NEW YORK — Misinformation, as opposed to disinformation, was chosen Monday as Dictionary.com’s word of the year on the tattered coattails of “toxic,” picked earlier this month for the same honor by Oxford Dictionaries in these tumultuous times.

Jane Solomon, a linguist-in-residence at Dictionary, said in a recent interview that her site’s choice of “mis” over “dis” was deliberate, intended to serve as a “call to action” to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits.

It’s the idea of intent, whether to inadvertently mislead or to do it on purpose, that the Oakland, California-based company wanted to highlight. The company decided it would go high when others have spent much of 2018 going low.

“The rampant spread of misinformation is really providing new challenges for navigating life in 2018,” Solomon told The Associated Press ahead of the word of the year announcement. “Misinformation has been around for a long time, but over the last decade or so the rise of social media has really, really changed how information is shared. We believe that understanding the concept of misinformation is vital to identifying misinformation as we encounter it in the wild, and that could ultimately help curb its impact.”

In studying lookups on the site that trended this year, Dictionary noticed “our relationship with truth is something that came up again and again,” she said.

For example, the word “mainstream” popped up a lot, spiking in January as the term “mainstream media,” or MSM, grew to gargantuan proportions, wielded as an insult by some on the political right. Other words swirling around the same problem included a lookup surge in February for “white lie” after Hope Hicks, then White House communications director, admitted to telling a few for President Donald Trump.

The word “Orwellian” surfaced in heavy lookups in May, after a statement attributed to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the Chinese government of “Orwellian nonsense” in trying to impose its views on American citizens and private companies when it declared that United Airlines, American Airlines and other foreign carriers should refer to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as part of China in public-facing materials, such as their websites.

Misinformation, Solomon said, “frames what we’ve all been through in the last 12 months.” In that vein, the site with 90 million monthly users has busied itself adding new word entries for “filter bubble,” ”fake news,” ”post-fact,” ”post-truth” and “homophily,” among others. Other word entries on the site have been freshened to reflect timely new meanings, including “echo chamber.”

The company’s runners-up for the top honor include “representation,” driven by the popularity of the movies “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” along with wins during the U.S. midterm elections for Muslim women, Native Americans and LGBTQ candidates.

But the rise of misinformation, Solomon said, stretches well beyond U.S. borders and Facebook’s role in disseminating fake news and propaganda in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The use of Facebook and other social media to incite violence and conflict was documented around the globe in 2018, she said.

“Hate speech and rumors posted to Facebook facilitated violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, riots started in Sri Lanka after false news set the country’s Buddhist majority against Muslims, and false rumors about child kidnappers on WhatsApp led to mob violence in India,” Solomon said.

Is disinformation or misinformation at play in terms of the year’s most prominent conspiracy theories? Solomon noted proliferation on social media over students in the Parkland school shooting being crisis actors instead of victims of violence, and over a group of migrants from Honduras who are making their way north being funded by “rich liberals.”

Elsewhere in the culture, countless podcasts and videos have spread the absurd notion of a global cover-up that the Earth is flat rather than round. The idea of “misinfodemics” has surfaced in the last several years to identify the anti-vaccination movement and other beliefs that lead to real-world health crises, Solomon said.

There are distinctions between misinformation and disinformation to be emphasized.

“Disinformation would have also been a really, really interesting word of the year this year, but our choice of misinformation was very intentional,” she said. “Disinformation is a word that kind of looks externally to examine the behavior of others. It’s sort of like pointing at behavior and saying, ‘THIS is disinformation.’ With misinformation, there is still some of that pointing, but also it can look more internally to help us evaluate our own behavior, which is really, really important in the fight against misinformation. It’s a word of self-reflection, and in that it can be a call to action. You can still be a good person with no nefarious agenda and still spread misinformation.”

She pointed to “Poe’s law” in slicing and dicing “misinfo” and “disinfo.” The term, dating to 2005, has become an internet shorthand to sum up how easy it is to spread satire as truth online when an author’s intent isn’t clearly indicated.

The phrase is based on a comment one Nathan Poe posted on a Christian forum during a discussion over creationism, in which he commented: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly (sic) impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone (italics used) won’t mistake for the genuine article.”

Dictionary.com chose “complicit” as last year’s word of the year. In 2016, it was “xenophobia.”

