Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
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Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.
-1984, George Orwell
On Wednesday at a budget hearing before the Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Mayorkas made some news in revealing a new Disinformation Governance Board. (His written testimony made no mention of it.) This came in an exchange with Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ohio). Video of the hearing is here, the exchange starts at about the 1:39:54 mark.
Underwood: Another huge threat to our homeland is mis- and disinformation. You noted that it’s a concern of yours at the border with human smuggling organizations peddling information to exploint vulnerable migrants for profit.
One of my main concerns about disinformation is that foreign adversaries attempt to destabilize our elections by targeting people of color with disinformation campaigns. After it became clear that there was more meddling in our 2016 election, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence authored a report on the disinformation tactics used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the IRA, to interfere in the election. The report found that “no single group of Americans was targeted by the IRA information operatives more than African Americans.”
A newer trend that we saw in the 2020 election and already in the 2022 midterms is that disinformation is being heavily targeted at Spanish speaking voters, sparking and fueling conspiracy theories. DHS and its components play a big role in addressing mis- and disinformation in Spanish and other languages. Can you share what steps you’ve taken and what future plans you have to address Spanish language mis- and disinformation throug department-wide approach?
Mayorkas: Our Under-Secretary for Policy, Rob Silvers, is co-chair with our principal deputy general counsel, Jennifer Daskal, in leading a just recently constituted Disinformation Governance Board. The goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat. I just read a very interesting study that underscores the importance of the point that you make, the spread of mis- and disinformation in minority communities specifically, and we are focused on that in the context of our CP3 and other efforts.
When asked about it, the odious Jen Psaki let the mask slip and mentioned COVID as a topic where the heavy hand of the government may be needed to keep the peasants in line.
“We know there has been a range of [disinformation] out there about a range of topics, I mean, including COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility,” Psaki said, adding that she would check for additional information on what the board plans to do.
The American Experiment also points out that SitD’s own Senator Klobuchar is in on the act, tackling “health misinformation.”
At a recent conference hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Senator Amy Klobuchar failed to answer a reporter’s direct question about the nature of her proposed bill, the “Health Misinformation Act,” leaving open the possibility of government and bureaucratic control over what constitutes internet misinformation and who has the power to make that decision.
Sitting on a panel at the “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference on April 8, Klobuchar was asked a direct question about her proposed bill by Chicago Thinker co-founder and Managing Editor Evita Duffy: “If I were to say there are only two sexes — male and female — would that be considered misinformation that you think should be banned speech on social media platforms?” Klobuchar proceeded to give a light chuckle and insisted it pertained to vaccine misinformation during a “public health crisis.” She refused to define misinformation and the parameters under which the proposed bill’s carveout would go into effect.
Klobuchar’s bill seeks to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives internet platforms protection from civil liability for published content. The amendment creates a carveout that would strike immunity from those platforms that use algorithms promoting content and permit the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), “in consultation with the heads of other relevant Federal agencies and outside experts determined appropriate by the Secretary, shall issue guidance regarding what constitutes health misinformation…”
Klobuchar’s evasive “answer” is not surprising considering the actual language of the bill has zero mention of vaccines and fails to define “misinformation.” But this lack of specific language and purpose in the bill — despite what Klobuchar may say at a conference — is very troubling. It leaves the door open for politicians and unelected bureaucrats in public health to determine what can and cannot be promoted on sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, harnessing the power of the federal government to punish platforms disseminating speech it deems “misinformation.”
As Scott Johnson pointed out at Powerline, there is clearly a coordinated effort going on that has led to the creation of this board. In early April, at a conference entitled Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, at which Rep. Underwood was a featured speaker by the way, Barack Obama gave a lengthy address entitled “Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy”. He said:
All right. With that as my starting point, I believe we have to address not just the supply of toxic information, but also the demand for it. On the supply side, tech platforms need to accept that the play a unique role in how we, as a people and people around the world, are consuming information and that their decisions have an impact on every aspect of society. With that power comes accountability, and in democracies like ours, at least, the need for some democratic oversight.
For years, social media companies have resisted that kind of accountability. They’re not unique in that regard. Every private corporation wants to do anything it wants. So, the social media platforms called themselves neutral platforms with no editorial role in what their users saw. They insisted that the content people see on social media has no impact on their beliefs or behavior — (laughter) — even though their business models and their profits are based on telling advertisers the exact opposite.
