Many Americans have been focused on misinformation since 2016, but the spotlight has skewed toward individual behavior rather than “the sociopolitical and economic context that allow for misinformation, or disinformation or even propaganda to spread,” said Azza El-Masri, a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. That context includes partisanship and low trust in media. Americans report a lower percentage of trust in news and a higher percentage and news avoidance than most of their developed-nation peers, according to the Reuters 2022 Digital News Report. [Transcript | Video]

Key definitions and types of misinformation and disinformation:

Misinformation: False content but the person sharing it doesn’t know; they don’t have an intention to harm others.

Disinformation: False information with intent to harm. “It’s motivated by three factors, to make money, to have political influence, either foreign or domestic, or to cause trouble for the sake of it,” El-Masri said.

How can a reporter determine intent in order to classify a statement as disinformation vs. misinformation? Not easily.

“Intentionality is so hard to actually discern,” El-Masri said, in part because it’s often difficult to find the original source on an encrypted messaging platform, for instance. “You can tell the intention if it’s political advertising or misleading advertising because they are making money off of this. They are intentionally spreading disinformation to us, to a targeted population. … Intention to harm is also very hard to discern … that’s why most people say misinformation.”

Other methods of mis-/disinformation:

Manipulated or out-of-context photos:

After every major hurricane or flooding event, the infamous “shark in a river” photo gets shared on social media. This is an example of an edited photo that some people mistake for being real.

“We are seeing manipulated images in photos and videos … and we are seeing images out of context. They are authentic images but they are from… events, times and places different to the situation they are being used for,” said Tamoa Calzadilla, an investigative journalist and director of elDetector, Univision’s fact-checking arm and the first Spanish language fact-checking platform in the U.S.

Manipulated or out-of-context videos: Many people are aware of deepfakes – videos edited to look and sound like someone they are not. But video misinformation can be much less technical.

“We are seeing manipulated videos with wrong subtitles in Spanish,” Calzadilla said, citing an example in which a video was “transcribed” as President Biden saying the U.S. was attacking Russia, which he did not say. These videos require no edits when it comes to video imagery. “You have a lot of people in Spanish vulnerable.”

Bait and switch: Headlines or teaser images that purport to be about one thing but deliver another message. For instance, “’Here are the first words of Chris Rock about the episode at the Oscars,’ and when you read the first words, ‘Okay, I want to apologize to Jada Smith,’ and… when you read the second paragraph it’s propaganda or ads about politicians in Central America or Latin America,” Calzadilla said. “The people copy and paste the first paragraph about alleged apologies of Chris Rock and the second paragraph is what they want.”

It’s a form she sees often in Spanish-language disinformation, but not in English. “It’s not just language … the content that is targeted at the Latino population, it’s different,” Calzadilla said.

Hashtag laundering: Information operations with the aim of increasing engagement on social media and giving the cover of legitimacy and credibility. Media organizations that cover these trending hashtags as if they represent public opinion give them unwarranted credence in the wider political discourse, El-Masri said. To avoid falling for hashtag laundering, El-Masri said journalists should “take a closer look at the hashtag in its entirety.”

“You will find some things that are probably authentic, but most of the time you’ll find overlapping tweets, accounts that retweet each other, accounts with weird user names – usually a string of numbers and letters – accounts that have been just created for the very purpose of posting the exact same text over and over again. So these are the telltale hints that you would have to look at in terms of information operations,” she said.

Why is misinformation thriving?

Misinformation often comes down to “identity-confirming discourse.”

“People perform their identities online, and so because they want to feel like they’re part of their tribe, they want to share stuff that are like their tribe, so it leads to the increase in misinformation,” El-Masri said. “It’s very hard to use facts to change people’s opinions. It’s immensely hard. The research has shown that it’s not facts that change people’s opinions, it’s emotions. Anger and fear lead to more misinformation-sharing or disinformation-sharing … so whatever is increasingly negative and increasingly panic-driven gets shared quickly.”

However, this often plays into the news media, even if it’s not explicit, El-Masri has found.

The media’s “relationship with the public is that they deliver identity-conforming news and opinion as a bundle. So for example, someone who reads The New York Times or someone who reads The Associated Press does not read Fox News or does not read ONA,” she said. “The segmentation of the population creates a relationship of dependency in identity-confirming media because we are no longer interested in diversifying our views or diversifying our beliefs or being challenged for our beliefs.”

“Elites profit from and ascertain control over identity-confirming discourse,” from advertisers to social media organizations to foreign interests, El-Masri said.

Fact-checking takes a toll

Journalists must consider whether debunking misinformation does, in fact, spread the truth or if it gives the original falsehood undue oxygen. El-Masri said journalists should never “regurgitate for clickbait purposes the misinformation in the headline,” particularly since most readers share without reading past the headline.

El-Masri, a former fact-checker herself, said it is a difficult job.

“It’s not only tiring in terms of doing the research, but it has a toll on you mentally and makes you a bit paranoid in your in your personal life,” she said. “We need to be cognizant of the mental toll that it has … on people who consistently debunk misinformation and find pushback from individuals and audiences.”

When facing pushback or outright verbal attacks, El-Masri advised against responding publicly.

“They would use that against you especially when we’re talking about people who are very overzealous about their beliefs,” she said.

Debunking and dealing with the backlash to it takes time and energy that journalists could be devoting to investigations and other work.

“The onus of responsibility shouldn’t necessarily be just on you as journalists but also on the platforms that have set community standards, but they are not applying them … the labor that you’re putting should be preemptively taken by social media giants that have the actual capacity and the labor to curtail it,” El-Masri said. However, she noted that even when they do act, it often takes 24 to 48 hours and “the damage is done.”

In addition to Twitter and Facebook, elDetector also heavily monitors WhatsApp “because the Latino population is a heavy user of WhatsApp to communicate with their families at home and abroad,” Calzadilla said.

“It’s a fight in social media,” a constant battle, she said.