An unattributed Japanese proverb has it that “if you understand everything, you must be misinformed.” Clever, no? If a bit twee. This word, “misinformed,” has taken on a political dimension that has totally cleaved it from its actual, literal meaning: mistaken, wrongly taught, in error, or incorrect. That’s because of its cognate cousin, “misinformation.” “Misinformation” was the dictionary.com word of the year for 2018, when the reference website wrote that there had been a “recent explosion of misinformation.” There was apparently a “growing vocabulary we use to understand” misinformation, as of four years ago, one including “disinformation, echo chamber, confirmation bias, filter bubble, conspiracy theory, fake news, post-fact, post-truth, homophily, influencer, and gatekeeper.”

By 2019, disinformation was the late NPR linguist Geoff Nunberg’s word of that year, writing that “over the past couple of years ‘disinformation’ has been on a tear — it’s 10 times as common in media headlines as it was five years ago, to the point where it’s nudged its siblings aside.” As Nunberg also notes, disinformation has a long history: “The term ‘dezinformatsiya’ was reputedly coined by no less than Josef Stalin in the 1920s as the name of the section of the KGB tasked with deceiving enemies and influencing public opinion.” Russian disinformation ops include Operation Infektion, which involved placing a story about the U.S. government creating AIDS in a lab intentionally, an idea that continues to be remarkably widespread and persistent, especially among left-wing radical groups. It’s even in an episode of The Chappelle Show.