Posted on 03/28/2024 8:59:19 AM PDT by JV3MRC
The Washington Post Editorial Board went to bat for the federal government colluding with Big Tech to police so-called disinformation online. Gatestone Institute Senior Fellow Gordon Chang was having none of it.
“Don’t defund the fight against Russia and China’s disinformation,” decried the Board in the editorial. In the editorial, the Board defended the State Department-tied Global Engagement Center’s financing of the now-infamous Global Disinformation Index (initially based in the U.K.), which has since been panned for blacklisting right-leaning American media. The Post propagandized how the GEC “deploys a $61 million budget and a staff of 125 to counter disinformation from Russia, China, Iran and terrorist organizations.” The only problem, as Chang pointed out in an exclusive interview with MRC Free Speech America, is that these pretexts are smokescreens the federal government has consistently deployed to violate the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens.
Chang rebuked The Post for parroting the government’s excuse of fighting “disinformation” to police online speech: “You have a clear attack on the First Amendment, and you have mainstream media supporting it. I mean, these guys [The Post] — aren’t they going to find out that at some point the government can use it against them?” Chang doubled down: “The First Amendment is absolutely essential for the preservation of democracy. And we should not have, especially newspapers, advocating unconstitutional restrictions on the First Amendment. It’s just as simple as that.”
In Chang’s view, “The most important thing is [that] we must delegitimize the concept of disinformation” in order to de-fang the government from using the evergreen newspeak concept as license to infringe on free speech. Rather, Chang argued that the marketplace of ideas is the best arena where false information can be filtered out, not through the police state tactics of coercive government oversight.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
“Disinformation” means “anything I don’t agree with or doesn’t conform to my prejudices”. One of those words that let you know you can safely ignore or ridicule someone using it.
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