Information disorder

Working Definition

Information disorder is an umbrella analytical framework for three distinct forms of pollution in the information ecosystem, classified along two axes: whether the content is false and whether it is shared with intent to cause harm. Mis-information is false or misleading content shared without malicious intent; dis-information is false content knowingly fabricated or disseminated to harm a person, social group, organization, or country; mal-information is genuine, factually accurate information weaponized to inflict harm—such as strategic leaks of private correspondence, doxing, or revenge porn. The framework further requires analyzing every episode across three elements (agent, message, interpreter) and three lifecycle phases (creation, production, distribution), because a single piece of content can change category as it travels: state-crafted disinformation reshared in good faith by an anxious parent becomes misinformation at the point of distribution. Its authors explicitly designed the taxonomy to retire the term “fake news,” which they argued was both analytically hopelessly vague and politically weaponized to discredit independent journalism.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The framework was formulated by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan in their report Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making, published by the Council of Europe in October 2017. Wardle, a British communication scholar with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania who then led the verification nonprofit First Draft, had published an influential seven-part continuum of problematic content in February 2017—ranging from satire and misleading headlines to imposter content and 100% fabricated stories—which became a core pillar of the report. Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger and media researcher who returned to the internet in 2014 after six years in an Iranian prison to find the open hyperlink web replaced by closed social feeds (described in his 2015 essay The Web We Have to Save), contributed the crucial third category of mal-information. Written in the immediate wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2016 US presidential election, and Russian active-measures revelations (and mapping early European fact-checking responses including Ukraine's StopFake, founded in 2014, and Central European initiatives such as Poland and Slovakia's Demagog or the Czech Interior Ministry's Center Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats), the report drew on James Carey's ritual view of communication, Erving Goffman's dramaturgy, and motivated-reasoning psychology to emphasize that people share dubious posts primarily to signal group identity rather than to convey literal propositions. The three-part taxonomy was rapidly adopted by the European Commission's 2018 Code of Practice on Disinformation, UNESCO handbooks, and platform trust-and-safety teams—though in bureaucratic circulation it was frequently flattened into a three-word glossary, stripping out its sociological sections on ritual sharing and institutional trust.

Central European Lineage

We found no documented link between this concept and the intellectual history or historical experience of Central Europe.

Why Now

Since 2018, Wardle and Derakhshan's taxonomy has become the standard operating vocabulary of democratic governance and platform regulation. The European Democracy Action Plan (2020) and the EU's Digital Services Act (enforced for very large online platforms from 2023) rely directly on its distinction between illegal content, intentional disinformation, and unwitting misinformation. The COVID-19 pandemic and the “infodemic” declared by the WHO in February 2020 exposed how thin the boundary between categories can be in real time: a physician repeating outdated clinical guidance (misinformation) circulated alongside commercial networks peddling toxic miracle cures (disinformation). Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the category of mal-information gained urgent strategic weight across Eastern and Central Europe: doxing, selective leaks, and publishing genuine personal data of soldiers, aid volunteers, or refugees became weapons of war against which traditional truth-checking is powerless. Meanwhile, the explosion of generative AI since 2023 has driven the marginal cost of the production phase near zero, while the global election year of 2024 sharpened a methodological debate over whether the true bottleneck lies in synthetic supply or in audience demand and elite amplification.

Explanatory Power

The framework's primary diagnostic achievement is breaking the monolithic panic over “online lies” into structurally distinct problems requiring different interventions. First, by separating intent from falsity, it shows why a state-sponsored influence operation designed by a professional agency (creation and production) but amplified by ordinary citizens in private WhatsApp or Messenger groups (distribution) cannot be solved by punishing end users as liars. Second, the concept of mal-information accounts for high-impact political operations in which not a single document is forged—such as the 2016 DNC email leaks or the 2017 MacronLeaks dump forty-eight hours before the French presidential runoff, where genuine private files were weaponized through timing and framing (and where Macron's team famously countered by seeding false files among genuine ones to slow verification). Third, tracking the three lifecycle phases shows how content mutates ownership over time: a satirical meme stripped of its original frame becomes misinformation in a family group chat, and is then harvested by a political operative as disinformation—demonstrating why counting “fake news URLs” without mapping the chain of agents and interpreters misses how manipulation actually works.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The least read—and most subversive—chapter of Wardle and Derakhshan's report is its discussion of the interpreter and ritual communication. Drawing on James Carey's distinction between the “transmission view” of communication (sending data packets across space) and the “ritual view” (performing shared beliefs to maintain a community in time), the authors point out that sharing a dubious headline on social media is rarely a failed attempt at amateur journalism; it is a Durkheimian ritual of solidarity saying “look who our enemies are.” This insight quietly undercuts much of the multi-million-dollar fact-checking industry that adopted the report's vocabulary: if a user shares a post to perform tribal belonging, replying with a literal factual correction addresses the transmission layer while leaving the ritual layer untouched—or worse, turns the correction itself into a badge of establishment hostility. Equally neglected is the report's warning about the collapse of local newspapers: where local civic reporting vanishes, communities lose the everyday institutional tether of shared factual reality, leaving a vacuum that national partisan narratives effortlessly fill.