Tag: misinfomation

Trump Is Using the ‘Misinformation’ Censorship Playbook Republicans Attacked Biden For

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson recently complained about alleged “lies, smears and AI deepfakes that are designed to deceive Americans” about President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. Pressed on whether the government was talking with social media platforms to stem this purported misinformation, the spokesperson said, “Yes and we are also putting resources forward to ensure DHS combats this.”

It wasn’t so long ago that candidate Trump and his Republican allies were decrying the Joe Biden administration for pressuring platforms to police misinformation. The Trump administration seems to have warmed to the idea. 

Many on the left, who previously supported giving the government greater power to combat so-called misinformation, are and should rightly be fearful of a Trump administration empowered to censor speech it disagrees with.

The DHS announcement signals a deeper shift toward government-driven moderation of online speech—a shift that threatens to turn every administration into a speech arbiter. The power to dictate what can be said on the internet is inherently prone to abuse, no matter who holds it. The stakes are high.

Jawboning for Me but Not for Thee

Under the First Amendment, federal and state governments cannot censor speech they dislike, so instead of blatantly shutting down a news organization or online platform, government actors often try to force a company to do their bidding through more subtle means. These demands often happen behind closed doors, backed by an implicit—or sometimes explicit—threat that refusal will bring government retaliation. Because the government wields so much power over businesses, these companies understand they are in a weak position to resist. This practice is called “jawboning.”

When the Biden administration made public and private demands that social media companies remove “misinformation” and “disinformation” related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it ended up at the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. The Court ultimately punted by ruling that individual social media users who claimed their speech was suppressed lacked standing to sue. 

This was disappointing. Internal emails from various social media companies showed that senior leaders felt they had no choice but to comply with the administration. Meta’s leaders internally said that they needed to change policy because they had “bigger fish to fry with the Administration.” YouTube claimed it needed to keep Biden officials happy since they wanted to “work closely with the administration on multiple policy fronts.” Amazon moved to “accelerate” its policy changes ahead of a call with Biden officials. Thankfully, the Supreme Court did at least uphold the principle that jawboning is wrong and unconstitutional in another case, NRA v. Vullo. 

Today, the Trump administration appears to be invoking Murthy as cover for its own pressure campaigns against online platforms. Apple removed an app that allowed users to report sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in real time. After complaints from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Meta removed a Facebook group that shared information about ICE agents. Now, the DHS says it is communicating with social media companies about supposed immigration misinformation. It would be naive to suppose it hasn’t applied any pressure during those talks.

It is entirely possible that the government can point to specific acts of illegality. It’s also possible that some of this content violates platform policies. For example, Meta claimed it removed the Facebook page with information on ICE agents for violating its “policies against coordinated harm.” It is possible this group was persistently violating this policy. But as long as these companies remain vulnerable to government pressure, we cannot simply trust officials who insist their demands are legitimate.

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MTG Expertly Smacks Down Jasmine Crockett After the Disgraced Congresswoman Echoes Jimmy Kimmel and Claims that Charlie Kirk’s Assassin is a MAGA Republican

Disgraced Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) got a much-deserved mackdown after not learning from Jimmy Kimmel after he lost his ABC show for defamatory comments regarding the Charlie Kirk assassination.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, the left-wing Kimmel told his late-night audience on Monday that a MAGA REPUBLICAN murdered Kirk and accused the right of trying to score political points off of it.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel claimed.

After his comments, Nexstar announced that all 32 of its ABC broadcast affiliates will preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely, blasting Kimmel’s sick comments about Kirk’s murder as “offensive and insensitive.”

However, Crockett decided to echo Kimmel during a congressional hearing on Thursday and claim Robinson was all MAGA. To back up her lie, she cited an article from far-left Yahoo.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) would not let Crockett off the hook and schooled her with some basic facts. She pointed out not just the fact that it has been proven Robinson was a radical leftist, but the assassin had a transgender lover who called himself a furry.

MTG next pointed out that the type of language and lies utilized by Crockett contributed to not just Kirk’s assassination, but also the near-assassination of President Trump and the 2017 Congressional Baseball shooting, where Rep. Steve Scalise was nearly killed.

