Disinformation: origin of the word and documented cases

Britain, 1915 and 1917. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee's text-only poster "Cold-Blooded Murder!" listed charges against Germany. In April 1917 British newspapers reprinted a report that Germany rendered its dead soldiers for fat. The German government denied it, and in 1925 the Foreign Secretary told the Commons the story had no foundation. Its origin is disputed: The German 'corpse factory': a false atrocity story and its long afterlife (1917-1925).

"Cold-Blooded Murder! Remember Germany's Crowning Infamy", Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster no. 97, 1915. Library of Congress. Public domain in the US (published before 1931).

Germany, 1916. The Imperial German government's counter-propaganda poster "Are We the Barbarians?", by Louis Oppenheim, answered Allied atrocity claims with a statistical chart. It is a rebuttal of claims some of which were false and some of which had a basis, and it is itself a selective use of figures (Card stacking).

"Sind wir die Barbaren?", poster by Louis Oppenheim, 1916. Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Britain, 1924: the Zinoviev letter. The Daily Mail published a letter attributed to the Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev about four days before the 29 October 1924 general election. MI5 judged it a forgery in late 1924, though the government was not told. A 1999 Foreign Office historical paper by Gill Bennett concluded that it is impossible to say who wrote it, with a best guess of White Russian intelligence circles, using forgers in Berlin or the Baltic states.

Soviet Union and East Germany, 1980s. An anonymous letter in an Indian newspaper, Patriot (17 July 1983), claimed AIDS was made in US laboratories. A Soviet weekly cited it on 30 October 1985, and East German state security helped spread a report by the biophysicist Jakob Segal. In 1992 Yevgeny Primakov, head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, acknowledged the KGB's role. Thomas Boghardt's account in Studies in Intelligence (2009) also notes that suspicion of a US origin was circulating before any KGB involvement. A related case is the 1984 letters on Ku Klux Klan letterhead threatening Olympic athletes: 'For whites only': the forged Klan letters sent to Olympic committees in 1984.

United States, 1950s. The 1952 State Department poster "The Communists Caught Lying", printed in French and at least eight Asian languages, places the Soviet delegate Jacob Malik's charge of germ warfare beside denials by Dean Acheson and Trygve Lie. It is an open, attributed rebuttal.

"Les communistes pris en flagrant délit de mensonge", US Department of State, 8 May 1952. US National Archives, RG 306, NAID 5729954. Public domain (US government work).

United States, other cases. The press reported in 2000 that the CIA placed fictitious stories in an Iranian newspaper during the 1953 effort against Prime Minister Mossadegh. The FBI placed material about US political groups in the press from 1956 to 1971 and mailed items that did not name it as source (COINTELPRO: the FBI's covert media and information operations against U.S. groups, 1956-1971). In 1986 a US campaign against Libya's Muammar Gaddafi became public; State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb resigned in protest. In 2002-03 US and UK officials stated intelligence judgements on Iraqi weapons with more certainty than the classified assessments, and inquiries differed on intent (How the US and UK governments presented the case for war in Iraq, 2002-03). From 2020 to mid-2021 the US military ran fake accounts in the Philippines casting doubt on China's Sinovac vaccine, as Reuters reported on 14 June 2024. The US government publishes its military doctrine for psychological operations, which states a preference for attributed, truthful products (psychological operations).

Russia, 2010s. A St Petersburg firm, the Internet Research Agency, ran Facebook pages posing as American communities on opposite sides of US politics, as the House Intelligence Committee documented in 2018: 'Russian Ads on Facebook' (House Intelligence Committee exhibit).

China, 1958-59. The Party press printed record harvests, the figures were added into a national total, grain was requisitioned against it, and questioning the numbers was condemned in 1959. This is a case of falsified reporting inside an institution as much as outward deception: The Great Leap Forward's 'sputnik' harvests and the famine that followed.

A case counts as disinformation only when evidence of intent exists: a document, an admission, concealed coordination. Where intent is only inferred from the effect, "false claim" is the accurate description.

The label sense became common after 2016. US President Donald Trump is credited with popularising the term by using it for negative press coverage of himself, and journalists such as Margaret Sullivan urged colleagues to stop using it. It was also adopted by governments elsewhere, and "fake news" has been written into law in several countries, with the stated aim of curbing false statements. Singapore's 2019 law allows ministers to order a correction notice on posts they judge to be false statements of fact; the government says it does not reach opinion, and critics say it can reach disputed political claims (Operation Spectrum: Singapore's 'Marxist conspiracy' and its answers). In the EU the High Level Expert Group (2018) dropped the phrase because it is "inadequate" and because politicians used it against outlets they disliked.

In this archive, where a claim is checkably false, the page says so and cites the primary source. Where a label is applied to a disputed claim, it records the dispute. The label itself is a technique: calling a report "fake" without checking is Name-calling, and refusing to engage with the record is Ad hominem when it targets the reporter, not the report.

The archive holds examples of that worry. A dashboard presented as tracking Russian disinformation was later reported to rest on a list of mostly ordinary accounts (Hamilton 68: the Russian-influence dashboard and its secret account list). A Department of Homeland Security board created to counter disinformation was paused within weeks after criticism from Republican lawmakers and civil-liberties groups (The DHS Disinformation Governance Board (2022)). In the pandemic both officials and critics used these labels in disputes over open questions (Follow the science, Plandemic: COVID-19 messaging from officials and contrarians, 2020-2022).