False memories to fake news: The evolution of the term "misinformation" in academic literature

Abstract

Since 2016, the term "misinformation" has become associated with a scientific paradigm that studies, at its core, people making, reading, and sharing false statements, usually on social media, and often warning of the harm to society resulting from the sum of many such events. By tracking the term through the academic literature, with special focus on the years 2011--2023, we connect the post-2016 paradigm with a strand of research dating to the Satanic panic of the 1980s. We argue that post-2016 misinformation research owes more to this intellectual lineage than is generally acknowledged, and we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this connection. We conclude by drawing parallels between the Satanic panic and 2026, and, similarly, between misinformation research then and now.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Count of the word "misinformation" in alshaabi2021storywrangler's Twitter data. The date of the 2016 US Presidential Election appears to roughly coincide with the beginning of a new trend of growth.
• Figure 2: The size of each community plotted against its rank, where rank=1 is the biggest community. We removed all communities containing only a single paper.
• Figure 3: Words with largest absolute frequency shifts before and after 2016 are on the right. We tagged all papers as having one from either or one of each. The top-left graph shows papers that have at least one word from that set of words as an annual percentage (some papers use both, so percentages do not add up to 100%); the bottom one is the raw counts of all papers in the data.
• Figure 4: In both graphs, each community is labeled with its top TF-IDF term. In (a), we count papers from the two biggest communities of each year in the dataset throughout its duration (Note that the same community often appears in the top 2 for many years, which is why there are fewer than might be expected). In (b), we instead count papers in the top 10 paper-communities as of 2023. Most histories of misinformation view the field as in (b), but our paper is about the interpretation in (a).
• Figure 5: Four communities' papers, including the Loftus community (#1432), plotted throughout the duration of our dataset. Note the diverse starting points and the gradual evolution towards post-2016 paradigmatic misinformation research.