Sorting Fiction from Fiction: Creating a Typology of Misinformation

• In Event: Elites Behaving Badly

Abstract

In recent years the word “misinformation” has become part of the public lexicon, with pundits and politicos expressing concern over its proliferation and consequences. Echoing these fears about misinformation as a threat to democratic functioning, political scientists have devoted substantial resources to its study, creating a sizable (and growing) literature. However, while considerable progress has been made in a relatively short amount of time, scholars have given little attention to what this new information landscape looks like – many simply refer to the catchall term “misinformation,” thereby overlooking potentially important heterogeneity. That is, few studies have sought to characterize and categorize various forms of misinformation.

In this paper, we take a step back to develop a typology: misinformation about civic engagement, misinformation about candidate backgrounds, and misinformation about encyclopedic facts. We argue that not all misinformation should be evaluated equally, and that different dependent variables should be pursued contingent on misinformation type. To get a sense of what misinformation in American politics looks like via this lens, we sort thousands of statements deemed false by fact-checking websites (from 2013 to the present) into our typology; this allows us to examine which types of misinformation are most commonly weaponized in the contemporary United States. As a complement to this, we also categorize extant work on misinformation by this same typology, thereby providing us with a sense of where current scholarly efforts are matching, outpacing, or coming up short relative to the practice of politics. Finally, we present results from a series of experiments in which we randomize exposure to different types of misinformation and look at the effects across a range of behavioral outcomes.

Authors

• Anand Edward Sokhey, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Taylor Nicole Carlson, Washington University in St. Louis