The Disinformation Industry is a Hoax
On the Censorship Industrial Complex and Its Disinformation Laws and “Experts”
In recent years, governments in the West have been flirting with authoritarianism through the chipping away at the freedoms of speech through legislation that ostensibly seeks to “safeguard” the internet. The state has taken on the role of the paternal figure that must watch over the ignorant public who is incapable of interpreting information. Over the past two years, we have witnessed the rollout of draconian disinformation laws across several western nations that are positioning themselves in a tyrannical role over their citizens as civil liberties are being destroyed in front of our eyes. The success of these restrictive laws is occurring, in part, because of the use of certain tactics and rhetorical devices that often mirror the protectionism we saw rolled out post 9/11 in the United States where the public was convinced that in order to fight terrorism, habeas corpus needed to be suspended. Today this tactic is being recycled ot legitimise the destruction of civil liberties in addition to the pretexts of fighting against “hate speech” and the safeguarding of children from child exploitation.
George W. Bush’s infamous statement in the days follow 11 September 2001, “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists,” set into stone a foolproof rhetorical device where the curtailment of the freedom of expression has been sold to the public using a similar rationale, even far afield of the United States. In recent years, governments across the west have told their citizenry to trust them with rooting out “disinformation” for the public good, fashioning a rationale on a dichotomy that pits freedom of expression against highly-curated dangers of terrorism, child welfare, and the obscure netherworld of “disinformation.” Not only have these narratives been remarkably successful in getting bills passed into law, but these stories have served to tame the media coverage where these bills are represented as merely requiring “industry to develop new codes to regulate illegal and restricted content,” as in the case of Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021. However, while the “illegal” content is never fleshed out or developed in writing, these laws are represented as doing the exact opposite of what they actually do: they claim to protect free speech while in reality they are simply devastating it.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed by the European Parliament in July 2022, went into effect on 25 August 2023 for many of the largest tech companies operating in Europe. Under this act, social media platforms with over 45 million monthly users in the EU must demonstrate how they are actively removing illegal content and taking down foreign propaganda. If they do not adhere to the DSA, these companies can face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual global revenue. So far, the EU has designated 19 platforms and search engines that fall into that category, including the following: Alibaba AliExpress, Amazon Store, Apple App Store, Booking.com, Facebook, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Zalando, Bing, and Google Search. While this is a hefty list and is due to expand as more users shift to free speech platforms like Rumble, the terms stipulated are never clearly defined. What consists of “illegal content” or “foreign propaganda”? These terms are also never materialised by any clear examples that are not ideologically based.
According to the European Commission this act “significantly improves the mechanisms for the removal of illegal content and for the effective protection of users’ fundamental rights online, including the freedom of speech,” while reading through the legislation it is clear that the DSA is simply censorship under the guise of clearing away “disinformation.” The EU has already received pushback to the DSA even before it went into vigour: in July, Amazon filed a petition that asks the EU to reevaluate its classification as a very large online platform, claiming that it’s getting “unfairly singled out.” German retailer Zalando also filed a lawsuit against the EU Commission, likewise claiming that it doesn’t meet the definition of a very large online platform.
The elephant in the room, however, is not the metrics of how large a platform is or is not, but rather what precisely constitutes “disinformation” and “propaganda.” Even today within American legacy media outlets the long-debunked Russiagate hoax propagated by the Hilary Clinton campaign with the Steele dossier compiled by retired British spy Christopher Steele. This dossier contained unverified and salacious allegations about Donald Trump, including claims that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election, all demonstrated as bunk by Robert Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Even to this day, myriad legacy media outlets still report what most would call “disinformation,” if not complete lies about the Russiagate story leading to the lowest trust in US media in decades.
On 30 January 2023, the Columbia Journal Review (CJR) published a four-part investigative report on the debunked Russiagate narrative still promulgated by legacy media in the US today. Authored by Jeff Gerth, a 78-year-old former investigative journalist for the New York Times between 1976 and 2005 and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for covering the American satellite-launch technology to China, this report reveals how the deep state created a disinformation smear campaign while enlisting legacy media. The CJR report dives deep into several key aspects of Russiagate, also referred to as the “Russian collusion controversy” and the outcome of this report is damning, especially in the light of laws recently passed that claim to fight “disinformation.”
