Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information

Recent controversies over "fake news," and concerns over entering a "post-fact" era, reflect a burgeoning crisis: problematically inaccurate information, it seems, is circulating in ways that disrupt politics, business, and culture.Journalists, commentators, policymakers, and scholars have a variety of words at their disposalpropaganda, disinformation, misinformation, and so on -to describe the accuracy and relevance of media content.These terms can carry a lot of baggage.They have each accrued different cultural associations and historical meanings, and they can take on different shades of meaning in different contexts.These differences may seem small, but they matter.The words we choose to describe media manipulation can lead to assumptions about how information spreads, who spreads it, and who receives it.These assumptions can shape what kinds of interventions or solutions seem desirable, appropriate, or even possible.Some information is problematic: it is inaccurate, misleading, inappropriately attributed, or altogether fabricated.This guide examines terms and concepts for problematic information.One of the challenges of describing problematic information is that many of these familiar terms do not have mutually exclusive definitions.Rather, their meanings overlap, and word choice can be a matter of perspective.These factors can make attempts to describe problematic information imprecise, inconsistent, and subjective.Intentionality and accuracy may be particularly hard to parse in the context of networked media, accelerating news cycles, and declining faith in social institutions.Longstanding terminologies can fall short of describing these new complexities.