Lesson no.: 7 HOW TO RECOGNIZE A DISINFORMATION
We live in a world where information has great importance and significance in the everyday life. The society is saturated with information. Information are everywhere around us, they drive science, technology, economy, politics, thereby making all of us managers of information. The presence of disinformation as strategic communication tool in the „sea of information“ has grown stronger.
The difference between information and disinformation is in the truthfulness. Information is true, while disinformation is false.
The false information, i.e. disinformation can be intentional and unintentional. The unintentional disinformation is an imprecise and incomprehensive dissemination of a certain news, which leads to a wrongful conclusion.
In the English language it is known as Misinformation. However, the Macedonian language does not contain a word that is a precise translation of the term, nor is there a word which will represent the negative form of the word “information”. This is why very often a difference between “misinformation” and “disinformation” is not made, thereby creating confusion. The latter, “disinformation”, is translated in Macedonian as “дезинформација”, while the term “fake news” is also used as a synonym. The unintentional disinformation is false information that is incomprehensive, imprecise or unreliable because it is based on unchecked information and wrongful interpretation of information and facts by the author. The difference is in the fact whether the author of the false information believes what they wrote or not. When people spread misinformation they often believe the information they spread, although they are unchecked, incomprehensive, false or partially true.
The most frequent example of unintentional spread of disinformation is when a disinformation is taken over from the source without checking its truthfulness. The transmitters only spread the already created disinformation, without checking whether it is true or false. In this case, we talk about „transimitting of disinformation“. Very often old news is shared on social media as recent, without checking it.
This concrete case is about an article published on 7 September 2016, which was shared on social media as a recent one.
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This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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