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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. […]
— Read More: www.frontpagemag.com
