The world faces a lot of threats these days, some existential, some serious, and some merely extremely annoying. The scourge of disinformation, though, is a problem that I have a hard time categorizing.
Some disinformation is merely smog, annoying, bad for your health, but ultimately (maybe) not fatal. The disinformation in the political sphere (about elections, conspiracy theories, etc.) might not threaten your existence, but if unanswered it can severely impact your quality of life.
I can speak with any kind of authority about the disinformation problem in my own country, but my reading and research tells me that the problem is global, from Andorra to Zanzibar, and it seems to be getting more serious and more pervasive with each passing day.
The problem, and again, I’ll only speak of my own country, is that the defenses against disinformation are not only weakening, but in some cases there seems to be a deliberate effort by some politicians to dismantle what few meager defenses we have.
Universities and some government agencies that have programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation regarding political falsehoods and even medical misinformation are increasingly under threat from conservative politicians and rightwing activists who accuse them of working in cahoots with the tech companies to censor rightwing views.
Institutions like Stanford University, who are tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Project (EIP), are facing threats of litigation from some of the very people who are responsible for a lot of the misinformation.
Now, you’ll have to pause here and do some thinking. The organizations that are tracking and flagging disinformation, misinformation, and sometimes outright lies on social media about elections and medicine (primarily the COVID-19 pandemic) are being threatened with legal action by the politicians and others who are the authors of said material.
Are these people saying that the ‘conservative views’ that are being called out are in fact misinformation? It certainly seems to me that this is exactly what they’re saying. It’s kind of like people planning a bank robbery over the phone wanting to sue the police who heard them on a wiretap for eavesdropping.
In other words, ‘you’re violating my right to engage in bad or illegal activity.’ I’m sorry. I’ve not read anything in the Constitution that grants the inalienable right to do wrong. You might have the right to say anything, but like the civil rights activists who engaged in civil disobedience to protest the Jim Crow laws of the 50s and 60s, you must be willing to accept the punishment for that disobedience. If it turns out that you have right on your side, the laws will be changed.
What you don’t do is arbitrarily dismantle a law or regulation to allow yourself to trample on the rights of others. That’s what’s being done here. And it’s being done right in front of our faces, all over the globe. Wannabe authoritarians and tinpot dictators are tearing down the walls that stand between us and anarchy, not, I think, because they really want anarchy. They want order, just an order where they are in control. Where ‘their’ conservative views are uncensored, but your views that they disagree with are.
Maybe they’re not really tearing the walls down, but dismantling them so they can be re-erected around views of their choosing when they’re in charge.
I don’t know about you, but the very thought of that keeps me awake at nights. | NWI
