Conspiracy, Misinformation, AND THE Infodemic

Recent years have been ones of overlapping crises. Some have been global in nature and others more local—the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, immigration, election security, policing, racism, book bans, and revisionist educational standards, just to name a few. All these crises are to some degree a manifestation of an underlying crisis in communication. This “infodemic” has been defined by the World Health Organization as “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments.”

Particularly during a health crisis, misinformation or disinformation can compromise evidence-based public health responses with lasting deleterious effects. “Fake news” and other forms of media manipulation have been around for decades, even centuries, but the rapid proliferation of and easy access to new technologies have led to unprecedented information overload and accompanying cognitive vulnerabilities. Every academic discipline today faces challenges from segments of the general population skeptical of traditionally authoritative sources of information.

From 2021 to 2023, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Center for Advanced Study and the Office of the Provost led an initiative called “Conspiracy, Misinformation, and the Infodemic,” hosting experts from campus and around the country for public conversations on these topics to investigate the history of rumor, propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories; their impacts on human behavior and public policy-making; and the role of institutions of higher education to halt, mitigate, or circumvent their corrosive effects on the health and safety of the public.

Twenty speakers explored these topics over the course of the initiative, with an emphasis on the history of misinformation and its impact on civic life and politics, the news media, and scientific research. This document surfaces speakers’ key insights, highlights arguments and trends that are central to the current state of misinformation research, and provides the context for the initiative’s future work and areas for possible further inquiry.