Factiva Research

Factiva Research

In February 2020, the author searched the Dow Jones Factiva database of 33,000 global media sources for the words “troll” and “trolling” — and received 65,000 results going back to the early 1970s. This empirical research, combined with the word-origins route through Indo-European languages and the contemporary culture route through Silicon Valley, converged on the foundational definition: “Emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.”

The Three Routes to the Definition

In February 2020 I started to look at the use of the terms “troll” and “trolling” in contemporary culture. So I read through sixty-thousand media articles with those terms in the Dow Jones Factiva database of thirty-three-thousand sources going back to the early 1970s.

I went down the Word Origins’ route, too. This brought me through the first written texts in Indian culture back across ancient Persia to eastern Ukraine where the first Indo-European language was spoken.

The third route that led me to this Common Denominator definition (“Emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.”) was from contemporary culture. This led me from Trolls films and dolls, early northern Californian computer culture, through Scandinavian folklore, legal texts (Yeph! There’s even references to trolls in Icelandic legal texts!) and back through all the Indo-European literary and religious traditions.

Source: Disinfolklore (5)

The Factiva data showed how the word “troll” had undergone rapid semantic expansion: from Scandinavian folklore creature, to internet pest, to political manipulator, to state-sponsored weapon. The word-origins route revealed that the “TR” element in “troll” and “trolling” is about movement — the same root as travel, trans, transition, transcend.

The Folklore Folder

Because I had this folder, this ‘folklore’ folder on my computer which I established, I think, in April 2020, where I started putting in stuff about trolls and about trolls as folkloric trolls. Then all of the work which I was doing, looking at trolls and trolling, which I talked about two episodes ago when I went through the Factiva series. Dow Jones Factiva database for 45,000 or something media sources globally and I got back to my query 65,000 returns.

Source: Podcast: Disinfolklore in Executive Orders

The Factiva research was one tributary of a larger investigation. The author maintained a “folklore folder” from April 2020, collecting observations about trolls as folkloric entities. The Factiva search validated what the bridge experience had already suggested: that “trolling” in all its modern senses retained its ancient folkloric structure.

Disinformation vs Disinfolklore: The Factiva Evidence

“Disinformation” is a relatively new signifier. Uses of the word “Disinformation” in DowJones Factiva database of 33,000 sources in the global media number over 300 only as the twenty-first century begins. In 2014 the number of times the term is used breaks 400 for the first time.

Source: Disinfolklore (3)

The Factiva data also showed that “disinformation” was a relatively recent addition to public vocabulary, spiking only after 2014 — the year Russia invaded eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, “propaganda” had 600,000+ mentions going back to 1969. This gap between the phenomenon (ancient) and the vocabulary (recent) is precisely what the concept of Disinfolklore fills: it names the ancient practice that “disinformation” and “misinformation” only partially describe.

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