Q&A on misinformation with Zach McDowell

Zach McDowell, assistant professor of communication, defines information, misinformation and disinformation and the importance of being a smart consumer in a digital world. McDowell, who works in the UIC Department of Communication at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, spoke with Science Sparks for a quick overview of the topic.

How are information, misinformation and disinformation defined? 

The definition of information is, kind of, anything. Really, what it comes down to is that all the things that kind of can be describing things and places and whatever, it can all be information. It doesn’t necessarily have to be factual, which is why I think that the misinformation and the disinformation — we really want to think about, rather than the information, we want to think about what is reliable information.

Misinformation is just incorrect information. It can be for a variety of reasons, like people are misquoting or people got the wrong information. They’re spreading things that they don’t know. But disinformation, on the other hand — typically, the way that most researchers think about this — is about intent. So, disinformation is the intent to spread misinformation. 

And the problem is that intent is really hard to figure out, right? Like, you can think that it’s intentional all you want, but proving that is really difficult. So really, what we want to think about, rather than, you know, is it disinformation or is it misinformation — because that might lead us down the wrong rabbit hole — is to think about who’s saying it, why are they saying it and have they come around to admitting their mistakes.

How can we be smart consumers?  

Well, I think the big issue is: What is the information asking you to do, right? What is it asking you to believe? Where is it coming from? If it sounds like it’s a little too good to be true, or it sounds like it’s fitting too perfectly into a narrative, I think that that should be the first thing that sets up some red flags, saying: Hey, this is feeding into a narrative — like, really perfectly. A narrative that, you know, maybe you want to buy into that narrative, but even if you do, I would just take a step back and slow down. Just do a quick search. 

I mean, you could literally just look at Google and see what comes up. If you’re seeing this information being repeated in, you know, the Sun-Times, or the Tribune or the New York Times, then go in, read what you can get into it, and see how that’s represented. See if you can get a little bit more of a kind of general, neutral kind of sense of it.