What characteristics define disinformation and fake news?: review of taxonomies and definitions

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review and analysis of definitions and characteristics of disinformation and fake news, emphasizing the roles of sender, content, receiver, and environment in their dissemination.

Contribution

It synthesizes 46 definitions and proposes a detailed framework for understanding disinformation, incorporating contextual factors and key elements involved.

Findings

Disinformation is often false, misleading, and crafted to manipulate reality.

The analysis highlights the importance of sender, content, receiver, and environment in disinformation dynamics.

A systematic review methodology was used to analyze 237 articles across multiple languages.

Abstract

What characteristics define disinformation and fake news? To address this research question, this Technical Note provides a comprehensive analysis of disinformation and fake news, synthesizing 46 definitions and highlighting four key points addressing their fundamental characteristics. Adopting the Prisma 2020 method, five search sets with the Boolean operator AND were selected in both Portuguese and English, which were applied across four databases, resulting in 237 reviewed articles. Following a meticulous analysis, relevant articles were identified and included, while duplicates and inaccessible documents were excluded. It points to disinformation as information that is totally or partially false, crafted by a sender with the aim of misleading, with opportunistic content designed to manipulate reality, being amplified by individual characteristics of the receiver in their interpretation and by contextual factors in which they are embedded. This Technical Note seeks to contribute to an understanding of the phenomenon of disinformation that includes the contextual dimension, obtaining as fundamental elements of analysis: I.) Sender; II.) Content; III.) Receiver; and IV.) Environment.