Kathleen Stock has written an excellent piece in UnHerd taking issue with the latest work of the BBC’s ‘Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent’ Marianna Spring, accusing her of spreading ‘disinformation’ in her own right.
In an interview and an accompanying feature published this week, Marianna Spring reiterates a narrative about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that she first aired on Panorama a few weeks back. According to Spring, online disinformation and hate speech is getting worse, and it’s the responsibility of social media platforms to regulate it more heavily.
Like me, Spring receives a lot of online misrepresentation and criticism in her professional role. Indeed, she frequently uses such experiences as a superficially compelling peg for many of her stories. Despite our similarities, though, I remain unconvinced by her case for strong regulation. More than that: through observing her output, I’ve become convinced that the BBC should not have a specialist “Disinformation Correspondent” at all.
In this week’s interview, Spring described her job for the BBC as “interrogating how mistruths or trolling or abuse online can affect real people, and then to investigate and hold to account the social media companies, policy makers, law enforcement…”. At face value, this may seem like a fairly standard quest for a journalist, albeit a noble one — a bit like investigating fraudsters or corrupt politicians, in order to bring their misdeeds and lies into the light.
But there’s at least one big difference. A journalist investigating fraud, but who accidentally misidentifies either what fraud is or the people committing it, doesn’t thereby become guilty of the very thing she is investigating. In contrast, a Disinformation Correspondent who misidentifies disinformation, either positively or negatively, runs the risk of disseminating disinformation herself — and is arguably all the more harmful because of the status implied by her position.
Perhaps it could be rejoindered that disinformation is not the same as misinformation. Whereas misinformation consists in the unwitting dissemination of false statements believed to be true at the time, disinformation is the knowing introduction of false statements with the explicit intention to deceive people. In other words, with disinformation, there is an intent to deceive. That’s a reasonable distinction to make as far as it goes; the problem is that it’s utterly useless in helping us analyse the growing problem with conspiratorial and magical thinking in the world. It also has no relevance to most of the things reported on by Spring.
The capacity of human beings to cling to incredible beliefs in a self-serving way, while being blind to blatantly contrary evidence, is well-established. And given this capacity, it’s very hard to know whether conspiratorial thinking has been propagated in the cynical knowledge of its falsehood. For instance, those in charge of Russian botfarms churning out what liberals call “pro-Putin propaganda” probably half-believe their own falsehoods. The originator of the New World Order conspiracy theory almost certainly believed his. Even bonkers theories like the lizard people one were probably started by the mad rather than the bad. Ironically, the persistent belief that there is a lot of disinformation in the world, in the sense of deliberately deceptive lies, is itself a kind of conspiracy theory. For some people, it seems much easier to believe in the organised and deliberate deception of others than in the chaos of accidental human fallibility.
Worth reading in full.
You can read Will Jones’s piece on Marianna Spring’s Panorama about Elon Musk here.
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Marianna Spring can be briefly heard on this BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast this morning, ‘AntiSocial – Covid vaccines and misinformation’ – but don’t let Marianna Spring put you off, I said ‘briefly’ and it is in fact an excellent programme, in which Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill is given the opportunity to make his case for free speech, and the presenter, Adam Fleming, makes a genuine attempt to be fair to all sides.
The whole series of ‘AntiSocial’ programmes on BBC Radio 4 are surprisingly fair and excellent, not the usual BBC propaganda, but much more open, and are well worth listening to.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k837
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to a BBC programme on misinformation. I wonder how many thousands of Roberts radios (other brands available) have been switched off for good over the last 3 years of unabating BBC propaganda.
Very much in agreement on point one and sadly I’m one of the thousands with a Roberts radio that hasn’t been switched on for the best part of three years.
“The originator of the New World Order conspiracy theory almost certainly believed his.”
Lol. Imagine a world in which powerful people globally talked to each other, shared information and collaborated (when it suited them) in order to further their own wealth and power, and pretended that everything they were doing was for the public good. Only a loony would imagine such goings on.
See Piers Morgan and his pitiful ‘apology’.
Speaking of disinformation, isn’t that all we’ve been bombarded with these past 3 years? So with that in mind, here’s a 13min video illustrating some prime examples of disinformation being spouted by Moderna’s CEO, Walensky, Fauci and more, plus more on the clot shot harms, with a particularly unpleasant clip at the end which is basically child abuse, in my opinion.
https://rumble.com/v2ek51m-who-killed-trista-rand-paul-grills-moderna.html
Misinformation, disinformation and fact checking are weapons used by established, traditional media to suppress competition which has flourished online and in social media.
It’s simple old fashioned gangster tactics used to defend “their turf”.
What’s the point of pretending its anything but that? They aren’t presenting an honest argument so why even pretend they are?
