False memories to fake news: The evolution of the term "misinformation" in academic literature

Abstract

Since 2016, the term "misinformation" has become associated with a scientific paradigm that studies, at its core, people making, reading, and sharing false statements, usually on social media, and often warning of the harm to society resulting from the sum of many such events. By tracking the term through the academic literature, with special focus on the years 2011--2023, we connect the post-2016 paradigm with a strand of research dating to the Satanic panic of the 1980s. We argue that post-2016 misinformation research owes more to this intellectual lineage than is generally acknowledged, and we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this connection. We conclude by drawing parallels between the Satanic panic and 2026, and, similarly, between misinformation research then and now.