‘Misinformation’ chosen as word of the year by Dictionary.com

Published November 27, 2018
Misinformation, as opposed to disinformation, was chosen on Monday as Dictionary.com’s word of the year. — File photo
Misinformation, as opposed to disinformation, was chosen on Monday as Dictionary.com’s word of the year. — File photo

NEW YORK: Misinformation, as opposed to disinformation, was chosen on Monday as Dictionary.com’s word of the year on the tattered coattails of “toxic”, picked earlier this month for the same honour by Oxford Dictionaries in these tumultuous times.

Jane Solomon, a linguist-in-residence at Dictionary, said in a recent interview that her site’s choice of “mis” over “dis” was deliberate, intended to serve as a “call to action” to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits.

“The rampant spread of misinformation is really providing new challenges for navigating life in 2018,” Solomon said ahead of the word of the year announcement.

“Misinformation has been around for a long time, but over the last decade or so the rise of social media has really, really changed how information is shared. We believe that understanding the concept of misinformation is vital to identifying misinformation as we encounter it in the wild, and that could ultimately help curb its impact.”

The rise of misinformation, Solomon said, stretches well beyond US borders and Facebook’s role in disseminating fake news and propaganda in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The use of Facebook and other social media to incite violence and conflict was documented around the globe in 2018, she said.

There are distinctions between misinformation and disinformation to be emphasised.

“Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behaviour of others. It’s sort of like pointing at behaviour and saying, ‘THIS is disinformation,’ she said.

“With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behaviour, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation. It’s a word of self-reflection, and in that it can be a call to action. You can still be a good person with no nefarious agenda and still spread misinformation.”

Dictionary.com chose “complicit” as last year’s word of the year. In 2016, it was “xenophobia”.

Published in Dawn, November 27th, 2018

Opinion

Editorial

1971 in retrospect
Updated 28 Nov, 2022

1971 in retrospect

The point of no return came when the military launched Operation Searchlight in March 1971.
Gender-based violence
28 Nov, 2022

Gender-based violence

IT is a war without boundaries and seemingly without end. A UN report on femicide released on Nov 25, the...
Battle against dacoits
28 Nov, 2022

Battle against dacoits

THE Punjab police is clearly fighting a formidable, and so far losing, battle against the criminal gangs based in ...
Policy rate hike
Updated 27 Nov, 2022

Policy rate hike

The decision to hike the policy rate by 100bps is a step in the right direction, even if intended to appease the IMF.
Vawda’s reprieve
27 Nov, 2022

Vawda’s reprieve

FAISAL Vawda should be relieved. After years of running from a reckoning for submitting a false declaration in his...
Gujarat’s ghosts
27 Nov, 2022

Gujarat’s ghosts

TWO decades have passed since the bloody Gujarat riots, one of the worst spasms of anti-Muslim violence witnessed in...
https://www.dawn.com/news/1447938/misinformation-chosen-as-word-of-the-year-by-dictionarycom
www.dawn.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-49
138738
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PLSXGHSVDYMTSJUUFHOJGZP7OXBMGII7
<urn:uuid:789a71b6-20a9-4200-a7f1-ca5e83f5186c>
2022-11-28T08:38:51Z
104.21.28.38
text/html
sha1:AMUZ2JR5RTWBEZNJ363MG3RLCFKUFUAT
<urn:uuid:752836fe-aeae-4f97-aab5-b2825c18cfa3>
https://www.dawn.com/news/1447938/misinformation-chosen-as-word-of-the-year-by-dictionarycom
response
<urn:uuid:69c62f1d-eb15-4737-92f6-d025ff60df9d>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-193
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/