Gerth’s report shows how the press uncritically handled the now-discredited Steele dossier, inserted misleading facts, and ignored apparent lacunae in the story to fit the Clinton campaign’s Russia collusion narrative. According to declassified (in 2020) CIA briefing notes cited by Gerth, Clinton approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” The Clinton campaign tweeted a link to a “bombshell report” on Yahoo. The campaign had secretly paid the researchers to pitch the story to Yahoo News’s investigative correspondence Michael Isikoff.
The CRJ report demonstrates how the media played an important role in linking Putin and the Russian government to Trump. And many notable journalists were willing to propagandise this fiction with Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, calling Trump the “Siberian candidate” and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic, describing Trump as a “de facto agent” of Putin. Again, all this was fabricated by so-called journalists. Gerth writes:
The Clinton campaign put out a statement on Twitter, linking to what it called the “bombshell report” on Yahoo, but did not disclose that the campaign secretly paid the researchers who pitched it to Isikoff. In essence, the campaign was boosting, through the press, a storyline it had itself engineered.
Gerth goes on to detail how the 2016 dossier’s conspiracy claim had never been corroborated by the media, including the supposed plot involving the Russian bank, Alfa Bank. Still, Peter Fritsch, a former Wall Street Journal reporter “made frantic efforts to persuade reporters from several outlets, including Isikoff, to publish the bank story,” eventually succeeding with the Times.
In 2020, journalist Glenn Greenwald noted the conspiracy theories flying from the Clinton campaign and legacy media as he underscores the “reckless journalism” that spawns dangerous conspiracy theories with zero evidence to support them:
Over the last four years, they devoted themselves to the ultimate deranged, mangled conspiracy theory: that the Kremlin had infiltrated the U.S. and was clandestinely controlling the levers of American power through some combination of sexual and financial blackmail. The endless pursuit of that twisted conspiracy led them to produce one article after the next that spread utter falsehoods, embraced reckless journalism and fostered humiliating debacles. The only thing more absurd than these hyper-partisan, reckless outlets posturing as the alternatives to hyper-partisanship is them insisting that they’re the only safeguards against misinformation.
“Russian disinformation” is now the modern-day political “the cat ate my homework” for politicians seeking excuses for their political ineptness and this rhetoric proliferates despite the Mueller report and Gerth’s excellent investigation. “Russian disinformation” has been so successfully embedded in neoliberal rhetoric within the US, that now even politicians outside the country are jumping for this convenient narrative. Case in point is when last month Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began to apologise for the fact that he led MPs in his Parliament in a standing ovation—not once, but twice—for Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian-Canadian World War II veteran of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Instead of offering a thorough apology for having invited this former Nazi soldier to Parliament, the standing ovations, and the offence this caused many Jewish Canadians, Trudeau clumsily truncated his apology and he nervously shifted the blame from his government’s symbolic embrace of an actual Nazi to blaming the incident on “Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation.”
I point to the Russiagate fiasco and the focus upon “Russian disinformation” since these are the gifts that keeps on giving within liberal political and media establishments whereby the lie is allowed to not only persist but the lie is allowed in plain sight. Falsehoods are transmitted across legacy media like MSNBC and CNN alike with no repercussions for the propaganda these outlets disseminate. Since the Hunter Biden laptop story hit the front page of the New York Post on 14 October 2020, Twitter and Facebook censured the sharing of this story, Twitter shut down the Post’s account for 16 days, and legacy media ran one story after another stating how the New York Post had it wrong. The most damning article on this subject was that of Politico’s Natasha Bertrand, a well-known pusher of Russiagate stories, who claimed that the emails on Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation” based on a letter signed by over 50 former intelligence officials casting doubt on the provenance of the New York Post story. Her story is what passed as “proof” of misinformation and was ever posted on Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies website.
