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The ever-evolving masspersonal media landscape (O’Sullivan & Carr, 2018) is also still relatively fluid with regard to many of the key concepts and constructs of informational distortion in the digital realm. The term “fake news,” for example, is receiving more usage, even if its specific definition may seem elusive and increasingly malleable (Avramov et al., 2020; Leal, 2020). For example, as of this writing, between the years 2010 and 2020, the phrase “fake news” caught up with and rapidly surpassed “pseudoscience” and “conspiracy theory” in usage (Google nGram; see Figure 2.1). It is not clear from such trends what the interrelationship is between these terms, if any.

Figure 2.1 Google nGram of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and fake news (September 2, 2020, case insensitive, smoothing, adapted).

One of the central elements of most of the concepts discussed thus far is that information or communicated messages intentionally or unintentionally lead consumers of that information to form inaccurate beliefs or perceptions of the world as it actually is. As such, most of the concepts involve some degree of either communication error or deception. For example, Table 2.1 illustrates some concepts related to such communicative distortions. There seems to be more general commonality than differences. Most of the distinctions revolve crucially around the issue of intent or motive: Is the distortion of meaning manipulated for intentional misrepresentation, or is it more accidental, innocently or sincerely believed by the source of the messages sent (Ekman & O’Sullivan, 2006)? For the sake of simplicity, and with some tongue-in-cheek, the two ends of this intentionality spectrum will be collapsed under an umbrella term of “dismisinformation.” The wink-and-a-nod is that such information should be “dismiss-ed” and thus the noun becomes a perlocutionary speech act of sorts. This term has the advantage of being both a simple declarative as well as perlocution—it attempts to describe and persuade at the same time—recognize and then dismiss both disinformation and misinformation.

Table 2.1 Illustrative conceptual definitions of key concepts.

