Misinformation Is The Wrong Word
The vital study of problematic information is being held back by vague language
I came across this recently by the late great Herbert Simon:
If men do not pour new wine into old bottles, they do something almost as bad: they invest old words with new meanings.
No doubt you’ve noticed people in public discussions trying to redefine words, presumably in the hope that their redefinitions will catch on. They often argue they’ve improved some descriptor by replacing its naturally vague conveyance with fresh, precise meaning. Their hearts might be in the right place, but they must notice how this retroactively fucks up every opposing argument that relied to some degree on the word.
I’ve nothing against stipulative definitions or exploring a term’s meaning and see the obvious good in these things but I don’t see it in trying to overturn general usage. Usage is what determines authority for a general audience. It springs up to fill a need. When you prescriptively redefine a word, you leave a vacuum.
The fight over “misinformation”
Take the term misinformation. It has scuffs, stretch marks, and scholarly smudges all over it from people trying to shape it in ways they see fit, which is ironic given the term’s meaning.
A recent Science Magazine article* by Kai Kupferschmidt rightly points out that there is no universal agreement on what constitutes misinformation, making it difficult to identify and study. The primary example it gives to support this exemplifies the kind of information that is so problematic at the moment:
In January 2021, the South Florida Sun Sentinel published a story about Gregory Michael, a doctor who had received a shot of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine just before the end of 2020 and then died suddenly on 3 January 2021. The story was republished by the Chicago Tribune under the headline “A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why” and quickly spread online. On Facebook it was one of the most shared articles of that year, seen by more than 54 million people in the U.S.
It argues that this example is, in some sense, misinformation. I looked up a gazillion definitions of misinformation. What they all have in common is the component of false information. Less frequently they also include “inaccurate” information. Less frequently still, a few recent definitions include “misleading” information. In light of this, reconsider the headline in question:
A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why
Is it false? No. Is it inaccurate? No, though you could argue that it doesn’t capture the full story’s intention. Is it misleading? If you read only the headline and not the story (placing you squarely among the majority of readers) then it could be seen as misleading, though this isn’t even clear since the article does note that no link had been found between the vaccination and the doctor's death.
As a former copyeditor, I wrote lots of headlines. You have a tiny space to summarize an entire story, which is itself a kind of summary of a great many interconnected truths and opinions. In this sense, nearly all headlines are misleading. Compounding this is the prevalence of so-called “click-bait” headlines, which due to their sensational nature can be particularly misleading without the full context of their accompanying story.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that someone who reads only the headline of the COVID story could come away with the idea that a healthy young doctor died because of a vaccination. And since 54 million people saw the article, this misconception might’ve prevented millions of vaccinations without any reporters/editors intending that to be the case. This kind of problematic communication is a phenomenon worth studying. And considered in this context, it is free of any suggestion of political bias or agenda, which is the biggest obstacle researchers in this field face. The term misinformation makes tentative contact with this problem but clearly a better term is necessary, not the redefinition of a poorly suited one that already serves another purpose.
We’re missing a term
I propose that information that is true and misleading but of unknown intent be henceforth known as “parainformation.” No doubt the field will adopt it right away.
This leaves us with four tidy categories of problematic information that are specific and do not require redefinition:
Problematic False Information
Misinformation: false information of unknown intent
Disinformation: Deliberately false information
Problematic True Information
Parainformation: True, misleading information of unknown intent.
Malinformation: True, deliberately misleading information
Parainformation is a big deal
In the U.S., parainformation is doing most of the work being attributed to problematic information in general. Misinformation as it’s most widely understood isn’t the main issue. The Science article goes on to say:
A 2020 paper in Science Advances, for example, found that clearly false news masquerading as the real thing (“Pope endorses Donald Trump,” say) only made up 0.15% of the daily media diet of people in the U.S.
Headlines on the other hand, accompany everything in the U.S. media diet and are often misleading when read in isolation. Data suggests this perceptual error will only rise as our skimming culture grows. A 2023 article highlighted that 63% of U.S. adults only read headlines of news stories shared on social media, with 74% of Millennials and Gen Z users frequently skimming headlines rather than reading full articles. While the problem of misinformation is being reframed as a problem of lies and deception, parainformation is more accurately a problem of misunderstanding—and we’re actually drowning in the latter.
Redefinition isn’t the answer
Distorting terminology to fit distorted information seems more akin to a symptom of our information problem than a reasonable remedy. Instead of trying to corral runaway meaning within an existing term, offer up a new term that precisely fits the category of information you intend to address. This way at least in this case there will be no disputing what someone means when they describe the thing they’re intending to describe.
*Thank you to the great Dan Williams, the wonderful writer behind Conspicuous Cognition, who brought this Science Magazine article to my attention in his post, “what Is misinformation, anyway?” I strongly recommend reading it:
I finally got around to reading this today (thanks for sharing it on someone else's. My biggest problem with the term is that, as you pointed out, it means nothing. Strictly speaking, mis-information would mean something like information that is false or erroneous. But that is not how it's used (as as you pointed out). So a claim that is patently false or a premise of a claim that is patently false would both be forms of misinformation. In the article headline example you provided, there is absolutely nothing that is patently false, so the article shouldn't be labelled misinformation (though it is). My favorite, though, is an example I saw in the past where some politician made a prediction about something that would happen, and some fact-checker labelled it as false and a classified it as misinformation. How the hell can a prediction about something that hasn't happened yet even be fact-checked, must less labelled as false. But this kind of stuff happens a lot, and now misinformation has become nothing but a way to dismiss arguments people don't want to engage with.