Disinformation, Censorship, and Tyranny
elites don't like the plebs
This week the social media watchdog at the EU, Thierry Breton, sent a letter to Elon Musk threatening him about Misinformation and the penalties that might ensue following his X Spaces conversation with Donald Trump.
https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1823033048109367549
Oh well, that was then. Now “Brussels slaps down Thierry Breton over ‘harmful content’ letter to Elon Musk” according to the Financial Times.
Breton’s letter was sent against a background of increased fears in Europe about the spread of disinformation on X. False information on social media has been accused of fuelling far-right sentiment within the EU and the spread of recent riots in the UK.
In other words, European governments don’t like speech that conflicts with its regime policy and its regime narrative. As all governments have felt since the dawn of time.
The latest flap over “false information” blew up during the late COVID unpleasantness. Governments everywhere used their powers to censor information online if it went against their current narrative and policy, even if the information providers were experts and scientists. In the aftermath, it turns out that many of the censored experts and scientists were right.
Of course, you know the official definitions of “false information.” Our own Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has a helpful page telling you all about it. Here is what they tell you.
Some tactics of foreign influence include leveraging misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Definitions for each are below.
Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.
Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate. An example of malinformation is editing a video to remove important context to harm or mislead.
Foreign actors use misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation campaigns to cause chaos, confusion, and division.
You can see where these guys are coming from. It’s the job of the Intelligence Community to protect us from foreign enemies. And that starts with defense against harmful information.
I’m not quite sure when the full MDM trio got defined.
Misinformation
According to La Wik, misinformation goes back ages.
Early examples include the insults and smears spread among political rivals in Imperial and Renaissance Italy in the form of pasquinades.
But obviously, the advent of social media has alerted governments to a big problem.
Social media platforms allow for easy spread of misinformation. Post-election surveys in 2016 suggest that many individuals who intake false information on social media believe them to be factual.
In other words, social media makes it much easier for non-elite “influencers” to get their message into the public square. And elites don’t like it.
You can see the snobby attitude here. “Many individuals” just don’t have the sophistication to tell truth from lie.
I get it. The one thing that government is for is to fight wars. And in wars, in western societies, it is deemed essential for the government to have sole control of information in the public square. The reason is obvious. The people must be confident of victory, because otherwise they might lose heart. If there’s a defeat in battle, it is at worst merely a minor setback. If the war ends in defeat, well, too bad. And you certainly don’t want yahoos passing on gossip they heard from a friend at the front that could be used by the enemy to ambush Our Boys at the front.
Disinformation
Would you believe that Disinformation comes from the Soviet Union?
Some consider it a loan translation of the Russian дезинформация, transliterated as dezinformatsiya, apparently derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department.
But let’s be honest. Everything that politicians say is, at least in part, a lie. Administrators and bureaucrats, ditto. I was listening to the Trump Musk conversation on X Spaces, and time after time, Trump was shaving the truth. That’s why our liberal and Democratic friends are beside themselves about Trump. What they don’t understand, because they live in a bubble, is that anyone who is not a CNN-MSNBC loyalist will find the same thing true about any Democratic politician. Back in the day Republican politicians were careful to shade their remarks so they would not step outside the Overton window of the global educated class. Trump has made a point of kicking over the traces. And our liberal friends are shocked.
So, disinformation is simply a power actor pushing his false narrative over on his enemy, with the intent to demoralize or disorient. Or he is pushing his false narrative on his supporters in order to encourage them.
For instance, there is no more vile disinformation that the accusation of “price gouging” by big corporations. It is vile because, in a market economy, no actor has the power to price gouge. Unless he is supported by government. But when things go wrong, and prices soar due to the government printing money, politicians like to blame corporations for the sufferings of their people. Because a politician never admits a mistake.
Malinformation
The use of the term Malinformation appears to be fairly recent. Wikipedia credits a certain Iranian Hossein Derakhshan for coining the term in a 2017 report “Information Disorder.”
Proponents of the term argue that malinformation is often used in conjunction with disinformation and misinformation as part of "orchestrated campaigns [to] spread untruths", a phenomenon known as fake news.
Funny that this notion developed in the aftermath of the Trump election as president.
Yeah. I can see that the global educated class would consider that Donald Trump could only get elected as the result of an “information disorder.” It couldn’t be that Trump was elected because the global educated class has Made Things Worse. Inconceivable!
There is, to me, a certain charming naïvété in the educated class’s development of its misinformation-disinformation-maliformation narrative. Really, it all comes down to the sudden exposure to a world view that is antagonistic to the global educated class. This is not right! There must be a glitch in the Matrix!
And, of course, the liberal mainstream media is right in the forefront of the war against misinformation-disinformation-maliformation. For me, this is comical. Does the MSM not realize that the press has been the patsy of the ruling class since forever. Why? Because every government is in the censorship business, usually both formal and informal. Every government needs to control the narrative. Always has and always will. And if you don’t go with the narrative, well, nice little media career you got here. Pity if something would happen to it.
If you don’t know that, don’t understand it, don’t put it at the center of your understanding of the human world, I gotta bridge in Baltimore to sell you.