Writes Eugene Robinson in "The Disinformation Governance Board is a bad name and a sillier idea" (WaPo).
I agree that "governance" is a ludicrous term here. The first word in the phrase that bothers me, however, is "disinformation." I've noticed that, lately, Democrats and others of the left have forefronted a concern for misinformation, offering it as a counterweight to the interest in freedom of speech. Misinformation is a much larger category than disinformation. Is this new board concerned narrowly with the deliberate use of bad information to manipulate or just everything than anybody is saying that's wrong? Misinformation is everywhere. We live in it and must learn to deal with it.
The only way for the government to go about its "governance" is to be selective and to choose which wrong statements to go after. Obviously, it should concern itself with the disinformation the enemy spreads in wartime, but you wouldn't set up a "disinformation governance board" to perform that function. Setting up the board is a theatrical show of going after something... but what? Claims of election fraud? Claims of election fraud made by Republicans but not claims of election fraud made by Democrats?
Robinson writes:
Republicans, understandably, are having a field day. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) should be having to explain his lies about what he said to and about former president Donald Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Instead, he took to Twitter to compare the governance board to the fictional “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s novel “1984.”
Ha ha. Robinson's problem with the board is that Republicans are benefiting from attacking it. If only it worked better to help Democrats!
I don’t believe for a minute that the purpose of the board is to somehow police the speech of American citizens.
Ironically, that strikes me as disinformation.
But in the absence of a clear statement of mission and vision from [DHS Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas — or, for that matter, anyone in the Biden administration — the far right is practically being invited to portray the Disinformation Governance Board as part of a vast (and imaginary) conspiracy to censor conservative voices.
Imaginary? Really? Again, that smells like disinformation. Maybe we need an Irony Governance Board.
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41 comments:
Shouldn't we just call it, by its official name? Minitrue
Actually, considering the lady they picked to run it; maybe Disinformation Governance Board
IS the correct name. Maybe The ENTIRE Point of the Board is to govern distribution of Disinformation.
Disinformation: It's What We DO!
Oh, it's just a silly idea.
The first word in the phrase that bothers me, however, is "disinformation."
Ann is mad that the fascists are using the wrong semantics.
It is to laugh.
It is time for all of these beautiful people to be humiliated.
The plan is that the government will establish many "Disinformation Governance Boards", and then those boards will instruct Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, etc. about what "disinformation" to prevent and ban.
"How do you govern lies?"
Hurt
I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I'm still right here
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
"the far right is practically being invited to portray the Disinformation Governance Board as part of a vast (and imaginary) conspiracy to censor conservative voices"
Ah, yes, the conservative cancellations on Twitter and YouTube are just imaginary. And don't you dare say otherwise, or you'll have the DGB teach you a little lesson. And rightly so: there is no "conspiracy," it's just what our prog overlords do routinely.
Democrats double down stepping on their own crank.
ALTERNATIVE FACTS! BRILLIANT
I think that the Democrats saw that they had insidious power to control political debate in America and decided to turn it into a bunch of patronage jobs for useless and annoying allies.
And also destroy the nation.
I really would like to know more about Jankowicz's Ukraine connections.
We know that she has done work for them as part of the Wilson Institute.
Does she have other, deeper, perhaps family connections?
John LGKTQ Henry
Define the 'Great Barrington Declaration.'
It was banned on social media. The twitterati could help define the terms, by identifying the Barrington Declaration.
I, for one, am glad the board has zero enforcement authority, and will only tell all other branches of government who to destroy.
Think of this as a "No Fly List" for legal word usage, without due process or appeal, that sends the IRS, DOJ, FBI SWAT teams and probably the local Child Protection Services to your house, job, church and school whenever it wants to silence you. Or just to make you an example to encourage the others to shut up.
To hell with that, and to hell with the Biden administration!
In my childhood, during the LBJ and Nixon administrations, this would have been an immediate impeachment of the president, with nearly unanimous votes from all House and Senate members.
There are only true and false statements, and it is up to each of us to determine which is which. “Disinformation” and “misinformation” are state-sponsored constructs to manipulate the uninformed.
WTF happened to liberal since Trump?
Now they love big business and they love censorship.
Well, they've always loved censorship as a means to power.
But still, it's pretty amazing to watch...
Well actually it will be the Imperial Ministry of Correcting (And Punishing) Wrong Think! There Mr. Mayorkas, I've fixed it for you.