Well put. No one seems to ask the question of how all us middle aged people, who were apparently bombarded with mis and disinformation in the years prior to the internet still have functioning brains.
I was told that Freddie Star had eaten a hamster yet I, and many others, didn’t need a middle class public school educated ‘intellectual’ such as Marianna Spring to allow us to disseminate such information.
The arrogance of these people is simply breathtaking, that they alone are so intellectually superior to everyone else that only they can decide what you and I can and cannot see.
I had a small interaction with this woman on twitter who airily dismissed my question as to why, as a Paramedic, I’d not seen a single serious Covid case. She wasn’t curious but simply explained to me that my observations were incorrect because the doctors HAD seen lots of these patients and as Doctors are far more trustworthy than Paramedics I was simply wrong!
I don’t think it is arrogance. They are just paid gatekeepers used to try to control the public discourse so as to support undemocratic narratives.
Misinformation and disinformation are just two of the most recent words to be subjected to ludicrous redefinition by government, institutions and authoritarians.
It has been done to corrupt the true meaning of the words in order to provide the so called elites an opportunity to weaponise language and bolster their cynical psychological projection onto others.
What it appears to mean is a comfortable little box that people draw around themselves, and within which they can unquestioningly for or against something, without anyone forcing them to think about its consequences or alternatives.
Excellent.
Questions are raised given the sheer amount that we have been able to discover in recent years and the concommitant understanding of how much is hidden. The main focus should be, where is a person now. That system is well and truly dead and not just dead but targeted for destruction. If you want to put as much distance as possible between them and you then you need to align yourself with the forces of goodness and beauty and truth. The bickering over the past leave it to them. Let the dead bury the dead.
Stupid cow.
Frome here on in who knows but it certainly isn;t the BBC. We are talking about months not years left of our culture. I hope you are savouring the last if it because if you have clear vision you can see exactly where it is going. I think the nasty English weather will help us with endurance.
I think everything that is happening is part of a grand project that involves the destruction of European Christian civilisation and the eradication of Europeans.
I was born in 61 and it seems to me it was happening fairly slowly, in second gear, (although decimalisation and metrication were acts of gross local cultural vandalism) until 97, when they went up a couple of gears.
After the election in 2019 they went up another couple of gears.
(I’m not aware of any cars with 7 gears,so my analogy will fail with the election of Labour next time!)
Certainly the destruction of the west is foremost for them. And to be honest they have largely achieved it by surrepititious means. The have moved very far forward since 1945. It is our job to tell them here and no further. We are here to restore a basic simple understanding and we will brook no quarter.
The very use of the terms misinformation and disinformation are offensive in themselves. This is simply pandering to the Orwellian language which is being foisted on us. In reality a twisted way of encouraging people to view the world through the vocabulary of the oppressors. I’m having none of it.
Misinformation is a mix up and disinformation is telling lies. End of.
The issue is the lateness of the hour. We aren’t just naive young bucks learning for the first time that things aren’;t as they seem.We are deeply involved in a war and all of our names are on the missiles.I would just ask for a bit more circumspection because in miltary terms we cannot win and to pretend otherwise is just stupid.
I can’t make anyone feel happier but as long as we gel with our intentions then we’re good to go.I genuinely want to keep this country and this culture alive no matter what.We try our best and see what happens.
All you need to remember is that when your country starts using depleted uranium then all optipns are on the table. Don;t imagine that because you’re an island that you will be safe forever from retaliation.Depleted uranium causes major environmental damage and severe birth defects in civilian populations and civilian injuries generally. This was all listed in a 1990s UN report. This is a very serious matter and you won’t be able to brush it under the carpet for long.
Of course the BBC should not have a misinformation correspondent. It is like they employ their own fact checker. The BBC as arbiters of truth, don’t make me laugh. Pure hubris and an insult to our intelligence.
Check out funding for BBC Media Action…including funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
We need to unplug from the BBC forever
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Ditched my BEEB license, 3 years ago and loving it. Have you heard and the latest corruption of Great Expectations with a black Estella. Renamed ” Great Exploitation “. I kid you not. Remind us about the Anne Boleyn fiasco
There is “truth” and there is “Official Truth”.—– There is “Science” and there is “Official Science”. ——-If someone says there is no such thing as an elephant then that would clearly be misinformation as most of us have seen elephants, even if only on TV. ———————–But NO ONE has seen “Climate Change”. You cannot look out of your living room window and say “Oh look at all the climate change”. ——–An individual might think they have seen it. They might feel a hot day and assume that is climate change. They may see a heavy downpour and think that must be climate change. They might hear about some ice melting and assume yep, that is climate change. ———–But those are all assumptions. But when officialdom tells you that those assumptions represent “Truth” then that is misinformation. They are “Official Truth”. ——————Climate Change is therefore “Official Science” in support of Public Policy.