“Fake news” has gone from a hot buzzword popularized during the 2016 presidential campaign to an ever-present phenomenon known more formally as misinformation or disinformation.

Whatever you call it, sowing F.U.D. — fear, uncertainty and doubt — is now a full-time and often lucrative occupation for the malign foreign actors and even ordinary U.S. citizens who try to influence American politics by publishing information they know to be false.

Several of my colleagues here at The New York Times track the trends and shifting tactics of these fraudsters on their daily beats. So I exchanged messages this week with Sheera Frenkel, Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson, all three of whom spend their days swimming in the muck brewed by fake news purveyors here and abroad.

Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:

This is a political newsletter, so let me ask my first question this way: What are you seeing out there that is new during this election cycle, in terms of tactics or topics?

Sheera Frenkel: I’d say it’s the way misinformation has shifted slightly, in that you don’t have the same type of superspreaders on platforms like Twitter and Facebook that you did in the 2020 election cycle. Instead, you have lots of smaller-scale accounts spreading misinformation across a dozen or more platforms. It is more pervasive and more deeply entrenched than in previous elections.

The most popular topics are largely rehashes of what was spread in the 2020 election cycle. There...

Read Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/politics/misinformation-social-media.html