‘Fake news’ is the invention of a liar: How false information circulates within the hybrid news system

Summary

This conceptual paper argues that the dominant focus on creators’ intent in defining “fake news” is inadequate for understanding how false information actually circulates in hybrid news systems. Drawing on second-order cybernetics, Bateson’s information theory, and Chadwick’s hybrid media system framework, the authors propose shifting analytical attention from injectors to propagators — the chains of actors whose truthfulness judgments and sharing decisions shape what becomes a global cascade. They develop a three-level (micro/meso/macro) model and a 2x2 typology of propagation acts, illustrating it with three cases where the original intent behind a piece of false content did not determine its downstream cycle. The paper also offers a pointed critique of the term “fake news” itself as rhetorically loaded.

Key Contributions

• Reframes false-information research by foregrounding propagators rather than creators as the central analytical object.
• Imports a second-order cybernetic, observer-dependent view of information into communication and misinformation studies.
• Introduces a 2x2 typology of propagation acts based on injector and propagator truth judgments, yielding four cycle types (pure disinformation, misinformation-through-disinformation, disinformation-through-misinformation, pure misinformation).
• Articulates a multi-level (micro/meso/macro) framework linking individual judgment, dyadic propagation, and emergent global cascades.
• Distinguishes lowercase “true/false” (actors’ situated judgments) from capitalized “True/False” (the analyst’s external assessment), staking a constructivist-but-not-relativist position.
• Critiques the label “fake news” as inherently divisive and a rhetorical truth-claim by its user.

Methods

Conceptual and theoretical work rather than empirical analysis. The authors review classic and contemporary literatures on disinformation, misinformation, rumor, propaganda, conspiracy, satire, parody, and “bullshit,” and synthesize them with second-order cybernetics (von Foerster), Bateson, Chadwick’s hybrid media system, and Luhmann’s systems theory. The framework is then illustrated through three case episodes: the Veerender Jubbal photoshopped image after the 2015 Paris attacks, Chris Lamb’s satirical Huffington Post piece on Trump and the Statue of Liberty, and the 2016 misidentified KKK “march” photo in Mebane, NC.

Findings

• Most existing definitions treat the generative act of creation as decisive, obscuring downstream propagation dynamics.
• Micro-level truthfulness judgments depend on source (authority, proximity), content (confirmation bias, congruence, relevance), and context (information overload, limited attention, “tweet first, verify later”).
• In social media, authority and proximity increasingly overlap, weakening expertise-based source evaluation.
• The illustrative cases show satirical, mistaken, and deceptive items can all be propagated as true by mainstream actors — original intent does not determine the cycle.
• False-information cycles are composite: a single cascade typically combines multiple propagation types rather than fitting one neat label.
• Global cascades are emergent and can be analyzed as autonomous phenomena, though composed of heterogeneous individual acts.
• Societal consensus on truthfulness is unlikely; coexisting opposing beliefs is the normal state of the hybrid news system.

Connections

This paper sits upstream of much current empirical work on propagation and sharing decisions in hybrid media: it resonates with structural-cascade and platform-circulation studies such as Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq, DeVerna2025-dl, and Bollenbacher2026-vz, and with research on individual sharing judgments like Mosleh2024-op. Its critique of the “fake news” label as rhetorically weaponized is closely aligned with Farkas2026-lr and the broader reassessment of misinformation’s actual prevalence and effects in Budak2024-ef. The second-order cybernetic, observer-dependent stance also connects to systems-theoretic treatments of media and disorder such as Rossi2023-847d5a9f and F2020-6278a4aa.