Journal Article

Disinformation and misinformation triangle

Rubin, Victoria L.

2019

Overview

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to treat disinformation and misinformation (intentionally deceptive and unintentionally inaccurate misleading information, respectively) as a socio-cultural technology-enabled epidemic in digital news, propagated via social media.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed disinformation and misinformation triangle is a conceptual model that identifies the three minimal causal factors occurring simultaneously to facilitate the spread of the epidemic at the societal level.FindingsFollowing the epidemiological disease triangle model, the three interacting causal factors are translated into the digital news context: the virulent pathogens are falsifications, clickbait, satirical “fakes” and other deceptive or misleading news content; the susceptible hosts are information-overloaded, time-pressed news readers lacking media literacy skills; and the conducive environments are polluted poorly regulated social media platforms that propagate and encourage the spread of various “fakes.”Originality/valueThe three types of interventions – automation, education and regulation – are proposed as a set of holistic measures to reveal, and potentially control, predict and prevent further proliferation of the epidemic. Partial automated solutions with natural language processing, machine learning and various automated detection techniques are currently available, as exemplified here briefly. Automated solutions assist (but not replace) human judgments about whether news is truthful and credible. Information literacy efforts require further in-depth understanding of the phenomenon and interdisciplinary collaboration outside of the traditional library and information science, incorporating media studies, journalism, interpersonal psychology and communication perspectives.

• Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Subject: Access to information / Automation / Beliefs / Causality / Computers / Conceptual models / Credibility / Deception / Digital media / Disease control / Epidemics / Epidemiology / Evaluative Thinking / False information / Human-computer interaction / Information Needs / Information Retrieval / Information science / Information Science Education / Information Seeking / Information sources / Information technology / Interdisciplinary aspects / Interpersonal communication / Journalism / Judgments / Language Processing / Librarians / Library and information science / Library Personnel / Library resources / Library Role / Literacy / Literacy skills / Machine learning / Mass media / Media literacy / Misinformation / Natural language processing / News / News media / Personal communication / Pollution control / Propaganda / Psychology / Public health / Public libraries / Quality Control / Resistance (Psychology) / Science education / Science Instruction / Social media / Social networks / Sociocultural factors / Telecommunications / Thinking Skills / Trends / Trust / User training