User:21st Century Schizoid Cat/Misinformation

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History
Early examples include the insults and smears spread among political rivals in Imperial and Renaissance Italy in the form of "pasquinades." These are anonymous and witty verses named for the Pasquino piazza and "talking statue" in Rome. In pre-revolutionary France, "canards", or printed broadsides, sometimes included an engraving to convince readers to take them seriously.

According to writers Renée DiResta and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, in 1588, false news of the victory of the Spanish Armada over the English (which had been expected) spread throughout Europe, and news of the actual English victory came many days later. The first recorded large-scale disinformation campaign was the "Great Moon Hoax," published in 1835 in the New York Sun, in which a series of articles claimed to describe life on the Moon, "complete with illustrations of humanoid bat-creatures and bearded blue unicorns". The challenges of mass-producing news on a short deadline can lead to factual errors and mistakes. An example of such is the Chicago Tribune's infamous 1948 headline "Dewey Defeats Truman".

The advent of the Internet has changed traditional ways that misinformation spreads '''. During the 2016 United States presidential election, is was seen that content from websites deemed 'untrustworthy' were reaching up to 40% of Americans, despite misinformation making up only 6% of overall news media. Later during the COVID-19 pandemic, both intentional and unintentional misinformation combined with a general lack of literacy regarding health science and medicine was proliferated, creating further misinformation. What makes those susceptable to misinformation is still debated, however .'''