Misinformation, disinformation, malinformation

The three definitions

Misinformation is false, and the person sharing it does not know that. Your aunt posts a health claim she believes. A local news account repeats a number it did not check. There is no plan and no malice. Most of what you see is this.

Disinformation is false, and the person creating it knows. It is manufactured to achieve something: money, votes, division, a stock price. Disinformation almost always ends up being spread by people who think they are sharing misinformation-free truth, which is the point of it.

Malinformation is true, and deployed to cause harm. A real leaked document released at a chosen moment. A genuine private photograph published to humiliate. Real facts about someone's past surfaced to derail them. Nothing here is false, so fact-checking finds nothing wrong, and that is exactly why it works.

The three are often grouped as MDM. The grouping matters because a response that fits one fits the others badly. You correct misinformation. You expose and starve disinformation. Malinformation cannot be corrected at all, because it is true; the only useful questions are who benefits from the timing and what context is missing.

Why intent is hard to establish and why you mostly should not try

Telling misinformation from disinformation requires knowing what was in someone's head. You usually cannot know that, and guessing wrong is costly in both directions: accusing a confused neighbour of running an operation, or treating a coordinated campaign as an innocent mistake.

So the practical move is to stop trying to read minds and look at structure instead. Coordinated activity leaves marks that sincerity does not: many accounts posting near-identical wording in a short window, accounts created recently, content engineered to be reshared rather than read, a claim that appears fully formed with no traceable origin.

The claim itself gets checked the same way regardless of intent. The four moves do not care why something is wrong.

Propaganda is a method, not a category of falsehood

Propaganda is often assumed to mean lies. It does not. Propaganda is communication designed to move an audience toward a predetermined conclusion, and the most effective propaganda is factually accurate. It selects, it frames, it repeats, and it omits.

That is why arguing about whether a piece of propaganda is true usually goes nowhere. The individual claims survive checking. What has been done is the arrangement: which facts lead, which are absent, whose reaction is quoted, what emotional register the whole thing sits in.

The useful questions are different from fact-checking questions. What is this trying to make me do? What would I need to know that I have not been given? Who chose this arrangement, and what do they get if it works?

Where the categories overlap in practice

A single viral post can be all three at once. Someone fabricates a claim about a local election (disinformation). Thousands of people share it sincerely (misinformation). Buried inside is a genuine document, released deliberately at that moment to make the fabrication more plausible (malinformation).

This is the normal case, not an unusual one. Treating a post as belonging to exactly one category is the mistake. Ask what is verifiably false, what is true but arranged, and what is missing, and you will have described it more accurately than any single label does.

What the research says about how it travels

Two findings are worth carrying around. First, engagement is not evidence: content optimized to be shared spreads further than content optimized to be right, because the feed ranks by predicted engagement and outrage engages. Second, the people spreading falsehood are usually ordinary and sincere, which means shaming them does not work and giving them a method does.

The Stanford History Education Group gave six evaluation tasks to 3,446 students in 16 school districts across 14 states, fielded between June 2018 and May 2019. More than 96 percent failed to consider that fossil fuel industry funding might affect the credibility of a climate website. That is not a failure of intelligence or of good faith. It is a missing habit.