The bizarre rise and fall of the "Disinformation Governance Board"
What one of the stranger episodes in US politics says about the dysfunctional state of our democracy and the need for neutral principles
On April 27th, the US Department of Homeland Security announced it was creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” and in that moment ignited a firestorm on Twitter, a blaze that quickly spread to mainstream (especially right-wing) media and the halls of congress.
Why? What would a Disinformation Governance Board actually do? Unfortunately, the DHS was scant on details and most people weren’t looking — the name was enough. In a super-charged political climate where people have very different ideas of what constitutes real and fake news, the idea of the government forming any sort of body to weigh in on such issues struck many as the inauguration of its own “Ministry of Truth” (the government bureau in Orwell’s 1984 that dictates what people can think).
The project lasted only three weeks, at which point it was so controversial that the government threw up its hands and gave up, but the story is still worth recounting for its sheer strangeness and for the light it sheds on the current ramshackle state of our democracy. Perhaps we can learn something from this circus.
One of the stranger things about the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) was who they chose to head it — a woman named Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz, like most people on Twitter, has strongly partisan opinions and so has inevitably come out on the wrong side of a number of disinformation disputes. She dismissed both the Hunter Biden laptop (“We should view it as a Trump campaign product”) as well as the possibility of a lab leak origin to Covid (a “fringe” theory that was “politically convenient for Trump”), all of which led many to ask: Would the DGB, with her at its head, be at all impartial?
Unfortunately, that wasn’t all: Jankowicz is also a very expressive musical theater enthusiast. Of course there’s nothing wrong with loving musical theater, but the fact that she posted a video of herself singing a disinformation parody of a Mary Poppins song, as well as another ditty with the chorus “I want to be rich, famous, and powerful,” made it a little too easy for people to mock her on social media, comparing her to the perky, all-in-pink Harry Potter villain Dolores Umbridge, and just generally lending an air of absurdity to the whole project.
No less strange, however, was just how bad the government was at explaining the purpose of the DGB. It started off clearly enough — it would “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia” (though that’s not entirely clear: I assume the term “irregular migration” is a bit foreign to most people). Nonetheless, from there it only got worse.
When people started clamoring that the board would police speech, the DHS countered by saying the board was actually formed to protect speech:
In a statement to CBS News, a DHS spokesperson said the department began its work on disinformation several years ago. “The Department has created the Disinformation Governance Board to ensure this work does not infringe on the fundamental right of free speech and to further protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties,” the spokesperson said.
Just take that in for a minute. If this was indeed the case, then the whole issue was simply due to the worst possible naming catastrophe of all time. They should have called it the “Civil Liberties Protection Board,” given it a strict mandate to “review all DHS activities to ensure they don’t infringe on free speech and privacy,” and put some respected member of the civil liberties community at its head. Disaster averted! All the people who were freaking out would have loved it.
But alas, it was hard for people to believe the we-just-want-to-protect-free-speech narrative, considering the actual name and description they gave it. It was all a bit too fuzzy. Even their media allies, such as the New York Times, assumed they’d have a broader mandate:
Ms. Jankowicz, 33, has suggested in her book and in public statements that condescending and misogynistic content online can prelude violence and other unlawful acts offline — the kinds of threat the board was created to monitor.
…Ms. Jankowicz has called for social media companies and law enforcement agencies to take stiffer action against online abuse.
So even the NYT saw the board’s purpose as monitoring “condescending and misogynistic content online”… which starts to sound a lot like policing speech you don’t like.
This focus on the world of online harassment became especially clear in the eulogies that both the NYT and Washington Post published when the board was laid to rest.
The NYT piece is called “A Panel to Combat Disinformation Becomes a Victim of It,” which is a great title, especially if you’re planning to expose some concrete disinformation the panel fell victim to. Unfortunately, the NYT is a bit hazy on that point.
Instead they make vague references to “mischaracterizations” and “false attacks” against the board, as well as to “vitriolic and highly personal harassment” that Jankowicz received online. The only specific event they point to was that “Republican leaders and commentators talked about [the board] as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that would police people’s speech” when in reality “that was never the board’s mandate.” That’s it. No nefarious campaign with underground hackers selectively editing videos of DGB officials. No breaking into the DHS website and manipulating data. Instead, the government was called a mean name on Twitter.
But the WaPo piece really takes the cake for elevating name-calling to a crime:
Just hours after Jankowicz tweeted about her new job, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth.” Posobiec’s 1.7 million followers quickly sprung into action. By the end of the day, there were at least 53,235 posts on Twitter mentioning “Disinformation Governance Board,” many referencing Jankowicz by name, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public-interest research. In the days following, that number skyrocketed.
That sure sounds bad… but is it? Is 53,235 Twitter posts a lot for one day? And is there something ominous about the posts referencing Jankowicz “by name,” seeing as the announcement was about the creation of the DGB and her leadership of it? You might hope the Advance Democracy report would provide some much-needed context for these claims, but where is it? When you click on the link in the article (included above) it just goes to the AD homepage.
And from there the WaPo article just gets sillier and sillier. For instance, there’s a whole section entitled “A textbook disinformation campaign” that describes the “playbook” used by right-wing peddlers of disinformation. What are these highly-developed deception strategies that are “crucial [for] the public and leaders of institutions… [to] understand more fully”? Only this: if you want to take down an institution, then find somebody there that your tribe won’t like (for right-wingers, this is “almost always a woman or person of color”) and make them look as bad as you can by pointing out all the bad stuff they’ve done (even if it’s not a true picture of who they are, but just “single, decontextualized moments”).
