Misinformation vs. disinformation: What the terms mean and the effects they have

Loose lips sink ships − especially when they're not telling the truth. Spotting misinformation can be difficult, especially on an information super-highway like the internet. Our Fact-Check team at USA TODAY is constantly finding both misinformation and disinformation.

At its most harmless, misinformation can be like a game of telephone: A group of once-true statements scrambled up and taken out of context giving readers a tinged version of the facts. At itsworst though misinformation − and its ugly friend disinformation − can radicalize those that consume it, or trick them into believing harmful mistruths about anything from medicine to politics.

Here's how you can better understand misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and everything in between.

What is misinformation?

Oxford Dictionary defines misinformation as both a verb and a noun meaning either "the act of giving wrong information about something" or "the wrong information that is give," respectively.

With the proliferation of social media and the ever-growing partisan divide in our news consumption habits, "misinformation" has become popular topic.

Politicians and researchers have warned of the growing risks of a misinformed public. When bots on Twitter, talking heads on cable news, or politicians delivering a stump speech espouse something false it can spread quickly.

"There is a myriad of consequences: From cynicism of government, the media, and science, to behaviors that harm individuals and others ... to large scale damage to public property, to insurrection," Dolores Albarracin, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois who studies attitudes, communication and behavior told USA TODAY in 2021.

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What is the misinformation effect?

The "misinformation effect" is a psychological term used to define the phenomenon in which a person's memory of something is retroactively altered by false information learned after the fact.

It is essentially the rewiring of a memory of historical events to incorporate misinformation presented in the aftermath. It demonstrates both the fallibility of human memory and the potential danger of misinformation.

“We have a lot more little bits of fiction roaming around in those memory banks than probably people would realize or would like to think is true,” Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California, Irvine professor who has done groundbreaking research on the misinformation effect, explained.

Her work revolves more around personal memories, than “semantic memories” or the “fact misinformation” commonly linked to fake news or online falsehoods., but she does think the two worlds should be speaking to each other more.

“If you can change a personal memory it ought to be really easy to either change or plant fact misinformation,” Loftus says. The misinformation effect doesn't just change memories, it can plant entirely new ones, she warns, and everyone is susceptible.

“Even the most intelligent, the most educated, most experienced people with really great memories can be contaminated with misinformation,” Loftus says. What's more, we're more susceptible to misinformation that feeds into our existing biases.

Our memories can start to change for a number of reasons she says, like if we weren't paying attention during the original event, or we trust the conveyer of misinformation more than we trust our own memory.

The real danger emerges though when we share that altered version of events, she posits.

What is fake news?

Fake news, literally, means any false information distributed by a news outlet or related to current events. There is a long and rich history of publications printing sensationalistic, distorted, and knowingly false news accounts. The modern iteration of the phrase is a bit more complicated, however.

"Fake news" gained newfound popularity in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election when then-candidate Donald Trump used it to describe any coverage he found unfavorable, regardless of its basis in fact.

In the years since Trump, along with some other hard-right members of the GOP have begun using the phrase as a catch-all for what they perceive as attacks from the "liberal" news media.

What is news literacy?

The News Literacy Project, an education nonprofit, defines news literacy as "the ability to determine the credibility of news and other information and to recognize the standards of fact-based journalism to know what to trust, share and act on."

It is the ability to think critically about the news you consume, to evaluate whether the author and the publication can be considered a trusted source and whether the reporting itself seems to have met the standards required of legitimate journalism.

Al Tompkins, an expert at the Poynter Institute who specializes partly in media literacy told USA TODAY a reader can begin to sort out fake news by asking the following questions:

• What do I know?
• What do I need to know?
• How do I know what I know?
• And is there any other way to look at that?

Galen Stocking, a senior computational social scientist at the Pew Research Center who specializes in News and Information notes that news people themselves are concerned about the rise of misinformation. He points to a survey from 2022 which revealed 71% of journalists said made-up news was a big problem, in contrast to 50% of the public.

“There is definitely an awareness among journalists and a sense of responsibility,” Stocking said.

Misinformation vs. disinformation

It might be easiest to think of misinformation and disinformation as Russian nesting dolls. Misinformation, or literal "fake news" settles comfortably into the category of disinformation when it is spread intentionally, and with malice.

So not all misinformation is disinformation, but all disinformation is misinformation. Confused yet? Here's an easy example.

Consider you are surfing the web and find a news article that, unbeknownst to you, contains false claims about the president. You share it with your followers on social media. You have just participated in the spread of misinformation. Now consider the same process but the story was written by an agent of the state, who knew it was false or was spread by a bot online for the purpose of misinforming others. That would be disinformation.

Misinformation on social media:

Social media has emerged as a powerful new frontier in the misinformation market. More so than traditional news channels, social media can be a host of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation, sorting users into echo chambers that only serve to distance them further from the truth.

Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have been grilled by Congress in recent years over perceived negligence in letting misinformation spread rapidly on their sites. Both the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic proved ripe moments for the dissemination of mis- and dis-information online. Falsehoods swirled about vaccines and treatments and the legitimacy of mail-in voting systems.

The ability to share quickly and to a wide audience makes social media a particularly easy medium for misinformation to travel quickly on social media.

Stocking points to a series of studies in 2019 and 2020 in which participants were split up based on where they said they got the bulk of their news: radio, television, print, social media, etc. There was a comparatively low proportion of the people who said they got their news on social media who had high levels of political knowledge, which Stocking defined as the ability to "answer multiple questions correctly about current events." The same cohort had a lower level of knowledge about COVID-19-related facts and reported seeing more misinformation.

“There’s something intrinsic about using social media, as a primary news source at least, that leads to this” Stocking said.

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