Who Defines Disinformation?

• Author: Orient, Jane M.
• Position: [GUIST OPINION]

Just after Elon Musk bought Twitter, promising more freedom, the Biden administration announces a new government agency to "protect" Americans and the world from harmful disinformation, especially about the COVID pandemic.

It is called the Disinformation Governance Board, although some would call it the Minitrue, short for Ministry of Truth, the ministry of propaganda in George Orwell's novel 1984. The abbreviation differs from KGB by only one letter.

There is the First Amendment, of course, but there is precedent for disregarding it, especially in war. Newspapers were shut down and editors arrested for expressing anti-war views, at the time of the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln and World War I by Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson even suppressed information about the raging 1918 influenza pandemic so as not to interfere with the war effort. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Wilson's Espionage Act and its 20-year prison terms. Wilson even demanded that the Librarian of Congress report the names of those who ordered certain books! Today's technology permits government to find out if you even looked at a book or article online.

Today, "mainstream media" is mostly owned by a few conglomerates, who all seem to be on board with the current Narrative about this "war" on COVID. The First Amendment does not apply to private organizations. The internet and social media owned by Big Tech could threaten those who want to suppress certain truths.

We can tell something about the Agenda from the accounts that Twitter has banned: views of election fraud that favors Democrats; evidence of corrupt dealings with foreign governments by certain highly placed officials, say from Hunter Biden's laptop; and information contradicting the official narrative on COVID-19.

With COVID, disinformation is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Skepticism about masks and lockdowns, information about early treatment with cheap, repurposed drugs, or anything that might lead to "vaccine hesitancy" are anathema.

Who writes the message? According to Dr. Scott Atlas, who was briefly a member of President Trump's COVID Task Force, in his book A Plague upon Our House, the nationwide message was dictated by Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Robert Redfield, even over the President's objection. Was it "the Science"? Dr. Atlas immersed himself in the deluge of scientific articles and...