Politico reports:
DHS is standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia. Nina Jankowicz will head the board as executive director. She previously was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship and oversaw Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute.
I’m sure many people at NR will want to weigh in on different aspects of this truly terrible idea. But I want to note that this position — and the choice of who to lead it — exists because of the CDC’s success in becoming an integral component of social-media policy. Information endorsed by the CDC was taken by Twitter and Facebook and turned into policy. CDC-created fact-sheets or talking points were used by these major companies to warn against, de-rank, censor, or suppress content created by American citizens. Often, these platforms would pair a warning label with a link to CDC’s information, as if the government had a fully automated right-of-reply to its own citizens.
In some ways, I understand why governments are anxious about social media. In the great age of media consensus, major media companies were in many ways dependent on the government, and dependable for it. The major newspapers were not as reliable to the government, but they did develop an institutional culture for presenting news and views that assisted democratic deliberation. Now, anyone can see their views broadcast far and wide.
But I can’t think of anything that has been more harmful to public trust in our institutions than what happened to our information environment during the pandemic. A nation’s people can understand that the official government line on events may change — either because the facts have changed, because a previous understanding was overthrown by a better one, or (more unfortunately) because the government’s political priorities have changed. What I think people truly resent is being censored and in some cases punished in the meantime for taking a different view of things, especially when the government itself comes around to it a few months or a year later. They resent being told that the medicine their doctor prescribed them was “horse paste.” They resent being told that protests and riots are an exception to public-health protocols that close all other gatherings, even religious services. Hiring someone who called the Hunter Biden laptop “a Trump campaign product” is par for the course.
The entire point of the Frances Haugen psy-op is to strengthen the nexus between government-approved information and the regulation of social-media networks. I think we have to go in the exact opposite direction. Social media should be allowed to become more wild — and probably more disreputable — again. Newspapers and magazines should withdraw more from social media and build up their institutional credibility again to intelligently challenge the government. And the government, rather than immediately moving to enhance an unofficial but effective public–private censorship partnership, should build up its own credibility, so that the information it puts out is viewed as likely to be reliable.