Disinformation is false information deliberately and often covertly spread in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.
Deliberateness is what separates it from its two neighbors. 📝misinformation is false and circulated innocently; disinformation is false and circulated on purpose; 📝malinformation is factually accurate but stripped of context and timed to damage. Only disinformation requires a knowing actor, which is why it is identified by campaign rather than by claim — the unit of analysis is the operation, not the sentence. Camille François's "ABC" framework formalizes exactly that, asking after manipulative Actors, deceptive Behaviors, and harmful Content, on the reasoning that an operation can be recognized by who runs it and how it behaves even when the individual posts are technically accurate.
The word entered English in 1955 from Russian dezinformatsiya, a Soviet term of art for planting false material in a foreign press, and it kept the flavor of statecraft: intelligence services, military deception, and now commercial and domestic political operations. Effective campaigns rarely traffic in pure fabrication. They blend falsehoods with verifiable truths, half-truths, and value judgments, exploit existing identity conflicts so that the audience performs the amplification, and operate through 📝astroturfing, 📝clickbait, conspiracy narratives, and coordinated inauthentic accounts across 📝Social Media.
📝Propaganda is the parent category — communication engineered to advance an agenda, not necessarily false and not necessarily concealed. Disinformation is the branch of it that depends on both falsehood and, usually, on the audience not knowing where the message came from. Generative synthesis of audio and video, treated at length in 📝Post-Truth Era, lowers the production cost of the first without changing the logic of the second.