'Disinformation' Is The Word Of The Year — And A Sign Of What's To Come
"As always, this year's word-of-the-year candidates came from all over. There were
the viral memes like 'OK, boomer' and 'weird flex, but OK,' but they won't endure any longer than earlier years' candidates like FOMO and 'manbun.' 'Quid pro quo' had a moment, but the jury's still out on that one. And a surge in dictionary lookups led Merriam-Webster to pick nonbinary 'they.'"
"My choice of 'disinformation' needs some explaining. It isn't a new word — just one of the family of names we give to the malignancies that contaminate the public discourse, along with 'propaganda,' and in particular "'misinformation' and 'fake news.' Each of those last two was chosen as word of the year by some dictionary or organization in 2017."
"But over the last couple of years "disinformation" has been on a tear — it's 10 times as common in media headlines as it was five years ago, to the point where it's nudged its siblings aside. That rise suggests a basic shift in focus: What most troubles us now isn't just the plague of deceptive information on the Internet but the organized campaigns that are spreading the infection."
"Most of those headlines concerned the Russians. There was their weaponization of social media during the 2016 elections, which The New York Times called 'the Pearl Harbor of the social media age' and the fears it will be repeated next year. There were also the stories about their interference in recent elections in the UK, Italy and other nations. And most recently, there was the Russians' success in planting the conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine rather than Russia who interfered in our 2016 elections, despite its being debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies."