Search

Since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, prominent social actors and institutions have warned about the threat of misinformation, calling for policy action to address it. However, neither the premises underlying expert claims nor the standards to separate truth from falsehood have been appraised. We conducted a scoping review of the medical and social scientific literature, informed by a critical policy analysis approach, examining what this literature means by misinformation. We searched academic databases and refereed publications, selecting a total of 68 articles for review. Two researchers independently charted the data. Our most salient finding was that verifiability relied largely on the claims of epistemic authorities, albeit only those vetted by the establishment, to the exclusion of independent evidentiary standards or heterodox perspectives. Further, “epistemic authority” did not depend necessarily on subject matter expertise, but largely on a new type of “expertise”: in misinformation itself. Finally, policy solutions to the alleged threat that misinformation poses to democracy and human rights called for suppressing unverified information and debate unmanaged by establishment approved experts, in the name of protecting democracy and rights, contrary to democratic practice and respect for human rights. Notably, we identified no pockets of resistance to these dominant meanings and uses. We assessed the implications of our findings for democratic public policy, and for fundamental rights and freedoms.

Since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, prominent social actors and institutions have warned about the threat of misinformation, calling for policy action to address it. However, neither the premises underlying expert claims nor the standards to separate truth from falsehood have been appraised. We conducted a scoping review of the medical and social scientific literature, informed by a critical policy analysis approach, examining what this literature means by misinformation. We searched academic databases and refereed publications, selecting a total of 68 articles for review. Two researchers independently charted the data. Our most salient finding was that verifiability relied largely on the claims of epistemic authorities, albeit only those vetted by the establishment, to the exclusion of independent evidentiary standards or heterodox perspectives. Further, "epistemic authority" did not depend necessarily on subject matter expertise, but largely on a new type of "expertise": in misinformation itself. Finally, policy solutions to the alleged threat that misinformation poses to democracy and human rights called for suppressing unverified information and debate unmanaged by establishment approved experts, in the name of protecting democracy and rights, contrary to democratic practice and respect for human rights. Notably, we identified no pockets of resistance to these dominant meanings and uses. We assessed the implications of our findings for democratic public policy, and for fundamental rights and freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disinformation is a phenomenon of concern to all political systems, as it poses a threat to freedom and democracy through the manipulation of public opinion aimed at eroding institutions. This paper presents a bibliometric and systematized study which allows the establishment of a comprehensive view of the research and current state of academic investigations on disinformation. To this end, a content analysis of the scientific articles indexed in Scopus up to 31 December 2023 has been carried out based on three categories of analysis: journals, authors and investigations. Similarly, a systematic study of the 50 most cited articles in this sample was performed in order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature, motivations and methodological approaches of these investigations. The results indicate that disinformation is a research topic which has gained great interest in the academic community since 2018, with special mention to the impact of COVID-19 and the vaccines against this disease. Thus, it can be concluded that disinformation is an object of study which attracts significant attention and which must be approached from transdisciplinarity to respond to a phenomenon of great complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term disinformation is generally used to refer to information that is false and harmful, by contrast with misinformation (false but harmless) and malinformation (harmful but true); disinformation is also generally understood to involve coordination and to be intentionally false and/or harmful. However, particular studies rarely apply all these criteria when discussing cases. Doing so would involve applying at least three distinct problem framings: an epistemic framing to detect that a proposition in circulation is false, a behavioural framing to detect the coordinated efforts at communicating that proposition, and a security framing to identify threats or risks of harm attendant on widespread belief in the proposition. As for the question of intentionality, different kinds of clues can be picked up within each framing, although none alone is likely to be conclusive. Yet particular studies tend to centre on or prioritise a single framing. Many today aim to make policy recommendations about combatting disinformation, and they prioritise security concerns over the demands of epistemic diligence. This carries a real risk of disinformation research being ‘weaponised’ against inconvenient truths. Against combative approaches, this article argues for a critical approach which recognizes the importance of epistemic diligence and transparency about normative assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms are fertile ground for spreading problematic information. This paper explored Library and Information Science (LIS) students' understanding of problematic information, i.e. misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, fake news, rumor, etc. associated with their ability to categorize these. This paper showed the relation between what students think they know and what they actually know in regard to recognizing mis-dis-mal-information. A survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire among LIS students of all public universities in Bangladesh, and 426 usable responses get backed. For analyzing the data, SPSS was used to carry out the descriptive analysis, Pearson Correlation, and Spearman's Correlation Coefficient. The result showed that students were connected with social media platforms on a daily basis, most preferably with Facebook and YouTube. In terms of sharing or commenting on a post that was not completely accurate, almost half of the respondents are habituated with the aim of doing so. Although