This morning’s Washington Post carries the welcome news that the Disinformation Governance Board has been “paused” and may very likely die its cradle, as Bolshevik enterprises should. The piece, written by famous crybully Taylor Lorenz, laments “How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts” [paywalled; excerpts here and here] and quotes an Administration flunky as saying, “Nina Jankowicz has been subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats. In congressional hearings and in media interviews, the Secretary [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas] has repeatedly defended her as eminently qualified [link added by Stromata] and underscored the importance of the Department’s disinformation work, and he will continue to do so.”
Well, the prospective tsarina did have to endure mockery of her TikTok videos and criticism of her dismissal of Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop as a “Trump campaign product”, but her ideas about what disinformation is and how to combat it deserved condemnation. I went to the trouble of reading her book on the subject and summarized her recommendations, which amount to government supervision of social media, large-scale subsidies to pro-government news outlets, and tools “integrated into the user interface” designed “to change user behavior” on the Internet, that is, to make “disinformation” (as defined by the government) hard to access.
The government already has two agencies that deal with “disinformation”: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”) and the Global Engagement Center. The latter focuses on foreign governments and “non-state actors” (the approved euphemism for foreign terrorist organizations) and is a Trump Administration revival of a State Department office that President Obama shut down in 2015. It could be misused but seems harmless at the moment. CISA is a purveyor of government propaganda but not, so far as I can tell, a very effective one. Its work product includes comic books and rather silly “infographs”. As high school projects, they might get a B+.
It’s pretty obvious that the Disinformation Governance Board was created as a more robust organ, and it seems quite reasonable to infer that Tsarina Nina was chosen to head it because the DHS bureaucracy likes her ideas. To somebody like Taylor Lorenz, who seeks to confine the entire populace inside a left-wing bubble, effective pushback against those ideas is doubtless a tragedy. The rest of us have reason to be pleased.
Update (11:15 a.m.): The Tsarina has officially abdicated.
Further reading: Robby Soave, “Nina Jankowicz’s Faulty Record, Not Her Critics, Doomed the Disinformation Board”
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