Tag: disinformation

DHS Disinformation’ Unit Headed by Woman Who Said Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was Disinformation

The Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘disinformation’ unit will be headed by a woman who says free speech makes her ‘shudder’ and who falsely labeled the Hunter Biden laptop story disinformation.

Oh dear.

Just two days after it was revealed that Elon Musk had reached an agreement to buy Twitter, DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas announced the creation of a “disinformation governance board.”

The new board will focus primarily on “misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”

The board will be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a former advisor to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry who oversaw related issued at the National Democratic Institute lobby group.

“Cat’s out of the bag,” Jankowicz tweeted. “Here’s what I’ve been up to the past two months, and why I’ve been a bit quiet on here.”

Jankowicz’s view of free speech is particularly odious. Free speech apparently makes her physically shudder.

“I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities, which are already shouldering disproportionate amounts of this abuse,” she tweeted in response to Musk’s Twitter takeover.

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The Only Way To Fight Disinformation Is To Fight Political Censorship

If outfits like the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” along with Big Tech’s faceless “fact-checkers,” ever get a total monopoly on dictating reality, the result will be a 24/7 mix of falsehoods with the occasional limited hangout to cover up their lies.

The icing on this fake cake is the use of conferences about disinformation, such as the recent stunt at the University of Chicago that served as cover for justifying political censorship. There former President Obama presented the perfect picture of psychological projection: a panel of propagandists accusing others of wrongthink.

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, for example, sought to censor the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by announcing she didn’t find it “interesting.” See how that works? Truth depends upon how our elites personally feel about what should be true.

But it gets much worse, because political censorship creates deep dysfunction in society. In fact, the surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.

Censorship causes disinformation. It’s the grandaddy of disinformation, not a solution to it. The sooner everyone recognizes this obvious fact, the better off we’ll be.

Whenever a self-anointed elite sets up a Ministry of Truth, the link between censorship and disinformation becomes clear. Before long, they invent reality and punish anyone who expresses a different viewpoint.

So, it’s no small irony that those who claim to be protecting “democracy” from disinformation are the biggest promoters of disinformation and greatest destroyers of real democracy. Their dependence on censorship obstructs the circulation of facts. It prevents any worthwhile exchange of ideas.

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Misinformation, disinformation, and the 1619 Project

Earlier this year, Joe Biden asked social media companies to engage in more censorship in an effort to divert attention from the wholesale failure of his administration to “shut down the virus.” In a televised speech, he said “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”

More recently, CNN denounced “misinformation” that blamed high gas prices and inflation on the Biden administration. Media outlets have accused Joe Rogan of “spreading disinformation” about Covid-19 and the vaccine because… he dared to ask scientific experts questions on these topics. Other examples of ideas that the legacy media has alternately labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation” include assertions that Covid-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China; the idea that there was some orchestrated manipulation of procedures to favor Biden in the 2020 election; that Hunter Biden’s laptop offered evidence that the Biden family had been enriched by various forms of international corruption; and that powerful NGOs and world governments are leveraging the pandemic to facilitate a “Great Reset” of the global economy. The campaign to ban these claims – most which are demonstrably true – indicates not a dangerous spread of “disinformation,” but a dangerous weaponization of the concept of disinformation in order to insulate the institutional left from criticism and opposition.

It is no accident that virtually every claim that is consistently labelled as disinformation is one that threatens the policy agenda of the Democratic party (or parts of their agenda that they are too embarrassed to state publicly). “Disinformation” is no longer a concept used to separate truth from falsehood. In the past few years, it has been rhetorically intensified to circumvent the question of truth entirely. It is a means to annex the public’s role in assessing the validity of reporting, placing this authority solely in the hands of “experts” who have the exclusive right to say what is “true.” Understanding the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation” and observing the ways these concepts are arbitrarily applied is crucial to grasping how our media and other institutions undermine genuine public deliberation—a prerequisite for any functioning democracy.

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How Truth was Destroyed So Americans Would Crave Propaganda

One of the most vital fundamentals in understanding how the ruling elite / predator class facilitate their agendas is the role of controlled media to create perception. Perception is, in essence, reality. What is perceived is usually widely believed.

