Picture this. Your aunt shares a post saying a politician secretly signed a law banning something everyone loves. It’s false. She believed it, felt angry, and hit share before dinner. Meanwhile, the person who first wrote that post knew it was false and wrote it to make people angry.
Same post. Same lie. But those two people are doing very different things, and that difference is what this whole series is about.
Three words that get mixed up
People throw “fake news,” “misinformation” and “disinformation” around as if they were interchangeable. Researchers don’t, and once you see why, a lot of political arguments online start to make more sense.
The most widely used framework comes from Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, who laid it out in a 2017 report for the Council of Europe. They split the problem into three parts, based on two questions: Is it false? and Is someone trying to cause harm?
Misinformation is false, but the person sharing it doesn’t know that. They think they’re helping. Your aunt is the textbook case.
Disinformation is false, and the person spreading it knows. It’s deliberate. Someone made it up, or twisted something real, to push people toward a belief, a vote, or a feeling.
Malinformation is the odd one out, because it’s true. The harm comes from how it’s used: leaking someone’s private messages, publishing a home address, or pulling a real quote out of context so it means the opposite. The facts are real. The intent isn’t friendly.
Intent is the hard part
Here’s where it gets messy. You can usually check whether something is false. Checking whether someone meant to deceive is much harder. You can’t open up their head.
And one piece of content often changes categories as it travels. A good example is the story that the US government invented HIV as a bioweapon. It started in the 1980s as a Soviet-backed campaign, planted first in a small Indian newspaper and then pushed through media in the Eastern bloc. That’s disinformation, a deliberate operation. But over the years, plenty of ordinary people who heard it believed it and repeated it sincerely. That’s misinformation. The lie got a handoff from people who knew to people who didn’t.
This is how it usually works. Professionals plant it, and everyday people carry it much further than the professionals ever could.
The best lies have something true in them
When people picture disinformation, they imagine outright fabrications, like a completely invented story or a fake photo. Those exist, but they’re often the clumsy kind.
The more effective version starts with something real: a true event, a real statistic, an actual quote. Then it adds a twist. An old photo gets a new caption. A real number gets compared to the wrong thing. A true scandal gets blown up into a bigger one that never happened.
That’s why “just check if it’s true” is harder advice to follow than it sounds. A claim can be 80% accurate and still built to mislead you.
What disinformation is not
It’s worth drawing a few lines, because the word gets stretched until it means “anything I disagree with.”
- Opinion isn’t disinformation. You can think a policy is terrible without that being a false claim.
- Spin isn’t automatically disinformation. Every campaign frames things in its own favor. That’s old politics, and it’s different from inventing facts.
- Honest mistakes aren’t disinformation. News outlets get things wrong and publish corrections. That’s an error, not a campaign.
- Satire isn’t disinformation. Though people do sometimes mistake it for real news, and that’s a separate headache.
When we blur these together, the word loses its meaning, and real operations get harder to talk about.
Why politics, specifically?
Disinformation exists everywhere, in health, finance and celebrity gossip. But politics has the strongest incentives. Power, money and national interest are all at stake, and a belief changed at the right moment can swing an election or turn a crowd. Add the fact that people already feel strongly about political topics, and you’ve got the perfect conditions: emotional, urgent, and easy to share without a second thought.
Why the labels matter
You might be thinking this is just academic hair-splitting. It isn’t, because the right response depends on which one you’re dealing with.
If it’s misinformation, the person usually needs a correction, ideally from someone they trust and in a way that doesn’t humiliate them. If it’s disinformation, correcting individuals won’t stop it. You have to look at who’s behind it, how it’s spreading, and what platforms are allowing. If it’s malinformation, fact-checking is useless, because the facts are fine. That’s a question of privacy, ethics and sometimes law.
Treat your aunt like a foreign propaganda unit and you’ll lose her. Treat a propaganda unit like a confused aunt and you’ll lose the fight.
What’s coming next
Now that we’ve got the vocabulary, the next piece in this series looks at where all this came from. Political propaganda is far older than the internet, and a lot of today’s tricks are just old ones with better delivery.