<p>According to a recent account of disinformation, disinformation is content that “generates ignorance” (Simion in Eur Rev 32(4):321–34, 2024a; Episteme 21(4):1208–1219, 2024b). The view improves upon previous accounts that focused primarily or exclusively upon the potential for disinformation to induce false belief since these views ignored a further functional connection to inducing doubts that generate ignorance. While this proposal gives us a broader understanding of what disinformation can be, it retains the idea that disinformation functions as evidence that provides incremental confirmation for falsehoods. Thus, this approach implies (in line with previous views) that disinformants need to capture the attention of agents, present these agents with content that will be treated as evidence, and hope that this content will change an agent’s belief state in epistemically undesirable ways. Certainly, this is an apt description of some disinformation tactics, but it is not an adequate definition of what disinformation is. In some successful real-world disinformation campaigns, a disinformant wants the audience not to gather and process evidence. In some cases, evidence that provides incremental confirmation for falsehoods will also provide the audience with the knowledge they seek. After arguing that there are documented disinformation tactics and campaigns that don’t fit with Simion’s approach, I shall offer an alternative pragmatic approach. On this view, disinformation can come in the form of evidence that’s misleading in ways that the agent doesn’t see, but it can also come in the form of content that makes it evident that the evidential resources the agent might need to advance her inquiries is corrupted. Rather than think of disinformation as essentially epistemic (e.g., functioning to increase the inaccuracy of attitudes), we should see it as essentially pragmatic, used by disinformants to minimise the probability that agents pursuing threatening ends will succeed in their efforts. In the special case (which is our focus here) where a disinformant is threatened by an agent’s inquiry, it is content that’s used to minimize the probability that the inquisitive agent achieves her ends by coming to know the answers to questions. This includes both misleading first-order evidence to lead agents away from the truth, but also accurate higher-order evidence that confirms that evidential resources have been degraded.</p>