In practice, it is far, far more common for bad actors to run the pump and dump than to short and issue fake news. The latter is rare enough that we don't have a word for it. The former is common enough to be called "pump and dump". There's a good reason why shorting is not a common scam technique: your gains are capped at 100% and your risk is unlimited. On the long side, it's the opposite. A pump-and-dump has unlimited upside and the you can only lose 100%.

The short version is called short and distort. I'd like to see stats on which is more common.

I was an investment professional from 2001 to 2009 and I never heard anyone say "short and distort".

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22pump+and+du...

"Ngram not found: short and distort"

Perhaps it's a newer term. Now "short and distort" is around, for instance prominently as section 3 in the wikipedia article on "pump and dump" [0], and investopedia [1] also describe it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortanddistort.asp

It's true that longs and shorts could both benefit from spreading false rumors. But shorts have an expiration date which can cause them to be much more incentivized to drive a rapid price change.