the basic familiarity rated by students themselves with the problematic information is nearly satisfactory, the capacity to recognize this information whenever it occurred in hands-on tasks was very low. There is a positive correlation among gender, study level, and frequency of using Internet and social media with familiarity with misinformation, disinformation, fake news, rumor, and malinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks back at Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine through the perspective of online disinformation in open-source spaces. The pre-invasion phase highlights the use of false videos and narratives to justify aggression and the role Open-source investigations play in debunking them. The tactics Russia employed in attempts to dehumanise Ukrainians and paint them as unsympathetic victims with a focus on leveraging the narratives of corruption and Nazism. The article also addresses the diversionary tactics employed by Russia to steer attention away from its presence in Ukraine, emphasising the exploitation of Western hypocrisy and polarisation. Finally, the growing role of AI in disinformation campaigns is discussed, stressing the need for policy development to counteract its misuse. Overall, this article emphasises the importance of updated, proactive and resilient policy to counter Russian disinformation, enhance the resilience of credible open-source investigations, and promote digital literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread use of social media all around the globe has affected the way of life in all aspects, not only for individuals but for businesses as well. Businesses share their upcoming events, reveal their products, and advertise to their potential customers, where individuals use social media to stay connected with their social circles, get updates and news from social media pages of news agencies, and update their information regarding the latest activities, businesses, economy, events, politics, trends, and about their area of interest. According to Statista, there were 4.59 billion users of social media worldwide in 2022 and expected to grow up to 5.85 billion in the year 2027. With its massive user base, social media does not only generate useful information for businesses and individuals, but at the same time, it also creates an abundance of misinformation and disinformation as well as malinformation to acquire social-political or business agendas. Individuals tend to share social media posts without checking the authenticity of the information they are sharing, which results in posts having misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation becoming viral around the world in a matter of minutes. Identifying misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation has become a prominent problem associated with social media.

Disinformation is a phenomenon of concern to all political systems, as it poses a threat to freedom and democracy through the manipulation of public opinion aimed at eroding institutions. This paper presents a bibliometric and systematized study which allows the establishment of a comprehensive view of the research and current state of academic investigations on disinformation. To this end, a content analysis of the scientific articles indexed in Scopus up to 31 December 2023 has been carried out based on three categories of analysis: journals, authors and investigations. Similarly, a systematic study of the 50 most cited articles in this sample was performed in order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature, motivations and methodological approaches of these investigations. The results indicate that disinformation is a research topic which has gained great interest in the academic community since 2018, with special mention to the impact of COVID-19 and the vaccines against this disease. Thus, it can be concluded that disinformation is an object of study which attracts significant attention and which must be approached from transdisciplinarity to respond to a phenomenon of great complexity.

The aim of this paper is to prove that people in an age of new media formats and media technologies should be media literate persons. The authors give the definitions of "media and information literacy" (knowledge, skills and abilities to effectively interact with the media and other information services and develop critical thinking) and "digital literacy" (the ability to use digital technologies to discover, evaluate, use, and create information). Different types of misleading information, such as: misinformation, disinformation and malinformation are analyzed in this paper. We want our students to be aware of such misleading information, to have the ability to use information from a variety of sources and effectively solve problems in an electronic environment. It is rather important to understand the varied kinds of the misleading information: satire or parody, false connection, misleading content, false context, imposter content, manipulated content and fabricated content which can be less or more harmful. The authors give examples of five fact-checking rules which are not no universal but can be basic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid text identification (CTI) is a crucial research concern in natural language processing (NLP). Social and electronic media are simultaneously adding a large volume of Covid-affiliated text on the World Wide Web due to the effortless access to the Internet, electronic gadgets and the Covid outbreak. Most of these texts are uninformative and contain misinformation, disinformation and malinformation that create an infodemic. Thus, Covid text identification is essential for controlling societal distrust and panic. Though very little Covid-related research (such as Covid disinformation, misinformation and fake news) has been reported in high-resource languages (e.g. English), CTI in low-resource languages (like Bengali) is in the preliminary stage to date. However, automatic CTI in Bengali text is challenging due to the deficit of benchmark corpora, complex linguistic constructs, immense verb inflexions and scarcity of NLP tools. On the other hand, the manual processing of Bengali Covid texts is arduous and costly due to their messy or unstructured forms. This research proposes a deep learning-based network (CovTiNet) to identify Covid text in Bengali. The CovTiNet incorporates an attention-based position embedding feature fusion for text-to-feature representation and attention-based CNN for Covid text identification. Experimental results show that the proposed CovTiNet achieved the highest accuracy of 96.61±.001% on the developed dataset (BCovC) compared to the other methods and baselines (i.e. BERT-M, IndicBERT, ELECTRA-Bengali, DistilBERT-M, BiLSTM, DCNN, CNN, LSTM, VDCNN and