The reality behind those screaming “misinformation,” however reveals a very different story. Joe Biden’s presidential campaign prompted former acting CIA Director Mike Morell to “help Biden” by enlisting him to organise his 50 plus colleagues to sign a letter in October 2020 falsely claiming that the emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop published by the Post were Russian disinformation. As it turns out, the “51 intel experts” letter implying Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian fake, and the ensuing efforts to kill the Post’s reporting on it, were the actual disinformation operation. Even long after the dust was settled on this story, there are still many pundits within legacy media who recycle the now-debunked media lies over the Biden laptop story are still recycled in attempting to derail a fact-based media story. Where “disinformation” in many broadsheets has been proven, legacy media is given free rein to disseminate absolute hokum with zero repercussions.
Not even President Biden’s first-ever Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) which was meant to combat disinformation that threatened national security was able to get off the ground for the many threats it posed to the First Amendment. When Biden began to formalise the creation of this disinformation body, first announced on 27 April 2022, tapping Nina Jankowicz to head it, the DGB came under immediate attack from GOP lawmakers and conservative influencers who cast it as the start of a type of “Ministry of Truth,” a censorship operation. The Disinformation Governance Board and its working groups were first paused on 18 May 2022 pending review after serious constitutional issues were raised in addition to this board claiming to address disinformation while actually creating more disinformation as its mandate was almost uniquely focussing on “Russian disinformation,” echoing the ideological flaws behind Russiagate. It was finally shut down on 22 August 2022.
The Disinformation Governance Board and the failures of Russiagate serve as a cautionary tale to the disinformation laws recently rolled out from Australia, the EU, the UK to Canada. These laws are putting freedom of expression into the crosshairs of political governance and are dangerously pivoting the notion that free speech is dangerous and something that must be controlled. The greatest irony, of course, is that these draconian laws are being pushed by so-called journalists who are merely mouthpieces to political parties.
Similarly, the European Union's Digital Services Act which went into effect for the world's largest online platforms two months ago, took Elon Musk’s X to task on 10 October 2023, in what can only be described as a quite frightening overstep of political authority. Thierry Breton, the commissioner responsible for the act, begins: “Following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, we have indications that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU. Let me remind you that the Digital Services Act sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation.” This introduction is in itself terrifying to think that a government body is telling a private citizen and outlet what can and cannot be published. This is extremely authoritarian, despite relying on the DSA as the legal reference.
Breton’s letter is worth reading as it indicates that he has misinterpreted the letter of the law within the Digital Services Act:
First, you need to be very transparent and clear on what content is permitted under your terms and consistently and diligently enforce your own policies. This is particularly relevant when it comes to violent and terrorist content that appears to circulate on your platform. Your latest changes in public interest policies that occurred overnight left many European users uncertain.
Second, when you receive notices of illegal content in the EU, you must be timely, diligent and objective in taking action and removing the relevant content when warranted. We have, from qualified sources, reports about potentially illegal content circulating on your service despite flags from relevant authorities.
Third, you need to have in place proportionate and effective mitigation measures to tackle the risks to public security and civic discourse stemming from disinformation. Public media and civil society organisations widely report instances of fake and manipulated images and facts circulating on your platform in the EU, such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games. This appears to be manifestly false or misleading information.
The language employed here is extremely vague: “mitigation measures,” “risks to public security” and “civic discourse stemming from disinformation” as if any of these terms were objectively clarified. What would a mitigation measure look like to avoid what the DSA terms “disinformation”? Breton’s letter to Musk is bathed in linguistic solipsism completely un-buttressed by legal clarity. He even invents aspects of the DSA that are simply non-existent from alleged deadlines for content removal, time frames in which service providers need to respond to notifications of ostensibly illegal content online (there is no 24-hour time frame within the law), and state pressure placed on tech companies to remove content based on these platforms’ terms and conditions leads to more preventive over-blocking of entirely legal content. This is why X has taken a step back from what it deemed to be over-moderation.
Breton, in fact, views implicates media companies as implicit “lookout guards” for the police instructing X and Meta to contact the “relevant law enforcement authorities” without specifying serious crimes occurring within the EU that would provide sufficient legal ground for complying with such a request:
I therefore invite you to urgently ensure that your systems are effective, and report on the crisis measures taken to my team.
Given the urgency, I also expect you to be in contact with the relevant law enforcement authorities and Europol, and ensure that you respond promptly to their requests.
Moreover, on a number of other issues of DSA compliance that deserve immediate attention, my team will follow up shortly with a specific request.
