The definition of disinformation is false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, presented, and promoted intentionally and misinformation is information that is unintentionally partially wrong or misleading. The difference between these two is that disinformation is intentional while misinformation is unintentional. Misinformation can be a problem for social media users as it can have inaccurate captions, dates, statistics, and translations. Disinformation can also be a problem for social media users as it could be construed as content and messages, purposely creating conspiracy theories or rumors, or deliberately creating harm towards a person, social group, organization, or country. Misinformation can be spread on social media through apps like Twitter where their newsfeed showed tweets in reverse chronological order but this changed in 2015 when they released a new algorithm that displayed the tweets based on “relevance” rather than recency. Thus causing human biases to perfectly example misinformation as we are most likely to react to content that relates to our beliefs and grievances which Twitter will show more of the content that we liked or retweeted. Disinformation can be spread on social media through apps like Facebook as it is an effective platform for countries and groups seeking to spread disinformation. On Facebook, we see the creation of media pages attacking specific politicians presenting information that is heavily biased, unreliable, and made to influence political outcomes. Ai is involved with the spread on social media as they are known as “Transformers”. Researchers generated AI models called “Transformers” to generate false news on cybersecurity and Covid-19. Then, they were presented to experts for testing resulting that the transformer-generated misinformation can fool experts. Video and audio can also be part of the problem of this spread as people on TikTok are regularly using popular audio tracks to express themselves as anti-vaccination thus hosting harmful Covid misinformation during the pandemic. The people that are spreading misinformation and disinformation are mainly politicians. One of the many reasons we are most familiar with the spreading of false information on social media is to help a political party during an election cycle. not only on social media platforms, but this has been happening in newspapers, ads, radio, and television as well. Fake news is related to misinformation and disinformation as it is also the spread of false information having explosive growth over the years in news outlets and social media platforms. It can also have really dangerous consequences. People fall for this fake news as our belief systems impact the stories and information we choose to accept as true.
