Techno, Social, Techno-Social: Examining Information Disorder Literature using Deductive Qualtitative Analysis and Flexible Pattern Matching

Over the last ten years, the broad field examining information disorder has generated a plethora of research by leveraging the strengths of its interdisciplinary nature. However, interdisciplinary fields also experience challenges including competing and incompatible theoretical orientations. This study uses two dominant orientations in the field that take technological (i.e., Shannon-Weaver model) or social (i.e., pragmatics) approaches to deception as guiding theories to inform theoretical codes for a deductive qualitative analysis and pattern matching approach. The thematic codes are applied to a systematic interdisciplinary sample of information disorder studies articles from 2010-2021 identified by Broda and Strömbäck’s meta-synthesis. The findings indicate that a significant proportion of the sample is moving towards an integrated consideration of intentional and unintentional deception by including both technological and social components. Specifically, techno-centric approaches are moving towards including contexts of message providers or receivers in their models. These combined approaches that consider both context of individuals and technological components of message transmission do not adhere to either of the theoretical perspectives examined. Future research should formally integrate the competing assumptions in technological and social models of information disorder to better align with the literature. These methods contribute to the assessment and refinement of the dominant approaches to information disorder as well as identifying gaps for future research. Specifically, there are many ways the sample operationalizes each model component. There is not a “correct” way to measure each component but future research is needed to assess if each operationalization is measuring the same construct. Further, there are model components that are underrepresented in the sample (i.e., neurocognitive and eco-temporal context) and should be addressed by future research.