MTG went to warn Crockett that these types of lies will no longer be tolerated.

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Misinformation Scholarship Exposed As Liberal Activist Grift

A funny thing happened when the NY Times reported a month back that Elon Musk’s exit from DC politics had been facilitated by a group of activists targeting his electric car company after he abandoned Democrats, helped fund Trump’s election, and then ran DOGE.

In short, Musk supports zero Democratic Party politicians and none of their priorities.

Enter Democratic activists who protested against the company run by the party’s main boogey man—protests that sometimes veered into violence and started at the impetus of sociology professor Joan Donovan.

The problem with Times story is what the Times journalist doesn’t tell us, namely the function professor Joan Donovan has served at the New York Times and other legacy news. Labeling Donovan a “sociology professor at Boston University,” skips over this purported academic’s role as a central character in the Time’s fake narrative that America is awash in “disinformation” that can only be fixed by legacy media and professors, like Joan Donovan—a misinformation authority who allegedly publishes objective scholarship with neutral, verified facts and reliable truths.

“Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns,” explains one news site. “She conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.”

In reality, the entire arena of disinformation studies has been exposed as a jobs program for liberal activists who dress up in academic garb, to provide quotes to the Times when they run articles claiming anything not published in the New York Times might be disinformation.

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FACT CHECK: Daily Kos Lying about ICE’s Tom Homan Quote, Misstating Law

Left-wing opposition to the Trump agenda typically relies on half-truths and outright lies. Left-wing individuals often, personally, do not believe in fundamental truths, so their efforts at dishonesty, sophistry, are seen as tactical concerns.

There’s no good faith interpretation of how Emily Cahn Singer misquoted Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan. When you compare what Homan really said, with how Singer quoted you, you see fundamental journalistic dishonesty at work.

Major Violations:

  • Dishonestly describe claims
  • Decontextualization
  • Major Misrepresentation of Source Material
  • Manipulative editing
  • Smearing
  • Misrepresentation

Singer’s article, “Trump’s racist ‘border czar’ admits ICE is breaking the law,” relies on a brief comment that Homan made on FoxNews.

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UN Launches Task Force to Combat Global “Disinformation” Threat

The United Nations has unveiled its first Global Risk Report, placing what it terms “mis- and disinformation” among the most serious threats facing the world.

Tucked into the report is the announcement of a new task force, formed to address how unauthorized narratives might disrupt the UN’s ability to carry out its programs, particularly its centerpiece initiative, the 2030 Agenda.

Rather than encouraging open discourse or transparency, the organization has taken a route that centers on managing what information gets seen and heard.

While the language used suggests a concern for public welfare, the actual emphasis lies on shielding the UN’s agenda from interference.

According to the report, survey respondents that included member states, NGOs, private companies, and other groups overwhelmingly called for joint government action and multistakeholder coalitions to deal with the highlighted risks.

Yet there is no clear endorsement of more open communication or free expression. The dominant solution appears to be top-down control over public narratives.

This newly established task force has a single focus. Its job is to assess how so-called mis- and disinformation affect the UN’s ability to deliver on its goals.

The report does not describe how this benefits the public or strengthens democratic values. Instead, the team’s mission is about insulating UN operations from disruption, particularly as they pertain to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The SDGs, which make up the foundation of the 2030 Agenda, touch nearly every aspect of governance and development, from climate to education to healthcare.

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Inside the Push for Police-Run “Misinformation” Units

Lexipol, a private consultancy geared towards providing services to law enforcement in the US, has come up with a recommendation to law enforcement to set up a “Misinformation/Disinformation Unit.”

A piece published on the company’s platform, Police1.com, asks its client police departments whether they are “prepared (for) the battle against mis/disinformation.”

Coming from Lexipol, this is no ordinary question, as the firm is said to have contracts with more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies, and is consequently considered to be a key player in what is known as “privatized police policymaking.”

According to Lexipol’s own statements, its reach in March 2020 extended to 8,100 agencies that used the company’s services and manuals (a year earlier, reports said that these agencies were located across 35 US states).