As for Eugene Robinson's fatuous claim that politicians--such as Kevin McCarthy, should be made to "explain their lies". That's a hoot--how many politicians in the world have been made to explain their "lies"? For a recent example, "You can keep your doctor". When Obama gets around to explaining that, then Robinson's rule may actually make some sense. Don't hold your breath.
Easy - One party harnesses the power of the media including all social media to fact check in their direction.
Any and all negative information regarding a high standing powerful Democrats will be labeled as DISINFORMATION OR RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION and boom. All taken care of.
State-run fact checking for one party.
This is also an Orwellian nightmare and a communist-Soviet dream come true.
Eugene Robinson? Seriously? Now you know why WaPo is the Nations High School Newspaper of Record. If you want to read what is on the minds of the nanny state marxists just read the WaPo and Eugene. Eugene who hasn't had an original thought since...............ever.
Democracy dies in disinformation*.
No extraneous light allowed.
* For select values of "dis".
When we declare war, I will go along with this up to the armistice. I don't believe we are officially at war with anybody right now, so mothball it along with those plans to take Paris and to occupy Toronto, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. Or declare war with Russia, already.
They are actually considering embedding features in network routers to prevent transmission of "disinformation," so look for being unable to send a message with "10% for the big guy" in it.
The gaslighting in the article is amazing. Conservative complaints about Twitter are never directly addressed, BTW, just characterized in leftist terms and attributed to the "far right."
Fauci discouraged any talk about covid therapeutics because he thought vaccines were the only answer. So valid concern that therapeutics needed developing was "disinformation".
Valid concerns about kids being forced to wear masks all day was "disinformation".
The gov was telling people to wear masks when outside, alone, which is stupid. Saying so is "disinformation".
Stacy Abrams never conceded her defeat in GA and Hilary said the election was stolen from her for years, but Trump supporters concerned about monkey business is "disinformation".
Failure to use the new trans terms will get you banned.
Notice how the banning goes only one way?
In general, people believe tons of crazy, absurd, or wrong things about aliens, organic food, romance, diets, drugs, politics, child-raising. You name it. Misinformation? Who is to decide?
We have a senile POTUS and nobody is in charge and so every crackpot with an agenda is in charge of something.
This is not an idea that a free people should tolerate.
There has been too much point and counterpoint in our history to think that a government board will do anything except hide the truth.
When you've lost Eugene Robinson, the project should be scrapped. They'll probably just rename it.
Given our government's record of doling out misinformation by the fenced-in yard-full for the last few decades, they seem least in position to judge anyone else's thoughts or speech.
And for those in favor of it, just remember- the political persuasions in Washington always change. How would you feel if Trump's administration were in charge of disinformation? Make you feel all warm and fuzzy now?
It's women and children first! on the foundering SS Democratic Party as the lifeboats are swung out, but there aren't enough biologists aboard to sort the women from the panic-stricken throng or the children from the consenting partners.
"Women can be born with penises, and men can be born with vaginas"- disinformation or misinformation?
The word "disinformation" is associated popularly with the Russian Government.
The Wikipedia article about Disinformation includes the following passage (emphasis added):
The English word disinformation, is a translation of the Russian дезинформация, transliterated as dezinformatsiya. Where misinformation refers to inaccuracies that stem from error, disinformation is a deliberate falsehood promulgated by design. Misinformation can be used to create disinformation when known misinformation is purposefully and intentionally disseminated. ....
Disinformation is primarily carried out by government intelligence agencies ... Front groups are a form of disinformation, as they mislead the public about their true objectives and who their controllers are. ...
Use of the term related to a Russian tactical weapon started in 1923, when the deputy chairman of the KGB-precursor the State Political Directorate (GPU), Józef Unszlicht, called for the foundation of "a special disinformation office to conduct active intelligence operations". The GPU was the first organization in the Soviet Union to use the term disinformation for their intelligence tactics.
William Safire wrote in his 1993 book, Quoth the Maven, that disinformation was used by the KGB predecessor to indicate: "manipulation of a nation's intelligence system through the injection of credible, but misleading data". From this point on, disinformation became a tactic used in the Soviet political warfare called active measures. Active measures were a crucial part of Soviet intelligence strategy involving forgery as covert operation, subversion, and media manipulation.
The 2003 encyclopedia Propaganda and Mass Persuasion states that disinformation came from dezinformatsia, a term used by the Russian black propaganda unit known as Service A that referred to active measures. ...
