Combating contamination and contagion: Embodied and environmental metaphors of misinformation

In recent years, government agencies, information institutions, educators and researchers have paid increasing attention to issues of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theorizing. This has prompted a seemingly endless supply of guides, frameworks and approaches to ‘combating’ the problem. In studies of mis- and disinformation, a constellation of analogous concepts are defined in multiple ways across multidisciplinary literatures and institutional contexts. Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theory are often conflated, lacking specific, portable definitions across fields of study. Linguistic metaphors are often leveraged in place of this definitional work. The larger conceptual metaphors that they connote contain normative assumptions that often impose values and moral imperatives, imply deficiencies, assume intent, and foreground individual agency or lack thereof. Metaphors are as restrictive as they are illuminating; once used, a metaphor also applies constraints to the way in which a phenomenon can be understood. Metaphors not only shape the ways in which science is communicated to the public, but also the kinds of questions that are asked, the theories and methods used, and the parameters of the research design. By analyzing instances of linguistic metaphor, this exploratory study identifies and develops two conceptual metaphors that are frequently evoked to discuss mis- and disinformation: embodied health metaphors and environmental health metaphors. The former includes linguistic metaphors like viral/virality, infodemic, infobesity, information hygiene, information dysfunction, and information pathology. The latter includes linguistic metaphors like information pollution, infollution, and digital wildfires. Uncritically invoking such metaphors adopts tacit arguments deriving from the original field of study (e.g., public health’s tendency to equate individual embodied health with virtue), or the image of the metaphor itself ( digital wildfires implies quick spread and immediate danger), or both. Widespread and uncritical use of such metaphors, we argue, rewards speed and epistemic homogeneity in mis- and disinformation research – ultimately discouraging in-depth inquiry.