I hope the experts didn’t spend too much time analyzing social media posts to decipher that formula — it’s just called “trash talking” and anyone who went to high school could have told them about it. (And did they really expect twitter mobs to be any more sophisticated than high school kids?)
And that was basically the tenor of the whole bizarre affair. An incredibly inept government roll-out for an initiative to banish name-calling (among other things) led to a bunch of name-calling, which led to further calls to banish name-calling. Describing it like that, it’s hard not to feel like I’m sharing some sort of epic “he said — she said” debacle that I just witnessed on the playground at recess.
Which is certainly not to deny the reality and seriousness of online harassment — it is nasty stuff. I rarely read the comments on Twitter, Facebook, or even YouTube, because it’s enough to make me lose faith in humanity. Social media is toxic much of the time — a traffic jam where everyone is blaring their horns and giving everyone else the middle finger.
But social media companies already have rules that ban harassment, so are people just upset that the rules aren’t strict enough or that platforms aren’t enforcing them properly?
No. What’s really happening is that people are crying out for the government to silence their political opponents. And that’s actually incredibly dangerous.
Of course it’s understandable why people do it. If I think someone’s ideas are wrong, it makes sense to oppose them. Ideas can be dangerous — to not argue against them potentially means to let others fall prey to them. And why stop at arguing? Why not do everything I can to get those ideas dismissed from the public square? It would seem to follow suit.
But when we move beyond argument we cross a line. If we truly respected people, we’d let them make up their own minds, not manipulate what they think. When we ban ideas, we harm not only the person speaking but also everyone who can’t hear that speech and make up their own minds.
One way to think about this is just to imagine you became God for a day and could erase any ideas you wanted. There are so many harmful ideas out there, which would you erase? Racism? Or maybe wokeness? Religion itself? Or perhaps materialism? If you could do so, why wouldn’t you? You’d be crazy not to. How much harm has come from people professing this or that idea?
But lying in bed that night, you might start to doubt. You might start to wonder if you hadn’t wounded the people you were trying to help, if you hadn’t taken away some essential part of who they are and made them into mindless automata. You’d erased away all the possible errors and placed them back in Eden — how wonderful! But now they’d never be able to perceive the truth for themselves.
That might sound a little dramatic, but is it really that far from the reality? What do people hope for when they try to banish ideas if not to erase them from existence?
So we should try to see the line that this whole strange affair with the DGB makes momentarily visible — the line between arguing against bad ideas and crying out for the authorities to banish them. It doesn’t matter if those authorities are governments or private businesses, nor if we call such banishment “censorship” or “content moderation,” the activity is the same.1
This sounds obvious enough, but it’s often amazingly difficult to recognize and abide by in one’s own life. Yes, we definitely feel it when some neutral principle like free speech has been violated, but only when it’s our speech; when it’s our enemy’s speech we rarely notice. Because it takes a certain discipline to notice. And it takes a certain discipline to act in a principled way, especially when it’s seemingly against our own interests.
This disciplined approach to working with social principles was described a century ago by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner:
Imagine someone on the teaching staff of a university who teaches something which I, or someone else, must go against. I would of course make every effort to show that the things this person teaches are wrong; wanting to do my duty, I would go to any length to show that he is wrong and everything he says — well, to put it bluntly — is balderdash. This is one side of the matter.
Now let us assume the individual concerned found himself in a situation where the authorities wanted to dismiss him from his post or discipline him in some way. Well, of course, I would stand up for him in every possible way, against his dismissal or disciplining; for this would not be a question of the content of his teaching, but of ensuring academic freedom. For as long as we are dealing with people’s theories, we have to fight; when it comes to an external institution, the fight ends and may even be transformed into coming to the individual’s defense. It has to be realized that it is abominable if someone lets his opposition to someone induce him to take an active part in disciplining such a person. Let us assume, however, the individual concerned was a lecturer or professor of economics or politics and were appointed to hold a government office. What would our attitude be then? It would have to be such that one got him out of that office as quickly as possible, for there his theories would cause real damage.
So we can see that if we truly care about society, and not just “our side” of society, then we need to learn to act in a hygienic way within it. We need to learn to perceive those principles that actually promote health in all of society and give those principles our highest allegiance.
Because the reality is that opinions and ideas come and go — what’s considered true or false changes from generation to generation (though we always seem to think we’ve finally discovered the Truth for all time). We need neutral principles that can handle that kind of change, that can allow things to be worked out ever anew.
Free speech is one such principle. It encourages new ideas and endures new tensions. In contrast, crying out for the authorities to erase whatever we deem to be disinformation is ultimately a dead-end — we just won’t be able to silence our political enemies forever; it’s not sustainable. So if we don’t want society to collapse then we’ll have to learn to fight bad ideas with good will. We’ll have to learn, not to shut-out what we dislike, but to transform it.
When speaking about “content moderation” as censorship, we should differentiate the act of curation. Every teacher has to curate what they teach — they have to choose which content to include and which to leave out. Every creative act also includes this same curation. But it’s completely different when a person chooses for themselves or when an authority chooses for them. When a politician bans a book or tells a teacher they can’t teach something, or when a social media company “moderates” content by erasing a story from everyone’s feeds, they’re not curating, they’re censoring.