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We do expect these companies to affirm the importance of our democratic institutions, not dismiss them, and to work to find the right combination of regulation and industry standards that will make democracy stronger. And because companies recognize the often dangerous relationship between social media, nationalism, domestic hate groups, they do need to engage with vulnerable populations about how to put better safeguards in place to protect minority populations, ethnic populations, religious minorities, wherever they operate.For example, in the United States, they should be working with, not always contrary to, those groups that are trying to prevent voter suppression and specifically has targeted black and brown communities. In other words, these companies need to have some other North Star other than just making money and increasing market share. Fix the problem that, in part, they helped create, but also to stand for something bigger.
This announcement naturally gave rise to accusations that this board would be a new Ministry of Truth. I don’t think that is the right analogy, though. In Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth was the propaganda factory. It was responsible for spreading Newspeak and rewriting history.
I think a better analogy from Orwell would be the Thought Police. This organization was responsible for enforcing not only what people could say, but what they could think. It’s why the Thought Police needed to be the only effective organization. If the people are controlled, and there’s no outlet to inspire other people to action, all else falls into place.
Orwell’s insight about the Thought Police was that they knew the truth, they knew the past. They had to in order to know how to change it. Someone knew the lies, and spread them anyway.
There was no mention from Rep. Underwood about efforts to declare the Hunter Biden laptop story as disinformation, and how people and organizations have been thrown off of public platforms for mentioning it and other “unapproved” thoughts.
The threat from boards like this and where they can go isn’t that government official truly believe things such as the Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, or that Trump colluded with the Russians, or that men can be women, or that America is a systematically racist country. It’s that they know these to be lies yet spread them anyway, and worse, work to suppress your opportunities to say otherwise.
It is worse than you think, Mr. Kouba.
On his show yesterday, Tucker Carlson mocked Mayorkas for talking about misinformation without defining it. In fact, DHS has defined misinformation. It has even defined three varieties of misinformation: misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation:
What is MDM?
Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation make up what CISA defines as “information activities”. When this type of content is released by foreign actors, it can be referred to as foreign influence. Definitions for each are below.
Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.
Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.
Foreign and domestic threat actors use MDM campaigns to cause chaos, confusion, and division. These malign actors are seeking to interfere with and undermine our democratic institutions and national cohesiveness. The resources provided at the bottom of this page provide examples and more information about MDM activities.
https://www.cisa.gov/mdm
This needs to be stopped. Consider that as designed, this is an agency led by a political appointee. Mayorkas job is to carry out the objectives of Joe Biden. There is not even a fig leaf of non-partisanship here.
Why do we need free speech? Why has the US succeeded with a long history of robust protections for free speech?
Change is the characteristic of the modern age. Changing times means that our institutions, political and cultural, need constant, ongoing reform. Free speech ensures that these institutions receive information on when to change and what changes are needed for our society to flourish.
Reform is painful to the people who make up these institutions, especially to the people in leadership positions. That is why the institutions are incapable of reforming themselves.
We need to stop dis- and mal- information From Foreign Actors in order to preserve free and fair elections which are the foundation of the American Way of Life. We can’t allow them to trick people into voting based on bad information.
We heard a rumor that Jeff Kouba may be a Foreign Actor. It’s too risky to allow him to continue to post dis- and mal- information. The seriousness of the charges demands he be banned until we have the results of a full and complete investigation which will probably be complete . . . just after the election.
What? That’s the reason WaPo gave for doxxing Libs of Tik Tok. Might have been a foreign actor. Can’t be too careful. We’re simply applying the same principle on a wider basis, putting up a longer and higher wall around the digital nation, so to speak. It’s our patriotic duty.
Now about that Berg . . . .
Why do we need free speech? Why has the US succeeded with a long history of robust protections for free speech?
MP, you are making an excellent case for 2nd amendment.
Dhimmicrap party, tell me you can’t win elections without censorship, without telling me you can’t win elections without censorship.
So, they have taken away the soapbox with their censorship. They have taken away the ballot box with vote fraud. They have taken away the jury box, as no court wanted to hear any of those cases (they knew the left would burn the frigging country down) thanks to the Brownshirts of the modern demonrat party.
What’s the last box again?
I closed my TwitR account 10 years ago because A) I don’t want to provide content that financially helps people that hate me, and want me dead and B) they’d have booted me off anyway.
But now Musk is flipping the table over and I’m fixin’ to create a new account; it will be a doozy, too. We’ve come to the point where shitposting and spreading discontent is a patriotic duty.
