Please read this article on the development of the anti-“disinformation” campaign of the left. An excerpt:
In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat.
That “something” was the wake-up call that, in a fair election, the left might not always win. So anything that could empower the right had to be stopped by a war that was fought on many fronts. One of those front was information censorship, something in which the left often engages when in power. That’s something Orwell knew very well, and it’s why he emphasized that aspect of the leftist regime he depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
More:
Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.
They want to eradicate what they label as error, not actual error. Although sometimes error is involved, it can just as easily be truth that is labeled “disinformation” by the left. In act, it’s probably even more important for them to suppress truth than falsehoods.
To continue:
Step one in the national mobilization to defeat disinfo fused the U.S. national security infrastructure with the social media platforms, where the war was being fought…
The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”
The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives…
By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.
This has become more and more obvious over time, but only the right seems to be paying attention or caring. That is probably for two reasons. The first is that the MSM isn’t really reporting much on this and is actually part of it, and the second is that a lot of people on the left feel that the ends justify the means.
More:
…[T]he next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.
It’s not only already underway, but it’s been underway for a long time. I noticed it years ago – I don’t recall how many – when suddenly Google was no longer a fairly neutral search engine. It became very difficult to find articles that ran counter to the leftist party line, and very easy to find information that conformed with it.
The article is very long, and I haven’t read it all yet. But it seems well worth reading in its entirety. Another excerpt:
What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue, “in informational and management solutions to existential problems” and in their “own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures.” As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth.
That’s the very same group that the brilliant Thomas Sowell has been writing about for nearly three decades. He has called them “the anointed” and emphasized that being in error over and over again did not seem to make a dent in their arrogant assumption that they must rule.
Defending “democracy” is their cry, although they don’t define it (sometimes it’s “our democracy”). That justifies almost anything, including ending liberty. Without liberty, what is “democracy”? What remains is not just “tyranny of the majority” (although there’s certainly that, too); it’s tyranny of the elite minority.
The left believes liberty is dispensable at this point. It’s just too threatening:
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”
That’s a perfect example of the total inversion of the idea of liberty. It’s where our leftist “elites” have arrived, and technology – particularly AI, which the article discusses at length – gives them tools of control they never had before, far superior to the telescreen of Orwell’s imagination.
