‘Language that once clarified is now obscuring’: NewsGuard retires the labels ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’

The end of an era?

Since its launch in 2018, NewsGuard has been in the business of labels. The company has rated the reliability of online news and information, giving publishers “nutrition labels” that provide context for scores from 0 to 100 (and using colors, sometimes controversially).

A founding goal of this system was to help readers better navigate an online information swamp and more easily distinguish trustworthy sources from misinformation and disinformation. But on Wednesday, NewsGuard announced it is “moving beyond ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’”

Whatever you think of NewsGuard’s approach or the usefulness of its labels, the decision speaks to how the internet, political landscape, and notions of collective truth have polarized beyond recognition since 2018.

Here’s McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, explaining the decision in the post:

The words misinformation and disinformation once served a purpose. They gave name to a crisis that many had not yet recognized: an onslaught of falsehoods flooding the digital ecosystem, often with malign intent. These terms helped distinguish between honest mistakes (misinformation) and intentional, agenda-driven lies (disinformation), and helped define a complex information landscape. But as the landscape and political climate have changed so has the language. These words have now been politicized beyond recognition and turned into partisan weapons by actors on the right and the left, and among anti-democratic foreign actors.

Sadeghi points to, for instance, Russian state media weaponizing the term “disinformation” against credible Western media and even launching “its own so-called fact-checking operations to legitimize that framing.” Closer to home, President Donald Trump has done the same, referring to allegations of Russian election interference as a “massive disinformation campaign.” Sadeghi also calls out Courier Newsroom for cloaking “hyper partisan content in the language of ‘fighting misinformation.’”

“Simply put, language that once clarified is now obscuring,” she writes.

Sadeghi notes that the threats these words describe have only increased. The company is “retiring these words as primary labels” nonetheless because “the words no longer help us explain these threats”; they’ve transformed from descriptors to partisan signals. In a world rife with AI-generated content, pink slime local news sites, and sophisticated foreign influence campaigns, “the language we’ve used to describe those threats hasn’t kept up. It’s vague, overused, and increasingly seen as partisan.”

“Fake,” too, has lost its meaning, Sadeghi says, “because those on all sides of the political divide use the term so avidly and casually.”

What kinds of language will NewsGuard use instead?

In short, “language that’s more precise, harder to hijack, and more specific,” according to Sadeghi. “We will describe what a piece of content actually does, such as whether it fabricates facts, distorts real events, or impersonates legitimate sources. We’ll explain whether a claim is explicitly false, AI-generated, unsubstantiated, or manipulated.”

As part of this shift, NewsGuard has renamed its Misinformation Fingerprints database to “False Claim Fingerprints.” “A simple phrase like ‘false claim’ is more powerful and precise than ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” she argues, “because it names the problem plainly and directs attention to the content itself — without triggering partisan reflexes or rhetorical spin.”

Is “fake” really more politicized than “false”? Can shifts in language bridge the fundamental partisan gulfs in perception of reality? The post left me thinking about these bleak questions with some skepticism, but strikes me as a fair assessment of how far gone “misinformation” and “disinformation” are as partisan buzzwords.

Read the full post here.