Malinformation is genuine, factually accurate information that is leaked, stripped of its original context, or timed to inflict harm — truth used as a weapon.
The term was coined by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan in Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making, published by the Council of Europe in 2017. It has no Merriam-Webster entry and remains a term of art rather than general vocabulary. The report sorts three cases along two axes, truth and intent: 📝misinformation is false but not meant to harm; 📝disinformation is false and meant to harm; malinformation is true and meant to harm. It is the only member of the triad a fact-check cannot touch, because there is nothing in it to correct.
The recognized forms are doxxing, publication of private correspondence, non-consensual intimate imagery, and authentic but selectively released leaks timed to a news cycle or an election. The harm is produced by the movement — private to public, then to now, whole to excerpt — rather than by the content, so diagnosis rests on demonstrable intent to harm, a privacy violation, or manipulative framing and amplification. None of those are readable from the material itself.
That unreadability is the term's principal liability, and the reason it is the most contested of the three. Critics argue that "true but harmful" has no stable boundary against public-interest journalism, which also publishes accurate material that damages its subjects, and that the label is easily turned on inconvenient reporting. Practitioners tend to answer with process rather than definition: minimal disclosure, context-aware verification, and an explicit public-interest justification recorded before a sensitive truth is published.