SHE is, according to one popular but unhinged US blog, the “wicked witch of woke”. It is hard to overstate how much - and even how often - America’s hard right hates Nina Jankowicz.

Supporters of Donald Trump and sundry other extremists have been smearing, harassing and threatening the thirty-something academic for more than a year.

At the height of their attacks, online culture warriors barely seemed to take a breath as they piled on to Ms Jankowicz.

Their unrelenting abuse was often misogynistic, sometimes sexually explicit and occasionally anti-semitic, even though their target was not Jewish.

Why did they loathe Ms Jankowicz so much? Well, their campaign really began when the expert in Kremlin propaganda was named as the head of a short-lived body at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called the Disinformation Governance Board.

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Despite its grand-sounding name, this outfit was just an ideas shop to discuss ways of tackling malign influence campaigns threatening national security. It had no actual power.

Yet for America’s rabid and very online right, the board was a scheme to police their free speech. Jack Posobiec, a provocative conspiracy theorist with 2m Twitter followers, declared the DHS unit was the “Ministry of Truth”. This theme - of Ms Jankowicz as some kind of Orwellian Big Brother who was going to edit people’s tweets - was picked up by Fox News.

Its crackerjack hosts amplified the internet madness on TV. Republican lawmakers took up the cause. The DHS hit pause on its project, Ms Jankowicz quit.

Earlier this month, a year after the board was first announced, the expert announced she would sue Fox. The channel has just paid out a cool three-quarters-of-a-billion bucks to settle a defamation case - from a firm which made voting machines - after its presenters repeated false claims about the real results of the 2020 presidential election. Now it faces more legal and financial consequences for its casual disregard for verifiable truth.

The entire episode also showed that mainstream institutions are very bad at contesting internet-generated falsehoods and hatreds. Government bodies in democracies are often criticised for having armies of spin doctors and PR specialists. Well, the DHS ones were nowhere near as fleet of foot as they needed to be to counter the pile-on Ms Jankowicz faced. Which is one of the reasons, I suppose, why they required the kind of board she headed in the first place.

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The Jankowicz Affair deserves our attention. This whole saga demonstrates all sorts of problems about the ways we have started talking about “disinformation” across the West, not least in Scotland.

The word itself is a calque of the Russian ‘dezinformatsiya”. For sticklers - and in this case I am one of them - it refers to a series of military-grade covert and overt tactics designed to disorientate strategic adversaries.

Think of the hack-and-leak operations and industrial-scale social media manipulation we have seen in recent years backed up by authoritarian state media outlets. That is what classic disinformation means in practice.

Yet in the rhetoric of debased public discourse the whole idea of ‘disinformation” has been devalued, stripped of meaning and context.

There is little serious debate about the problem here. Detailed proposals to build Scotland’s society-wide resilience to foreign and domestic malign information actors - from MP Stewart McDonald - remain on the shelf.

For many of our politicians, pundits and online commentators “disinformation” has just become a smartypants word for “lying”.

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For others, it is a now catch-all term for internet dystopia. There are people who use the D-word to refer to sloppy journalism, or just to mean “stuff with which we disagree”.

Scotland’s hyperpartisan political pattersphere is full of diehards of one cause or another trash-talking each other for “disinfo”.

It reminds me of what happened to “fake news”. This handy term has been around a while, to be fair. But it boomed a decade or so ago as a way to refer to websites which mimicked real media outlets in order to harvest clicks - and advertising revenue - from gullible Facebookers.

Later “fake news” became a catch-all for bad reporting - and finally, from the pouting gob of Mr Trump, just a way to refer to all journalists and their output.

Words change meaning; that is a fact of life. We have to accept the reality that when a lot of people spit out terms like “disinformation” or “fake news”, they may not even know their origin meaning.

This is a shame. First, because we will probably need to find new words to describe actual disinformation. And, second, because a whole subset of attack dogs are triggered to bark incoherently when they hear the about efforts to counter the real problem.

Which is what happened to Ms Jankowicz. She is a high profile victim of a radical right war on the very idea of agreed reality. A whole range of nationalist conservatives and various more extreme fascist and fascist-adjacent actors, for example, see “fact-checking” as tyrannical, as a an assault on free speech, or, more bluntly, on their right to lie.

Just imagine how they feel about a modish formulation like “disinformation”. They don’t see this concept as a way of understanding specific threats to democracy, they see it as a way of shutting down debate. So too do some on the hard left.

We have victims of disinformation - people duped by, say, Kremlin lies about Ukraine or nonsense about vaccines - who now instinctively reject the very idea represented by the D-word.

Where does this leave us? Well, basically we are now struggling to fight misinformation about the very idea of disinformation.