Contributions
- Proposes a precise definition of disinformation as information that is both false and deliberately designed to cause harm, excluding unintentional misinformation and non-deceptive propaganda.
- Contextualizes disinformation within the political economy and history of media—connecting it to scholarship on propaganda, media manipulation, and partisan media.
- Organizes contemporary research into two broad categories: content studies (supply-side: sources, actors, and tactics) and reception studies (demand-side: psychological effects on audiences).
- Synthesizes findings from content studies showing diverse actors (state, commercial, grassroots) using varied tactics across social media platforms.
- Reviews reception studies grounded in political psychology, examining effects of disinformation through theories of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and political polarization.
- Identifies critical open questions: the persistence of partisan asymmetry in disinformation exposure, definitional clarity for edge cases (legal disinformation, satire), and mechanisms of disinformation effects on democratic behavior.
Method
This is an introductory essay to a special issue of Political Communication. The authors conduct a narrative literature review, situating disinformation scholarship within its intellectual and political context. They distinguish disinformation from related phenomena by examining historical origins (propaganda analysis dating to the 1930s; misinformation research since the 1980s; disinformation as a distinct focus only post-2016). They organize existing empirical work by distinguishing the supply side (who creates and spreads disinformation, through what mechanisms) from the demand side (how audiences receive, process, and respond to disinformation). They ground the reception studies in political psychology, identifying theories (motivated reasoning, cognitive biases, attitude consistency) that predict how individuals with different ideological beliefs and media trust respond to disinformation.
Results
The paper does not report quantitative results but synthesizes key findings from the field:
- Content side: State actors (Russia, China) conduct coordinated campaigns; commercial actors exploit clickbait and native advertising for profit; grassroots actors ("junk news" sites, fringe platforms) produce false rumors. These supply diverse false narratives across social media, creating "trading up the chain" dynamics where fringe content reaches mainstream audiences.
- Reception side: Participants exhibit confirmation bias, selectively endorsing disinformation aligned with their ideological priors. Fact-checking effects are mixed and depend on political context. Participants who distrust media and political institutions are disproportionately vulnerable to disinformation belief.
- Asymmetries: Some evidence suggests conservatives are disproportionately targeted by Russian disinformation in the 2016 election; open questions remain about stable partisan asymmetries.
Notes
This is a widely-cited introductory essay that established the conceptual vocabulary for the field. The authors make a crucial move in defining disinformation by intent (deliberately deceptive) rather than truth value alone, which excludes accidental false claims (misinformation) and honestly held propaganda. This distinction has been adopted across subsequent work, though application remains contested in boundary cases (satire, parody, legal disinformation). The paper's organization into content and reception categories has become a standard lens. The authors' emphasis on political economy and democratic stakes grounds the work in concerns beyond information accuracy, a framing that shapes subsequent scholarship. Some limitations: the empirical synthesis is qualitative and the special issue's articles themselves are still in their infancy (pre-2020), so many research questions remain open. The paper's scope is primarily US-focused, though it acknowledges international contexts (Russian campaigns, European regulatory responses).