Dezinformarea în era digitală. Concepte și abordări

Abstract

This article presents a review of the definitions for the concept of disinformation/misinformation which are used in the perspective of digital communication. At a time when words like disinformation, manipulation, propaganda, influence, persuasion, fake news are used more and more often, it is necessary to clarify their conceptual framework. The paper reviews the classic literature on the concept of disinformation/misinformation, but also the definitions that state structures and organizations (such as the European Commission) and social platforms (such as Facebook) give to this concept. It presents the relationships that various theorists identified between disinformation/misinformation, on the one hand, and influence, persuasion, lies, intoxication and manipulation, on the other hand. The paper also reviews the origins of the term and the etymological problems it imposes in languages such as French and Romanian. The article concludes that among researchers in the field of online disinformation there is need for a clear delimitation of the concept of disinformation (intentionally made) from the concept of misinformation (unintentionally made) in order to have an appropriate conceptual framework of phenomena that occur especially in the digital media and online social networks. This imperative lies more in the languages that do not use different terms to define the two concepts. Therefore, the use of traditional concepts should be carefully considered in reference with the digital media.