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Misinformation vs. Disinformation: What’s the Difference?
Gabe Regan
VP of Human Engagement
Published Jun 1, 2024 · Updated Oct 14, 2026
Misinformation is false or misleading information shared without intent to deceive. The person spreading it usually believes it. Disinformation is false information created or shared deliberately to mislead. The difference is intent, not content: the same fake post is disinformation when its creator publishes it and misinformation when someone shares it believing it’s true.
What is Misinformation?
Misinformation is false or misleading information that’s shared without intent to deceive. The person passing it on usually believes it’s true. They might be repeating a rumor, forwarding a screenshot, or resharing a post that looked credible at a glance.
No bad intent doesn’t mean no harm. In May 2023, an image of an explosion near the Pentagon spread across social media. Experts said it was likely AI-generated. Accounts with verified badges shared it as breaking news, and the S&P 500 briefly dipped before officials confirmed there had been no explosion. Whoever made the image may have meant to deceive. Most of the people who shared it didn’t. Their sharing was misinformation, and it still moved markets.
Misinformation spreads because people share what fits what they already believe. Speed matters too: a false post can reach millions before a correction is written, and the correction rarely travels as far as the original.
What is Disinformation?
Disinformation is false information created or shared on purpose to mislead. The person behind it knows it’s untrue and spreads it anyway, usually for one of three reasons:
- Political: to sway an election, suppress turnout or erode trust in institutions
- Financial: to move a market, run a scam or sell a product
- Reputational: to damage a person, a brand or an organization
In January 2024, voters in New Hampshire got a robocall in what sounded like President Biden’s voice, telling them not to vote in the state’s primary. The voice was AI-generated. Whoever made the call built the message to deceive, which is what separates disinformation from misinformation. Once a disinformation campaign reaches people who believe it and pass it on, it becomes misinformation in their hands. That handoff is how a deliberate lie reaches far more people than its creator could on their own.
Where Synthetic Media Fits
Misinformation and disinformation describe the intent behind a claim. Synthetic media describes something different: whether the artifact itself was manufactured. A cloned voice, a generated video or a fabricated image is synthetic no matter who shares it or why.
That’s why synthetic media needs its own category. A claim can be fact-checked against other sources. An artifact has to be verified as real, and that’s a different job. In early 2024, a finance employee at engineering firm Arup joined a video call with people who looked and sounded like senior colleagues, then sent about US$25 million to fraudsters. No claim in that call was checkable. The faces and voices were the lie.
Fabricated stories also rarely arrive in just one format. The same fake can run as a voice clip, a video and a still image at once. Checking one format leaves the other two in circulation.
Misinformation vs. Disinformation vs. Synthetic Media at a Glance
| Misinformation | Disinformation | Synthetic media | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it describes | A false claim | A false claim | A manufactured artifact |
| Intent to deceive | No | Yes | Depends on who uses it |
| Typical form | Reshared posts, forwarded messages, screenshots | Coordinated campaigns, fake accounts, robocalls | Cloned audio, generated video, fabricated images |
| Example | Sharing a fake image you believe is real | Creating and posting that image to cause panic | The image itself |
| How it’s countered | Corrections, media literacy | Platform enforcement, attribution | Verifying whether the audio, video or image is real |
Verifying What’s Real
Fact-checking addresses claims. It can’t tell you whether a voice, a video or an image was generated. For trust & safety and communications teams, that means adding a separate check on the artifact itself, across every format a story arrives in.
RealScan analyzes audio, video and images from a single architecture, so the same fabrication doesn’t slip through in a format nobody checked.
Frequently Asked Questions
What trust & safety teams ask about misinformation
It can be either. A deepfake made and posted to deceive is disinformation. The same deepfake reshared by someone who believes it’s real is misinformation. The deepfake itself is synthetic media, a manufactured audio, video or image file, whatever the intent of the person sharing it.
Misinformation is false and shared without intent to deceive. Disinformation is false and shared deliberately to deceive. Malinformation is true information used to cause harm, such as leaked private details published to damage someone.
Yes, and it usually does. In May 2023, an image of an explosion near the Pentagon, likely AI-generated, was posted to mislead. Most people who reshared it believed it was real, which made their sharing misinformation, and the S&P 500 briefly dipped before officials confirmed there was no explosion.
Fact-checking tests a claim against other sources. A synthetic voice or video may not contain a checkable claim at all. The deception is in the artifact. Catching it means analyzing the audio, video or image itself to see whether it was generated.
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