Historical and contemporary perspectives of disinformation

About the event

Join our guest speaker, Dr William Dance (Lancaster University) for his online talk, Historical and contemporary perspectives of disinformation.

Disinformation, false information that is shared to deceive others, is a prominent global issue with more than 50 governments worldwide enacting or proposing legislation, task forces and investigations to address its spread (Funke and Flamini, 2019). Despite these actions, little research has investigated the history of disinformation as a linguistic term. In this talk, I will trace terms such as ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ through large historical corpora to address the following two research questions:

• How far back can these terms be traced?
• What other synonyms and near-synonyms have been used throughout the centuries?

Historical corpora offer researchers a wealth of qualitative evidence for how linguistic terms are used in context (Mair, 2009) and can present otherwise inaccessible records in the form of machine-readable documents. This research finds that written documents addressing ‘false news’ date back centuries and discovers several competing terms. These synonyms are examined for their frequency over time to see which variants had greater longevity and which were relatively transient.

These findings are compared to contemporary social media datasets of discussions of the terms ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ to understand how these topics are discussed in the modern era. Using 20-million tokens of Twitter discussions, trends are identified and explored over a ten-year period to identify what dominates discussions of disinformation and how people in ‘real-world’ settings talk about deception online. Combining corpus-based approaches such as keyness and collocation analysis with close qualitative readings of texts, we can better understand how disinformation has changed over time, and what this can teach us about tackling its spread today and in the future..