BY W. James Antle III

At a time of war, rampant inflation, and new fears of recession, the Biden administration has decided to tackle the problem of disinformation. 

The new Disinformation Governance Board, brought to you by the same federal agency currently overseeing the border crisis, has conspicuously set up shop around the same time Elon Musk agreed to a deal to acquire Twitter after complaining about censorship on the major social media platform.

“Orwellian” and “dystopian” were some of the adjectives used to describe this new initiative, with some likening it to a Ministry of Truth. In ordinary times, it would merely be silly. Unfortunately, we do not live in such times.

The White House sees the matter differently, of course. “[W]hat I can tell you is that it sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “ I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”

Disinformation has long been a problem and the internet makes it easier than ever to spread (just as it has expedited the transmission of accurate information). But the other factor is the collapse in credibility among the well-credentialed gatekeepers.

The people who told you the WMD in Iraq were real, Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake and we were winning in Afghanistan are now going to be the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes disinformation? 

On cue, the person tapped to serve as executive director of this effort, Nina Jankowicz, appears to have held most of the mistaken Washington consensus views that have millions retreating into a fantasy world of their own creation.  (She is also perhaps somewhat eccentric.) 

While it has become a cliche at this point, ask yourself how a similar entity under former President Donald Trump, with, say, Stephen Miller as executive director, would play. At the very least, it might be easier for Psaki to comprehend how someone might oppose the creation of a government-run disinformation board. 

Not only do the gatekeepers sometimes get it wrong, but sometimes even out of self-interest. This is a bad approach to countering misinformation on its own terms. 

The pandemic has seen elites and well-credentialed authorities throughoversimplification and overconfidence drive people into the arms of conspiracy theorists by making authoritative declarations that at the least can be reasonably second-guessed.

Nobody is going to take seriously an administration, spearheaded by a president with a job approval rating in the low 40s, leading an anti-disinformation campaign after winning the White House in the first place thanks in some small part to a news story about that chief executive’s son being erroneously labeled disinformation.

If the fight against disinformation simply means policing one side’s prejudices, phobias, and eccentricities while accepting the other’s as scientific truth, it will do little to keep the general public from rejecting “alternative facts.” 

The lack of a common understanding of reality in America as much as the speed of the internet makes news consumers susceptible to disinformation. Combating that requires more modesty about what the authorities really know, not less. Treating differences in values and priorities as the difference between truth and lies is counterproductive. 

So, of course, is a government operation getting involved in these matters at a time of intense political polarization. Nobody the Biden administration can find to lead or be the public face of such an effort is going to have the credibility or authority to succeed. 

By all means, study what the Russians or the Chinese are doing to keep us confused and bickering. But don’t police it from the executive branch. The end result won’t be pretty.

Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor. He was previously managing editor of the Daily Caller, associate editor of the American Spectator, and senior writer for the American Conservative. He is the author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? You can follow home on Twitter: @Jimantle.

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https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/04/joe-bidens-war-on-disinformation-will-end-badly/

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Attorneys General from two Republican-led US states, Missouri and Louisiana, have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, Fox News reported on Thursday. The states are accusing high-ranking officials, including President Joe Biden, of having “pressured and colluded” with social media companies to censor and suppress information on a number of big stories over the past two years.

Among the officials named as defendants are White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and the President’s Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci. They and others are accused of exerting undue pressure on, or working together, with a number of Big Tech companies such as Meta, Twitter and YouTube to suppress information regarding the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, Covid-19 origins, and security concerns associated with mail-in voting during the pandemic.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry claim the Biden Administration has been doing so “under the guise of combating misinformation.”

The events of the past years added a new dimension to the heated debates over misinformation in the United States, which are expected to become more intense amid the approaching midterm elections.

Two US states, led by Republicans, initiated legal action on Thursday against the Biden administration, accusing the President, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and other staffers of colluding with major social platforms so as to shape the coverage of several controversial topics, including Hunter Biden’s laptop story, the origins of COVID-19 and the security of voting by mail during the pandemic.

The lawsuit was filled by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry in US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Fox News reported, citing obtained court papers.

Among other defendants is Nina Jankowicz, recently appointed as the head of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, which has already been dubbed as the “Ministry of Truth” and received criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, mainly for Jankowicz’s reputation. Jankowicz at one time supported Hillary Clinton's disinformation that attempted to tie Trump with Russian special services. She has also earlier tried to discredit the New York Post’s report regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, saying it should be seen as “a product of the Trump campaign.”

The filing also names DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Jen Easterly.

The policies the current administration adopted were said to violate the constitutional rights of free speech in “one of its greatest assaults by federal government officials in the Nation’s history.”

The lawsuit claims that the officials “coerced, threatened, and pressured social media platforms” such as Meta, Twitter and YouTube “to censor disfavored speakers and viewpoints by using threats of adverse government action.”

“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,' ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’” the documents say.

The lawsuit claims that the Biden administration affected how Hunter Biden's laptop scandal was covered in Twitter and Facebook, where the option to share the New York Post publication was banned. Shortly before the presidential election, Twitter blocked the newspaper’s account. Last month, some other mass media outlets finally acknowledged the authenticity of the compromising evidence and the non-involvement of any special services in the laptop story.

Republicans also pointed to the alleged censoring of publications mentioning the theory that claims the novel coronavirus was leaked from the Wuhan laboratory. Fauci was said to launch a campaign to “discredit” the theory, while at the same time was “exchanging emails with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, regarding the control and dissemination of COVID-19 information.” The campaign reportedly lasted till major media outlets “began to report on the viability of the theory.”

The lawsuit also mentioned YouTube's censorship of conservative leaders Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for questioning the effectiveness of wearing cloth masks during the pandemic.

Another cited example was a June 2021 press briefing with White House press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, during which Biden administration officials said that social networks should be doing more to fight “misinformation” about COVID-19.

“We’re saying we expect more from our technology companies,” Murthy reportedly said during the briefing. “We’re asking them to monitor misinformation more closely. We’re asking them to consistently take action against misinformation super-spreaders on their platforms.”

In addition, the attorneys highlighted the way social media covered the security of voting by mail in the most recent presidential election, saying the “platforms aggressively censored core political speech by then-President Trump and the Trump campaign raising concerns about the security of voting by mail in the run-up to the November 2020 presidential election.”

The attorneys general are asking the court to find that the Biden administration's policies violate the First Amendment, claiming that the DHS and HHS officials' conduct violates the Administrative Procedure Act to “hold unlawful and set aside final agency actions” that they described as abuses of power, arbitrary and capricious.

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https://sputniknews.com/20220505/two-us-states-sue-biden-admin-over-pressure-collusion-with-big-tech-to-censor-information---report-1095297833.html

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