NewsLiteracyPlaybook - Flipbook - Page 14
History of Misinformation
Motives and More
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“Misinformation” is false information
shared with no intent to harm, such as when
someone shares an untrue rumor as a matter
of gossip.
“Disinformation” falls under the
umbrellas of both false and harmful, and
includes hoaxes, misleading context and
manipulated or fabricated content.
“Malinformation” is harmful, and
includes harassment and hate speech.
— From Information Disorder: Toward an
interdisciplinary framework for research and policy
making by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan
Technology-fueled misinformation
To know where damage is being done, it helps to
know where people are exchanging information
and news. Today, that’s increasingly online, using
social networking sites and apps — where people’s
behaviors are shaped by algorithms and their beliefs
influenced by bots.
Among the most popular worldwide are Facebook,
which has long topped the list in terms of numbers
worldwide, with more than 2 billion active users;
YouTube (owned by Google), the largest video
networking site; WhatsApp (owned by Facebook),
an instant messaging service; Facebook Messenger,
an instant message service within Facebook; and
Instagram (owned by Facebook), a photo-based
sharing site. In China, where the government blocks
access to Facebook and Google products, WeChat,
a mobile messaging, social media and payment app,
has 1 billion users.
Because they are private forums, not public
platforms, messaging apps especially are growing
in countries with increasingly authoritarian
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governments. As the Reuters Institute for the Study
of Journalism at the University of Oxford noted in its
2018 digital news report:
“A safe place for free expression has been one
factor driving the rapid growth of messaging apps
in markets like Turkey, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.
In our data we find a strong correlation between
use of networks like WhatsApp and self-expressed
concern about the safety of posting political
messages. The highest levels of concern (65%) are
in Turkey, where a failed coup two years ago led
to opponents of President [Recep Tayyip] Erdoan
being jailed and the media muzzled. In a country
that the U.S. NGO Freedom House recently labelled
‘not free’ for the first time, encrypted messaging
apps like WhatsApp have proved a relatively safe
way to express political views.”
Both bots and our own behavior create the online
world we each inhabit.
Bots — automated accounts that can appear to
be the accounts of real people — can send out
messages on a massive scale. And human behavior
doesn’t help. Simply put, people tend to spread
misinformation (which is often more titillating and
interesting than the truth) far more widely and
quickly than less sensational news. Also, posts that
tap into primal emotions spread farther and faster
online because they keep people engaged longer,
thus gaining an even larger audience.
The most dangerous situation — one that threatens
democracy — is what Facebook calls “false
amplification” (PDF download), which it defines as