I urge you to ensure a prompt, accurate and complete response to this request within the next 24 hours. We will include your answer in our assessment file on your compliance with the DSA. I remind you that following the opening of a potential investigation and a finding of non-compliance, penalties can be imposed.
The tone of Breton’s letter is patently terrifying as his ignorance of the law. Here you have a EU official telling a private business owner to not only censor information on his platform, but also to report ostensible “misinformation” to the police and Europol based on his say-so.
Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, professor of comparative law at Università degli Studi Roma Tre, offers a brilliant analysis of what is wrong with the EU’s Digital Services Act in his article, “The EU regulation of speech. A critical view.” Zeno-Zencovich begins his critique by noting the provisions on “hate speech,” what he calls a “fruit salad” approach that “puts together terrorism, child pornography, copyright infringement, deceitful consumer information and ‘illegal hate speech’ (see e.g. the Commission Recommendation 2018/334 ‘on measures to tackle illegal content online’).” He delineates why this is specifically a problem within the EU:
The first striking feature is putting within the same framework (“illegal content”) completely different phenomena from a political, economic and social point of view. In a non-digital environment, copyright infringement is countered by copyright laws; unfair commercial practices by consumer protection laws; terrorist promotion and abetting and child pornography by provisions in penal codes. One can legitimately doubt the wisdom of clustering such different conducts simply because they are all put into place through the Internet.
Noting how “hate speech” is used arbitrarily throughout the DSA as a portmanteau, Zeno-Zencovich claims “hate speech” is broadly constructed and seemingly endless: “from verbal aggression towards an ethnical or religious group; to the frequent banners or choruses one sees or hears at the football stadium addressed towards the other team and its supporters; the political party or movement one despises...” All this translates to a hodgepodge approach to “hate speech” with myriad political ideologies being adopted by the EU regulation that:
puts together extremely different phenomena: terrorist content, child pornography, «illegal racist and xenophobic expressions». But if one extends the scope to the vast area of «discriminatory speech» – which falls within the «otherwise harmful» category – one can already see the multitude of organizations which, purporting the defence of minoritarian groups, ask for the removal of speech or other forms of expression which they consider offensive. It is sufficient to look at the aggressive campaigns conducted under the flags of trans-Atlantic movements (“Me- Too”, “Cancel Culture”, “Black Lives Matter”, “Last Generation”, LBGT+whatever, etc.) to understand what the effects of such private internet militia can be on freedom of expression.
On this Zeno-Zencovich has much to say since he notes that the “Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation” within the DSA focuses upon fake news, but again, what is “disinformation” or “true” forms part of the EU’s “Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation 2022,” which is merely a voluntary agreement. As Zeno-Zencovich observes, “A voluntary acceptance which reminds of the often-quoted phrase from The Godfather: «An offer which one cannot refuse».”
Although the code largely concerns itself with “clearly deceptive practices, such as fake accounts, impersonation, BOT amplification, use of influencers,” Zeno-Zencovich notes that it “spills over in the field of individual speech, in particular in the case in which an individual or a group of individuals advocate un- conventional ideas which clash with majoritarian views. The bottom line is the question on what content «may cause public harm».” I would add to this: what exactly consists of “public harm” since factual information can also be said to “cause public harm.”
To give further depth to this analysis, Zeno-Zencovich discusses the “Russia Today France” decision by the EU General Court which in a lengthy decision by the Grand Chamber (27 July 2022, in case T 125/22) rejected the claim and confirmed the Regulation that effectively banned RT from France. Zeno-Zencovich observes:
One hundred of the 250 paragraphs of the decision are devoted to the question raised by RT France of the infringement of freedom of expression and information. According to the Tribunal the activities of RT France constitute «propaganda actions against the Union and its Member States» which «are capable of undermining the foundations of democratic societies and are an integral part of the arsenal of modern warfare».
It’s worth reading the entirety of Zeno-Zencovich’s criticism of the DSA for he cautions how this legislation threatens the freedom of thought and expression in the EU:
But as it is impossible to control the immense information eco-system by human activity, the only way to enforce the mastodontic legislation issued is by resorting to automated processes governed by Al, which notoriously does not operate on a case-by-case basis but via inferential logic, which is completely insensitive towards diversity.
