'Misinformation' and the war on civil society.
This elite campaign is both megalomaniacal and pathetic.
Pretty much every Western government or international institution now has a programme to fight ‘misinformation’:
The only ‘trusted sources’ for information are ‘public health authorities’. You should be careful about listening to other people or to what you read on the internet. ‘Don’t let anyone fool you.’
What is occurring here is an attempt to establish vertical lines of communication, from the top down - and to disrupt (and stigmatise) horizontal communication between peers.
Free communication is compared to a virus or a disease, which spreads rampantly throughout the population. The UN secretary general identified a ‘dangerous epidemic of misinformation’ spreading ‘harmful health advice’ and ‘hatred’.
What we have here is not a war on incorrect facts, but on the whole concept of civil society. Civil society is about free horizontal relations - relations between peers. The first news organs came from the newly emerging world of traders and merchants who published ‘information letters’ about the prices of commodities or political news from distant lands. They published information for each other. This world of horizontal communication became more radical in the 18th century, with the emergence of coffee shops, salons and journals, which remorselessly subjected everything to scrutiny and ‘criticism’.
The Prussian king tried to bring these news organs under his wing and ensure that they were to ‘inform the public of useful truths’. But, says the sociologist Jurgen Habermas, soon these writers were to ‘think their own thoughts, directed against the authorities’:
(Civil society) ‘was now casting itself lose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion’ (1).
The campaign against misinformation has the presumption of the Prussian king. UN under-secretary general said ‘We own the science, and we think that the world should know it’. They ‘partnered Google’ to ensure that UN resources came top of searches for ‘climate change’ (rather than the ‘incredibly distorted information’ that was coming top before); they also had a ‘trusted messenger project’ getting ‘influencers’ to ‘carry messages’ to TikTok users.
The Biden administration also asked social media to fiddle search algorithms, as well as requesting that TikTok influencers make videos of themselves being vaccinated, that TV hosts get vaccinated live on air, and that a particular American football player made a video with his parents encouraging vaccination.
Yet the campaign against misinformation is also pathetic. Misinformation is the word of a middle-rung pen pusher, someone with a shirt tucked too far into his trousers, who purses his lips and says ‘I think you have been misinformed’. ‘Misinformation’ suggests that a number has been erroneously put in one part of the spreadsheet rather than another. This is not a very substantial basis on which to build a new ideological order, or to enforce vertical relations with the population.
As such, this campaign has been remarkably unsuccessful. Although the media and social media have been incorporated, there has been a dramatic growth in independent civil society communications - podcasts and substacks - that are completely detached from any institutions or official bodies. These are people thinking in their bedrooms and garages, producing news sheets and criticism on the open market of public debate. Joe Rogan has more viewers than CNN, and attempts to get him cancelled this year led to 2 million new subscribers.
This new world of independent communication is not one of uniformity, but - like those eighteenth century coffee shops - of intense scrutiny and conflicts. There is no one opinion among vaccine skeptics, for example. Every official statement sets laptops whirring with thousands of analyses and criticisms.
The elite knows this. A WEF panel about fighting misinformation included a lament by one of the talking heads: ‘The other side makes people feel like they are part of something, and that’s why they are succeeding’.
That is because being part of a free civil society is being part of something. And the more that they seek to repress it the more that it will flourish.
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(1) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas, MIT 1999, p25