Whilst it has come to mean "a small fact" or "snippet of the information", the word
Factoid (originally coined by [Norman Mailer]
? in his 1973 biography of
Marilyn Monroe) originally had a different and more subtle meaning. The original meaning was an wholly spurious "fact" invented to create or prolong public exposure or to manipulate public opinion. Mailer himself described a factoid as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper"