New terms for the misinformation trade

The language surrounding misinformation seems to change as fast as the tactics used by the people who spread it. Terms that once meant one thing — “fake news,” for example — now mean something else, or are used so differently by different people that they have lost a common meaning.

For people like us, who write about misinformation as a profession, it’s a little hard to keep up.

(Dictionary.com, by the way, defines misinformation — its 2018 word of the year — as “false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.” The word often works for us in this newsletter as a catchall because we can’t always be certain something is intended to mislead. If we are sure it’s “disinformation,” though, we will call it that.)

Another example of an ambiguous, evolving term is “troll” or “trolling.” In her report last year for Data & Society, “The Oxygen of Amplification,” Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communications and rhetoric at Syracuse University, noted that “trolling” now encompasses a broad range of online behaviors, “rendering the term so slippery it has become almost meaningless.”

Fortunately, several experts in this space are trying to keep up with the changes and sort out the terminology.

Claire Wardle, the U.S. director of First Draft, a nonprofit focused on ways to address misinformation, last year published a helpful glossary of frequently used — and commonly misunderstood — words and phrases. An earlier Data & Society report, “Lexicon of Lies,” laid out some of the basics.

Now there are some new additions to add to the nomenclature, from a report (also from Data & Society) called “Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice” by misinformation experts Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg.

Donovan and Friedberg identify and give terms to ways that deceptive actors try to get journalists and influential public figures to pick up falsehoods. Donovan has talked about source hacking before, but this new report helps people in the misinformation space zero in on specific techniques used by the manipulators.

She and Friedberg came up with four terms, and included case studies for each to show how they have been employed in real life.

Viral sloganeering , where short slogans are repackaged for social media and press amplification. One of the case studies in this example was the viral slogan “jobs not mobs.”

Leak forgery, in which forged documents are staged as “leaks” in an effort to win media attention.

Evidence collaging, where image files featuring a series of screenshots and text are arranged in a way that make them shareable.

Keyword squatting , where social media accounts or specific terms are used to capture and direct search traffic. They give as an example the proliferation of fake Antifa accounts in 2017.

Will these terms be added to the vocabulary of those who study misinformation? Maybe. Phrases catch on, or don’t, for lots of reasons. But we like the effort to parse for precision. The information system is so disordered right now that the least we can do is agree on the tactics used to spread falsehoods, and what to call them.