Multimodal analysis of disinformation and misinformation

Abstract

The use of disinformation and misinformation campaigns in the media has attracted much attention from academics and policy-makers. Multimodal analysis or the analysis of two or more semiotic systems—language, gestures, images, sounds, among others—in their interrelation and interaction is essential to understanding dis-/misinformation efforts because most human communication goes beyond just words. There is a confluence of many disciplines (e.g. computer science, linguistics, political science, communication studies) that are developing methods and analytical models of multimodal communication. This literature review brings research strands from these disciplines together, providing a map of the multi- and interdisciplinary landscape for multimodal analysis of dis-/misinformation. It records the substantial growth starting from the second quarter of 2020—the start of the COVID-19 epidemic in Western Europe—in the number of studies on multimodal dis-/misinformation coming from the field of computer science. The review examines that category of studies in more detail. Finally, the review identifies gaps in multimodal research on dis-/misinformation and suggests ways to bridge these gaps including future cross-disciplinary research directions. Our review provides scholars from different disciplines working on dis-/misinformation with a much needed bird's-eye view of the rapidly emerging research of multimodal dis-/misinformation.

Research on Disinformation in Academic Studies: Perspectives through a Bibliometric Analysis

“…In this way, the present work aims to show an accurate picture of the state of scientific research on the global phenomenon of disinformation. In order to achieve this objective, a series of partial goals were set: (1) to determine the area of knowledge in which there are the greatest number of publications on this subject; (2) to verify research of scientific activity in the different disciplines; (3) to study the origin of the publications; and (4) to carry out a systematic analysis of the 50 most cited articles on disinformation. This is, therefore, a descriptive type of research that will be performed with a quantitative approach through this academic discipline.…”

“…In the last decade, disinformation has emerged as a phenomenon of remarkable complexity, standing out especially for its constitutive plurivocity. Not only does it manifest itself as an (un)informative phenomenon with diverse strategies, but it is also presented in multiple forms in the numerous academic approaches which have been published in the last decade [1][2][3]. This conceptual variety reflects the epistemological difficulty in its definition, encompassing a wide range of terms such as disinformation, misinformation, fake news, hoax, deepfakes and astroturfing, amongst others [4][5][6], all of which refer to different realities within the same phenomenon that is normally termed generically, in turn, as disinformation.…”