Tag Archives: disinformation

Disinformation And Misinformation

Posted on by

I apologize in advance for the length of this article, but there is a lot of information in the article linked.

On April 26th, PC Magazine posted an article titled, “Why Disinformation and Misinformation Are More Dangerous Than Malware.”

Here are some highlights from that article:

“The overwhelming majority of people who are ever going to see a piece of misinformation on the internet are likely to see it before anybody has a chance to do anything about it,” according to Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter.

When he was at Twitter, Roth observed that over 90% of the impressions on posts were generated within the first three hours. That’s not much time for an intervention, which is why it’s important for the cybersecurity community to develop content moderation technology that “can give truth time to wake up in the morning,” he says.

“It’s a hacking of people problem,” lamented panel moderator Ted Schlein, chairman and general partner at Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity venture capital firm. “In my view, if we spend so much time, energy, and dollars fighting to protect our technology and our systems, shouldn’t we be doing the same for people?”

The cybersecurity community should focus on creating ways to detect and shut down disinformation while mitigating its effects, Schlein argued. Presumably, this call to action includes targeting misinformation, which differs from disinformation as it relates to intent. (Misinformation is defined(Opens in a new window) as “incorrect or misleading information,” regardless of intent. Disinformation is a lie told deliberately to influence opinion or cover up a fact.)

I totally disagree with his perspective. The responsibility is not with the platform–the responsibility is with the reader to take the time to evaluate the information and do their own research. Saying that a platform should detect and shut down disinformation leads to censorship. It also brings  up the question of who decides what is misinformation or disinformation. Remember that during the 2020 election, articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop were censored and declared misinformation or disinformation. How did that work out?

The article also notes:

Here are some recent examples of disinformation campaigns and misinformation spreaders caught in the act:

Why is the platform required to protect their users? The users can make decisions as to what they choose to believe and which platforms they choose to frequent.

Mr. Roth also stated that truth can change. If truth changes, was it truth to begin with?

The article reports:

Roth began his part of the panel discussion by noting that it’s natural for knowledge and perceived truths to change over time, and “something that is known to be true with absolute certainty one day could be known to be totally false another.”

Roth cautioned that misinformation is not actually like malware because malware is software that has been designed to generate a specific outcome every time it runs. Disinformation doesn’t guarantee the intended results. Effectively tackling misinformation and disinformation online will require dynamism and flexibility from cybersecurity developers, Roth said.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. There is a section at the end that reminds us of the First Amendment. Not all media platforms are happy that The First Amendment exists. We need to keep that in mind.

Will There Ever Be An Apology?

Posted on by

I really like Rand Paul. He is not afraid to say what he believes is truth regardless of the pushback. He was one of the more rational voices during the Covid pandemic and was ridiculed for the things he said (things that later turned out to be true). Will the Democrats and tech companies who maligned him ever apologize? Probably not.

The Washington Examiner posted an article on March 1st about Rand Paul and the information he provided on Covid during the pandemic.

The article reports:

The U.S. Energy Department and the FBI now agree that a lab leak is probably to blame for the spread of the COVID-19 virus, according to reports. The disclosure was made in “low confidence” earlier this week after the department received new intelligence on the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Energy Department oversees 17 national labs and research centers and was investigating the pandemic’s origins. Meanwhile, the Energy Department’s admission was just the latest in a recent string of evidence vindicating Paul. A new study released this month revealed that immunity from a natural COVID infection was “at least as high, if not higher” than receiving the vaccine. Paul said this last year but was dismissed by many on the Left as spreading misinformation.

The article concludes:

Paul was heavily criticized by those on the Left for saying the same thing the Energy Department just now concluded. He was censored by Big Tech and vilified by Democratic politicians who claimed Paul’s now-vindicated assertions were detrimental to the country. But it was Big Tech and the Democrats who were harming the country, not the Kentucky Republican.

“Trust the science” evolved into “trust the tyrants,” and the Left sought total compliance to its authoritarianism during the pandemic. Anyone objecting, such as Paul, was vilified as an ignorant conspiracy theorist and, in some cases, accomplice to murder. What happened to Paul should serve as a warning of left-wing, Democratic totalitarianism and why they can never be trusted to regulate speech or information. Liberals, Democrats, the Left, and Big Tech all owe Rand Paul an apology. Will they ever do so?

Will the political left ever be held accountable for their lies?

 

My Head Is Spinning!

Posted on by

The Covid pandemic has brought us a lot of information and a lot of censorship of information. Oddly enough, a lot of the information that was censored is now being reported as true. Currently the difference between a conspiracy theory and a major news story is a few months.

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights reported the following:

This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated lately.

In the past few days, a key federal agency concluded that COVID was likely the result of a Chinese lab leak. A prestigious medical journal reported that natural immunity is better than vaccines against COVID. Another that mask mandates were worthless. And President Joe Biden’s advanced age is now, according to Biden, a legitimate issue.

All of these claims had been labeled as “disinformation” by the mainstream press, by “independent” fact-checkers, by social media platforms. Anyone who espoused them was attacked as a crazy anti-vaxxer, QAnon racist, Russian stooge who deserved to be de-platformed, demonetized, and discredited.