And freedom of expression by individuals is – in our democratic societies – a question of diversity which cannot, and should not, be curtailed by majoritarian opinions on what is good and what is bad (in the EU words “harmful”) for our minds, our feelings, our intellectual well-being.
Numerous feminists in the UK know precisely what happens when you dare state the dictionary definition of the word “woman” on social media, since the draconian effects of online have bled over into real life with the police showing up at many a woman’s doorstep asking her why she stated that "lesbians don’t have a penis." The real-life effects of online expressions—including the freedom to state platitudes—are under assault by the very legislation that claims to protect the citizenry from any number of nebulous dangers.
I spoke with Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich about his article and how the DSA might serve to undermine individual EU countries’ laws and constitutions through the employment of artificial intelligence to oversee the DSA. He tells me, “What is troubling here is that you set some rules and then tell a private entity to apply these rules. And so, these entities end up closing down profiles and removing content,” noting the fact that these companies just want to make money and stay in business. Discussing the specific case of Italy, Zeno-Zencovich relays, “There is a constitutional right to no prior censorship and the limitations to freedom of speech in Italy can only be applied by the courts. He further points out that by relying on social media to censor or close down accounts that employ AI to make these decisions, is a circumvention of the courts. This is censorship and it raises national and EU constitutional issues.” Zeno-Zencovich goes on to state how the DSA could be viewed as going against Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights for which only court challenges will resolve such issues on a country-by-country basis.
A basic question at the forefront of the EU legislation is how “disinformation” is ascertained given the myriad examples of how fake news has been allowed to proliferate within legacy media with no repercussions whatsoever. It becomes clear that much of the DSA’s intention is to curate free speech more than to control disinformation given its failure to engage in good faith debates over what consists of real news as opposed to said disinformation. Moreover, disinformation is an industry that paradoxically traffics in disinformation.
Take the example of Reset, an NGO that lobbies in Brussels for tech industry regulation sporting the tagline “resetting the internet for democracy.” Pierre Omidyar, the Iranian-American founder of the e-commerce company eBay, became wealthy in the first dot-com wave and is also the founder of the Luminate Group which finances related media activities through the NGOs European Digital Rights, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Digital Action, and Reset. Moreover, many regard the interventions and involvement in the drafting of EU legislation by philanthropists like Omidyar, George Soros and Bill Gates as deeply worrying and that the political influence of these elite donors “calls the legitimacy of philanthropic donations into question.” Policy is being created through the merging of the global elite and government curating ideological views within media as elected officials open the doors for the unelected oligarchs to have a say in the rights all of us should be afforded.
All is not what it seems in “Disinformationland.” Remember Frances Haugen, the former Facebook data scientist who disclosed tens of thousands of Facebook's internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021? Currently, Haugen bills herself as “an advocate for accountability & transparency in social media” but her recent endeavours and relationship with Reset raise concerns about who has driven her push to rewrite Europe's online content rules in meetings with EU lawmakers since 2021. While she claims to advocate for transparency in social media, her involvement with Reset highlights some of the problems regarding the global debate as to how social media giants should be held responsible for users’ online actions while governments are using Big Tech to undertake censorship in their stead.
Reset's Executive Director, Ben Scott, was an outside technology adviser to Clinton’s failed 2016 US presidential campaign and his operation receives up to $10 million in annual funding from the philanthropic, UK-based organisation, Luminate, established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and the Sandler Foundation, a US-based donor that also supports the American Civil Liberties Union and media outlet ProPublica. There are no coincidences here as many readers will recognise the ACLU, a longtime free speech advocacy NGO which has done an about-face on civil liberties over the past decade, now firmly supporting the repression of freedom of expression within the United States, most notably around identity politics.
Haugen’s input into the European Parliament’s Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection also skates upon a thin line between concerns for Big Tech’s reach and the dangers of “misinformation.” After whistleblowing regarding her time at Facebook, she penned an op-ed last year in the Financial Times wherein she conflates the importance of access to data with the problem of “disinformation.” She then makes her argument hiding behind the pretext of child protection and “our freedoms” which is another nod to George W. Bush who also proclaimed how “they [the terrorists] hate our freedoms” in 2001. Haugen writes: “the EU must enshrine in law the role that we can continue to play in protecting our children, our democracies and our freedoms.” In the end, the focus on “disinformation” becomes its own word salad with the overtones of authoritarianism handed to the state.
