Since 2016, the national security establishment has tried to reframe mass disaffection with mainstream politics as the outcome of foreign meddling. But disinformation isn’t the cause of our political malaise, and fighting it won’t get us out of it.
I don’t think the title is particularly great and I probably should’ve changed it for this post. I think the issue that they’re addressing here is that the task of addressing disinformation and framing it as the primary problem behind modern issues plays into the hands of different groups of powerful people. The liberal cry that everything they don’t like is Russian interference, that every bit of political activism or deviation from the norm in any direction is the result of a proxy war between Russia and/or China and the rest of us. People desperately looking for tech CEOs to address disinformation by embracing centralized arbiters of truth. That kind of thing that you hear a lot from (often older) American liberals who reject progressives and the left about as much as they do the far right. That attitude can be harmful and lead to a kind of thinking where no one who deviates from the center actually means what they say and that they’re just trying to spread information on the behalf of some Evil party like Russia:
There has been an attempt to understand every instantiation of populism and social tumult as a question of disinformation. Just how far this goes was made clear when Susan Rice invoked Russian meddling in the context of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest movement. The resulting vision of the world is one in which movements are seen as pseudo-actors subservient to an underlying system of information war. By the same token, the disinfo technocrats can imagine themselves as an indispensable corps of experts who “promote objective fact as the basis for democratic governance worldwide”
The article could’ve gone further to specify what they’re addressing though. I don’t think they’re trying to get into the stuff that you’re talking about.
The liberal cry that everything they don’t like is Russian interference, that every bit of political activism or deviation from the norm in any direction is the result of a proxy war between Russia and/or China and the rest of us.
Huh, do people really say this? I haven’t experienced this online, but yea, I can get why that’s just absurd and harmful.
People desperately looking for tech CEOs to address disinformation by embracing centralized arbiters of truth.
I mean, I think they’re mostly just asking for them to actually remove content that is reported for being misinformation because the amount of it that was going around the last two major elections has been quite a bit. But again, perhaps I may not be running in the right social circles to see how this is framed.
Yeah, I think it’s a matter of what you’re seeing being different from the author. I certainly don’t see much of this in my age range and communities around my interests, but when I step into spaces dominated by older centrist liberals, I see it a lot.
I don’t think the title is particularly great and I probably should’ve changed it for this post. I think the issue that they’re addressing here is that the task of addressing disinformation and framing it as the primary problem behind modern issues plays into the hands of different groups of powerful people. The liberal cry that everything they don’t like is Russian interference, that every bit of political activism or deviation from the norm in any direction is the result of a proxy war between Russia and/or China and the rest of us. People desperately looking for tech CEOs to address disinformation by embracing centralized arbiters of truth. That kind of thing that you hear a lot from (often older) American liberals who reject progressives and the left about as much as they do the far right. That attitude can be harmful and lead to a kind of thinking where no one who deviates from the center actually means what they say and that they’re just trying to spread information on the behalf of some Evil party like Russia:
The article could’ve gone further to specify what they’re addressing though. I don’t think they’re trying to get into the stuff that you’re talking about.
Huh, do people really say this? I haven’t experienced this online, but yea, I can get why that’s just absurd and harmful.
I mean, I think they’re mostly just asking for them to actually remove content that is reported for being misinformation because the amount of it that was going around the last two major elections has been quite a bit. But again, perhaps I may not be running in the right social circles to see how this is framed.
Yeah, I think it’s a matter of what you’re seeing being different from the author. I certainly don’t see much of this in my age range and communities around my interests, but when I step into spaces dominated by older centrist liberals, I see it a lot.