Dissed Information

The short, sad life of a Bad Idea

For what seemed like about fifteen minutes in April, Homeland Security announced the formation of a Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), widely referred to as “The Disinformation Board”. Met with near-universal ridicule and distain, the announcement invited comparisons to the dreaded Ministry of Truth in the George Orwell novel, 1984. Explanations of the Board’s purpose and function were varied, contradictory, and in general, uninformative. The Board, it seems, was meant to monitor social media for things they deemed to be Untrue.

The reaction to this absurd new government body was so negative that the Board was disbanded in May, before holding even a single meeting. To mitigate embarrassment the administration claims that the DGB is merely ‘paused’, implying that it could be resurrected once most of us are distracted.

The appointed head of the DGB, Nina Jankowicz, has made her views clear on the need for government oversight of public discourse. During an interview on NPR she stated, “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities all around the world”. In other words, some people require government protection from the words of others, and I am ready to become that authority. (Jankowicz has since resigned from her position on the Board).

The DGB was not just a bad idea, it was spectacularly bad! Even for the present administration, it is remarkable. We expect bad ideas from bureaucrats, but rarely do they expand the reach of government so far and so fast. Let’s look at just a few of the worst aspects of the DGB.

The DGB was formed under the Department of Homeland Security. These are the same people who have taken it upon themselves to secure our borders with guns, listen in on your phone calls, and see that you are frisked and shoeless at our airports. In other words, they do what countless government agencies can already do, but perform these tasks more aggressively, and with less oversight than, say, your police department.

We may ask, why does Homeland Security need to look at my Facebook posts? According to the department, “The spread of disinformation can affect border security, Americans’ safety during disasters, and public trust in our democratic institutions.” An example given was the gathering of hopeful Haitian immigrants in Del Rio, Texas. The major crime of these migrants was believing that they could become American citizens – creating a severe threat of low cost (inflation-fighting) labor, a surge of new taxpayers, and the opening of small restaurants serving plantain dishes. 

We might also ask where DHS acquires the authority to create new Boards and Committees, entire new bureaucracies which assert authority over an aspect of public life which government has previously had no authority whatsoever.

The DGB was designed to protect us “and counter” disinformation. Apparently, there are users of social media with no knowledge that a great deal of the tweets, memes, and statements that appear are utter nonsense. Clearly, only a government organization of hand-picked professionals could hope to protect our sensitive eyes from posts that contain dubious information. This must be why we pay taxes, after all.

But when a groundswell of laughter and protest occurred, the DHS quickly offered a strange admission. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas went on CNN to declare, "The board does not have any operational authority or capability". He went on to say, "What it will do is gather together best practices in addressing the threat of disinformation from foreign state adversaries, from the cartels, and disseminate those best practices to the operators that have been executing in addressing this threat for years." In other words, the Disinformation Governance Board governs nothing at all – they just are assigned a scary-sounding name, so don’t worry about them.

But we should worry about them. Not only is the DGB, (paused, not eliminated), a bad idea, it has serious potential to encroach on individual freedoms and privacy. Do we really need the DGB, an arm of Homeland Security, monitoring our social media posts to ensure they are in line with government sanctioned “truth?” You may say, “I have nothing to fear, I don’t post false information,” but what happens when an administration that disagrees with your perspective is in power? The DGB has the potential to not only engage in actual censorship of unsanctioned “truth;” it has the very real potential to stifle free speech through self-censorship. Fear of censorship can be as bad, if not worse, than actual censorship. In a free society we need a free exchange of ideas. We need the freedom to be wrong and to be corrected by our peers. We do not need a DGB.

Making the point beautifully, the joke in the media became centered on how the Disinformation Board was in fact the center of a great deal of, (how should I put it?) …. disinformation.

At a time of rampaging inflation, growing involvement in global wars, calls to restrict the freedom of Americans in service of safety, and a looming world-wide food crisis, the administration decided to promote a high-level board of governance that was never needed and governed nothing. This may be the very definition of Tone-Deaf Government.

All this comes after two years of growing mistrust of the government, due to (you guessed it) suspected disinformation. Public trust in our government is near historic lows, according to polls from Pew Research that goes back to 1958. In fact, voter trust in what the government tells them has mostly been below 30% since 2007. More recently, the number is closer to 20%.

When people do not trust what the government says, they cannot discriminate between truth and fabrications. The COVID pandemic generated constant and conflicting claims from the administrations to the point where even good information with reliable data was often discounted along with the noise of changing claims. When every other week you read that eggs are either healthy or poisonous you tend to ignore the claims altogether.

So, a government with information that is not trusted produced a Disinformation Board to tell us what we should not trust, with no real mandate or authority, got ridiculed, and collapsed without doing anything other than look foolish. So much for disinformation.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a government that produced reliable, relatively trustworthy information? What if we had free access to good quality data that allowed us to digest the intelligence and draw our own conclusions? Might that be a better use of our tax dollars?

Guess what? There are agencies that do exactly that. Thousands of businesses rely on government databases that provide information about industries, consumer behavior, export trends, and countless other data points. One good example is the US Census Bureau. Surprisingly, even the CIA has a high-quality site called the World Factbook that provides information, including images of over 260 countries. It is, therefore, possible to get decent information out of our government if you know where to look.

These outlets don’t make headlines. Instead, foolish ideas like the Disinformation Governance Board make the news, generating less, not more, trust in government. When the administration decides to protect those who need no protection what they are really doing is seeking greater control over our lives.

Being skeptical about claims made on social media is a good idea. Distrusting bureaucrats who claim to know what we should or should not read is an even better one. Thomas Jefferson had it right back in 1787. He was in Paris, writing to Edward Carrington, his delegate to the Continental Congress. Jefferson wrote, “…a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”