Please do not normalize the use of a term that is being pushed by the government to justify censoring information they don’t like [1]. I understand that there is such a thing as “true information presented out of context in a manner meant to mislead”, and I even grant that the comment might be guilty of it. But “malinformation” and “misinformation” are just becoming labels for “information that is inconvenient”, and I don’t think normal internet commenters adopting their use is doing us any good.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

The same goes for dog whistling. It is easy to see dog whistling everywhere because that's its entire purpose: to hide within normalized speech. Covert speech is not covert if the only ones using that speech are manipulators. But that's why fighting it is so hard, because you don't know who's a useful idiot and who's a manipulator. But it is clear that the manipulators hide in a sea of useful idiots and parrots.

So I think good faith is trying to extract the signal from the noise and to differentiate the two rather than assuming maliciousness.

All of these fancier words like whataboutism or misinformation are just attempts to assert authority via the word. They don't convey additional meaning.

Malinformation doesn't mean something is wrong but that it is misleading. This distinction is important because if you claim malinformation you actually aren't claiming that the information used is wrong, but the way it is is. A classic example of this is white nationalists using the phrase "despite being 13% of the population black people <insert something about crime here>". While the statistics may be accurate it does not incorporate the complexities involved which end up decoupling race from the statistics. To put it more accurately, this is an aggregation error (more specifically ascertainment bias, a form of collider bias on conditional probabilities). Without the deaggregation here it is natural to assume that the conditional variable here is ethnicity (the intent of the malinformation) but in reality this is misleading because the way the information was presented is not entirely accurate.

Malinformation is specifically difficult to defend against because one can google to confirm accuracy of claims. But in reality it takes expertise to dismantle the claims. It is preying upon people's naivety and inability to process information that they are not intimately familiar with (which is all of us, just in different subjects). So it is important to recognize that this form of manipulation exists. The defense is to maintain skepticism and consult experts. Looking for consensus among experts specifically.

These words do in fact convey a significant amount of additional meaning and the distinctions are important. Especially if we're trying to encourage more meaningful and nuanced discussions.

It is easy to see dog whistling everywhere because that's the phrase's entire purpose: it's a weapon. It's an accusation that's cheap to make, and near-impossible to disprove.

Sure, legitimate cases of dog whistling probably exist. It's impossible to tell for sure, because the "test" has near 100% false-positive rate. Or, put another way, talking about dog whistling being a thing is itself malinformation - technically the phenomenon exists, but bringing attention to it is between confused and malicious.

I'm not saying that the government isn't trying to manipulate the topics and use the same words too. After all, that's the entire thing we're discussing. But that doesn't mean that they get to control words either. That's an unwinnable battle because the adversary has such an easy path to victory. All you need to do is take language people are using and incorporate it into your own, but with slightly different (but reasonable) meaning. You're actively engaging in their strategy. Words are defined by how they are used and understood by the public. So if you understand my intention and that I am not using it in this same manipulative manner, then we're pushing back and ensuring they do not take control of our language.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...

Thanks for a new word for my 1984 dictionary.

Good, now we finally have an accurate, single-word description of all non-tabloid journalism.

> It muddles the conversation with more noise.

I agree with GP and I believe that this whole conversation is noise. The biggest red herring there ever was (no pun intended). Yes, Russia is interfering with US elections. So does US with Russia's. I can point at any news article and claim foreign interference and, unless you're literally NSA and can map-reduce the entire Internet in an afternoon, there's no way for you to conclusively prove me wrong. And whether a given article is a result of foreign interference or not, it's creating a misleading context anyway.

The right answer is to understand that the news articles, particularly on hot topics, are always manipulated by some combination of: {your party, other party, foreign influence, The Elites, advertising money} - and to treat it accordingly. That is, don't update your views on the world based on second-hand recycled soundbites. Either try to dig in and understand an issue, or accept the fact that you don't know enough to have an opinion. Yes, it's OK for an adult to not have a strong opinion on a topic. And be very careful about any argument that lets you preferentially dismiss things you don't like as malicious interference by third parties.