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Disinformation. BLM. Masks.
Count three moral panics that never made any sense, that destroyed people’s lives, yet questioning them had severe consequences. And certainly the one place that they could never be questioned was in the media. Yet, when the time came, the media simply shrugged, brushed them aside and acted like they had been no big deal in the first place.
Disinformation was originally a Russiagate component that was used to conduct mass censorship of political dissent and a top-down regulation of speech on the theory that there was a dangerous kind of speech ‘disinformation’ that made democracy unworkable without censorship.
But now the time has passed and a Politico article casually brushes the whole thing aside without actually acknowledging the harm that it did and while still pretending that the censors were acting in good faith.
What followed was almost a decade of alarm over disinformation, with legislators agonizing over which ideas social media platforms should allow to propagate, and hand-wringing at how this was all irrevocably corroding the foundations of society.
A vibrant cottage industry — dubbed “Big Disinfo” — sprang up to fight back against bad information. NGOs poured money into groups pledging to defend democracy against merchants of mistruth, while fact-checking operations promised to patrol the boundaries of reality…
There is currently a “crisis in the field of misinformation studies,” announced an October article in Harvard University’s Misinformation Review.
“For almost a decade,” misinformation has been a central fixation of political elites, non-profits and the media, the authors wrote. Despite this, “it can sometimes feel as if the field is no closer to answering basic questions about misinformation’s real-world impacts, such as its effects on elections or links to extremism and radicalization.”
Foundational issues such as how to define misinformation are still vexing the field, the authors note.
The work is frustrated by “incredibly polarizing” conversations on the role misinformation plays in society. For example, whether “Facebook significantly shaped the results of 2016 elections” — which, eight years on, is still inconclusive, although studies have cast doubt on Russian bot farms having had much to do with it.
Because it was all a bunch of lies. Misinformation can simply be defined as something the other side believes that you think isn’t true. (That turns out to be most things.) The very notion of censorship was a fundamental attack on the First Amendment and yet, until very recently, we had courts, law professors and top experts wave away the idea that the government telling social media platforms what speech needed to be removed was censorship or at all problematic.
What just changed?
The Politico article says it. “‘Nobody was tricked into voting for Trump’: Why the disinformation panic is over.”
The disinformation campaign was manufactured to stop Trump. Stopping Trump is moot since he won his second term. Now the whole thing can be taken apart and packed away in storage until it’s needed next time. (Which will likely be before long.)
The one good thing you can say about Kamala is that unlike Hillary she didn’t manufacture a fake narrative about why she lost (beyond the usual racism and sexism.) Hillary created the Russiagate disinformation monster (which Politico never gets around to acknowledging.)
The same can’t be said for what Politico still insists on referring to as ‘disinformation researchers’ even while admitting that it’s not a scientific subject and has no validity.
Some scholars believe the unavoidable subjectivity involved in defining “misinformation” renders it inappropriate as a field of scientific inquiry altogether…And some scholars have pointed out that Big Disinfo’s roots, forged in a partisan revolt against Trump, led to glaringly one-sided speech prescriptions.
“Misinformation researchers have not transcended the partisan origins of the misinformation discourse to develop an unbiased and reliable procedure for separating misinformation from true information,” wrote Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at Miami University, in 2023.
This has resulted in the field’s “inadvertent tendency to take sides in the polarized political debates it attempts to study” and the “asymmetrical pathologization of what we, the researchers, consider to be false beliefs.”
That’s because ‘misinformation’ just literally labels conservative views as a dangerous pathology and sets out to suppress them. It’s no more a scientific field of study than witchcraft is, but at least it’s an entirely predictable one.
The people engaged in it, unless they were complete blinkered idiots, no more believed in it than the political consultants believed that Bloomberg would become president. They were cashing checks and pursuing political goals. If there’s anyone who ought to be charged with threatening democracy, it’s them.
Disinformation is information that contradicts the Democrat narrative.
I tried to reply, “You nailed it!”. But the algorithm told me that was too short and wouldn’t post it. So here it is: ” You nailed it!”. There, I think that’s long enough.
“Conciseness” isn’t a virtue, in some domains, I guess. 😉
How could the U’s (unattractive, uneducated, unintelligent and unnecessary) pass up a chance to get even with their oppressors and get paid bonuses besides?
“Media: Remember That Whole Disinformation Thing? It Was All Made Up.” None of this could have happened had not it been for the corrupt news media, and radicalized IT industry supporting the social media platforms. Thanks to Trump’s election the news media & social media have lost their stranglehold on the flow of news and information. This stranglehold has been broken by alternative conservative news platforms, pod casts, and YouTubers. You will always have those that will try to infringe on your rights, but now you have a more balanced access to what is real so you can decide. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, & CBS will soon wither and die or shrink to a small fraction of what they once were with no way to control the narrative. Twitter is now ‘X’ and that speaks for itself.
People who read Front Page are less likely to swallow bullshit lies of the main sleaze media and their paid whores in government –
We sense BS when we hear it – we know = something in us tells us immediately, this is not right, this makes no sense – it’s all lies
We were taught a hard and scary lesson from the coup d’etat of rigged and stolen 2020 election and the 4 years we have endured – if we are still here –
This is why President Trump has his landslide victory, it is our victory too. Never before or since President Lincoln has the clear choice in front of us which person to vote for POTUS.
If we had not 4 years of this dufus, demonic, corrupt and installed regime, we would not know the difference and President Trump would seem like just another person running for POTUS!
I can choose what to read and watch – my remote has an on/off and channel changer.
Excellent!@ Hear! Hear!
“Misinformation Studies” Is there a PHD available in these studies? Asking for a friend. Also, would the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin be considered MIS-information, DIS-information or downright “Pathological Beliefs”?
Most all our News from the M.S. Media is Disinformation the typical leftists propaganda we get from the NYT’s/CNN
Fresh from the Deep State Ministry of Truth:
“Truth is disinformation.”
Yep, conservative media have been filled with “disinformation”: (1) Joe Biden is fit as a fiddle; (2) the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation; (3) the Covid vaccines were perfectly safe; (4) the Covid protocols were all perfectly sound and science-based; (5) the BLM protests were almost entirely peaceful; (6) the J6 riot nearly toppled the government and almost ended “democracy”; (7) Donald Trump will reinstate Jim Crow and imprison Kathy Griffin and Robert De Niro; and (9) climate change will destroy the world by 1996, I mean 1998, I mean 2002, I mean 2005, I mean 2008, I mean 2012, I mean 2018, I mean 2020, I mean 2023. Oh, wait . . .
In the 1970s MSM was full of scare stories about the impending Ice Age.
Well it was obviously made up from the start. Misinformation/disinformation/malinformation are quite obviously any information that exposes the Leftists narratives for the lies they really are.
I hate to be a debby downer, but I can’t help but believe that there was little to no evidence that the democrat cheat machine was at full throttle in the presidential election, but rather parked in their garage. Why? Because they knew that Harris winning would discredit the party even more by the next election. I believe they have other plans of dealing with MAGA, either by removing Trump, dead or alive, or wait for the next presidential election to rev up the cheat machine once more.
“We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False” William Casey (former CIA Director 1981-1987)
who elected them to decide Americans, and by default, the peasants of their client and vassal states, should be made ignorant about “everything”?
WHY do we need to be “made to believe everything is false”?