ACNN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine how forms of new media, or social and digital media (SDM), can serve as conduits of participatory democracy while, at the same time, perpetuate the cannibalization of a cornerstone of democracy: public schools. I discuss how this new era of unprecedented access to content creation and dissemination has opened spaces and opportunities to spread misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) about public schooling. I trace how forms of SDM are being used to perpetuate the anti‐CRT movement, foster attacks on LGBTQ+ students, and exacerbate the villainizing and doxing of educators and leaders in public schools. I then discuss the role of critical media literacy in a democracy to combat these movements, and offer suggestions and provocations to address these cannibalistic campaigns against public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a teachable moment to empower citizens to assess and apply information to protect their health by promoting critical health literacy. Most Americans took preventive measures, suggesting some overall increase in critical health literacy around infectious disease. Simultaneously, however, a torrent of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation intentionally buried facts, sewed doubt and confusion, promoted lies and conspiracies, and undermined health authorities and institutions. The authors discuss how this 'infodemic' rose from previously localized, unconnected anti-vaccination, anti-government, and anti-science groups galvanized by the pandemic. Prominent politicians seeking political gain lent the power of their offices to the movement, layering a 'polidemic' onto the infodemic and overwhelming inconsistent public health messaging. Even those with strong health literacy skills were challenged. Millions were misled to over-confidently self-manage their risk, revealing the possibility and perils of empowerment in the absence of critical health literacy skills – negative empowerment. The roots of resistance to the government response to COVID-19, and conditions that fostered its influence are examined, followed by recommendations to position health literacy scholars and practitioners to better meet communication challenges and opportunities in future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Education Research (1680-6360) is the property of Angle Publishing Co., Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents the DMMI Matrix Cube and demonstrates its use in assessing risk in the context of information warfare. By delineating and ordinating the concepts of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and information, its purpose is to gauge a communication's intention to cause harm, and its likelihood of success; these, together, define the severity of weaponised information, such as those employed within sophisticated information operations. The chance or probability of the (information) risk is determined by the intention to harm, the apparent veracity of the information, and the probability of its occurrence. As an exemplar, COVID-19 anti-vaccine campaigns are mapped to the DMMI Matrix Cube, and recommendations are offered based on stakeholder needs, interests, and objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates information disorder behaviors, such as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation on social media, using Jones’ Moral Intensity lens. Our central argument is that moral intensity evaluations have a contextual impact on information disorder behavior. Based on our research findings, we assert that the interpretation of the six characteristics of Moral Intensity significantly influences information disorder. This research contributes to the advancement of theories that explain online behavioral ethics, particularly in the context of information disorder behavior on social media. Our study provides valuable insights into understanding the complexity of online ethical behavior, which has become increasingly relevant in today's digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An "infodemic" is defined as "an overabundance of information - some accurate and some not - occurring during an epidemic". This paper describes the characteristics of an infodemic, which combines an inordinately high volume of information (leading to problems relating to locating the information, storage capacity, ensuring quality, visibility and validity) and rapid output (making it hard to assess its value, manage the gatekeeping process, apply results, track its history, and leading to a waste of effort). This is bound up with the collateral growth of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. Solutions to the problems posed by an infodemic will be sought in improved technology and changed social and regulatory frameworks. One solution could be a new trusted top-level domain for health information. The World Health Organization has so far made two unsuccessful attempts to create such a domain, but it is suggested this could be attempted again, in the light of the COVID-19 infodemic experience. The vital role of reliable information in public health should also be explicitly recognized in the Sustainable Development Goals, with explicit targets. All countries should develop knowledge preparedness plans for future emergencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the theoretical-philosophical foundations of propaganda to better position it in contemporary conceptual discussions about (computational) dis/mis/malinformation. It discusses propaganda as a tangible expression of ideology in communication-its principal purpose to enforce ideological goals, manage opinion, and consolidate loyalties. Starting from the notion of propaganda as a technique to further ideological interests that naturally hail from it, propaganda is discussed in relation to communication and information and how it relates to ideology and power, referring to ideas from key authors including Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, and Lukes. Taking inspiration from Gramsci, it discusses the role in propaganda communication of intellectuals, operating at the behest of elite power, but increasingly for the intellectuals' own interests. Finally, propaganda, as communication, effecting values + beliefs, and therefore opinion, is analyzed as a central component in creating, influencing, and justifying Searle's notion of status functions in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on the COVID-19 infodemic, this paper identifies different dimensions of information disorder associated with the pandemic, examines how online platform governance has been evolving in response, and reflects on what the crisis reveals about the relationship between online platforms, international law, and the prospect of regulation. The paper argues