From that position, Lexipol is now making recommendations to its “subscribers” in the law enforcement community to establish a unit that would not only tackle supposed misinformation and disinformation, but also “collaborate with tech companies and civil society organizations to develop early-warning systems and identify harmful content in real time.”

This can be read as brazen defiance of the ongoing efforts, including in the US Congress, to put an end to just such “collaboration” between private and government (here, law enforcement) entities – investigated in one instance as government-Big Tech collusion.

But Lexipol’s write-up plays on fears that it is “disinformation” that might increase public hostility toward police officers and put them at greater risk.

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Biden-Harris spent $1 billion to spread COVID vaccine misinformation

A new Congressional report shows the Biden-Harris administration spent almost $1 billion manipulating public opinion on COVID vaccines, at times relying on wrong or speculative information.

A House Energy and Commerce report released Wednesday night details how the National Institutes of Health seeded “erroneous or unproven information” into COVID-era messaging and advertisements.

In other words, when state officials, such as Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer were jubilantly shuttering schools and businesses, the White House was knowingly manipulating the public on vaccines’ promised efficacy against COVID. 

“While the Biden-Harris administration’s public health guidance led to prolonged closures of schools and businesses, the NIH was spending nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money trying to manipulate Americans with advertisements—sometimes containing erroneous or unproven information,” the report said. 

“By overpromising what the COVID-19 vaccines could do—in direct contradiction of the FDA’s authorizations—and over emphasizing the virus’s risk to children and young adults, the Biden-Harris administration caused Americans to lose trust in the public health system,” Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-WA, said.

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How the Biden Campaign Redefined Misinformation to Control the Online Narrative

Evidence keeps piling up that the use of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” has become the ultimate tactic to manipulate and censor people and content, invalidate legitimate arguments, and control the narratives.

Matt Orfalea writes about the case of Joe Biden, and the effort his team put into trying to convince voters that any (as it turned out, completely legitimate) talk about the president’s mental decline was “disinformation.”

A Zoom call between three members of that team has now surfaced, dating to the 2020 campaign, when questions were already being asked about the state of health of then-candidate Biden.

And according to them – the manipulative methods that they discuss, designed to dispel those concerns – supposedly resulted in Biden receiving 200,000 more votes than he would have.

Biden-Harris digital director Rob Flaherty, Biden’s Rapid Response Director Becca Rinkevich (after the election, the White House Deputy Director of Digital Strategy), and DNC Counter-Disinformation Program creator and lead analyst Tim Durigan were on the call when they spoke about how to counter “misinformation” regarding Biden’s health and other issues.

Flaherty, who is now Deputy Campaign Manager for Kamala Harris, is considered a key figure in the censorship efforts of the Biden administration during the past four years and is known for trying to influence social media like Facebook to silence Covid vaccine skeptics, including journalist Tucker Carlson.

At one point, Orfalea writes, he even refused to define “misinformation” while under oath.

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Surgeon General Murthy Advocates for Digital ID to Combat Online “Misinformation” and Protect Youth

These days, as the saying goes – you can’t swing a cat without hitting a “paper of record” giving prominent op-ed space to some current US administration official – and this is happening very close to the presidential election.

This time, the New York Times and US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy got together, with Murthy’s own slant on what opponents might see as another push to muzzle social media ahead of the November vote, under any pretext.

A pretext is, as per Murthy: new legislation that would “shield young people from online harassment, abuse and exploitation,” and there’s disinformation and such, of course.

Coming from Murthy, this is inevitably branded as “health disinformation.” But the way digital rights group EFF sees it – requiring “a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents” – is just unconstitutional.

Whenever minors are mentioned in this context, the obvious question is – how do platforms know somebody’s a minor? And that’s where the privacy and security nightmare known as age verification, or “assurance” comes in.

Critics think this is no more than a thinly veiled campaign to unmask internet users under what the authorities believe is the platitude that cannot be argued against – “thinking of the children.”

Yet in reality, while it can harm children, the overall target is everybody else. Basically – in a just and open internet, every adult who might think using this digital town square, and expressing an opinion, would not have to come with them producing a government-issued photo ID.

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