The Industry
- 1 in 4 Journalists killed in non-conflict zones between 2017 & 2022 were the target of disinformation campaigns, including those run by private PR firms.1
- 48 Number of countries where politicians hired private firms to spread disinformation online in 2021.2
- $10-15 a day Is the wage offered to ‘hired trolls’ in Kenya.3
Distrust In The News5
59% People worldwide who worry about distinguishing fake from real news online.
Concern was highest among some of the countries with elections in 2024:
- UK: 70%
- USA: 72%
- South Africa: 81%
- India: 58%
Laws And Regulations4
- 8 countries have passed anti-mis/disinformation laws (France, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Kenya, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia).
- 13 countries have specialized task forces to tackle the problem of mis/disinformation (including UK, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Oman & Mexico).
- 11 countries have responded to mis/disinformation with criminal investigations, policing and arrests, threats or total internet shutdowns (including Italy, Cameroon, Myanmar, Thailand, Turkey and Saudi Arabia).
Key Terms
Misinformation is false information shared by those who believe it to be true, a term which dates back to the 16th century.
Disinformation is the deliberate dissemination of information known to be false, and came into use in the 1950’s.
Fake news is a heavily politicized and often weaponized term for deliberately fabricated news stories with no verifiable facts or sources. Its earliest known use was actually in the 1890s, but the phrase became notorious during the 2016 US presidential elections, and was named Collins’ ‘word of the year’ in 2017.*
Malinformation is a term coined by academics in 2017 to describe true information or real content which has been deliberately recontextualised to inflict harm (for example, revenge porn).6
Term Usage Over Time
This graph approximates the prevalence of misinformation, disinformation and fake news in English language texts over time, using data from Google Books’ digital corpus.7 Whilst mis- and dis-information have been in use for many decades, their prevalence has spiked since the mid-2010's. At the same time, fake news has sharply risen from relative obscurity and outpaced both terms.

- ‘Story Killers: inside the...’, Forbidden Stories, 14 February 2023, a.nin.tl/StoryKiller
- ‘Social media manipulation..., Oxford Internet Institute, 13 January 2021, a.nin.tl/OII
- Vittoria Elliot, ‘“Disinformation influencers” for hire, only $15 a day’, Rest of World, 2 September 2021, a.nin.tl/TrollWage
- Daniel Funke & Daniela Flamini, ‘A guide to anti-misinformation actions around the world’, a.nin.tl/PoynterGuide
- Nic Newman et al., ‘Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024’, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 17 June 2024, a.nin.tl/DNR24
- Claire Wardle & Hossein Derakhshan, ‘Information Disorder: Toward an..., Council of Europe, 27 September 2017, a.nin.tl/COE17
- Google Ngram Viewer: ‘disinformation, misinformation, fake news’, Google Books, a.nin.tl/NGram (accessed 25 September 2024)