Concept	Illustrative Definitions
Bots	“automated accounts that use artificial intelligence to steer discussions and promote specific ideas or products on social media such as Twitter and Facebook” (Allem & Ferrara, 2018, p. 1005).message streams or “accounts that may range from completely automated (i.e. traditional scripted bots) through to hybrid accounts that utilize varying degrees of automation and/or scheduling software, thus producing extremely rapid (1 second or less) coordinated retweet activity” (Graham et al., 2020, p. 17).
Conspiracy theories	“an unverified claim of conspiracy which is not the most plausible account of an event or situation, and with sensationalistic subject matter or implications. In addition, the claim will typically postulate unusually sinister and competent conspirators. Finally, the claim is based on weak kinds of evidence, and is epistemically self-insulating against disconfirmation” (Brotherton, 2013, p. 9).“a conspiracy theory can generally be counted as such if it is an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role (at least until their aims are accomplished)” (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009, p. 205).“conspiracy theories are narratives about events or situations, that allege there are secret plans to carry out sinister deeds” (Andrade, 2020, p. 1) or “attempts to explain particular events or situations, as the result of the actions of a small, powerful group, with perverse intentions”(Andrade, 2020, p. 2).“causal explanations of events or circumstances that posit a powerful group acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good… they represent one form of misinformation” (Connolly et al., 2019, p. 469).“attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors” (Douglas et al., 2019, p. 4).“commonly defined as explanatory beliefs about a group of actors that collude in secret to reach malevolent goal” (van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018, p. 897).
Conspirituality	a belief system predicated on the integrated assumptions that (1) there is an emerging paradigm shift toward an awakened consciousness in which (2) groups coordinating covert manipulation of social and political order will be revealed and reformed (Asprem & Dyrendal, 2015; Ward & Voas, 2011).
Deception	“the deliberate intention to mislead, without prior notification of the target of the lie” (Ekman & O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 674)
Disinformation	“intentionally deceptive messages” (Lukito et al., 2020, p. 201); “types of information that one could encounter online that could possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world” (Tucker et al., 2018, p. 3). “disinformation, which is deliberately propagated false information; misinformation, which is false information that may be unintentionally propagated; or online propaganda, which is potentially factually correct information, but packaged in a way so as to disparage opposing viewpoints (i.e., the point is not so much to present information as it is to rally public support)” (Tucker et al., 2018, p. 3).“used interchangeably with terms like misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, lies, deception, and ‘trolling’” (Raderstorf & Camilleri, 2019, p. 5).“online publications of intentionally or knowingly false statements of facts that are produced to serve strategical purposes and are disseminated for social influence or profit” (Humprecht, 2019, p. 1975).
Fake news	“fabricated information that mimics the output of the news media in form but not in organizational process or intent” (de Regt et al., 2020, p. 169).“entirely fabricated stories, most often designed to attract copious views and perhaps to also affect public opinion” (Carlson, 2020, p. 378).“news emanating from websites that falsely claim to be news organizations while ‘publishing’ deliberately false stories for the purpose of garnering advertising revenue” (Tucker et al., 2018, p. 3).“information including ‘phony news stories maliciously spread by outlets that mimic legitimate news sources’” (Torres et al., 2018, p. 3977); it is information (transmitting untrue propositions, not considering the cognitive state of the sender) and disinformation (again, transmitting untrue propositions, but now consciously by the sender) (Shin et al., 2018).“the phenomenon of information exchange between an actor and acted upon that primarily attempts to invalidate generally-accepted conceptions of truth for the purpose of altering established power structures” (Weiss et al., 2020, p. 7).“a news article or message published and propagated through media, carrying false information regardless of the means and motives behind it” (Sharma et al., 2019, p. 4).“fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent…. Fake news overlaps with other information disorders, such as misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (false information that is purposely spread to deceive people)” (Lazer et al., 2018, p. 1094).“the empirically observed problem of the mass distribution of deceptive content across mostly digital media” (Kopp et al., 2018, p. 10).“information that is inconsistent with factual reality” (Brody & Meier, 2018, p. 2).“news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers” (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 213; see also: Bondielli & Marcelloni, 2019; Kim & Dennis, 2019, p. 1026).“an amalgam of long-standing approaches and strategies taken to delegitimize information itself” (p. 3): It has been examined from various perspectives, including: (1) “Fake news as a result of information overload and ‘the principle of least effort;’” (p. 3); (2) “Fake news as a result of poisoned public discourse, logical fallacies and overconfidence” (p. 3); (3) “Fake news as context-independent in a ‘post-truth’ society” (p. 4); (4) “Fake news as propaganda/disinformation” (p. 5); (5) “Fake news as rumor, misinformation, and conspiracy theory” (p. 5); and (6) “Fake news as parody, satire, and political kayfabe” (p. 6).“a type of online disinformation, with totally or partially false content, created intentionally to deceive and/or manipulate a specific audience, through a format that imitates a news or report (acquiring credibility), through false information that may or may not be associated with real events, with an opportunistic structure (title, image, content) to attract the readers’ attention and to persuade them to believe in falsehood, in order to obtain more clicks and shares, therefore, higher advertising revenue and/or ideological gain” (Baptista & Gradim, 2020, p. 5).
Misinformation	“false or inaccurate information regardless of intentional authorship” (Southwell et al., 2019, p. 282).“health-related claim of fact that is currently false due to a lack of scientific evidence” (Chou et al., 2018, p. 2417).
Pseudoscience	“a reason to regard a theory as pseudoscientific is that it purports to be scientific but has been refused admission to, or excluded from, a research tradition of this kind” (Dawes, 2018, p. 290).

A formal definition of dismisinformation is any message or set of messages that represent a meaning complex discrepant from or incompatible with a sender’s intent and/or a relatively informed or expert consensual evidentiary state. A meaning complex here represents any individual or normative collective state of belief, value, or attitude and their interrelationships represented as a coherent articulable position, stance, attribution, explanation, or narrative. The phrase of “a sender’s intent and/or a relatively informed or expert consensual evidentiary state” refers to at least three potential tests of informational malformation: (1) deception, in the discrepancy between sender’s understanding of reality vis-à-vis the signification of the message sent; (2) the discrepancy between the message and majority expert consensus; and (3) the discrepancy between the message and majority expert consensus regarding the state of best evidence. Obviously, any of these may be empirically challenging to establish, and each is potentially fallible. However, given the impossibility of proving the affirmative (i.e., inductive verification), and the possibility of disproving the affirmative (i.e., deductive falsification) (Popper, 1980), each of these tests is at least feasible (Dawes, 2018; cf., Huneman & Vorms, 2018). The function of the term is to pejoratively encompass and advise against the entire spectrum of potentially strategic rhetorical strategies and tactics available for leading information consumers astray from potentially falsifiable evidentiary bases for belief and action, both individually and as a collective polity.

Where formal conceptual definitions find themselves often formulated with the hope that their relevance will be sustained through various technological innovations and evolutionary developments, for the sake of systematic empirical investigations of dismisinformation, a more taxonomic approach may be necessary. There are several taxonomies and typologies relevant to the spectrum of dismisinformation, some of which are reviewed next.