For example, the notion that the sky is blue. Scientifically speaking it actually is not, we only perceive it as blue due to the refraction of light waves through earth’s atmosphere and into the retina of the eye. Ask anyone without an understanding of this scientifically fundamental fact and they will undoubtedly espouse that the sky is indeed blue — as that is the “reality” created by their perception. This is a harmless false perception, but others are not so.

The same is true for the illusionary reality versus objective reality. An empirical observation of how the world really works as opposed to a manufactured perception based on incomplete or inaccurate information represented as authoritative and propagated in repetition.

Unfortunately however in our ever increasingly polarized society it is the manufactured perception that is espoused most fervently. In some cases those who choose to ignore facts in favor of narrative, echo chambers, and tribalism, live in a somewhat alternate reality, albeit a willfully ignorant one.

A control paradigm plays a crucial part in this. And as this report will demonstrate, the current incarnation of US news media, by way of deliberate obfuscation facilitates this paradigm by default.

One stark example of this would be manufactured outrage. Manufactured outrage is a term to describe the intentional misrepresentation of events with the aim of invoking a furious reaction from one or more groups of people. Intentionally praying on the emotional vulnerability of the human condition, typically in the form of gaslighting. Done so in a way that those galvanizing the reaction would find beneficial to their own aims.

Manufactured outrage is a tactic used frequently by the media, typically as a tool of controlled opposition used within identity politics to maintain division.

As this article exemplifies the multiple facets in which the media has been co-opted for use towards these manipulative agendas, the context for the use of manufactured outrage will become clear.

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The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s justifiably despised class of media employees.

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CNN, ABC and CBS News to stop broadcasting in Russia after Putin’s threat to lock up journalists for 12 years: Bloomberg, BBC and Canada’s CBC ‘temporarily suspend’ operations

CNN International, the global arm of CNN, ABC and CBS News will stop broadcasting in Russia, after the Kremlin introduced a new law in the country that could jail anyone intentionally spreading ‘fake’ news.

Bloomberg News, the BBC and Canada’s CBC also said they were temporarily suspending the work of their journalists inside Russia. 

Russian officials have said that false information has been spread by enemies such as the United States and its Western European allies in an attempt to sow discord among the Russian people.

Lawmakers in Moscow passed amendments to the criminal code making the spread of ‘fake’ information an offense punishable with fines or jail terms. They also imposed fines for anyone calling for sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

The new legislation was passed by parliament and will become law when Vladimir Putin signs it, as he is widely expected to do. It was not clear when Putin would sign the measure.

It appeared to give the Russian state much stronger powers to crack down, by making it a criminal offense to spread fake information, with a jail term of up 15 years for posting about ‘fake news.’

‘CNN will stop broadcasting in Russia while we continue to evaluate the situation and our next steps moving forward,’ a spokesperson said Friday. 

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QAnon Decoder Says Half of What Conspiracy Theory Says Isn’t True

Dave Hayes, who’s become a prominent figure in the QAnon movement, recently dismissed skepticism about unfulfilled promises from the movement’s leader, known only as “Q,” because he believes part of the strategy of the movement is to put out disinformation.

Hayes is an influential interpreter of the writings of Q, who inspired the QAnon conspiracy theory that believes prominent people, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, will be arrested for various crimes. While he acknowledged that many have spent the last three years waiting for the arrests, which never came, he argued the disappointment was part of the plan all along.

Speaking with Patrick Gunnels on the Reading Epic Threads webcast on Thursday, Hayes said Q warned people he would put out a lot of “disinformation.” It was designed to “make the bad guys make wrong moves,” according to Hayes.

“If you’re going to buy on to the Q thing, you have to know upfront that half of what Q is going to tell you is not going to be true,” Hayes said. “It’s for the purpose of psychological operations and that’s just what it is.”

