This is a British vs American English thing. In British English a “factoid” is something that looks true but isn't. In American English “factoid” is a synonym for trivia--something that is true, but of minor importance.
> In British English a “factoid” is something that looks true but [ ... ]
may or may not be true.
Wikipedia has it as "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact." after the original USofAmerica coinage by Norman Mailer.
In Commonwealth countries (Australia, Canada, UK) two decades past we used it on intelligence forums as the name for atomic snippets of information released by companies via stock exchanges, company reports, PR .. each nugget being an atomic fact like paragraph linked back to a source that asserted that fact to be true, but to be taken as potentially incorrect.
