Malinformation

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Malinformation is a controversial term for information which is based on fact, but removed from its original context in order to mislead, harm, or manipulate. [1] The term was first coined by media researcher Hossein Derakhshan in a report titled "Information Disorder". [2] According to Derakhshan, examples of malinformation can include "revenge porn, where the change of context from private to public is the sign of malicious intent", or providing false information about where and when a photograph was taken in order to mislead the viewer. [3]

Proponents of the term argue that malinformation is often used in conjunction with disinformation and misinformation as part of "orchestrated campaigns [to] spread untruths", a phenomenon known as fake news. [4] However, critics of the term argue that "unlike 'disinformation,' which is intentionally misleading, or 'misinformation,' which is erroneous, 'malinformation' is true but inconvenient". [5] Journalists have raised concerns that terms such as malinformation expand the definition of "harmful content" to encompass true information that supports non-mainstream views, resulting in people who hold dissenting viewpoints being censored and silenced even if those views are substantiated. [6]

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<i>Bullshit</i> Slang profanity term

Bullshit is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive. It is mostly a slang term and a profanity which means "nonsense", especially as a rebuke in response to communication or actions viewed as deceptive, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false. As with many expletives, the term can be used as an interjection, or as many other parts of speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings. A person who excels at communicating nonsense on a given subject is sometimes referred to as a "bullshit artist" instead of a "liar".

Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through attacks that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Media manipulation</span> Techniques in which partisans create an image that favours their interests

Media manipulation refers to orchestrated campaigns in which actors exploit the distinctive features of broadcasting mass communications or digital media platforms to mislead, misinform, or create a narrative that advance their interests and agendas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hossein Derakhshan</span> Iranian-Canadian blogger

Hossein Derakhshan, also known as Hoder, is an Iranian-Canadian blogger, journalist, and researcher who was imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014. He is credited with starting the blogging revolution in Iran and is called the father of Persian blogging by many journalists. He also helped to promote podcasting in Iran. Derakhshan was arrested on November 1, 2008 and sentenced to 19½ years in prison on September 28, 2010. His sentence was reduced to 17 years in October 2013. He was pardoned by Iran's supreme leader and on November 19, 2014 was released from Evin prison.

Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such checking done in-house by the publisher to prevent inaccurate content from being published; when the text is analyzed by a third party, the process is called external fact-checking.

Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. It differs from disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive and propagated information. Early definitions of misinformation focused on statements that were patently false, incorrect, or not factual. Therefore, a narrow definition of misinformation refers to the information's quality, whether inaccurate, incomplete, or false. However, recent studies define misinformation per deception rather than informational accuracy because misinformation can include falsehoods, selective truths, and half-truths.

Post-truth politics, amidst varying academic and dictionary definitions of the term, refer to a recent historical period where political culture is marked by public anxiety about what claims can be publicly accepted facts. It suggests that the public distinction between truth and falsity—as well as honesty and lying—have become a focal concern of public life, and are viewed by popular commentators and academic researchers alike as having a consequential role in how politics operates in the early 21st century. It is regarded as especially being influenced by the arrival of new communication and media technologies. Popularized as a term in news media and a dictionary definition, post-truth has developed from a short-hand label for the abundance and influence of misleading or false political claims into a concept empirically studied and theorized by academic research. Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 was "post-truth", citing a 20-fold increase in usage compared to 2015, and noted that it was commonly associated with the noun "post-truth politics".

Fake news websites are websites on the Internet that deliberately publish fake news—hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation purporting to be real news—often using social media to drive web traffic and amplify their effect. Unlike news satire, fake news websites deliberately seek to be perceived as legitimate and taken at face value, often for financial or political gain. Such sites have promoted political falsehoods in India, Germany, Indonesia and the Philippines, Sweden, Mexico, Myanmar, and the United States. Many sites originate in, or are promoted by, Russia, or North Macedonia among others. Some media analysts have seen them as a threat to democracy. In 2016, the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs passed a resolution warning that the Russian government was using "pseudo-news agencies" and Internet trolls as disinformation propaganda to weaken confidence in democratic values.

