A lot of terms that originally had, and in fact even today have a particular meaning often get misunderstood and used incorrectly, with the incorrect meaning in a context that doesn't fit.
One that's gets misused a lot nowadays is "gaslighting".
Curiously, in my experience it gets misunderstood and misused by all sides, not just the far left (which loves misusing words and change their meaning to suit their agenda.)
A lot of people seem to think that "gaslighting" is synonymous with "deceiving", in other words, making someone believe something that's not true, to have them have an incorrect belief about something.
While "gaslighting" is a form of deception, of making someone believe a falsity, it's not the generic term for it, nor a synonym for it. It's a very specific form of such deception.
In particular, "gaslighting" is making someone doubt his or her own memories about something, with the end goal of having the person believe that those memories are false or distorted, incorrect, not corresponding to what actually happened. Usually this attempt is intentional and purposeful (if someone starts doubting his own memories for other reasons, that's not usually called "gaslighting". "Gaslighting" does not refer to the doubt itself, but to the act of someone making someone else doubt.)
Giving a false report of some event is not "gaslighting". It's simply lying and spinning a narrative.
Deceiving someone into believe a false version of an event is not "gaslighting", unless the person already knew the accurate version of the event and the intent of the deception is to make the person doubt that memory and convince the person otherwise, convince the person that they remember and interpreted the event incorrectly. If someone does not know about the event and is given a false description of it, that in itself is not "gaslighting".
However, even then, "gaslighting" is not the term usually used. Most often and usually the term is applied more to situations where the memory is of a personal nature, ie. something that happened to the person himself, something that he experienced or witnessed personally. It's most often used to refer to making someone doubt, to try to convince them "you misremember what you saw", "you misremember what happened to you".
After all, it's very easy to make someone doubt given how flawed human perception and memory is. For many things, especially things that happen suddenly, they catch us by surprise and we are not prepared for them, and we only get a very limited and narrow set of sensory inputs. We don't see nor hear everything, we only see and hear a small fraction of the entire context. We easily miss the larger picture. We only see from our limited perspective what happens.
This happens all the time: Something unusual happens, like a crime, and the cops interview eyewitnesses and they usually get as many slightly differing stories as there are eyewitnesses. And sometimes they even get wildly differing stories. Cops who investigate crimes need to constantly be piecing together the larger picture from these sometimes conflicting individual testimonies.
Thus, it's easy to make someone doubt his own memories: "Are you completely sure that it happened exactly as you remember? After all, it happened so suddenly and it was all so chaotic and scary. Are you sure in your panic you didn't misinterpret what you saw? It happens all the time to people, and it's completely normal! People constantly misremember events, and eyewitnesses to the same event very often give very different descriptions of it, because their perception of it was limited and their memories flawed."
On top of that, a very strong gaslighting weapon is to tell the person (truthfully or deceitfully) that there were numerous other people who testify the thing happening quite differently. "We have interviewed fifteen other people who saw it happen, and they all describe it like this, very different from you." Most people have a sort of "group mentality instinct" where they trust the unanimity of other people even if it differs from their own experience and memories. (In fact, there have been numerous social experiments demonstrating exactly this. It's astonishing how many people will start giving answers that they know are incorrect just because a dozen other people are giving that same incorrect answer. The group mentality instinct is very strong with most people.)
This is what "gaslighting" means, quite specifically. It's not just a generic term meaning "to deceive", "to tell someone a lie", even though it's being used with that meaning by a lot of people.
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