Misinformation on social media is a concern for content creators, consumers and regulators alike. Transitude looks at misinformation generated by machine translation (MT) through distortion of the intention and sentiment of text. It is the first study of MT’s impact on the formation of users’ views of society through refugees in Ireland. It extends current MT evaluation methods with a new quality evaluation framework, producing the first dataset annotated for information distortion. It provides insights into the risks of relying on MT, with recommendations for users, developers, and policymakers.