I dunno about that. Thought experiment:

The Earth is a flat disc.

Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?

To be sure it's a vague term applied quite continuously online but simply deflecting it as actually meaning "wrongthink" is disingenuous. There's a lot of misinformation being spread specifically about objective measurable facts. It is simultaneously true that a lot of opinions are being mislabeled as misinformation.

The firehose of falsehoods relies on this.

The liar can produce 10 lies and demands you disprove them or they are somehow true. The burden of the liar proving their reasoning is missing.

The goal is that their opinion and your fact be treated with equal weight or the opinion has greater weight simply because they can produce more "opinions" more often than you can facts.

Yes, this. John Green mentioned in his vlog several months ago that he was not going to be answering antivax objections anymore because doing so was becoming a fulltime job and he has other work to do. This is the burden that deliberate misinformation is trying to impose: flood the zone with factual-seeming counter information, provide "data" (generally cherry-picked or out of context) to back it up and demand that it must be addressed. This is the antivax playbook. At it's worst flooding the zone with misinformation is designed to cause the populace to tire of the debate and give up trying to determine what the actual truth is.

> flood the zone with factual-seeming counter information, provide "data" (generally cherry-picked or out of context) to back it up and demand that it must be addressed.

This is also referred to as Gish Gallop and relies heavily on the bullshit asymmetry principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

"named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution."

Interesting that there seems to be a lot of overlap between creationists and antivaxers. Creationists seem to buy into a sort of conspiratorial view of science where they claim that their "creation scientists" are purposely ignored by mainstream science which is in the grip of some kind of delusion so that they can't comprehend that creationism is the way or are in fact actively trying to subvert the idea that creationism is actually true. Extrapolate to vaccines and they easily believe that there's some kind of alternative science that hasn't been corrupted, but isn't widely known. Similar overlaps for denying climate change.

> The Earth is a flat disc.

> Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?

Neither. It is an assertion based on a frame of reference. The mapping systems used on my phone don't often describe geographic topography and so assert a flatness to the surface of this planet. Likewise this planet viewed from its moon would have the visual appearance of a disk. Is "The Earth is a flat disc" a helpful explanation for operating in the world? Not if you are a rocket scientist but it isn't a terrible model if you live an entire life within the vicinity of your family farm.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful”. George E. P. Box

https://www.lacan.upc.edu/admoreWeb/2018/05/all-models-are-w...

I find that most complaints about 'misinformation' are rooted in ideological conformity rather than truth. Like most buzzwords, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or have an objective definition, but it does mean you should closely examine the motivations of those who are loudest about it.

> The Earth is a flat disc.

> Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?

You missed the fourth option: it's neither. No-one would call it misinformation or wrongthink; rather it's false, or a lie if you're feeling judgemental. I think the person you replied to has made a good point.

What if I show you a heavily biased paper in a quack journal with impressive-looking graphs that shows the earth is a flat disc? Is this misinformation?

Most people will not have the experience to discern things like p-hacking and massaged numbers. Having experts call these things out as misinformation seems quite useful to me.

> What if I show you a heavily biased paper in a quack journal with impressive-looking graphs that shows the earth is a flat disc? Is this misinformation?

Maybe. I've not heard people calling "misinformation" in cases like that though.

Noise?