Misinformation

The word is older than its current prominence and simply meant wrong information. The 2017 taxonomy of Wardle and Derakhshan gave it a precise place: content that is false, spread by someone who does not know it is false or does not mean harm by it. The same false claim is disinformation in the mouth of the person who invented it and misinformation in the mouths of the thousand people who passed it on believing it.

That hand-off is the normal life cycle of a propaganda claim, and it is why the distinction matters in practice. A campaign needs only a few deliberate sources; the rest of the work is done by sincere people. Techniques such as Bot Amplification and Sock Puppets exist to get a claim across the gap from the few to the many, after which it travels on its own.

Misinformation is not propaganda in itself. A mistaken statistic in a newspaper is an error, not a technique. It becomes relevant to this site when someone adopts it into a campaign, or when a technique such as Firehose Of Falsehood relies on the audience's inability to tell honest error from deliberate falsehood at volume.

Compare disinformation and malinformation.