There is good reason to be worried about Big Tech’s influence within government. Just in 2021 alone, 612 companies, groups and business associations lobbied the EU’s digital economy policies and institutions spending over €97 million. According to Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and LobbyControl in their report titled “The Lobby Network: Big Tech's web of influence in the EU,” Big Tech appears to be the biggest lobby sector in the EU by spending more than big pharma, fossil fuels, finance, and chemicals.
However, there is even greater reason to be worried about the burgeoning “disinformation” sector. Disinformation is a growing industry that traffics in curating the news and that is currently clamping down on free speech across countries where laws like the Digital Services Act have been legislated. The very same conflicts of interest that are claimed about Big Tech in “The Lobby Network” can be easily made about those representing the disinformation industry, because they are being funded by an elite class that seeks to minimise criticism of the war in Ukraine or against the current Israeli strikes in Gaza. What becomes quickly apparent about these disinformation “experts” and laws is that the discourse around “disinformation” is purely ideologically driven.
Take, for instance, Joseph Menn’s article for the Washington Post wherein he claims that “Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began, according to a study released this week by the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union” (1 September 2023). Menn references the year-long study, “Digital Services Act: Application of the Risk Management Framework to Russian disinformation campaigns,” that was released just as the Digital Services Act went into effect on 25 August of this year. Attempting to lend a quasi-scientific backing to the DSA, despite this study having zero scientific merit and even less clarification of its aim in curbing disinformation, Menn’s article falls short on facts, failing to offer even one example of disinformation. Given the weakness of the EU study, it appears that Menn penned his article in an attempt to lend credibility to the European Commission’s report on so-called “disinformation” while eliding the greater ideological issues within the sector, not least of which is Omidyar’s Reset and its witch-hunt against Twitter undertaken with great ferocity since the Twitter files emerged December 2022.
While Menn names Reset as having conducted the research for the European Commission, he fails to scrutinise the ideological machinery behind Reset or any of the government bodies that rely on this initiative for “disinformation” testing. More disconcerting, however, is that Menn failed to mentioned Omidyar’s links to and funding of Frances Haguen whose branding as a “whistleblower” was quickly turned into a vital political asset by the neoliberal wings of power because she confirms Omidyar’s quest for greater control over online political discourse.
Menn advances that “Russian disinformation against Ukraine, thrived” on social media using this study as evidence for his claims, writing:
The research found that, despite voluntary commitments to take action against Russian propaganda by the largest social media companies, including Meta, Russian disinformation against Ukraine, thrived. Allowing the disinformation and hate speech to spread without limits would have violated the Digital Services Act, the EU’s social media law, had it been in force last year, the commission study concluded.
Yet neither Menn’s article nor Reset in its 73-page report is able to define what precisely constitutes “Russian propaganda” about Ukraine. The only conclusion that the reader can draw from reading this report or the DSA in full is that “Russian propaganda” is merely dissent, speaking against EU narratives about the war in Ukraine. Moreover, Reset’s name appears nowhere on the report—I had to dig around for hours to find out who authored this report. So, it comes off as intellectually dishonest that this report hid the authorship from public view while citing Reset within the report three times. How can there be any trust placed in this report when we see the political ideology driving this sector, in addition to elementary conflicts of interest?
More questions regarding Menn’s article remain, such as: What is a “pro-Kremlin account” and would this be determined? And by asking Musk to stop this “propaganda,” what is expected from him aside from the logical conclusion that governments are outsourcing censorship to the private sector, thus violating Article 11 by proxy? As the Twitter file investigations have demonstrated the government circumvents accusations of censorship by outsourcing censorship to the private sector. It’s a neat trick, except it's painfully evident to the naked eye that governments are violating their own constitutions by relying on Big Tech to do its dirty work while multi-billionaires collaborating with government bodies are often co-funding the studies that justify the need to control free expression.
