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by ineedasername 1592 days ago
No. If the media reports that the average salary is $50k/year that is not disinformation even if a lot of people will misinterpret it as meaning "most people make $50k/year" simply because they don't understand that an average is a measure of central tendency, not distribution.

Something like this only rises to the level of disinformation if the media (or whoever) deliberately presents an accurate piece of data in a way that it knows will not be understood.

If metrics that average people don't understand was disinformation than 90% of my job would be disseminating disinformation. It's not. Instead, a large part of my job is explaining the metrics.