Story: Leanne Italie

TIJUANA, Mexico — Mexico pledged to shore up security near its border with the United States and local authorities said that 39 migrants were arrested after a peaceful march devolved into chaos when U.S. agents fired tear gas into Mexico to stop some migrants who tried to breach the border.

Mexico’s Interior Ministry said Sunday it would immediately deport those who tried to “violently” enter the U.S. from Tijuana. Meanwhile, Tijuana’s municipal government said that more than three-dozen migrants were arrested for disturbing the peace and other charges stemming from the march and what followed.

The vast majority of the more than 5,000 Central American migrants camped out for more than a week at a sports complex in Tijuana returned to their makeshift shelter to line up for food and recuperate from an unsettling afternoon.

Lurbin Sarmiento, 26, of Copan, Honduras walked back to the sports complex with her 4-year-old daughter shaken from what had unfolded a short time earlier at the Tijuana River and U.S. border.

She had been at the bottom of the river — a concrete riverbed conveying a trickle of water — near the border with her daughter when U.S. agents fired tear gas.

“We ran, but the smoke always reached us and my daughter was choking,” Sarmiento said. She said she never would have gotten that close with her daughter if she thought there would be gas.

The gas reached hundreds of migrants protesting near the border after some of them attempted to get through the fencing and wire separating the two countries. American authorities shut down the nation’s busiest border crossing at San Ysidro for several hours at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend.

The situation devolved after the group began a peaceful march to appeal for the U.S. to speed processing of asylum claims for Central American migrants marooned in Tijuana.

Mexican police had kept them from walking over a bridge leading to the Mexican port of entry, but the migrants pushed past officers to walk across the Tijuana River below the bridge. More police carrying plastic riot shields were on the other side, but migrants walked along the river to an area where only an earthen levee and concertina wire separated them from U.S. Border Patrol agents.

Some saw an opportunity to breach the crossing.

An Associated Press reporter saw U.S. agents shoot several rounds of tear gas after some migrants attempted to penetrate several points along the border. Mexico’s Milenio TV showed images of migrants climbing over fences and peeling back metal sheeting to enter.

Honduran Ana Zuniga, 23, also said she saw migrants opening a small hole in concertina wire at a gap on the Mexican side of a levee, at which point U.S. agents fired tear gas at them.

Children screamed and coughed. Fumes were carried by the wind toward people who were hundreds of feet away.

“We ran, but when you run the gas asphyxiates you more,” Zuniga told the AP while cradling her 3-year-old daughter Valery in her arms.

As the chaos unfolded, shoppers just yards away on the U.S. side streamed in and out of an outlet mall, which eventually closed.

Throughout the day, U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopters flew overhead, while U.S. agents on foot watched beyond the wire fence in California. The Border Patrol office in San Diego said via Twitter that pedestrian crossings were suspended at the San Ysidro port of entry at both the East and West facilities. All northbound and southbound traffic was halted for several hours. Every day more than 100,000 people enter the U.S. there.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement that U.S. authorities will continue to have a “robust” presence along the Southwest border and that they will prosecute anyone who damages federal property or violates U.S. sovereignty.

“DHS will not tolerate this type of lawlessness and will not hesitate to shut down ports of entry for security and public safety reasons,” she said.

More than 5,000 migrants have been camped in and around a sports complex in Tijuana after making their way through Mexico in recent weeks via caravan. Many hope to apply for asylum in the U.S., but agents at the San Ysidro entry point are processing fewer than 100 asylum petitions a day.

Irineo Mujica, who has accompanied the migrants for weeks as part of the aid group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, said the aim of Sunday’s march toward the U.S. border was to make the migrants’ plight more visible to the governments of Mexico and the U.S.

“We can’t have all these people here,” Mujica told The Associated Press.

Tijuana Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum on Friday declared a humanitarian crisis in his border city of 1.6 million, which he says is struggling to accommodate the crush of migrants.

U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter Sunday to express his displeasure with the caravans in Mexico.

“Would be very SMART if Mexico would stop the Caravans long before they get to our Southern Border, or if originating countries would not let them form (it is a way they get certain people out of their country and dump in U.S. No longer),” he wrote.

Mexico’s Interior Ministry said Sunday the country has sent 11,000 Central Americans back to their countries of origin since Oct. 19, when the first caravan entered the country. It said that 1,906 of those who have returned were members of the recent caravans.

Mexico is on track to send a total of around 100,000 Central Americans back home by the end of this year.

Story: Christopher Sherman