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The Real Disinformation Agents: Watch as NBC News Tells Four Blatant Lies in a Two-Minute Clip

The war on “disinformation” is now one of the highest priorities of the political and media establishment. It has become the foundational justification for imposing a regime of online censorship. Around the world, new laws are being enacted in its name to empower the state to regulate discourse. Exploiting this cause, a small handful of billionaires are working in unison with Western security state agencies — under the guise of neutral-sounding names like The Atlantic Council — to set the limits of permissible thought and decree what is true and false. Corporate media outlets are attempting to rehabilitate their shattered image by depicting themselves as the bulwark against the rising tide of disinformation.

It is an understatement to say that this righteous cause is a scam. That its motive is power and control over speech and thought — to eliminate dissent and discredit competition — rather than a noble quest for truth is almost too self-evident to require explanation. No human institutions should be trusted with the inherently tyrannical power they seek to arrogate unto themselves: to decree truth and falsity with such authoritative power that views they have decreed “false” become prohibited, off-limits, even worthy of punishment.

A foundational view of the Enlightenment was that truth and falsity are best discovered by humans engaging in free inquiry and appealing to reason and persuasion, rather than being captive to the whimsical decrees of centralized authority dictating to citizens what they are and are not permitted to believe. That is why I believe, as I wrote at length in a 2013 Guardian article, that at the heart of every censor lies hubris: the belief that they are so evolved, enlightened and superior that they have risen above the eternal human propensity to err, enabling them to ascertain universal truth whose validity is so unassailable that nobody should be permitted to question it let alone dissent from it.

All that said, there is a core truth — an unintentional one — that lies at the crux of this elite war on “disinformation.” It is absolutely true that U.S. political discourse is drowning in deliberate disinformation campaigns and lies. It is also true that this disinformation epidemic is a serious menace, a toxic plague on our democracy and society. That part they have right.

Where they have gone wrong — very, very wrong — is how they have identified the most harmful sources of this disinformation. It does not emanate primarily from Trump boomers on Facebook or dark web QAnon groups or mischievous and transgressive teenagers on 4Chan. Ordinary citizens are obviously as capable as anyone of believing and spreading false assertions. But the far more damaging, destructive, organized and coordinated disinformation campaigns come from major corporate media outlets themselves and their security-state partners — particularly the corporate outlets that most vocally and flamboyantly claim to be so profoundly concerned about disinformation that they want to censor the internet in the name of stopping it. They are the ones who spent the last five years flooding the country with demented CIA-constructed conspiracies about a Kremlin takeover of the U.S. using clandestine sexual blackmail over the president and hallucinating Russian agents hiding under every bed; so many fabrications were disseminated under the rubric of that fairy tale that it is genuinely hard to choose the worst.

Arguably the most pernicious and prolific disseminator of organized disinformation campaigns is NBC News, which includes its cable unit MSNBC. We have spent the last several months working on a mini-documentary demonstrating how most of the coordinated lies from the U.S. security state were spread by a tiny handful of pundits, three of whom — Rachel Maddow, all-but-official CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian, and former Bush/Cheney spokesperson Nicolle Wallace — work for NBC News. That report will be published shortly.

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‘I find QAnon total nonsense’: Michael Flynn DISAVOWS conspiracy movement he once  pledged allegiance to by saying its a ‘disinformation campaign created by the CIA or the left’ in audio released by lawyer Lin Wood

Former White House national security adviser and ardent supporter of QAnon, Michael Flynn, allegedly suggested the far-right political conspiracy theory movement is in fact a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the CIA.

Flynn publicly pledged allegiance to the right-wing conspiracy group last summer, which first originated on internet message boards. 

But in a telephone call that has not yet been independently verified, Flynn, a former adviser to Trump appeared to completely disavow the group as he spoke with pro-Trump election conspiracy theorist and attorney Lin Wood. The man Wood says is Flynn was even heard dismissing QAnon’s claims as ‘total nonsense.’ 

Wood recorded and posted it to his Telegram channel on Saturday.   

‘I think it’s a disinformation campaign. I think it’s a disinformation campaign that the CIA created. That’s what I believe. Now, I don’t know that for a fact, but that’s what I think it is,’ The man said to be Flynn could be heard saying on the recording. 

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