Ion Mihai Pacepa, former senior official from the Romanian secret police, said the word was coined by Joseph Stalin and used during World War II. The Stalinist government then used disinformation tactics in both World War II and the Cold War. Soviet intelligence used the term maskirovka (Russian military deception) to refer to a combination of tactics including disinformation, simulation, camouflage, and concealment. Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak authored a book entitled Disinformation, in which Pacepa wrote that Stalin gave the tactic a French-sounding title in order to put forth the ruse that it was a technique used by the Western world.
Pacepa recounted reading Soviet instruction manuals while working as an intelligence officer, that characterized disinformation as a strategy used by the Russian government that had early origins in Russian history. ....
... authors Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell characterized disinformation as a cognate from dezinformatsia, and was developed from the same name given to a KGB black propaganda department ... formed in 1955 and was referred to as the Dezinformatsiya agency.
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William Colby explained how the Dezinformatsiya agency operated, saying that it would place a false article in a left-leaning newspaper. The fraudulent tale would make its way to a Communist periodical, before eventually being published by a Soviet newspaper, which would say its sources were undisclosed individuals. By this process a falsehood was globally proliferated as a legitimate piece of reporting.
According to Oxford Dictionaries the English word disinformation, as translated from the Russian disinformatsiya, began to see use in the 1950s. ... a form of Soviet tradecraft, defined in the 1952 official Great Soviet Encyclopedia as "the dissemination (in the press, radio, etc.) of false information with the intention to deceive public opinion." ....
There is so a government definition of misinformation. Mayorkas knows what it is. He probably did not reference it because it is so bad:
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.
<a href="https://www.cisa.gov/mdm>https://www.cisa.gov/mdm</a>
"Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment" is a more apt designation.
Regardless of the lefty scramble to downplay its significance, this is a page out of 1984.
"Setting up the board is a theatrical show of going after something... but what? Claims of election fraud? Claims of election fraud made by Republicans but not claims of election fraud made by Democrats?"
You nailed it! There is very little reason to imagine it could ever be used against Dems. Reps will be targeted, while Dems are free to say Hillary's failure to be elected was fraudulent.
“ Democrats double down stepping on their own crank.”
Esp when they included White Supremacy and COVID-19 vaccine in their mandate for suppression.
DGB Job 1: identify Mr. Q. Anon.
A Twilight faith. A nominally "secular" Pro-Choice "ethical" religion. A liberal ideology. Political congruence ("="). Sacrifice rites for social, redistributive, clinical, and fair weather causes. A brave new world. One step forward, two steps backward.
According to Oxford Dictionaries the English word disinformation, as translated from the Russian disinformatsiya, began to see use in the 1950s. ... a form of Soviet tradecraft, defined in the 1952 official Great Soviet Encyclopedia as "the dissemination (in the press, radio, etc.) of false information with the intention to deceive public opinion." ....
The most successful use of this was the KGB's creation of anti-nuclear hysteria. It is still going strong while the KGB is no more.
Let's not overthink the DGB. Nor be ignorant about what has been known about such organizations for decades and take the position that those opposed to it should have to prove why it is wrong.
"Is this new board concerned narrowly with the deliberate use of bad information to manipulate or just everything that anybody is saying that's wrong?"
It seems fairly evident that the Biden regime, and all its flying monkeys, are concerned quite broadly with using information that is wrong to manipulate, coerce and mislead. My daughter has a dental appointment today, here in Oregon. She had to hunt up a COVID mask, because, although no one wears them anywhere any more, the State of Oregon will cancel the dentist's license if he does not require his patients to put on a mask - any mask, a Halloween mask would do - before entering his office. Of course, she will take it off as soon as she sits down in the chair. Would anyone like to try to convince me that the Oregon State government is not in the hands of utter lunatics, complete morons, or worse? Much worse, I'm thinking.
Pisaki is claiming this horseschiff “board” began under Trump. A real reporter - there are just a few in the press corp - should ask her to name one Trump nominee or appointee to this board.
Just one.
DGB, KGB. Tomayto, tomahto.
"The 2003 encyclopedia Propaganda and Mass Persuasion"
Mike. Why do I get the impression that book is on your bookshelf in easy reach?
I've listened to and read the statements of Democrats that the new Ministry of Truth will not threaten free speech at all; but I remain skeptical. Why should I believe a gang of chronic statists when they tell me that, this time, they're really going to protect my liberty?
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