# Misinformation False or misleading information that is spread without explicit intent to deceive — the spreader may sincerely believe what they are passing along, may be confused, may be repeating something they heard from someone they trusted, or may be unaware of the actual evidentiary status of the claim. The term sits inside the now-standard *information disorder* taxonomy alongside [[Disinformation]] (false information spread *with* intent to deceive) and *malinformation* (true information spread out of context to cause harm). The three-way distinction was developed by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan in the 2017 Council of Europe *Information Disorder* report and has become the lingua franca of the post-2016 academic disinformation-studies field. ## The taxonomy The Wardle / Derakhshan framework partitions the universe of problematic information by two axes — true vs. false, and intent-to-harm vs. not — producing three named categories (the fourth cell, true-information-without-harm-intent, is just *information*): | | **False content** | **True content** | |---|---|---| | **No harm intent** | **Misinformation** | (ordinary information) | | **Harm intent** | **Disinformation** | **Malinformation** | The distinction matters because the appropriate response differs: - **Misinformation** — corrections, education, source-evaluation training, fact-checking. The spreader is in good faith and may update on accurate information - **Disinformation** — the spreader is not in good faith; corrections to the spreader are largely useless, and the focus shifts to *the audience* (inoculation, prebunking) and *the infrastructure* (platform moderation, takedown, deplatforming, legal accountability) - **Malinformation** — context restoration; the underlying fact may be accurate, but the *framing* or *omission* is the harm. Doxxing is the canonical malinformation case — the published information is often technically true; the harm is in publication The taxonomy's primary analytical contribution is to *decouple the question of what is true* from *the question of what is happening*, allowing analysts to discuss the structure of an information operation without first having to settle the truth of every constituent claim. ## Examples of misinformation that is *not* disinformation The category gets its analytical work done largely by what it *excludes*: - **Honest mistakes by journalists** — the standard correction-and-erratum cycle handles these; not disinformation - **Outdated information** — old facts that were once accurate but are no longer current - **Sincere conspiracy-theory belief** — most rank-and-file QAnon, anti-vax, or election-denier participants are sincerely-believing repeaters; the *originators* and *amplifiers* are doing disinformation, but the individual sharers are doing misinformation - **Rumor and pre-confirmation reporting** during fast-moving events — Twitter posts during active shooter situations, hurricane landfall, etc., often misstate facts that are still being established - **Memory error and reconstruction** — political news consumers who report having seen things they didn't or attribute statements to the wrong source - **Translation and decontextualization errors** — cross-cultural and cross-language information transmission frequently introduces unintended distortion The category is *operationally important* because most platform content-moderation that targets "false information" cannot reliably distinguish between sincere misinformation and deliberate disinformation in individual posts. Conflating the two leads to over-broad takedowns that catch sincere users alongside bad actors. ## The intent-detection problem The conceptual weakness of the mis/dis distinction is that *intent is hard to verify*. From outside an operation, a sincere believer who repeats a false claim and a deliberate operator who repeats the same claim are observationally identical. The distinction matters analytically but is empirically elusive for any individual post. The methodological work-around used by most contemporary research is to focus on *coordination patterns*: an account that posts in coordinated time-windows with a stable of other accounts on a narrow set of topics is far more likely to be doing disinformation than an account showing organic posting patterns. The *coordinated inauthentic behavior* (CIB) framework adopted by Facebook in 2018 is an operationalization of this approach — focusing on detectable *behavioral* signatures rather than on the unknowable interior state of any individual poster. ## The right-wing rebrand attempt Following the post-2016 mainstream adoption of the misinformation / disinformation vocabulary, an organized right-wing rhetorical project has worked to delegitimize the terms themselves — particularly around 2022–2024, framing academic disinformation research as a "Censorship Industrial Complex" (Michael Shellenberger / [[Matt Taibbi]] / *[[Twitter Files]]* framing) and the misinformation/disinformation distinction as ideologically-loaded. The campaign has produced: - [[House Judiciary Committee]] subpoenas to [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] and other research groups (2023–2024) - Federal civil suits (*Missouri v. Biden*, *Murthy v. Missouri*) challenging government-platform coordination on misinformation flagging - The June 2024 Supreme Court *Murthy* ruling (limited standing analysis; substantive issues left open) - Substantial defunding and staffing cuts to academic disinformation-research programs (Stanford Internet Observatory wound down in 2024) - Significant withdrawal of major-platform cooperation with disinformation-research community The structural effect: the analytical vocabulary remains in academic use, but the *infrastructure* of disinformation research and platform-research cooperation has been substantially weakened heading into the 2026 midterm cycle. ## See Also - [[Disinformation]] — the *intent-to-deceive* sibling category - [[Information Disorder]] — the umbrella concept - [[Claire Wardle]] — co-architect of the framework - [[Disinformation Hub]] — Subject hub - [[Prebunking]] — the audience-side inoculation strategy - [[Fake News]] — the rebranded press-attack term that misinformation-researchers shifted away from - [[Disinformation Lexicon]] — alphabetical MOC