Media: Remember That Whole Disinformation Thing? It Was All Made Up

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.

What just changed?

The Politico article says it. “‘Nobody was tricked into voting for Trump’: Why the disinformation panic is over.”

The disinformation campaign was manufactured to stop Trump. Stopping Trump is moot since he won his second term. Now the whole thing can be taken apart and packed away in storage until it’s needed next time. (Which will likely be before long.)

The one good thing you can say about Kamala is that unlike Hillary she didn’t manufacture a fake narrative about why she lost (beyond the usual racism and sexism.) Hillary created the Russiagate disinformation monster (which Politico never gets around to acknowledging.)

The same can’t be said for what Politico still insists on referring to as ‘disinformation researchers’ even while admitting that it’s not a scientific subject and has no validity.

Some scholars believe the unavoidable subjectivity involved in defining “misinformation” renders it inappropriate as a field of scientific inquiry altogether…And some scholars have pointed out that Big Disinfo’s roots, forged in a partisan revolt against Trump, led to glaringly one-sided speech prescriptions.

“Misinformation researchers have not transcended the partisan origins of the misinformation discourse to develop an unbiased and reliable procedure for separating misinformation from true information,” wrote Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at Miami University, in 2023.

This has resulted in the field’s “inadvertent tendency to take sides in the polarized political debates it attempts to study” and the “asymmetrical pathologization of what we, the researchers, consider to be false beliefs.”

That’s because ‘misinformation’ just literally labels conservative views as a dangerous pathology and sets out to suppress them. It’s no more a scientific field of study than witchcraft is, but at least it’s an entirely predictable one.

The people engaged in it, unless they were complete blinkered idiots, no more believed in it than the political consultants believed that Bloomberg would become president. They were cashing checks and pursuing political goals. If there’s anyone who ought to be charged with threatening democracy, it’s them.