that online platforms are intermediary fiduciaries of the international public good, and for this reason regulation should be informed by relevant standards that apply to fiduciary relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lack of legal regulations and difficulties in enforcement, supporting the easy manipulation and provocation of the masses are among the major disadvantages of social media. Users can the opportunity to send information, photos, videos and narratives about the news events that they witness firsthand through their social media accounts. The malicious use of private and corporate accounts, which had the opportunity to spread the fake information and content quickly, caused their social networks to have a negative reputation for hosting fake news. The news or information process that develops without discipline can naturally cause different effects and confusion. Therefore, the manipulative effect of fake news or information and the evaluation of the impact processes are of great importance. The purpose of this study is to explain the evaluation of fake news of individuals who may be exposed to fake news, to determine decision and impact processes, attitudes and behaviors in dealing with false news. This research is a descriptive field research using a quantitative research method. Survey is preferred as the data collection technique. Within the scope of the study a questionnaire was applied to 230 students studying at three universities in Ankara, Samsun and Eskisehir on a voluntary basis. The stratified sampling method, which is a probabilistic sampling method, was used in sample determination. In order to reveal the attitude and behavior patterns against fake news, the age range and gender variables of the sample representing the formal student population of three universities were taken into consideration. A questionnaire consisting of the use of media, the process of encountering fake news, the decision process of believing / not believing in the news, and verification is applied. As a result of the research, it was revealed that this sample found the visual content more convincing, false news with propaganda and guiding features was common, and it was common in magazine, politics and economy news types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of journalism has long been based on the premise that a receptive audience awaits the content and that citizens—as participants in a democracy—will use the news to make sound decisions. Yet mainstream journalism has lost much of its audience to purveyors of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation, a situation that has grown more perilous with the widespread embrace of social media tools in all their sophistication. This represents a threat to the vital forums of democracy and a new challenge for journalism education: How to equip future journalists with the critical thinking and technology skills they need to produce and/or share content that is independent, accurate, and fair, while developing relationships with audiences that reflect accountability, respect, and understanding. Journalists also need to learn how to identify situations that call for careful consideration of audience confirmation biases and accordingly to present important information, such as on vaccines, in a manner less likely to trigger those biases. The mix of new skills required in this complicated, sometimes toxic, information environment is the subject of this essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Misinformation poses a serious challenge to clinical and policy decision-making in the health field. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified interest in misinformation and related terms and witnessed a proliferation of definitions., Objective: We aim to assess the definitions of misinformation and related terms used in health-related literature., Methods: We conducted a scoping review of systematic reviews by searching Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane, and Epistemonikos databases for articles published within the last 5 years up till March 2023. Eligible studies were systematic reviews that stated misinformation or related terms as part of their objectives, conducted a systematic search of at least one database, and reported at least 1 definition for misinformation or related terms. We extracted definitions for the terms misinformation, disinformation, fake news, infodemic, and malinformation. Within each definition, we identified concepts and mapped them across misinformation-related terms., Results: We included 41 eligible systematic reviews, out of which 32 (78%) reviews addressed the topic of public health emergencies (including the COVID-19 pandemic) and contained 75 definitions for misinformation and related terms. The definitions consisted of 20 for misinformation, 19 for disinformation, 10 for fake news, 24 for infodemic, and 2 for malinformation. "False/inaccurate/incorrect" was mentioned in 15 of 20 definitions of misinformation, 13 of 19 definitions of disinformation, 5 of 10 definitions of fake news, 6 of 24 definitions of infodemic, and 0 of 2 definitions of malinformation. Infodemic had 19 of 24 definitions addressing "information overload" and malinformation had 2 of 2 definitions with "accurate" and 1 definition "used in the wrong context." Out of all the definitions, 56 (75%) were referenced from other sources., Conclusions: While the definitions of misinformation and related terms in the health field had inconstancies and variability, they were largely consistent. Inconstancies related to the intentionality in misinformation definitions (7 definitions mention "unintentional," while 5 definitions have "intentional"). They also related to the content of infodemic (9 definitions mention "valid and invalid info," while 6 definitions have "false/inaccurate/incorrect"). The inclusion of concepts such as "intentional" may be difficult to operationalize as it is difficult to ascertain one's intentions. This scoping review has the strength of using a systematic method for retrieving articles but does not cover all definitions in the extant literature outside the field of health. This scoping review of the health literature identified several definitions for misinformation and related terms, which showed variability and included concepts that are difficult to operationalize. Health practitioners need to exert caution before labeling a piece of information as misinformation or any other related term and only do so after ascertaining accurateness and sometimes intentionality. Additional efforts are needed to allow future consensus around clear and operational definitions., (©Ibrahim K El Mikati, Reem Hoteit, Tarek Harb, Ola El Zein, Thomas Piggott, Jad Melki, Reem A Mustafa, Elie A Akl. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 09.08.2023.)