Decoding the Sociotechnical Dimensions of Digital Misinformation: A Comprehensive Literature Review

TL;DR

The paper presents a systematic literature mapping of digital misinformation in computer science across $1993$–$2020$, analyzing $788$ studies from major digital libraries and organizing sociotechnical challenges into six dimensions. It introduces a sociotechnical framework for categorizing misinformation types and an integrated stakeholder-analysis framework to connect technical and social factors. The findings reveal definitional fragmentation, dataset heterogeneity, and a predominance of technically focused methods, advocating for multidisciplinary, multimodal, and lifecycle-aware mitigation strategies. By proposing a mitigation-strategies taxonomy and a semiotic-ladder analysis, the work offers a foundation for more holistic, context-aware interventions with potential policy and application implications.

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic literature review in Computer Science that provide an overview of the initiatives related to digital misinformation. This is an exploratory study that covers research from 1993 to 2020, focusing on the investigation of the phenomenon of misinformation. The review consists of 788 studies from SCOPUS, IEEE, and ACM digital libraries, synthesizing the primary research directions and sociotechnical challenges. These challenges are classified into Physical, Empirical, Syntactic, Semantic, Pragmatic, and Social dimensions, drawing from Organizational Semiotics. The mapping identifies issues related to the concept of misinformation, highlights deficiencies in mitigation strategies, discusses challenges in approaching stakeholders, and unveils various sociotechnical aspects relevant to understanding and mitigating the harmful effects of digital misinformation. As contributions, this study present a novel categorization of mitigation strategies, a sociotechnical taxonomy for classifying types of false information and elaborate on the inter-relation of sociotechnical aspects and their impacts.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Research lines on digital false information.
• Figure 2: Systematic Mapping Protocol
• Figure 3: Amount of publication by year
• Figure 4: Amount of publication by country
• Figure 5: Mapping of digital false information types identified in the literature.