Misinformation and fake news

Misinformation is false information that is considered incorrect based on the best available evidence from relevant experts at the time and is spread, regardless of intent to mislead. It can be unintentional mistakes such as inaccurate captions, dates, statistics or translations or when satire is taken seriously.

There are typically five types of misinformation, each with their own degree of basis in fact, intent to deceive, impact on a community, and context.

• Satire or parody refers to content that uses humor or exaggeration to critique or mock a person, organization or policy. The information has no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool.
• False connection or context - when headlines, visuals or captions don’t support the content. Such as when genuine content is shared with false contextual information. A picture reshared to fit a new narrative would be an example of this false connection.
• Misleading content - Misleading use of information to frame an issue or individual. It’s about cropping photos, or choosing quotes or statistics selectively in order to support an argument.
• Imposter Content - When genuine sources are impersonated. This form of disinformation takes advantage of the trust you may have in a specific organization, person, brand etc.
• Manipulated content - When real information or media is manipulated to deceive. Usually it concerns photos and videos that are altered in such way that they seem real enough, but the overall meaning of the genuine content is different than intended. This is a particular problem with new AI technologies where it is difficult to discern facticity.
• Fabricated content - content is completely fake and designed to purposely deceive and do harm to a community, an individual, or an organization.

There are four equal dimensions of misinformation: facticity, intention, audience and context. Each of these dimensions can influence how we interact with information and how we perceive information to be true.

• Facticity is the degree to which fake news relies on facts.
• Intention is the degree to which the creator of misinformation intends to mislead.
• Audience is the degree to which our communities influence our information seeking, information selection, information avoidance, and information usage.
• Context is the degree of social tumult in a community's world or worldview.

This guide is broken down into four sections of questions you should consider as you navigate the world of information. Each of these questions is tied to a dimension of misinformation.

This guide is an expanded version of the Navigating the News/Media for accuracy and validity document.