It’s Time to Define Misinformation and Disinformation
Policymakers who seek to address the issues of misinformation and disinformation must agree on what these terms mean before attempting to formulate solutions. Without consensus, legislators and regulators will be hamstrung before the policymaking process even starts. According to a seminal article from the University of Michigan, this step “serves as the overture to policymaking, as an integral part of the process of policymaking, and as a policy outcome.”
One way for policymakers to reach a shared understanding of misinformation and disinformation is to examine scholarly research on the subject. For example, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government interviewed 150 of the world’s most prolific misinformation experts in an attempt to define the phenomenon. While no clear consensus was reached, the survey results can give policymakers a better idea of what actually constitutes misinformation.
“False and misleading information” was the most popular answer among survey respondents when asked how they define misinformation. While they mostly agreed that pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are misinformation and that satirical news is not, experts disagreed on whether propaganda, clickbait headlines, and hyper-partisan news should be categorized as misinformation.
Curiously, the Harvard survey did not attempt to define disinformation. A senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation described disinformation as a subset of misinformation that “refers to false or inaccurate information that [is] disseminated with the knowledge that it is false or inaccurate.” If this is true, then propaganda and conspiracy theories should be considered disinformation because they are often spread intentionally.
Another concept policymakers must understand is the significance of problem definition within the policymaking process. According to a researcher from the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, problem definition comprises “a package of ideas that includes, at least implicitly, an account of the causes and consequences of undesirable circumstances and a theory about how to improve them.” In this case, the problem is the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation by bad actors.
The next step after problem definition is problem structuring. As a scholar from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs explained in a piece about the role of problem structuring in public policy analysis, “[T]he way a problem is structured governs the identification of solutions.” Skipping this crucial step results in policies that are “ill-defined, ill-structured, or wicked.”
How, then, should policymakers structure the misinformation and disinformation problem? The first key aspect of structuring is to define terms so that all parties understand their meaning. The Harvard survey should have offered some clarity on how to define misinformation, but it is unclear whether the researchers were able to form a consensus that policymakers could easily and immediately grasp.
Second, structuring requires identifying the “right problem” for policymakers to solve. Have fake news, misleading information, lies, deepfakes, propaganda, and rumors reported as facts risen to the level that new legislation and regulation is required? Over 50 percent of participants in Harvard’s survey agreed there should be “regulations to hold social media [platforms] accountable for what users share.” About 25 percent argued that people who share misinformation on social media should be penalized in some way—perhaps by a government body or law enforcement agency.
Third, diversity of thought and/or political ideology is crucial when structuring a policy problem. Harvard researchers found that, when queried about their political beliefs, nearly all participants identified with the political left. Indeed, the R Street Institute could be one of the only right-leaning institutions researching misinformation and disinformation. Surveying more right-of-center scholars and including their views in the research would help achieve greater ideological diversity and could lead to bipartisan policymaking, should legislators choose to devise solutions to the misinformation and disinformation problem.
It is important to develop a broad-based consensus on the definitions of misinformation and disinformation among academics, policymakers, the general public, and the media. Once these terms are defined, legislators must define and structure the problem to help formulate appropriate policy responses. Surveying experts is a step in the right direction, but input from additional stakeholders with diverse political ideologies is necessary to fuel further discovery in the academic field and help mitigate the problem in the policy arena.