Isah Nasidi | May 6, 2022
Introduction
The rise in contamination of the content of information and abnormalities in the production, distribution and consumption of information pose challenges to the worlds of academics, practitioners, policymakers and the entire community of media consumers. For time immemorial, information has never been free from different forms and tactics of manipulation by individuals and states, yet the current trend is beyond human expectation due to the influence of new information technologies.
People live in the era of infodemic and post-truth courtesy of what Brennen, (2020) called technology affordance that eases deformation. As Horowitz (2018) observed, the value of trust and facts has been compromised in public debates. The level of trust human society enjoys is in decline; as distrust between citizens and government, experts and on-experts, media and audience keeps rising.
The alarming issues about information disorder are the novel abnormalities and their effects on the entirety of the human endeavour most notably in recent elections, climate change and COVID-19 (Cook, et al., 2017, Manalu, Pradekso & Setyabudi, 2018).
The quest for understanding this phenomenon and ways for addressing the effects have attracted the attention of academia and administrative fora. The novel abnormalities transcend the research philosophy of a single discipline, making it an interdisciplinary field. However, Udupa et al., (2020) observed that as a nascent field of interdisciplinary inquiry, information disorder studies have yet to find a coherent framework for theory, definitions, and methods.
Going through the information disorder literature depicts a clear picture of conceptual dilemma. Scholars use different labels for different aspects of information disorder: Fetzer, (2004) false information, Lukasik, Cohn, and Bontcheva, (2015) rumours, Chakraborty, (2017) clickbaits, Korta, (2018) conspiracy theories, Glenski, Weninger, and Volkova, (2018) deceptive news, Ilahi, (2019) hoax news, Zhou, et al., (2019) fake news, Jerit, and Zhao, (2020) misinformation, Broniatowski, et al., (2020), propaganda, Tolosana (2020) deepfakes Chang, Lewandowsky, (2021) disinformation, and Mukherjee, & Coppel, (2021) questionable content.
Among these concepts, misinformation and fake news were the most used concepts based on the Google Search I conducted on 17th Nov. 2021. Misinformation was mentioned with the exact phrase in any part of publication about 238,000 and mentioned in the titles 6,380. Fake news was mentioned with the exact phrase in any part of related publications about 123,000 and mentioned in the titles 13,400.
Fake news is more recognised in the titles of publications compared with misinformation. However, fake news has been identified as a problematic concept weaponised by politicians and other actors to attack truth and the media profession. A similar incidence happened to the concept of propaganda especially during the World wars (Romarheim, 2005).
Scholars now discourage the use of fake news. That may be one of the reasons for the decline in the use of the concept; in 2019 for instance, about 2,700 articles published on Goggle Scholar used fake news in their titles but the number dropped to 1,860 as of Nov. 2021, while the use of misinformation in titles rises from 514 in 2019 to 1,150 as in Nov. 2021.
To avoid fragmentation and grasp the complexity of the information disorder problem, we need to agree on a common vocabulary and typologies. When trying to tackle a multidimensional problem we need to be able to clearly define it (Christopoulou, 2018).
One of the most widely cited works on conceptual definitions and taxonomies of the information disorder is written by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan title, Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking and other works by Claire Wardle alone.
Wardle and Derekhshan’s study sets a new trend by giving an inclusive concept “information disorder” that explains the whole ecosystem of polluted information. The work also proposed taxonomies of the information disorder’s elements and tactics used by agents of information disorder.
Therefore, guided by critical research inquiry, this paper identified some gaps in the definitions, taxonomies, and elements given by Wardle and Derekhshan. The paper gathered information from previous studies and interrogate them with the aim of setting research agenda that would lead to the development of a common epistemological ground that will provide common concepts, definitions, taxonomies, methods, models, and theories for the study of information disorder.
