Carefully Selected Paragraphs,
by Ye Editor
"Earlier this year, Joe Biden asked social media companies to engage in more censorship in an effort to divert attention from the wholesale failure of his administration to “shut down the virus.” In a televised speech, he said “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”
... It is no accident that virtually every claim that is consistently labelled as disinformation is one that threatens the policy agenda of the Democratic party (or parts of their agenda that they are too embarrassed to state publicly).
“Disinformation” is no longer a concept used to separate truth from falsehood. In the past few years, it has been rhetorically intensified to circumvent the question of truth entirely. It is a means to annex the public’s role in assessing the validity of reporting, placing this authority solely in the hands of “experts” who have the exclusive right to say what is “true.”
Understanding the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation” and observing the ways these concepts are arbitrarily applied is crucial to grasping how our media and other institutions undermine genuine public deliberation—a prerequisite for any functioning democracy.
... The line between misinformation and disinformation is deliberately obscured to ensure that people who are disseminating information that is inconvenient for those in power can be smeared as a malevolent threat to (the catchphrase runs) “our democracy”.
The motives of the populists must always be characterized as nefarious – to acknowledge that they engage the dialogue in good faith would require those in power to enter the sphere of debate. That process of debate is what they are trying to silence and avoid: you can’t lose a debate that never occurs.
ressively spread it at her talk.
... An indicator of disinformation is the absence of important contextual information that would mitigate the truth status of a speaker’s claims. The so-called “fact-checkers” of the mainstream media understand this: they often label assertions “false” on the grounds of “missing context.” ...
The weaponization of the concept of disinformation to achieve political ends is a greater threat to whatever’s left of American democracy than any isolated pieces of actual disinformation could ever be.
Democracy is built on the assumption that typical citizens can discern the truth, and that they have the capacities necessary to develop and implement situations to the problems they face.
The elite disinformation campaign on disinformation implies not only that regular Americans should not play any meaningful role in governance, administration, or deliberation—it insinuates that they don’t have the cognitive ability to learn the truth and to know it when they see it. It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than that."