Take the lab-leak story. The Energy Department, “citing new intelligence,” changed its view on the origins of COVID-19 and now thinks it did, in fact, escape from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The article notes how the lab leak theory was treated in the past:

A-list journalist Anne Applebaum once compared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to a Soviet propagandist for suggesting that COVID came from a lab. A New York Times reporter said the lab-leak theory had “racist roots.” The editor in chief of Scientific American called it a “conspiracy theory.” CNN said it was “like something out of a comic book.”

Politifact, one of the supposed independent guardians against disinformation, said that any such claim was “inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” Facebook banned posts mentioning the lab-leak theory.

The article concludes:

One of the articles that Google is right now targeting is our Feb. 23 editorial applauding Congress for investigating COVID vaccines (Congress To Probe COVID Vaccines — And It’s About Time).

Apparently, merely calling for a congressional investigation “promotes harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” according to Google’s thought police.

So, let’s review.

The stuff labeled as dangerous disinformation keeps turning out to be true. The supposed guardians of credible information turn out to be some of the biggest peddlers of actual disinformation. And groups that are supposedly targeting disinformation are really just out to defund conservatives.  

In all this confusion, one thing is perfectly clear. If you want to know what will be labeled as disinformation tomorrow, just look at whatever is on the left’s agenda today.

The mainstream media is simply pointing out the need for Americans to find alternative sources for their news.

Who Is Behind The Cancellation Of Conservative Thought

Posted on by

On Thursday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about the censorship of conservative ideas.

The article reports:

Well-funded “disinformation” tracking groups are part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars, a Washington Examiner investigation found.

Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly “nonpartisan” groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online “disinformation.” These same “disinformation” monitors are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to ad companies, with the aim of defunding and shutting down disfavored speech, according to sources familiar with the situation, public memos, and emails obtained by the Washington Examiner.

…The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups sharing similar board members, is one entity shaping the ad world behind the scenes. GDI’s CEO is Clare Melford, former senior vice president for MTV Networks, and its executive director is Daniel Rogers, a tech advisory board member for Human Rights First, a left-leaning nonprofit group that says disinformation fuels “violent extremism and public health crises.”

The article explains the financial aspect of this censorship:

“It’s devastating,” Mike Benz, the State Department’s ex-deputy assistant for internal communications and information policy, told the Washington Examiner. “The implementation of ad revenue crushing sentinels like Newsguard, Global Disinformation Index, and the like has completely crippled the potential of alternative news sources to compete on an even economic playing field with approved media outlets like CNN and the New York Times.”

GDI’s mission is to “remove the financial incentive” to create “disinformation,” and its “core output” is a secretive “dynamic exclusion list” that rates news outlets based on their alleged disinformation “risk” factor, according to its website. There are at least 2,000 websites on this exclusion list, which has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,” Melford said on a March 2022 podcast episode hosted by the Safety Tech Innovation Network, a British government-backed group.

Along with similar organizations, GDI has been raking in cash as funding pours into disinformation tracking. Its charity in San Antonio, Texas, posted $345,000 in revenue in 2020, while its affiliated private foundation saw its roughly $19,600 revenue jump in 2019 to over $569,000 in 2020, according to tax records.

This article at The Washington Examiner is the first in a series of article to be posted about the censorship of conservative views. Please follow the link above to read the entire article and look for more to come.

How Short Is The Average American’s Memory?

Posted on by

Disinformation is something the Biden administration wants to fight against. However, they seem to be spreading it themselves. On Thursday, The Daily Caller posted an article about some recent disinformation put out by the current White House.

The article reports:

The White House tweeted COVID-19 disinformation Thursday evening to imply that President Joe Biden deserves credit for vaccinating Americans against the virus.

The official White House twitter account tweeted that when Biden took office, on Jan. 20, 2021, there were millions of Americans unemployed and no COVID-19 vaccines available. The tweet went on to tout the decrease in unemployment since then, calling it the fastest drop in unemployment at the start of a president’s term ever.

…Biden himself had already received two doses of the coronavirus vaccine before he became president. He received his first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine Dec. 21, 2020, and then his second dose on Jan. 13, 2021.

Maybe he forgot.

On Saturday, Townhall reported that the misinformation had been corrected.

Townhall reported:

On Thursday night, as Katie highlighted, the official White House Twitter account, tweeted out a falsehood about the timeline of the availability of the vaccines. Though it has since been corrected, the original tweet in question is still up. 

…Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker for The Washington Post, also weighed in, demanding to know who was manning the account and calling for them to “Delete this false tweet.”

The job growth claims in the tweet are also questionable. Adding back jobs that you killed with the shutdown of the economy does not count as economic growth–it counts as recovery. This is really not the time for the Biden administration to be praising itself for its economic achievements–inflation has wiped out the salary gains Americans achieved during the Trump administration and food shortages and other supply chain issues have become a problem. I think the Biden administration needs to spend less time bragging and more time actually finding solutions to the problems they have created.