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The Dangers of the New Disinformation Governance Board
The dangers of this “Ministry of Truth” are the same no matter who is in power, and even if you support it today, you may come to regret it tomorrow.
This week the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the creation of a new Disinformation Governance Board. The ostensible reasoning behind this board is to combat Russian disinformation and misinformation about the U.S.-Mexico border, but these newly created powers will undoubtedly stretch much further than these initial claims.
The board will be headed by so-called “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz, a Wilson Center fellow who is being criticized for her previous statements on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. While much of the original reporting of that story was true from the beginning, people like Jankowicz and large swaths of the media labeled it as Russian disinformation. However, the establishment has since been forced to acknowledge reality as the New York Times recently reported on the story’s authenticity.
The creation of this new board comes closely after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, a move that the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” claims is an attempt to restore free speech to the social media platform. Jankowicz’s response to that news raises even more concern for her new role as the government’s disinformation czar. “And I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms,” she recently told NPR when speaking about online harassment. She goes on to say that “we need the platforms to do more, and we frankly need law enforcement and our legislatures to do more as well.” While harassment clearly goes against any decent person’s morals, her newly announced position coupled with her belief that the government should do more to censor online discourse is very disconcerting.
The news of the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board is already enough to cause concern, but the person selected to run it seemingly taking issue with the concept of free speech makes it that much worse. Many people, especially those on the right but not exclusively, have called this board a real-world “Ministry of Truth”, which is a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. While comparisons like this are often a bit of a stretch, this one, in my opinion, is spot-on.
In the book, the Ministry of Truth is tasked with controlling what information the public is allowed to know and censoring or revising any information that contradicts the Party’s official narrative. This is behavior that many people have already considered Big Tech platforms to be engaged in, but the government setting up a board with the literal intention of deciding which speech is true and which is considered “misinformation” fits this 1984 comparison almost perfectly.
The fact of the matter is that no one is qualified to determine what is true in every single circumstance. In 2020, the idea of Covid-19 leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China was considered misinformation. Today, the virus’ origins are still unknown but evidence increasingly points toward the lab leak theory. As stated earlier, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was originally labeled Russian disinformation. Today, it has been proven to be authentic. For years the corporate media pushed the Russiagate conspiracy theory when time and time again it was proven to be false. More recently, NBC News reported that the Biden administration intentionally declassified information about Russia’s alleged intent to use chemical weapons in Ukraine despite there being no actual evidence to support that claim. According to NBC News:
Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
These are just a few examples of the establishment, both in media and government, peddling what eventually turned out to be misinformation. The idea that we would let the same people who got all of those stories wrong — sometimes even pushing those narratives as evidence increasingly came out against them — decide what constitutes truth and what doesn’t is entirely ludicrous. Most things in life are filled with nuances, and that often makes discovering the absolute truth a difficult task. The best way to learn what’s true and what isn’t is to allow open debate and discussion. While that does mean that incorrect information will often be allowed to circulate, the alternative of allowing an authoritarian government body decide who’s right and who’s wrong is truly something out of a dystopian novel.
For those who support the current administration and are praising this recent development, I suggest you engage in a simple thought experiment: Imagine if this exact situation was taking place during Donald Trump’s time in office. Imagine this exact scenario, but instead of your team in control of this Disinformation Governance Board, it’s your political rivals. Does it still seem like a good idea? If not, then you can’t possibly continue to support it now. The dangers of this “Ministry of Truth” are the same no matter who is in power, and even if you support it today, you may come to regret it tomorrow.
Correction: While Nina Jankowicz’s remarks to NPR were about Elon Musk’s intention to purchase Twitter, they were made before that purchase officially took place. I apologize for the error.
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