“Hate speech” will commence tomorrow, and I look forward to hearing from Pedo Joe’s Ministry of Truth.
^ How mendacity of a certain scale affects politics over time, making democracy more difficult.
“PR advice from Hitler, if you tell a lie that’s big enough, people won’t believe that you won’t believe on that scale, if they take it in at first, they don’t want to disbelieve it later on, it becomes part of their life, it becomes what we now call an alternative reality, it begins to shape politics, it then begins to instantiate itself, not only in memory but in policy. You act as if it’s true and then you move to to do things as if it were true. Once you kill on a big lie, then the big lie has to be true.” ~ Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands, Professor of History, Yale
That’s how disinformation works Mr Musk. The result is there in your adopted country with its Big Lie. Try fixing that fast. And please don’t break it.
Just what is the “disinformation”aimed at Hispanics? The dhimmicraps treat you like serfs but count on your vote?
Yes, the d’s are losing poc voters by the tens of thousands. Time for more dhimmi lies.
Lol at the troll telling Elon Musk ANYTHING.
He is smarter than you dude, by a long LONG way.
It’s coming from inside the house.
You’re writing as though Twitter is currently a successful, advertising-led business that prioritizes law and regulation, and filters out lies, manipulation and extremism. It’s anything but that right now.
In a country where 10 million people believe that Obama, the Clintons and Angelina Jolie are lizard humanoids, you can easily understand how another 60 million or so might actually believe in other instances of “disinformation”.
The ten million people Emery is talking about are imaginary.
Katenji Brown Jackson, who will soon join the supreme court as its first black woman, says that she cannot define what a woman is. That is some serious crazy.
And our president, Joseph Robinette Biden, can not tell how how many genders there are. More serious nuttiness.
And some people continue to believe that Trump colluded with Putin to steal the 2016 election, when empirical evidence shows that this story was a fiction funneled into the FBI by the Hillary campaign.
Talk about nuts!
The only good social media is no social media at all. There is nothing to fix because nothing is broken; social media is what it is by design.
What do you think it was going to happen when you substitute the Curators (information gatekeepers) with critics, analysts, pundits and now Influencers?? Web2.0 designers called it democratization of the information. Instead of democracy, we got bigotry, tribalism, opinion bubbles, information overload, constant state of anxiety, demobilization, memes, the selfie and Only Fans.
Good content there is, but it’s buried under tons of gibberish, useless posts, click bait and pay walls. The chances of finding a pretty useful piece of information using google are almost null. Better to use a random crawler instead. The noise is simply too big. We were sold access to the information; what we’ve got is information inflation.
In social media moderate words are non-existent, they quickly drift to the fringes pushed out by the more punchy (polemic) discourse. Hence, the excessive moralization. This, again, is by design. Big Tech knows that only polemic content generates the rates of engagement they require to keep the marketing machine pumping billions. The woke is the final materialization of all the moral gymnastics that were bred and hatched in social media, finally becoming mainstream. The shallows is how I label social media, where users engage in their superfluous game. The aesthetics of the social media age: self-glorification, aggrandisement through person-as-a-brand, attention seeking and the virtual persona; the latter, a hologram version of our desired self.
Emery is beginning to agree with me: repeal section 230 of the CDA. It will break the business model of all social media. Every single post will have to be reviewed by an editor, maybe a lawyer, before it is published on the platform.
Yes, I know this will ravage the comment sections of blogs like SITD.
It will be worth it.
MP, heh heh
I find myself agreeing, to some extent, with woolly. Social media companies should have the same civil and criminal liability that applies to print publishers and broadcast media. When they were in their infancy there was a case for giving them protection but those days are long gone. If they were both criminally and civilly liable for what they publish they would very quickly find ways to manage the situation and continue to prosper. If print media can manage BTL comments there is no reason why Twitter Facebook and social media blogs cannot.
OTOH — Removing immunity from prosecution would just force social media companies to be far more conservative about what they allow on their platforms, not make them accountable to users. I would suggest there would many more who will probably not be allowed on social media ever again…Am I missing something?
The purpose of section 230 of the CDA was to foster free and open discussion on the internet.
It has done the opposite.
Emery, this is America. All published speech is legal unless you libel a person or intentionally incite violence and that violence occurs.
These are high hurdles to clear.
Twitter banned The Babylon Bee because it used Twitter to announce that Rachel Levine had won their fictitious “Man of the Year” award.
