Service Alert
Misinformation comes in many forms, but it tends to have one or more the aspects below:
Misinformation tends to evoke strong, negative emotions from its audience, such as fear, disgust, and surprise (Vosoughi et al., 2018, p. 1).
In contrast, true information is more likely to evoke anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust (Vosoughi et al., 2018, p. 1).
This is one reason why misinformation spreads faster than true information, as people are more likely to share messages with moral-emotional language and novel stories (Kozyreva et al., 2020, p. 124).
Misinformation seeks to grab the audience's attention with claims that are totally false, extreme, over-generalized, or taken out of context (Otis, 2020, p. 203).
This often takes the form of clckbait headlines, as pictured below:
(Rose, 2017)
This type of content contrasts with actual news and science, which tends to be:
(Krause et al., 2022, p. 114)
Misinformation often relies on logical fallacies in its arguments. We've listed 3 of the more common logical fallacies found in misinformation below.
For a full treatment of logical fallacies, please visit this guide by the UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center (“Fallacies,” n.d.):
This is where the argument assumes that correlation equals causation. "If event B occurred after event A, event A must have caused event B."
In reality, there could be multiple contributing factors that led to event B, or event B could have nothing to do with event A.
If event A really did cause event B, the arguer needs to clearly explain the process by which event A caused event B (“Fallacies,” n.d.).
This is when someone uses 2 or more contradictory arguments at the same time to prove a point.
An example of this would be someone arguing that the earth is flat insisting that:
This video from Inoculation Science provides more context:
This is where someone implies there are only 2 incompatible choices in a given situation when those choices may not be incompatible, and they may not be the only choices (Truth Labs for Education, 2021a).
Example: "If you don't support banning certain types of books from school libraries, you don't care about children."
This video from Inoculation Science provides more context:
The purpose of misinformation is often to sow division and prevent people from different perspectives from finding any common ground (Hameleers et al., 2022).
This type of manipulation seeks to separate people into in-groups and out-groups and demonize members of the out-group (Hameleers et al., 2022).
While there may be real areas of strong disagreement between political parties, different cultures, or other identities, misinformation often seeks to deepen those divisions rather than bridge them. Thus, misinformation displays a lack of nuance when describing disagreements.