operationalize disinformation campaigns online
Term	Description	Term	Description
Astroturfing	A centrally coordinated campaign that mimics grassroots activism by making participants pretend to be ordinary citizens	Fake news	Genre: The deliberate creation of pseudo-journalism Label: The instrumentalization of the term to delegitimize news media
Conspiracy theories	Rebuttals of official accounts that propose alternative explanations in which individuals or groups act in secret	Greenwashing	Deceptive communication makes people believe that a company is environmentally responsible when it is not
Clickbait	The deliberate use of misleading headlines and thumbnails to increase online traffic for profit or popularity	Propaganda	Organized mass communication, on a hidden agenda, and with a mission to conform belief and action by circumventing individual reasoning
Culture wars	A phenomenon in which multiple groups of people, who hold entrenched values, attempt to steer public policy contentiously	Pseudoscience	Accounts that claim the explanatory power of science, borrow its language and legitimacy but diverge substantially from its quality criteria
Doxxing	A form of online harassment that breaches privacy boundaries by releasing information intending physical and online harm to a target	Rumors	Unsubstantiated news stories that circulate while not corroborated or validated
Echo chamber	An epistemic environment in which participants encounter beliefs and opinions that coincide with their own	Trolling	Networked groups of digital influencers that operate 'click armies' designed to mobilize public sentiment
Hoax	News in which false facts are presented as legitimate	Urban legends	Moral tales featuring durable stories of intruders incurring boundary transgressions and their dire consequences
Note: This is an adaptation of Table 2 from Disinformation on Digital Media Platforms: A Market Shaping Approach, by Carlos Diaz Ruiz, used under CC BY 4.0 / Adapted from the original.

A framework for how disinformation spreads in social media

Whereas disinformation research focuses primarily on how actors orchestrate deceptions on social media, primarily via fake news, new research investigates how people take what started as deceptions and circulate them as their personal views. As a result, research shows that disinformation can be conceptualized as a program that encourages engagement in oppositional fantasies (i.e., culture wars), through which disinformation circulates as rhetorical ammunition for never-ending arguments. As disinformation entangles with culture wars, identity-driven controversies constitute a vehicle through which disinformation disseminates on social media. This means that disinformation thrives, not despite raucous grudges but because of them. The reason is that controversies provide fertile ground for never-ending debates that solidify points of view.

Scholars have pointed out that disinformation is not only a foreign threat as domestic purveyors of disinformation through media manipulation through newspapers, radio stations, and news media. Current research suggests right-wing online political activists in the United States may be more likely to use disinformation as a strategy and tactic. Governments have responded with a wide range of policies to address concerns about the potential threats that disinformation poses to democracy, however, there is little agreement in elite policy discourse or academic literature as to what it means for disinformation to threaten democracy, and how different policies might help to counter its negative implications.

In 2019, Camille François devised the "ABC" framework of understanding different modalities of online disinformation:

• Manipulative Actors, who "engage knowingly and with clear intent in viral deception campaigns" that are "covert, designed to obfuscate the identity and intent of the actor orchestrating them." Examples include personas such as Guccifer 2.0, Internet trolls, state media, and military operatives.
• Deceptive Behavior, which "encompasses the variety of techniques viral deception actors may use to enhance and exaggerate the reach, virality and impact of their campaigns." Examples include troll farms, Internet bots, astroturfing, and "paid engagement".
• Harmful Content, which includes health misinformation, manipulated media such as deepfakes, online harassment, violent extremism, hate speech or terrorism.

Research on the consequences of exposure to disinformation in the US 2016 election

There is a broad consensus amongst scholars that there is a high degree of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda online; however, it is unclear to what extent such disinformation has on political attitudes in the public and, therefore, political outcomes. This conventional wisdom has come mostly from investigative journalists, with a particular rise during the 2016 U.S. election: some of the earliest work came from Craig Silverman at Buzzfeed News. Cass Sunstein supported this in his book #Republic, arguing that the internet would become rife with echo chambers and informational cascades of misinformation leading to a highly polarized and ill-informed society.

Correspondingly, whilst there is wide agreement that the digital spread and uptake of disinformation during the 2016 election was massive and very likely facilitated by foreign agents, there is an ongoing debate on whether all this had any actual effect on the election. For example, a double blind randomized-control experiment by researchers from the London School of Economics (LSE), found that exposure to online fake news about either Trump or Clinton had no significant effect on intentions to vote for those candidates. Researchers who examined the influence of Russian disinformation on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential campaign found that exposure to disinformation was (1) concentrated among a tiny group of users, (2) primarily among Republicans, and (3) eclipsed by exposure to legitimate political news media and politicians. Finally, they find "no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior." As such, despite its mass dissemination during the 2016 Presidential Elections, online fake news or disinformation probably did not cost Hillary Clinton the votes needed to secure the presidency.

Research on this topic remains inconclusive, for example, misinformation appears not to significantly change political knowledge of those exposed to it. There seems to be a higher level of diversity of news sources that users are exposed to on Facebook and Twitter than conventional wisdom would dictate, as well as a higher frequency of cross-spectrum discussion. Other evidence has found that disinformation campaigns rarely succeed in altering the foreign policies of the targeted states.

Research is also challenging because disinformation is meant to be difficult to detect and some social media companies have discouraged outside research efforts. For example, researchers found disinformation made "existing detection algorithms from traditional news media ineffective or not applicable...[because disinformation] is intentionally written to mislead readers...[and] users' social engagements with fake news produce data that is big, incomplete, unstructured, and noisy." Facebook, the largest social media company, has been criticized by analytical journalists and scholars for preventing outside research of disinformation.

Alternative perspectives and critiques to disinformation research

Researchers have criticized the framing of disinformation as being limited to technology platforms, removed from its wider political context and inaccurately implying that the media landscape was otherwise well-functioning. "The field possesses a simplistic understanding of the effects of media technologies; overemphasizes platforms and underemphasizes politics; focuses too much on the United States and Anglocentric analysis; has a shallow understanding of political culture and culture in general; lacks analysis of race, class, gender, and sexuality as well as status, inequality, social structure, and power; has a thin understanding of journalistic processes; and, has progressed more through the exigencies of grant funding than the development of theory and empirical findings."

Alternative perspectives have been proposed:

1. Moving beyond fact-checking and media literacy to study a pervasive phenomenon as something that involves more than news consumption.
2. Moving beyond technical solutions including AI-enhanced fact checking to understand the systemic basis of disinformation.
3. Develop a theory that goes beyond Americentrism to develop a global perspective, understand cultural imperialism and Third World dependency on Western news, and understand disinformation in the Global South.
4. Develop market-oriented disinformation research that examines the financial incentives and business models that nudge content creators and digital platforms to circulate disinformation online.
5. Include a multidisciplinary approach, involving history, political economy, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and science and technology studies.
6. Develop understandings of Gendered-based disinformation (GBD) defined as "the dissemination of false or misleading information attacking women (especially political leaders, journalists and public figures), basing the attack on their identity as women."