Nicely done. I was reminded of the phrase, "Lies, damned lies and statistics" while reading this. The idea being there are intentional untruths, intentional untruths designed to harm and statistics, which enables the twisting of truth to appear as one wishes it to. A simulacrum of truth perhaps.
And I lie regularly, when it comes to small things. We all do, they are called "white lies". The girl you want to impress asks if her jeans make her bum look fat (and they do)... Your husband is worried he's getting fat (and he is)... etc. There have been some interesting studies done that some lies are necessary to maintain social cohesion and harmony. Humans have a very hard time dealing with 100% truth all the time. That is why politicians and other manipulative control freaks have such an easy time of things. People often prefer to be lied to when things gets serious.
This also reminded me of the word hijacking that came up not to long ago about "alternate" facts. That set off a firestorm in my circles, with people mocking "alternate" as essentially a substitute for "fake", which it isn't semantically, not by a long shot. When the "alternate"/"alternative" facts line was uttered, I knew it would result in a s*itstorm of partisanship.
Still, I was surprised at just how vehement it got. The media really screwed the pooch on that one, twisting a word that means "other" to portray it to mean "completely fictitious" or "lying" took Newspeak to a whole new level. Since then, I have come to consider that a genuine battle in the information war sanity lost, with "alternate" and "alternative" as in alternative news, completely smeared for a large portion of the population, e.g. "Where did you get those alternate facts, the alternative news?"
Yes, we must not allow them to hijack the words. We need to challenge them on it when we catch them at it. Otherwise we cede linguistic territory to them and it seems to be a popular tactic to unsettle someone mentally as they attack. If you refuse to give in to their redefinition of words it seems to sometimes throw them off balance instead. Jordan Peterson is someone that is good at stopping this type of action. Ben Shapiro is excellent at it as well.