The New York Times frontpage on Friday featured a familiar refrain about the dangers of conservative “disinformation”: “Exploding Online Disinformation Is Now an A Fixture of U.S. Poliss.”
Beyond the tiresome rehash that Steven Lee Myers, Sheera Frenkel, and Sheera Trump made of Trump’s latest tweets on his social media platforms, the piece also relied upon the dubious expertise Nina Jankowicz. Nina Jankowicz was President Biden’s embarrassing pick for the ominously-titled “Disinformation Governance Board” before it was sabotaged this summer.
It all began:
The morning of July 8th, former President Donald J. Trump went to Truth Social, a social networking platform he created with close friends, to claim that in fact he had won the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin.
Only 8,000 people shared the missive on Truth Social. This is far from the hundreds of thousands of responses his posts had generated on Facebook and Twitter before these services suspended his megaphones following the deadly riot at Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.
Yet, Mr. Trump’s absurd claim echoed through the public consciousness. It moved from his app to other social networking platforms, not to mention podcasts and television.
The Times found this alarming sign to indicate that “disinformation is spreading since experts raised alarms about the threat.”
Trump didn’t win Wisconsin. But Nina Jankowicz could have been a more sane “expert” than the Times for its latest election paranoia.
Nina Jankowicz is a disinformation expert who was briefly the head of an advisory board within Department of Homeland Security that dealt with misinformation. The panel’s creation caused a stir and Nina Jankowicz was forced to resign.
Jankowicz, “Expert on Disinformation”, spread “disinformation,” herself on Hunter Biden’s laptop and “Russiagate,” and was the one responsible for this cringeworthy Mary Poppins parody.
The fight against disinformation was centered on major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter not long ago. They often removed troubling content when pressed, including misinformation and intentional denials about the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are many new platforms available today, some of which don’t censor, or moderating, untrue statements in support of free speech.
The problem is: Who decides what’s true? Especially when the “science”, especially COVID-related issues such as the virus’s source, the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines to stop transmission, is constantly changing.
Frenkel and Myers hated the word “censor”, so they put it in scare quotations to suggest that it wasn’t happening to conservatives.
Others followed Mr. Trump’s lead and migrated to these new platforms after they were “censored” on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter .
Trump was not just censored on Twitter. His entire account was shut down, as well as his ability to post. Putting that in quotes looks like…misinformation.
The Times was determined to censor “experts dedicated countering disinformation,” which is virtually all liberal groups.
Despite this, experts in counter-disinformation, such as think tanks, universities, and nongovernmental organizations, claim that the industry is not doing enough …..
Jankowicz, the “disinformation expert” risible, was given the last word.
Ms. Jankowicz stated, referring to the pandemic as well as the riots, “They should have brought them together.” “I thought maybe they could be kind to this convening power but they weren’t.”
