{"id":103904,"date":"2026-07-28T04:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T08:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=103904"},"modified":"2026-07-27T12:48:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T16:48:38","slug":"mis-dis-and-malinformation-defined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/28\/mis-dis-and-malinformation-defined\/","title":{"rendered":"Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation defined"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gawain Towler<\/a> kindly provides a pr\u00e9cis of a behind-the-paywall essay discussing misinformation, disinformation and the less-well-known malinformation, as governments on both sides of the Atlantic rush to codify new laws to further restrict the freedom of speech of their citizenry:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The essay examines “malinformation”, a term coined in 2017 and now embedded in official doctrine on both sides of the Atlantic, and I argue that it exists for one purpose, to give the state a category under which accurate speech can be treated as a harm. I start by Channelling Ambrose Beirce’s Devil’s Dictionary<\/em>, with a dictionary entry defining the word as information whose defect is that it is true. Thereafter I proceed to trace its origins, its spread through British and American officialdom, its intellectual kinship with behavioural government, and its practical operation, before closing with a demand for its formal abolition.<\/p>\n

First the taxonomy itself. The doctrine of “information disorder” rests on a triad. Misinformation is false and innocent, disinformation false and deliberate. Both turn on falsity. The third category does not. CISA, the American cybersecurity agency, defines malinformation as based on fact but used out of context to mislead or harm, and the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council calls it the intentional spreading of genuine information with intent to cause harm. The offence, the essay observes, is not lying but telling the truth on purpose. The term’s coiners, Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, applied it narrowly to revenge pornography, miscaptioned photographs and weaponised leaks, and the essay concedes these are real phenomena. But the concept escaped its paddock. Within four years it had migrated from a Council of Europe research paper to the letterhead of a federal agency and thence into British government training materials.<\/p>\n

The British chapter centres on RESIST 2, the Cabinet Office counter-disinformation toolkit issued to government communicators in 2021. The toolkit reproduces the triad, admits the categories are hard to distinguish in practice, and resolves the difficulty by instructing officials to stop asking whether material is true and to focus instead on the harm it can do<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The essay treats those five words as the whole doctrine laid bare, truth demoted from test to complication. From the Cabinet Office the word trickled downward, into Local Government Association guidance, a Stockport Council webpage, even a Met Office blog. The essay notes a telling exception. Ofcom and the Electoral Commission, bodies with statutory exposure and lawyers, avoid the word entirely. Its distribution across the state maps the distribution of accountability. Where courts can reach, the concept hides.<\/p>\n

The American experiment, the essay argues, ran to destruction. CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation team spent the early 2020s flagging content to platforms, much of it neither foreign nor false, drawing a House Judiciary Committee report accusing it of collusion and camouflage. When Missouri and Louisiana sued, the case reached the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri<\/em>, where the government prevailed not on the merits but on standing. The essay relishes the irony of a Justice Department litigating for its own right to withhold context. Britain played a damper version. After Big Brother Watch revealed that the Counter Disinformation Unit had monitored lawful speech by journalists and parliamentarians, the government refused substantive disclosure and renamed the unit National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), in the tradition of Windscale becoming Sellafield.<\/p>\n

The essay then traces the doctrine’s parentage to the habit of mind exemplified by the Nudge Unit. RESIST had different midwives, but both traditions live in the Cabinet Office and both treat the citizen as an object of professional influence. They embraced during Covid, when SPI-B recommended raising the perceived level of personal threat through hard-hitting emotional messaging while the information machinery flagged sceptical commentary, some of it correct. Fear turned up on one wing, information turned down on the other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gawain Towler kindly provides a pr\u00e9cis of a behind-the-paywall essay discussing misinformation, disinformation and the less-well-known malinformation, as governments on both sides of the Atlantic rush to codify new laws to further restrict the freedom of speech of their citizenry: The essay examines “malinformation”, a term coined in 2017 and now embedded in official doctrine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[84,9,10,28,53],"tags":[459,186,58,593],"class_list":["post-103904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-law","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-internet","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-r1S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103907,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103904\/revisions\/103907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}