There are no smokestacks rising above factories, churning out anti-disinformation tanks and aircraft. Michael Shellenberger calls this the “censorship-industrial complex” but it’s really more like a protection racket than an industry. The Biden White House, the federal bureaucracy, the NGOs, the media and the digital oligarchs can today be found dancing around the same Maypole, all amazingly in sync about the need to control the web. But here’s a strange psychological twist: With the exception of Elon Musk and Twitter, those who own and staff the platforms feel desperate to be seen as part of the team and have shown themselves perfectly willing to get “partnered,” again and again, by various federal agencies. Journalists are happy to punish the digital platforms that have destroyed their business, as they go about saving democracy from Nazis, Russians and Republicans. NGO experts like DiResta stoke the disinformation frenzy that has consumed the news media. One shudders to think what lack of integrity would bring us. But wait: Isn’t that disinformation? Maybe even “high stakes,” since an election was in the balance? Not at all, DiResta informs us-it was a sort of scientific experiment to “investigate” how to “grow audiences … using sensational news.” DiResta, I note, was part of Stanford Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership. Who is Renee DiResta? In 2017, she was linked to a bot-driven internet hoax targeting the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama. Here is Renee DiResta of Stanford Internet Observatory, loudest voice on the subject from the penumbral NGO world, sounding the alarm: “Over the past decade, disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war.” These places found the situation to be much worse than anyone had thought. The federal government’s quarrel with disinformation was laundered through outfits like Stanford Internet Observatory, Global Disinformation Index and the Aspen Institute. The Biden administration, after writing a few checks, reached out to Nongovernmental Organizations, or NGOs-a shady underworld full of self-proclaimed experts who’ll say pretty much anything for money. In Washington, it’s called partnering with the private sector. Ordinarily, this is considered criminal behavior. In government, if you can’t do it legally, you pay shady people to do it for you. That was way too much information, at least for the rubes living in the more obscure parts of the map, so the scheme for a Disinformation Board came to nothing. She also can be found on TikTok claiming to be the “Mary Poppins of disinformation” and elsewhere online asking, in song, who she needed to have sex with to get ahead in life. Who is Nina Jankowicz? She insisted, during the 2020 presidential campaign, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, something we now know was false. In 2022, Biden appointed Nina Jankowicz to lead an ambitious new Disinformation Governance Board that aimed to hold all of us accountable. The Biden White House is on record demanding that social media be held “accountable.” Accountable to whom, you ask-and for what? Well, accountable to them, naturally, for the spreading of disinformation. It’s loaded with hostility to reason, evidence, debate and all the stuff that makes our democracy great. The word means, “Shut up, peasant.” It’s a bullet aimed at killing the conversation. Disinformation is just a jargon word with a subliminal meaning, thrown out by the mighty of the earth whenever they worry that they are about to lose an argument-something that happens with painful regularity these days. I have written long, deeply researched tracts about the technical aspects of disinformation. And by the web, they mean, of course, you-but I already said that. And by “disinformation,” they mean the web. Also misinformation and malinformation-the latter defined as “bits of actual reality we totally object to.”īut disinformation is the big dog. Protect us from what, you ask? Well, mostly from ourselves, but also from a threat that makes nuclear annihilation feel like a pinprick by comparison: disinformation. They did this, we are told, to protect us. While your back was turned, the federal government erected a convoluted apparatus of control for what you can say and see online.
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