Any person can pick up their phone any time and place a call to anyone whose number they know (or a random person) and say ugly, obscene to that person, up and including illegal threats of harm.
Sometimes this actually happens.
You know who we don’t blame for this? The phone company.
How many times do the courts have to say “social media companies aren’t bound by the First Amendment” before people stop acting like this isn’t a profoundly silly question to ask?
That’s because you are a shallow thinker, Emery.
If you are not bound by the first amendment, you are a common carrier and cannot pick and choose what you publish.
Section 230 of the CDA allows social media company to be act both as a common carrier. It’s safe harbor provision allows any person to use their social media platform to libel people. Unlike a newspaper, if I use Twitter’s platform to libel a person or a company, that person or company cannot sue Twitter for publishing the libelous material.
It’s not clear to me what the Disinformation Governance Board thinks it’s going to do, but to the extent it tries to punish or censor speech generally on the ground that it deems the speech to be disinformation, that would violate the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects disinformation. There is no general exception to the First Amendment for false statements. Twitter actually spends a lot of time defending First Amendment rights in court. Will an Elon Musk owned Twitter fight for free speech rights in court to the same level?
“ Good content there is, but it’s buried under tons of gibberish, useless posts, click bait and pay walls.”
Fuck. If *only* God had given us a brain, we might have been able to sort through the trash to get to the good stuff.
Right, rAT?
*exasperated*
There is no such thing as disinformation.
It does not exist.
There is only information.
A Texas cop holds an AC repairman at gunpoint because he mistakenly believes the man’s van contains 750,000 fraudulent ballots.
A NC man travels several states and shoots up a pizza restaurant over rumors that a child sex trafficking ring was operating out of the restaurant’s non-existent basement.
A California Air Force veteran is killed while attempting a violent breech of the House Speaker’s lobby to prevent the peaceful transition of power in America that is required by our constitution.
Forty one US towns are effectively shutdown over fears of attacks by “Antifa” generated by false rumors from QAnon.
A man uses a speargun to kill his two children because he believed they had “serpent DNA” and would become “monsters”. One child was two years old, the other was 10 months.
Bamboo fibers, horse de-wormer COVID cures, Jewish Space Lasers, JFK Jr returning from the dead, Satanic baby sacrifices and blood drinking. That is only coming from one side.
Darkness cannot defeat the dark. Only light can defeat the dark.
Banning speech spreads darkness, not light. Doesn’t matter what fig leaf you use to hide it, you’re working for the dark side.
A Texas cop holds an AC repairman at gunpoint because he mistakenly believes the man’s van contains 750,000 fraudulent ballots.
A NC man travels several states and shoots up a pizza restaurant over rumors that a child sex trafficking ring was operating out of the restaurant’s non-existent basement.
A president who is unable to state how many genders there are puts in charge of his anti-disinformation board a woman who endorsed the authenticity of the fraudulent Steele Dossier and called the very real Hunter Biden laptop story a Russian intelligence operation.
Governments were the greatest murderers of their own people in the 20th century, not internet kooks.
As John F Kennedy said, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.
If you are not sitting at the table, you’re on the menu 😉
Mark Judge reminds us of one of the greatest misinformation campaigns of the last decade: The attempt to label Brett Kavanaugh a gang rapist, based entirely on the verbal accounts by a victim who could neither prove she had been raped nor had ever met Kavanaugh.
MP, fake but accurate. What more do you need to know?
Moralizing short-circuits rational debate. If you go into outrage, you don’t have to consider whether a person is wrong or right. You know they’re wrong by whatever moral compass you’ve chosen to adopt. The reason, IMHO, is that people don’t want rational debate because they don’t want to change their ideas.
I still keep seeing leftards claiming Stacey Abrams is the rightful governor of Georgia. Funny how that questioning of an election is ok.
Via Ann Althouse, we learn that the person chosen by Biden to lead his rhymes-with-KGB censorship board once pushed Hillary campaign messaging about a Hillary campaign fake story about Carter Page and “Russian Collusion”:
https://twitter.com/ChuckRossDC/status/1521160000235839488?s=20
I suppose putting hard-Left partisan Jankowicz in charge of Biden’s MGB tells us something about the incompetence of the administration. Apparently no one thought that this was a bad idea that would discredit the board and harm its mission, and this has been its only result so far. This being the Biden administration, there will be no change of course, no one will admit that this is another unforced error, no one will be fired, no one will even admit that there is a problem.