The Global Disinformation Index doesn’t seek to prevent disinformation. It exists to censor accurate information.
To reduce disinformation, we need to remove the financial incentive to create it,” the Global Disinformation Index declares on its mission page. But as the Washington Examiner exposed last week, the self-appointed arbiter of truth doesn’t seek to silence the legacy corporate outlets that repeatedly peddled false stories. Rather, it demands the widespread censorship of conservative webpages that got those stories correct by branding the right-leaning sites the “riskiest” ones when it comes to “disinformation.”
It is not conservative new outlets that are “risky,” however. And it isn’t even “disinformation” that’s risky: Disinformation — whatever that means — can be countered with the truth. What is risky is the growing belief that experts can both dictate what is deceptive and declare that such speech should be censored.
A simple graphic from the GDI’s summary of its “Disinformation Risk in the United States Online Media Market,” crystalizes the implications of the censorship approach pushed by GDI by establishing that if the outlets GDI seeks to silence were muted, the public would remain ignorant about important questions of national security, government malfeasance, corruption, and major policy matters.
Compare, for instance, the first two media outlets GDI identifies as the “least risky sites” and “riskiest sites” — NPR and the New York Post, respectively — and their coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The New York Post not only broke the story but provided a detailed analysis of material recovered from the abandoned MacBook that implicated then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal.
In contrast, NPR declared on Twitter it was not covering the Hunter Biden story because “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” NPR’s failure to initially cover the story caused the government-funded outlet to remain ignorant of the basic facts, prompting NPR to later falsely report that the documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop had been “discredited by U.S. intelligence.” NPR later issued a correction on that disinformation.
In general, the outlets on the left — both politically and in GDI’s graphic — either ignored the Biden family scandal or spun the story as representing Russian disinformation, with The Washington Post’s so-called fact-checker even framing the New York Post’s breaking news inaccurately as “hacked or leaked material.” The “riskiest sites,” in contrast, reported the story and dug deeper for corroborating information.
It is not conservative new outlets that are “risky,” however. And it isn’t even “disinformation” that’s risky: Disinformation — whatever that means — can be countered with the truth. What is risky is the growing belief that experts can both dictate what is deceptive and declare that such speech should be censored.
A simple graphic from the GDI’s summary of its “Disinformation Risk in the United States Online Media Market,” crystalizes the implications of the censorship approach pushed by GDI by establishing that if the outlets GDI seeks to silence were muted, the public would remain ignorant about important questions of national security, government malfeasance, corruption, and major policy matters.
In contrast, NPR declared on Twitter it was not covering the Hunter Biden story because “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” NPR’s failure to initially cover the story caused the government-funded outlet to remain ignorant of the basic facts, prompting NPR to later falsely report that the documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop had been “discredited by U.S. intelligence.” NPR later issued a correction on that disinformation.
In general, the outlets on the left — both politically and in GDI’s graphic — either ignored the Biden family scandal or spun the story as representing Russian disinformation, with The Washington Post’s so-called fact-checker even framing the New York Post’s breaking news inaccurately as “hacked or leaked material.” The “riskiest sites,” in contrast, reported the story and dug deeper for corroborating information.
In addition to the corporate legacy outlets limiting their reporting on the materials contained on the abandoned laptop that suggested Joe Biden profited from Hunter’s foreign business ventures, Twitter censored the story, and Facebook limited visibility of the scandal. Such censorship had serious consequences: Half of the respondents who were surveyed after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, revealed the details behind the efforts to block the New York Post story said they would have voted differently had they known the revelations about...
Read More HERE
gdi is funded by soros i believe. what did you expect.
ReplyDelete