Public concern about ‘fake news’ skyrocketed following the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum, and has only intensified since then. A burgeoning body of research on the topic is emerging, and conceptual clarity is vital for this research to converge into a cumulative body of knowledge; the purpose of this article is to underline and address some of the conceptual clutter and ambiguities around the concept of fake news and situate it within its social context. To do so, we first discuss the problems with current terminology and conceptualisation, and then draw on recent developments on the ontology of digital objects and their attributes to shift the focus from fake news to false messages, a type of syntactic digital objects comprised of content and structure and characterised by attributes of editability, openness, interactivity, and distributedness. Then we expand this concept further by placing it within a network of actors and digital objects. Our analysis uncovers several areas of research that have been overlooked in the study of fake news.

在 2016 年美国总统大选和英国脱欧公投之后，公众对“假新闻”的担忧猛增，此后愈演愈烈。关于该主题的新兴研究机构正在出现，概念清晰度对于这项研究汇聚成一个累积的知识体系至关重要；本文的目的是强调和解决围绕假新闻概念的一些概念混乱和歧义，并将其置于其社会背景中。为此，我们首先讨论当前术语和概念化的问题，然后利用数字对象本体及其属性的最新发展将焦点从假新闻转移到虚假消息，一种由内容组成的句法数字对象和结构，具有可编辑性、开放性、交互性和分布式。然后我们通过将其放置在演员和数字对象的网络中来进一步扩展这个概念。我们的分析揭示了在假新闻研究中被忽视的几个研究领域。