Steven Edgington has written a perceptive piece in the Telegraph about the “moral panic” over ‘disinformation’ and the clueless Conservatives handing their ideological enemies a nuclear weapon in the form of the Online Safety Bill.
Yet how often do official ‘facts’ turn out to be wrong, and supposed ‘misinformation’ turns out to be true?
Remember all the fuss about Hunter Biden’s laptop? In 2020, everyone had an opinion on its significance. You were either convinced of a great media coverup of Biden-family corruption, or adamant that Trump’s conspiracy theories had got a whole-lot weirder.
Perhaps you even believed that it was Russian disinformation. That’s what Mark Zuckerberg was concerned about when the story broke.
Of course, even the New York Times now admits the story was authentic. But in a recent interview with Joe Rogan – the world’s most popular podcaster – the Facebook founder said the FBI had warned him to be on “high alert” for a big Russian dump of propaganda.
Attempting to excuse his company’s decision, he said: “Hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country… come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”
This led to Facebook suppressing the story for up to a week. People could still share the expose, but far fewer people saw it on their Facebook feeds. Twitter banned sharing any link related to the story altogether.
Fifty former intelligence chiefs even signed a letter dismissing the Hunter Biden story as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”.
This moral panic over “disinformation” arguably altered the course of the election, and such concerns continue to grip politicians and journalists on both sides of the pond.
A grievance racket of what I call the disinformation industrial complex has grown ever larger in recent years.
Covid took the censorship to a whole new level.
In April 2020, YouTube decided to crack down on Covid misinformation. The company’s CEO Susan Wojciki said at the time: “Anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
But what if the WHO gets it wrong, as it did in January 2020 when they tweeted that there was no clear evidence of Covid human-to-human transmission?
By sponsoring the Online Safety Bill, the Tories are shooting themselves in the foot, argues Edgington.
In the U.K., the Government is currently trying to pass the Online Safety Bill, which will outline a new category of legal-but-harmful online content. It says the new law will force social media platforms to address “categories of content which are harmful to adults, likely to include disinformation.” The law will also focus on “empowering users with the critical thinking skills they need to spot online falsehoods”.
Since when was this the role of government? The naivety of a Conservative administration pushing for imprecise laws against disinformation is staggering.
Reports have suggested that Nadine Dorries may hang on as Culture Secretary in Liz Truss’s new Cabinet, meaning her Bill will almost certainly pass by the end of the year. It doesn’t bear thinking about the damage that an ideologically-driven Labour Culture Secretary could get up to with these new powers. How long would it be before something as innocuous as “women don’t have penises” is classified as disinformation?
If it passes, the Tories may leave office in 2024 having given the Left its best asset for censoring conservatives online.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Rockefeller Foundation reports that the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has announced it will provide “an initial $7.2 million in direct research funds to 12 teams working in 17 countries in order to better understand how health mis- and disinformation spreads, how to combat it, and how to build stronger information systems, while increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates”. The amount of money pouring into global censorship efforts is terrifying.
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