Disinformation

The English word is a calque of the Russian dezinformatsiya, the name of a Soviet intelligence practice, and came into general use in the second half of the twentieth century as that practice was described in the West. The classic case is Operation INFEKTION, the 1980s campaign that planted and then amplified the claim that the AIDS virus had been engineered in a United States laboratory; it began in an Indian newspaper and reached dozens of countries before it was publicly traced to the KGB.

In the taxonomy that Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan proposed in 2017 and that most researchers now use, disinformation sits at the corner where content is false and the intent is to harm. Its neighbors are misinformation, false content spread without that intent, and malinformation, true content used to harm. The taxonomy is about the message and the sender. It says nothing about the techniques by which the message is made persuasive, which is where this site comes in.

Disinformation is a favored instrument of propaganda, not a synonym for it. A campaign may run on fabricated documents (Leak And Plant), on Spoofed Outlets, or on a Big Lie; it may equally run on true facts arranged to mislead (Cherry Picking, Half Truth) or on emotional appeals that assert nothing. Treating disinformation as the whole problem leads to fact-checking as the whole answer, and fact-checking does not touch the second kind.