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

2026-02-25

AI Summary

This study traces the semantic evolution of the concept of “misinformation” in academic literature from 2011 to 2023, revealing its transformation from psychological research on false memory to the contemporary paradigm of social media–driven disinformation. Through bibliometric and historical discourse analysis, the paper establishes—for the first time—a systematic scholarly genealogy linking current misinformation studies to the false memory theories that emerged during the 1980s “Satanic Panic,” thereby challenging dominant narratives in the field. The findings indicate that after 2016, the domain significantly inherited theoretical frameworks from this earlier period and caution that a comparable episode of sociocognitive panic may reemerge around 2026.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Influence propagation, information diffusion, and the prediction on networks
• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

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.

Problem

• misinformation
• false memories
• Satanic panic
• fake news
• academic literature

Innovation

• misinformation
• false memory
• Satanic panic
• academic lineage
• social media