We must understand the underlying complexities in the news articles that promotes more clicks at the expense of true journalistic integrity. The stakes in the 2023 conflict have never been higher to make sure the information you're consuming is legitimately sourced. You should be aware that there are three different kinds of "Fake News" to be on the alert for.
Misinformation: This is information that is false, but not necessarily intended to harm and the person or persons who are reporting the information believes it to be true. This could be a news story shared on social media by someone who has not evaluated or fact checked the story for credible sources.
Disinformation: This is information that is false, and the person or persons who are reporting the information do know it to be false. It is a deliberate lie, with or without malicious intent. An example: "an image from Vietnam, captured in 2007, re-circulated seven years later, was shared under the guise that it was a photograph from Nepal in the aftermath of the earthquake in 2015."
Malinformation: This is information that is false, and the person or persons reporting the information know it to be false, with intent to harm with malicious intent to harm a person, country, or culture. Examples: phishing to steal someone's identity or sharing false ballot numbers to swing an election vote would be considered malinformation.
According to scholar Claire Wardle, spreading misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation can be brought together under the broader term "information disorder". Living in an Information Age, we need tools to help us identify the context of the information we are consuming. "Information disorder is complex. Some of it could be described as low-level information pollution — clickbait headlines, sloppy captions or satire that fools — but some of it is sophisticated and deeply deceptive. In order to understand, explain and tackle these challenges the language we use matters. Terminology and definitions matter." (Wardle, 2019: "Information disorder: ‘The techniques we saw in 2016 have evolved’').