As the disinformation sector has grown markedly since the 2016 US election, it is alarming that this sector is being dominated by the elite who are handed the keys to elected offices through backdoor agreements and funding typically found within the third sector. In 2017 it was announced that the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school and research organization respected in certain liberal quarters, was to receive $1.3 million in grants from the Omidyar Network and Open Society Foundations to expand its work in accountability journalism through its International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) over the following years. Even before the US government’s Disinformation Governance Board failed to launch into operation last year, Poynter was one of many new enterprises cashing in on “fake news” surveillance to include chiefly focussing on Twitter for promoting “falsehoods.” To this day, the Poynter Institute is still is unable to define in any meaninful way “disinformation,” especially given its terrible record in promoting the very fake news it calims to prevent.
The Poynter Institute’s censorship during the coronavirus pandemic of what it deemed to be “conspiracy theory” and “scientific evidence” is notable here since Poynter’s nonprofit project PolitiFact was constantly wrong about the lab leak theory that today has been embraced by most scientists as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. When Dr. Li-Meng Yan was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on 15 September 2020 for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Yan discussed his research that the virus that causes COVID-19 “is a man-made virus created in the lab.” PolitiFact responded the same month with a “fact check” that claimed that Yan’s evidence for the lab leak theory “is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” This despite the fact that many scientists around the world have agreed with Yan’s conclusion to include many government agencies. Earlier this year, the United States Energy Department stated that this theory is entirely plausible. And while a declassified US intelligence report from June claims to have found no clear evidence of Covid origins in the Wuhan lab, how on earth can such a report even be trusted given that it is now alleged by a CIA whistleblower, that six of the seven experienced officers with significant scientific expertise who formed the CIA’s COVID Discovery Team were bribed to reject the lab-leak theory with “a significant monetary incentive to change their position.” PolitiFact’s entry on this matter includes none of the above information which logically should be included in any fact-checking organisation that asserts itself as standing for “transparency” and “fairness.”
Then there is the Trusted News Initiative which is just a conglomeration of legacy media that, along with the Poynter Institute and Reset, are curating an acceptable media ecosystem of war, bi-partisan consensus and propaganda. The message these “fact-checking organisations” maintain is fundamentally this: “Believe us, not them.” And “them” today translates to independent media usually composed of journalists undertaking investigations that have all but disappeared from legacy media. “Disinformation experts” are simply the modern-day snake oil salesmen who have been given hold of public institutions and democratic processes with the power to strangle free speech as legacy media viewership is at an all-time low.
When Thierry Breton sent Elon Musk the European Commission letter earlier this month he also posted the letter to X writing: “Following the terrorist attacks by Hamas against [emoji of Israeli flat], we have indications of X/Twitter being used to disseminate illegal content & disinformation in the EU.” Musk responded publicly to Breton on X writing: “Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports. Please list the violations you allude to on 𝕏, so that that the public can see them. Merci beaucoup.” Breton responded: “You are well aware of your users’—and authorities’—reports on fake content and glorification of violence. Up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk.” Noting the vagueness in Breton’s accusations, Musk told Breton to post his “concerns explicitly” on X adding, “We take our actions in the open. No back room deals.” Breton did not take this further publicly and Musk expressed dismay for the lack of specificity within the correspondence he received, adding, “Maybe it’s in the mail or something.”
Breton has also sent similar letters to Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, and in response a collective of tech companies responded in a group letter, hitting back at Breton about his misplaced focus upon large online platforms (VLOPs) removing content rather than underscoring their due diligence obligations to regulate their systems and processes, noting that Breton conflates the two categories:
“Disinformation” is a broad concept and encompasses varied content which can carry significant risk to human rights and public discourse. It does not automatically qualify as illegal and is not per se prohibited by either European or international human rights law. While the DSA contains targeted measures addressing illegal content online, it more appropriately applies a different regulatory approach with respect to other systemic risks, primarily consisting of VLOPs’ due diligence obligations and legally mandated transparency. However, the letters strongly focus on the swift removal of content rather than highlighting the importance of due diligence obligations for VLOPs that regulate their systems and processes. We call on the European Commission to strictly respect the DSA’s provisions and international human rights law, and avoid any future conflation of these two categories of expression.
