Freelon, D., & Wells, C. (2020). Disinformation as Political Communication. Political Communication, 37, 145–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1723755
Summary
This introductory essay to the Political Communication special issue “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation” situates disinformation as the defining political communication topic of the current era. Freelon and Wells define disinformation by three criteria—deception, potential for harm, and intent to harm—following the European Commission’s 2018 High Level Expert Group, distinguishing it sharply from misinformation (which lacks malicious intent) and from the older concept of propaganda. They argue that “fake news” should be retired as an analytical term, both because it has been weaponized by Donald Trump and because its many referents make it ambiguous. Crucially, they insist that digital disinformation must be understood within a wider crisis of public communication: declining institutional trust, affective polarization, and the clickbait-driven political economy of platforms—what Bennett and Livingston call the “disinformation order.”
Key Contributions
- A working, criteria-based definition of disinformation (deception + harm + intent) and clarification of its boundaries against misinformation, propaganda, and other “problematic information.”
- An argument for abandoning “fake news” as an analytical concept in favor of more precise terminology.
- A concise intellectual history linking disinformation research to the older traditions of propaganda study (Institute for Propaganda Analysis; Herman–Chomsky) and misinformation study (cognitive psychology).
- A content-versus-reception typology for organizing disinformation scholarship.
- A forward-looking research agenda emphasizing effects, subpopulation and partisan asymmetries, cross-national comparison, and empirical testing of whether the mis/disinformation distinction actually matters.
Methods
The essay is conceptual and definitional rather than empirical. It combines a historical literature review of propaganda and misinformation traditions with a bibliometric indicator—Google Scholar title counts—to demonstrate the post-2016 surge in disinformation scholarship. It closes with an editorial synthesis classifying the special issue’s seven articles into content studies and reception studies.
Findings
- US public confidence in the press reporting news fully, accurately, and fairly has declined since the 1970s, bottoming out in 2016 and then sharply polarizing along partisan lines.
- Over 70% of Google Scholar titles containing “disinformation” published 2010–2019 appeared after 2016, evidencing an abrupt scholarly surge.
- Native advertising is recognized as paid content by fewer than 10% of consumers; learning its nature reduces perceived producer credibility.
- Within the issue: junk news reached parity with professional sources in 2016 election Twitter shares; fact-checking can reduce disinformation credibility; ostracized users persist in endorsing attitude-congruent falsehoods; and low system trust increases disinformation belief and can shift German voters toward the AfD.
- US disinformation shows partisan asymmetry, with conservatives disproportionately targeted and susceptible, and Black Americans specifically targeted by the Russian Internet Research Agency.
Connections
As a foundational conceptual and definitional statement, this essay anchors the wider disinformation literature and connects directly to Freelon’s own later work on partisan and racial targeting Freelon2024-sc and to Bennett and Livingston’s “disinformation order” Bennett2018-ys. Its account of the disinformation order builds on the political economy of the media system in Benkler2018-lw and speaks to the affective-polarization and partisan-asymmetry research it foregrounds Iyengar2019-jj, Osmundsen2021-et, while its call for conceptual precision resonates with definitional and diffusion studies such as Vosoughi2018-at and Lazer2018-mm.