Is disinformation just lying?
No. The word “lying” usually implies a teller’s awareness of spreading untruths. Long study in psychology, e.g. false memory syndrome and groupthink, suggests that honest advocates of a view can rarely tell when they have accepted some questionable premise or evidence along with the valid evidence for that view. Such views may reflect not a desire to disinform, but rather a biased mind-set or paradigm where some central dogma has become accepted as true.