David Inserra
Misinformation is persistently mentioned as one of the major threats in the world today. It was Dictionary.com’s word of the year in 2018, and in 2024 the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report found misinformation powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to be the most severe threat facing the world over the next two years—greater than even active wars or threats of war, climate and weather events, or economic volatility. Thousands of books and research papers are published every year discussing the challenge of misinformation. In a 2023 Pew Research Center poll, 55 percent of Americans felt that the federal government “should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information,” an increase of 16 percentage points in just five years.1 The discussion around misinformation is truly ubiquitous.
And the concerns about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) extend to nearly every domain of human knowledge.2 Is misinformation regarding climate change stopping proper policies? To what degree is misinformation or disinformation responsible for ethnic and racial conflict? How did MDM affect the health and well-being of individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic? What role is disinformation having in debates over foreign policy decisions? Is MDM undermining elections and democracy itself? How does the average person know what is true and false in their daily life?
It is notable that the perceived crisis posed by misinformation first spiked after the June 2016 Brexit referendum and the November 2016 election of Donald Trump, times during which many people would challenge the conventional wisdom. The use of the term “misinformation” in English-language books tripled from 2015 to 2022 after seeing slow, gradual increases and decreases over the past two centuries.3 Academic articles on misinformation spiked in the past fifteen years, with one study finding around 100 articles published per year on three major databases prior to 2011 but around 4,000 articles in 2021 alone.4 A similar review found that prior to 2017, there were only 73 academic articles available on Google Scholar with “fake news” in the title; from 2017 to 2019, there were 2,210.5 Google searches for “misinformation” would spike and remain high starting in February 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world.6
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