[woooooo]

Whatever happened to "wrong"? As in, "that's wrong". Ideally followed by some reasoning.

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

[godelski]

Misinformation and disinformation are just nuanced versions of wrong. The former means unintentional and the latter means intentional. The distinctions are useful here because the latter is a claim that the person spouting the information is corrupt and knowingly trying to propagate lies. This is more universally considered bad. People are wrong all the time, but most people aren't intentionally spreading lies.

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.

[woooooo]

Just labeling true things that you don't like as "malinformation" does not encourage more meaningful and nuanced discussions.

[godelski]

Who said I was encouraging that? I'm saying you have to use nuance to explain how something is malinformation in the first place. I even did this in my example. We need good faith discussions and I do think you need to step up your game here a bit.

[kube-system]

"Misinformation" might (sometimes) be a synonym for "wrong".... but "whataboutism", "disinformation", "malinformation" are not. They mean different things.

[godelski]

Disinformation actually does mean wrong. But it also is an accusation of maliciousness. That's the distinguishing feature between misinformation and disinformation: intent and prior knowledge. But with the other two I agree. Whataboutism is non-sequitur arguments. Malinformation is cherry-picking data with intent to deceive.