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Disinformation is the deliberate use of lies to manipulate people, whether to extract profit or to advance a political agenda. Its unwitting accomplice, misinformation, is spread by unknowing dupes who repeat lies they believe to be true. In America today, both forms of falsehood are distorting our perception of reality.
In a democracy, the people need a shared set of facts as a basis to debate and make decisions that advance and secure their collective interests. Differences of opinion, and even propaganda, have always existed in the United States, but now, enemies of democracy are using disinformation to attack our sovereign right to truthful information, intellectual integrity, and the exercise of the will of the people. Online disinformation is particularly insidious because of its immediacy, its capacity to deceive, and its ability to reach its target.
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No it’s not.
/s 😉
I mean, folks from Time Magazine suddenly deciding misinformation is a problem…
https://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2016-donald-trump/
For all of Trump’s public life, tastemakers and intellectuals have dismissed him as a vulgarian and carnival barker, a showman with big flash and little substance. But what those critics never understood was that their disdain gave him strength. For years, he fed off the disrespect and used it to grab more tabloid headlines, to connect to common people. Now he has upended the leadership of both major political parties and effectively shifted the political direction of the international order. He will soon command history’s most lethal military, along with economic levers that can change the lives of billions. And the people he has to thank are those he calls “the forgotten,” millions of American voters who get paid by the hour in shoes that will never touch these carpets—working folk, regular Janes and Joes, the dots in the distance.
And that’s not even touching its hagiographies of various Evangelical ministers from Billy Graham (1954, 1993, 1996, 2007) and Jimmy Swaggart and Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker (both in the glorious year of 1987). An assortment of nine Catholic Bishops scored nine covers (the last in 1966), and of course eight Popes have worn the red frame more thirty-three times. And then there’s the straight-up pandering Jesus-y editions.
Today it’s going to be “Has misinformation gone too far?!” and tomorrow its going to be Inside the Uranium Underworld: Dark Secrets, Dirty Bombs and another excuse to march to war.