A troll farm or troll factory is an institutionalised group of internet trolls that seeks to interfere in political opinions and decision-making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fake news</span> False or misleading information presented as real

Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term fake news was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information presented as news. It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Full Fact</span> Fact-checking organisation

Full Fact is a British charity, based in London, which checks and corrects facts reported in the news as well as claims which circulate on social media.

First Draft News was a project "to fight mis- and disinformation online" founded in 2015 by nine organizations brought together by the Google News Lab. It included Facebook, Twitter, the Open Society Foundations and several philanthropic organizations. In June 2022, First Draft announced it would be shutting down, with its mission continuing at the Information Futures Lab.

Fake news in India refers to fostering and spread of false information in the country which is spread through word of mouth, traditional media and more recently through digital forms of communication such as edited videos, websites, blogs, memes, unverified advertisements and social media propagated rumours. Fake news spread through social media in the country has become a serious problem, with the potential of it resulting in mob violence, as was the case where at least 20 people were killed in 2018 as a result of misinformation circulated on social media.

An infodemic is a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about certain issues. The word is a portmanteau of information and epidemic and is used as a metaphor to describe how misinformation and disinformation can spread like a virus from person to person and affect people like a disease. This term, originally coined in 2003 by David Rothkopf, rose to prominence in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disinformation attacks are strategic deception campaigns involving media manipulation and internet manipulation, to disseminate misleading information, aiming to confuse, paralyze, and polarize an audience. Disinformation can be considered an attack when it occurs as an adversarial narrative campaign that weaponizes multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value-laden judgements—to exploit and amplify identity-driven controversies. Disinformation attacks use media manipulation to target broadcast media like state-sponsored TV channels and radios. Due to the increasing use of internet manipulation on social media, they can be considered a cyber threat. Digital tools such as bots, algorithms, and AI technology, along with human agents including influencers, spread and amplify disinformation to micro-target populations on online platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube.

A truth sandwich is a technique in journalism to cover stories involving misinformation without unintentionally furthering the spread of false or misleading clams. It entails presenting the truth about a subject before covering misinformation, then ending a story by again presenting truth. Margaret Sullivan summarized it as "reality, spin, reality — all in one tasty, democracy-nourishing meal".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disinformation Governance Board</span> Board of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) was an advisory board of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced on April 27, 2022. The board's stated function was to protect national security by disseminating guidance to DHS agencies on combating misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation that threatens the security of the homeland. Specific problem areas mentioned by the DHS included false information propagated by human smugglers encouraging migrants to surge to the Mexico–United States border, as well as Russian-state disinformation on election interference and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disclose.tv</span> German disinformation outlet

Disclose.tv is a disinformation outlet based in Germany that presents itself as a news aggregator. It is known for promoting conspiracy theories and fake news, including COVID-19 misinformation and anti-vaccine narratives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Community Notes</span> Fact-checking feature on X (formerly Twitter)

Community Notes, formerly known as Birdwatch, is a feature on X where contributors can add context such as fact-checks under a post, image or video. It is a community-driven content moderation program, intended to provide helpful and informative context, based on a crowd-sourced system. Notes are applied to potentially misleading content by an algorithm not based on majority rule, but instead agreement from users on different sides of the political spectrum.

References

  1. "Foreign Influence Operations and Disinformation". Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. 2023. Retrieved 11 March 2024.
  2. "Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making". Freedom of Expression. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
  3. Grech, Jacob (2023-03-27). "Personalised media consumption, malinformation and the nature of platforms - In conversation with Hossein Derakhshan". 3CL Foundation. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
  4. "Journalism, 'Fake News' and Disinformation: A Handbook for Journalism Education and Training". UNESCO. 2018-09-03. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
  5. Sullum, Jacob (22 March 2023). "The Crusade Against 'Malinformation' Explicitly Targets Inconvenient Truths". reason.com. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
  6. Wir, Andrey (March 16, 2023). "'Malinformation' and the Wrong Truth : By accepting the concept of "misleading truth," democratic society departs from its foundations". Discourse Magazine.