Information disorder is a complicated phenomenon that has emerged with the development of technology and social networks. It refers to chaos created by false, inaccurate and misleading information that is produced and spread everywhere, polluting the entire digital communication ecosystem and endangering societies and democracies. Information disorder also refers to gossip presented as news, manipulated videos, old photographs presented as current, or information that is true, or half true, but taken out of context.
Information disorder is a crisis that intensifies all other crises, states the Final Report of the Commission on Information Disorder from the Aspen Institute. When bad information becomes as common, convincing, and persistent as good information, it generates a toxic chain reaction.
In their initial studies, researchers mentioned that the conceptual framework of information disorder has three key elements and each of them is composed of another three different parts. Thus, there are three important types of information disorder: (1) Disinformation, which refers to false information that is purposefully spread to hurt a person, a social group, an organization, or even a country. Those who produce disinformation are usually motivated by political, economic, psychological, or social factors. (2) Misinformation, which refers also to false messages that aren’t shared with the goal of causing damage. For example, people who share something on social media without realizing that it is false and harmful. (3) Malinformation, which refers to true information (public or private) that is utilized with the intent to hurt a person, an organization, or a country. Each category has three phases: the false information is first conceived, then it is produced, and finally it is distributed. The main elements of information disorder are agent, message, and interpret. Later, researchers added some more categories of information disorder: a satire or parody shared out of its initial context, a false connection (clickbait-type headlines and articles), false context, and misleading, imposter, manipulated and/or fabricated content.
Information disorder cannot be completely eradicated, but there are certain ways to mitigate its effects. The Aspen Institute commission suggests “high reach content disclosure” to urge social media platforms to share critical information about viral posts. The report also proposes “content moderation platform disclosure” to demand platforms present insights about the posts they take down.
