The decision by a federal court judge last week that limited Biden Administration contacts with social media companies has resulted in the most panicked hand-wringing by the left since the Dobbs decision made abortion a matter for individual states to decide.
In essence, the left thinks you’re all too stupid to know when you’re being manipulated by charlatans and snake oil salesmen, and they worry that this “disinformation” (opposing viewpoints) will get in the way of their control of the narrative.
Perhaps many of you are, indeed, so gullible and so ignorant that you can’t tell the difference between “truth” and “disinformation.” Even if that dubious supposition was true, is it the government’s job to instruct you on what you should believe or accept as “fact”?
This is the reason for the First Amendment. And no matter how outrageous information can get, no matter how many people’s feelings get hurt, and no matter which side is deliberately misleading or falsifying the records or history of opposing politicians, any hindrance or characterization of such speech as “disinformation” is more dangerous than any scenario the left can come up with that “threatens democracy.”
It’s just too easy, too simple to declare some information “disinformation” when there’s literally no objective standard to judge the efficacy of most statements on the internet. Claiming that information from Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” did more damage to democracy than any ten wildman theories of COVID-19.
In the end, one side of the partisan divide gets to make those judgments. And since the left is already infused with a righteousness that allows it to justify censorship of speech on a wide variety of topics because it doesn’t comport with left-wing ideology, the extraordinary danger of appealing to an invisible standard of “disinformation” should be self-evident.
Nina Jankowicz, the self-described “Mary Poppins of Disinformation,” is on a crusade to frighten policymakers into severely cracking down on speech to “save democracy.”
Jankowicz, you may recall, was slated to head up the Biden Administration’s “Disinformation Board,” which it was promised, wouldn’t stifle free speech in the slightest — except when she and her “Disinformation Board” decided it did.
When the video of Jankowicz performing a parody of the Mary Poppins song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” went viral, her nomination to serve as “Disinformation Czar” became toast.
Jankowicz didn’t see her embarrassing and unbalanced performance as the cause of her downfall. She thought it was right-wingers who wanted to continue using disinformation who derailed her candidacy.
“There were these crazy accusations being made that had no basis in reality,” Jankowicz said. “But still, the administration crumpled. They ceded that territory.”
It never got off the ground. The board — and Jankowicz herself — came under immediate attack from GOP lawmakers and conservative influencers who cast it as the start of a “Ministry of Truth”-style censorship operation. That framing was adopted by conservative outlets, as The Washington Post chronicled at the time, prompting all manner of threats directed at Jankowicz.
For weeks, the administration struggled to defend against the onslaught. Then, it gave in. The board was “paused,” and Jankowicz became a fixture on Fox News. Postings she’d made on social media platforms ricocheted from cable to the internet and back. Eventually, she resigned, and three months later the entire project was dissolved.
Jankowicz argued that the cabal of right-wingers who ruined her shot at glory as Disinformation Czar was actually trying to “undermine trust in government.” That’s nonsense, of course. There were people on the right pushing back on a false narrative on the pandemic, COVID-19, and what they saw as a stolen election. None of that threatened democracy as much as it threatened the government’s monopoly on information — information that turned out, in many instances, to be knowingly false and misleading.
“It’s going to scare civil servants who are working on these issues from, frankly, doing their jobs,” Jankowicz said. She added: “It might come with great personal danger, as I’ve seen in my case.”
There is no place for civil servants to be deciding what’s true and what isn’t. No one gave them that kind of power. It sure as hell isn’t in the Constitution. Judge Terry A. Doughty’s order will probably be modified on appeal, but it’s certainly a welcome shot across the bow to information control freaks like Jankowicz.
