A Critical Review of the anglophone and francophone Disinformation Research

Towards a conceptual history. Part II

Bibliographic Data

ID21762086
AuthorsJayson Harsin (0000-0002-8696-8834, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume49
Pages461-480
Publication date2026-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueQuestions de communication (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1633-5961 • E-ISSN: 2259-8901
PublisherOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/16ec2
OpenAlexW7164849864
LanguageEN
References cited57

Building on Part I’s conceptual history of mis-/disinformation, désinformation, and related French terms—and its finding of substantial definitional flux—Part II examines the epistemological stakes of the ontological assumptions that currently organize anglophone and francophone research. Through a comparative review of recent literatures (including expanded francophone searches across multiple translations and near-synonyms such as fausses informations, fausses nouvelles, and information erronée/inexacte), the article maps (1) the distribution of theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches, (2) keyword clusters that signal what scholars implicitly treat as the phenomenon’s referents, and (3) the media “units” most often analyzed (e.g., posts, images, videos, articles, messages). Across corpora, it identifies a shared “hole”: limited attention to persuasive strategy, performance, and the agency of form in multimodal expression. The paper argues that this gap is not accidental but is encouraged by an infocentric framing that reduces complex communicative acts to “(false) information,” thereby importing transmission models and cognitivist/behaviorist assumptions that flatten meaning, rhetoric, and interpretation. Re-situating current “information disorder” discourse within critical histories of communication theory (from Shannon–Weaver and Lasswell to critiques by Peters and Carey, alongside francophone infocom debates), the article concludes by calling for research that moves beyond “false information” as a master category and instead theorizes how deceptive phenomena are assembled, stylized, and rendered believable in situated media practices

Conceptual history · Critical discourse analysis · Disinformation · French · Obfuscation · Situated · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Misinformation and Its Impacts

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