This letter indicates something that seems to have slipped by Breton who has gleefully purity postured various versions of this letter on Twitter in recent weeks: that “disinformation” is being purposefully misused by the European Commission as a surrogate for systemic risks, leaving companies in the awkward position of having to spell out the law in addition tto underscoring the human rights abuses that the European Commission threatens. The letter concludes with a powerful statement on the importance of the freedom of expression and the fact that the Commission is obliquely asserting that “fake news” needs no qualification:
Freedom of expression and the free flow of information must be vigorously defended during armed conflicts. Disproportionate restrictions of fundamental rights may distort information that is vital for the needs of civilians caught up in the hostilities and for recording documentation of ongoing human rights abuses and atrocities that could form the basis for evidence in future judicial proceedings. Experience shows that shortsighted solutions that hint at the criminal nature of “false information” or “fake news”—without further qualification—will disproportionately affect historically oppressed groups and human rights defenders fighting against aggressors perpetrating gross human rights abuses.
The EU’s new censorship law is clearly up against a legal wall when it comes to defining “illegal content and disinformation” and to the naked eye looks very much like ideological authoritarianism. The regime of censorship being imposed on the internet by a consortium of neoliberal politicians, billionaire-funded “disinformation experts,” the US Security State, and liberal employees of media corporations is dangerously intensifying in ways I believe are not adequately understood even as I write this.
From Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021 to Canada’s Online Streaming Act (also called Bill C-11) enacted in April 2023, to the UK’s Online Safety Bill (which received royal ascent yesterday, thus becoming law), many Western countries have just legislated censorship-by-proxy through the Trojan horse narratives of child protection and anti-terrorism. The United States government is late to this race and is currently in the throes of passing similarly draconian legislation introduced in the Senate on 7 March of this year. This bill called the RESTRICT Act (Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology) could make censorship in the United States much easier. And while it’s still early in the legislative process, the bill already has bipartisan support.
And it’s not just the RESTRICT Act threatening free speech in the US. The Pentagon has recently been implicated in this censorship-by-proxy manoeuvre that is becoming a staple within western democracies. NewsGuard Technologies, a private company that rates news outlets for their “reliability” and their reputation for sharing “falsehoods and misinformation narratives,” is, together with the United States government, the subject of a lawsuit filed filed on 23 October 2023, by the independent website Consortium News. The complaint targets both the government and a private media ratings service is putting the censorship-by-proxy system is being put on trial. The NewsGuard lawsuit is already revealing the depth of censorship-by-proxy of independent media which simultaneously censoring the news while pushing the internet readership towards corporate media in an era where legacy media readership is tanking.
Before a Congressional hearing in March 2023, journalist Matt Taibbi stated that NewsGuard is part of the “censorship industrial complex.” In his 25 October article, Taibbi published the contractual evidence of the Department of Defense having paid NewsGuard $749,387. In an email to Taibbi, Newsguard's CEO Gordon Crovitz, also a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, denied receiving government funding for censorship, claiming that the government pays for access to NewsGuard’s data, adding: “As is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the US and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China.” All of these companies specialising in disinformation and yet Russia is invariably the number one issue which is targetted while the ethos is clearly to drive traffic away from independent media sources.
We should all be very worried about this growing legislative trend which is upending Enlightenment values of truth and scientific processes. From the curtailing of scientific debates on social media during the coronavirus pandemic to the more recent online discussions about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, we are seeing more notices on our social media posts which attempt to sleight certain coverage as “fake news” while toeing the official line as “authentic” even when facts abound in the so-called “disinformation” reports. The liberal establishment has largely driven this censorship regime in recent years, until the war in Gaza where now so-called free speech pundits have suddenly decided that certain speech ought to be repressed.
The EU’s “Digital Services Act” report was launched as a thinly-veiled attempt to legitimise the Digital Services Act. Quite problematically this report demonstrates how fraudulent these disinformation studies are while revealing the core tactics that shape this joint state, media, and corporate campaign that seizes the power to decree what is and what is not disinformation. The greatest paradox of all is that we have simply allowed the state and legacy media to decide what is “disinformation” by enlisting multi-billionaires who have the necessary funds to establish “disinformation” enterprises, expert positions, and numerous faux studies with the end goal of curating the news and deciding which narratives are false and which ideas merit public debate.
Orwellian doesn’t even begin to describe the depravity of this current legislation.