I think you're trying to say that telling white lies is deception, but not malicious... however, in this case it is not the scientist nor the picture, but they claim nature that is malicious in showing us what we expect to see (or what the writers think we expect to see).

"The temptation is to interpret the EHT image as a straightforward telescopic view of the hot accretion disk, seen from above, with the black hole carving out a hole in the middle. But it isn’t quite that."

So that's not what I expected to see, nor what I think I saw, but then I'm probably not part of the typical public. I do realize that it's a radio image not in the visible spectrum... so maybe that's deceptive too, like thermal imaging. But it's still click bait.