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, NGOs, 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.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Maret, Susan.
2025.
"Mal-Information, the Anatomy of an “Information Disorder”."
Secrecy and Society
3(2).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55917/2377-6188.1090
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/secrecyandsociety/vol3/iss2/4
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