A Washington Post editorial (which I didn’t see until it emerged from behind the pay wall) reassures readers: “Ignore the hysteria over the Disinformation Governance Board”. According to the Post, all is benign:
The Disinformation Governance Board (whose acronym is the Soviet-sounding DGB) is supposed to aid coordination among DHS offices as they counter viral lies and propaganda that pose a threat to domestic security. Done right, this is a useful function. Mr. Mayorkas mentioned campaigns by human smugglers targeting migrants to trick the Haitian community into thinking they could enter the United States without risk of deportation. Russia’s persistent efforts to influence U.S. elections are well known. Studying the “best practices” for stymying these attempts and sharing them with government actors could do a great deal of good.
What the board is not tasked to do is to establish what is true and what is false, or to push Internet services or anyone else to take a tougher line on expression in general. Indeed, the board has no operational authority at all.
Already, components of the agency are gathering knowledge about what rumors are circulating so that they might respond. They, as well as government actors charged with disseminating the facts to debunk popular falsehoods or with educating citizens on how to avoid being fooled in the first place, need to know how to execute their roles effectively – as well as how to do so without infringing on civil liberties. The board is supposed to ensure that these government authorities – from the Federal Emergency Management Agency as it counters scammers after natural disasters to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as it instructs critical infrastructure companies on how to secure themselves against hackers – respect human rights.
As the Post mentions in passing, the Department of Homeland Security already includes a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA’s efforts focus heavily on “resources that individuals; State, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) governments; the private sector; academia; and others can use to understand the threat of malicious information activities and includes actions to mitigate associated risks from mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM) and foreign influence activities”. Unmentioned in the editorial is the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, whose mission is “To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations”.
What will the DGB add to the already existing agencies? Does it have a function other than giving employment to its executive director and a few other progressives? A “fact sheet” issued by the Department of Homeland Security purports to furnish the answer:
The Department is deeply committed to doing all of its work in a way that protects Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. In fact, the Disinformation Governance Board is an internal working group that was established with the explicit goal of ensuring these protections are appropriately incorporated across DHS’s disinformation-related work and that rigorous safeguards are in place. The working group also seeks to coordinate the Department’s engagements on this subject with other federal agencies and a diverse range of external stakeholders. The working group does not have any operational authority or capability.
One who read that in a vacuum would infer that DHS has discovered that its anti-disinformation activities infringe civil liberties and need to be reined in, much as the Church Committee’s investigations led to new restraints on the CIA, FBI and other government intelligence operations. Strangely, the announcement of the creation of the DGB and initial reports about it made no mention of those alleged concerns.
The choice of the DGB’s executive director is likewise a clue to the thinking behind its creation. As I discussed in an earlier post, the appointee, one Nina Jankowicz, has written a book titled How to Lose the Information War, in which she laments the insufficiency of government anti-disinformation efforts and proposes three steps to remedy matters:
- ”[S]et the guardrails of the internet and the social media platforms on which we share so much of our lives.” While saying that “we are hesitant to allow government bodies jurisdiction over our right to free speech”, she goes ahead and defends enhanced government supervision of social media.
- ”Investments in journalism as a public good are critical to maintaining a healthy information environment in which disinformation can more easily be dispelled, and in which a trusted voice is readily accessible in times of chaos and turmoil.” If that doesn’t means government-funded media that will be endorsed as “trustworthy” information sources, I don’t know what she has in mind. She expresses nostalgia for the era when a handful of newspapers and television networks dominated the dissemination of news, and dissent from their monologues was confined to obscure publications on the fringes of public awareness. Americans were protected, it’s true, from claims that President Eisenhower was a communist agent and that fluoridation of water supplies would endanger children’s health – and also from the facts about Stalinist genocide in Ukraine, John F. Kennedy’s serious health problems and rampant womanizing, and the failure of the communist Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Media monopoly is a spreader of falsehoods, not a remedy.
- Finally, Miss Jankowicz, doubting that the preceding two steps will be sufficient, advocates one more: “deep-rooted attempts to change user behavior” that are “integrated into the user interface of the platform – not buried in a help section or in a print newspaper advertisement”.
If DHS Secretary Mayorkas intends that the DGB will protect free speech, he may want to reconsider his choice of a guardian.
One may hope that the furor raised by the DGB will render it wholly ineffectual, but the only way to be sure of that is, if one may borrow Winston Churchill’s line about Bolshevism, “to strangle it in its cradle”.
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