Mal-Information, the Anatomy of an “Information Disorder”

"Abstract

Mal-information is a fairly recent addition to federal policy and the lexicon of political communication with implications for understanding censorship and secrecy during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reviews documents authored by IGOs [International Governmental Organizations], NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations], and the US government that mark the evolution of mal-information as true information intended to cause harm. The term, as it is currently employed, is now associated with misinformation and disinformation to create a complex of 'information disorders' known as the acronym MDM. In this paper, the creep of the term mal-information and its use by federal agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and US Department of Homeland Security is documented. These agencies, according to the Twitter files, for example, pressured tech companies such as Amazon, Meta, and X to restrict speech during the pandemic...

Contagious Mal-information Policy

'[M]alinformation emerged just in the past year or so. The word was created by combining two language patterns: 1) mis- and dis- information and 2) malware - 'malicious software.'' However, as the fact pattern below demonstrates, 'information disorders' and the collision of misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information as 'MDM' traveled from Council of Europe documents in 2017, then diffused into US and intelligence/information policy in 2022 as Official Discourse, a mere five years after its introduction... 

Mal-Information as a Way to Talk About Secrecy and Censorship

[M]odifications to the definition of mal-information were, in part, a response to alternative viewpoints during the pandemic circa 2021. The timeline also shows that mal-information was employed in a behind the scenes campaign in which federal agencies pressured technology companies to suppress and remove content  –  speech, in other words... [T]he bipartisan Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reported that the White House pressured tech companies to revise their content moderation policies during the pandemic... The Committee also found 'the White House’s censorship campaign targeted true information, satire, and other content that did not violate the platforms’ policies,' which had a 'chilling' effect on speech. In addition to encouraging restriction of speech and communications – coercion is used throughout the report - 'the White House pressure campaign was not limited to just social media companies, but also the world’s biggest online bookstore, Amazon'... 

Uneasy Claims of Mal-information

... [M]al-information is an imprecise term that is politically and ethically-charged. The term has been utilized to suppress expression around public health, science, and informed consent. Words matter, and even more so when they are an element of governing."