Vaccination

10 insights to reduce vaccine hesitancy on social media

Effective population level vaccination campaigns are fundamental to public health. Countercampaigns, which are as old as the first vaccines, can disrupt uptake and threaten public health globally.

Health

Misinformation continues to harm LGBTQ people

In an Editor's Statement on the importance of access to gender affirming care for our nation's youth, Transgender Health Editor-in-Chief Robert Garofalo, MD, MPH states, "LGBTQ youth need love, support, and acceptance, not ...

Obstetrics & gynaecology

New research describes troubling abortion infodemic

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision which guaranteed the right to access abortion services. Immediately following this decision, there was an outpouring of misinformation about abortion ...

Health informatics

ChatGPT flunks self-assessment test for urologists

At a time of growing interest in the potential role of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in medicine and healthcare, a new study reported in Urology Practice finds that the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot performs poorly ...

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Misinformation

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread unintentionally. It is distinguished from disinformation by motive in that misinformation is simply erroneous, while disinformation, in contrast, is intended to mislead.

Adam Makkai proposes the distinction between misinformation and disinformation to be a defining characteristic of idioms in the English language. An utterance is only idiomatic if it involves disinformation, where the listener can decode the utterance in a logical, and lexically correct, yet erroneous way. Where the listener simply decodes the lexemes incorrectly, the utterance is simply misinformation, and not idiomatic.

Damian Thompson defines counterknowledge as "misinformation packaged to look like fact." Using the definition above, this may refer to disinformation, as the motive is deliberate and often pecuniary.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA