The case, you may remember, involved the Biden administration’s 2022 attempt to create a Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security that would scrutinize the seamy corners of the internet and your Facebook account in search of the three horsemen of naughty speech: misinformation (unintentional falsehoods), disinformation (deliberate falsehoods), and malinformation (inconveniently shared truths). And yes, the federal government does use these terms. The head was supposed to be Nina Jankowicz, who is frequently touted as a disinformation expert.
After pushback from civil liberties advocates, Republicans, and people who’ve read George Orwell’s 1984, the board was unceremoniously terminated and Jankowicz had to seek employment elsewhere.
Disinformation, Misinformation, or Just in the Eye of the Beholder?
The problem is that while there’s undoubtedly a huge amount of bullshit in circulation—including on the internet, which the board was supposed to police—the amount that is indisputably false is relatively small. Most arguments are about interpretations of facts and levels of confidence among people who can’t be trusted as arbiters of truth even (and especially) if working on behalf of governments.
“All communication across all contexts – whether news, opinion journalism, science, misinformation studies, political debate, and so on – involves countless decisions about what information and context to include, what to exclude, how to present information, which narratives and explanatory frameworks to embed the information in, and so on,” philosopher Dan Williams pointed out earlier this year. “Any attempt to divide this communication into a misleading bucket and a non-misleading bucket will inevitably be biased by pre-existing beliefs, interests, and allegiances.”
Unfortunately, among the most prevalent sources of false information are governments, the very bodies that want to set themselves up as the arbiters of truth. They lie about abuses of power, about inconvenient facts that might cause disputes with other states, and about screw-ups embarrassing to those in office. Jankowicz herself repeatedly referred to Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which contained incriminating evidence of his conduct, as Russian disinformation (It has been confirmed as real). She’s been quite the purveyor of disinfo herself, and walking, talking evidence of the danger in letting government create truth police.