Disinformation, Misinformation, Malinformation — Useful Distinctions

The phrase 'fake news' entered mainstream political discourse around 2016 and rapidly became a problem — not because the underlying phenomenon it pointed to was unreal, but because the term was imprecise enough to be weaponised by the very people producing the content it was meant to describe. Politicians, media organisations and researchers all used the phrase to mean different things. The resulting confusion made it harder, not easier, to talk clearly about how information environments are manipulated.

In 2017, Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, writing for the Council of Europe, proposed a more rigorous vocabulary. Their report, Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking, introduced a three-part typology that has since become the standard reference in the field (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). First Draft, the journalism support organisation with which Wardle was then affiliated, elaborated the framework in a widely-used 2019 guide (First Draft, 2019).

The three categories are disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. Each is defined not by whether the content is true or false in isolation, but by the combination of two factors: the factual status of the content, and the intent of the person sharing it. This pairing makes the typology analytically useful in ways that simpler terms are not.

Why intent matters — and why it is difficult

Deciding whether a piece of content is false is only half the analytical task. Deciding whether the person who created or shared it knew it was false — and intended to cause harm — is the other half. That second question is far harder to answer, and the difficulty is not merely practical.

Attributing intent requires evidence about what a person knew at the time they acted. The same false story can travel through an information environment in the hands of three different actors: the political operative who invented it (disinformation), the well-meaning relative who forwarded it without checking (misinformation), and the journalist who reported on it as an example of how false stories spread (neither). The content is identical in all three cases. The moral and strategic implications differ entirely.

This matters for how institutions respond. Fact-checking organisations can correct false content regardless of intent. Platform moderation can remove it. But attribution — deciding who is responsible, whether for criminal prosecution, regulatory sanction, or diplomatic consequences — requires establishing intent. The typology helps keep those different questions distinct.

What this topic covers

The following pages examine each category in depth, explore the phenomenon known as 'information laundering', and consider both what the typology illuminates and where its limits lie. By the end, readers will have a practical vocabulary for analysing specific cases of information disorder, rather than reaching for the catch-all phrase that obscures more than it reveals.