Understanding disinformation : definitions, discussions, and discourses

Dance, William and Hardaker, Claire (2025) Understanding disinformation : definitions, discussions, and discourses. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Disinformation is an online harm that has affected billions of people worldwide. It has become the focus of political figures, government legislation, educational initiatives, and even an array of television specials and documentaries. Despite its prevalence as a cultural issue, disinformation is not necessarily a well understood phenomenon. The use of other terms such as ‘misinformation’ and ‘fake news’ alongside the many associated, subjective concepts such as propaganda, clickbait, and trolling mean it is a topic characterised by conceptual murkiness. Disinformation is mediated semiotically. Whether through text, audio, video, or other means, disinformation must be mediated through some communicative mode in order to be disseminated and consumed. Consequently, linguistics has a lot to offer disinformation studies. There is an ever growing body of research that explores how disinformation spreads, the content of disinforming articles, and the actors responsible for its production. A great deal of this research focuses on so-called ‘fake news’. However, to date there have been no studies that explore how the terms ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ are themselves used in computer-mediated communication. This thesis seeks to redress this foundational gap in the literature by examining the use of ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’, and other terms for false content in naturalistically occurring discourse to inform theory surrounding disinformation. Using an approach grounded in critical corpus assisted discourse studies, this thesis examined two time periods: a historical study ranging from 1470-1690 using the pre-existing Early English Books Online (EEBO) corpus, and a contemporary study from a ten-year period spanning 2012-2021 using custom-made Twitter corpora. Corpus tools such as concordancing, word lists, and keyword lists are used to explore how discourses are constructed surrounding these terms and to analyse them drawing on contextual factors. The purpose of this is to understand firstly how disinformation evolved over the centuries and secondly to understand whether public representations of disinformation as mediated through discourse on social media can add additional insights to dictionary definitions of terms such as ‘disinformation and ‘misinformation’. The historical analysis, in tandem with an analysis of definitions of disinformation, found that several competing terms have been used over centuries but that one of the core components of defining disinformation is intentionality and blame. This analysis led to tangible recommendations for both disinformation scholars and counter-disinformation practitioners for how we should refer to disinformation, and the issues with over-extending terminology. The contemporary social media analysis shows that intentionality manifests itself in many explainable, but not previously reported, ways. Chief among these is that discourses of the term ‘misinformation’ focus heavily on matters related to health, medicine, and science, while discourses of the term ‘disinformation’ focus on disinformation actors and hostile-state information operations. I consistently draw on real-world examples of disinformation to ensure the thesis is grounded in actual examples of disinformation, and not hypothetical scenarios. I conclude by noting that we need to bear in mind how people represent disinformation and misinformation when we discuss it so that we are not at odds with public understandings of these concepts. Throughout the thesis I provide examples where we can update our current understandings of disinformation using evidence-based analysis from naturalistically occurring discourse and highlight potential policy and educational interventions that could help mitigate the impacts of disinformation.