The language surrounding misinformation seems to change as fast as the tactics used by the people who spread it. Terms that once meant one thing — “fake news,” for example — now mean something else, or are used so differently by different people that they have lost a common meaning.
For people like us, who write about misinformation as a profession, it’s a little hard to keep up.
(Dictionary.com, by the way, defines misinformation — its 2018 word of the year — as “false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.” The word often works for us in this newsletter as a catchall because we can’t always be certain something is intended to mislead. If we are sure it’s “disinformation,” though, we will call it that.)
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Source: Here are 4 new terms to describe online deception and misinformation – Poynter