Department Of Homeland Security Announces New Disinformation Governance Board

Herdfan said:
And the end result is less Brown people coming here is it not?
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Yes, that's theoretically the result, but I don't see that as a problem for liberals if that's what you're suggesting.
 
Herdfan said:
This being the same woman who said the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't real. A position since contradicted by both the NYT and WaPo.



And if they do it in the aggregate they might be OK, but the minute they point at an individual or news organization and say "what they say is bullshit", then it will be over.
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To be clear, the Hunter Biden laptop story was:
A. An obvious October-surprise effort to hurt Biden in the 2020 election.
B. A heap of bullshit mixed with few real facts.
C. So screwy in terms of chain of custody that acting like it wasn't anything but A was dangerous.

No one should have reported the laptop story without a serious effort to examine the data, and independently confirm the findings. And, the Hunter Biden laptop story illustrates just exactly why we have such a problem. We have a lot of propagandists operating in a world where obvious bullshit outpaces every attempt at fact-checking, and we have fundamentally stopped being able to agree on central facts.

That said, putting DHS in charge of such an effort is mind-boggling dumb because those guys have never been trustworthy. I suspect that such a "ministry of truth" will become a dangerous system of right-wing apologia under a Republican president, similar to ICE's horrible Victims Assistance Program.
 
Edd said:
Is that how you really read it? I’m reading it as smugglers spread or take advantage of disinformation to encourage people to use their services to attempt border crossings, which results in all manner of negative outcomes. That’s not good, liberals don’t want that.
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DHS has long maintained the Border Safety Initiative, which once under the State Department, included major messaging programs to remind people that crossing the borderlands was dangerous and difficult. It largely failed as a program because smugglers were often able to convince desperate people that they knew the route. And, we've found the remains of at least 5,000 people who died during the 20-year campaign.

Putting DHS in charge of a new messaging program that's intended to point out the truth is based on flawed premises.
 
hulugu said:
To be clear, the Hunter Biden laptop story was:
A. An obvious October-surprise effort to hurt Biden in the 2020 election.
B. A heap of bullshit mixed with few real facts.
C. So screwy in terms of chain of custody that acting like it wasn't anything but A was dangerous.

No one should have reported the laptop story without a serious effort to examine the data, and independently confirm the findings. And, the Hunter Biden laptop story illustrates just exactly why we have such a problem. We have a lot of propagandists operating in a world where obvious bullshit outpaces every attempt at fact-checking, and we have fundamentally stopped being able to agree on central facts.

That said, putting DHS in charge of such an effort is mind-boggling dumb because those guys have never been trustworthy. I suspect that such a "ministry of truth" will become a dangerous system of right-wing apologia under a Republican president, similar to ICE's horrible Victims Assistance Program.
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I agree with most of that.

But when the laptop story did surface (and sure it was an October surprise, but that is par for the course and each side would do it if they could), most of the MSM didn't want to investigate it and instead went into default "protect Biden mode" and ignored it. Twitter even locked the NYP's feed because of it. But it turns out that maybe there is something there. Maybe not a "bring down the administration smoking gun", but something that needs investigated by the best investigative journalists on the planet doing their job. It has never gotten that and that alone should bother everyone.
 
Herdfan said:
most of the MSM didn't want to investigate it and instead went into default "protect Biden mode" and ignored it
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That’s not true at all. NBC News immediately requested a copy of the hard drive in October 2020 from Giuliani and was told no. If it was chock-full of incriminating evidence indicating Hunter Biden, why didn’t he give it to them? 🤔

en.wikipedia.org

Hunter Biden laptop controversy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

And we already went over the NY Post vs Twitter kerfuffle. But you ignored all the details that were presented. And now you come back with the previously debunked talking point as if it was never discussed.

And your final statement is also totally inaccurate. I posted here more than once the Washington Post‘s detailed investigation. Somehow it appears you never bothered to read it? It was quite extensive, but once again - you prefer to believe there’s something nefarious and some MSM cover-up despite the exact investigation you ask for already being done and finding the world’s most overhyped nothing burger: a laptop that had been passed around, with files edited countless times until it was only possible to verify a tiny sliver of the information on it.

Even the person who originally found the laptop said he saw false claims about what was supposedly on it.

PS - Is the Wall Street Journal part of the MSM and the “protect Biden mode”? I mean, Trump’s team leaked the info to them first, but they didn’t publish it because the data couldn’t be verified. The NY Post, having no journalistic ethics, somehow got the unverified info and posted it anyway.
 
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I’m not sure how people have strong opinions for or against a “disinformation governance board” when as far as I can tell no one actually knows what powers and responsibilities this office will hold. For all we know it’s just some advisory position to identify misinformation and counter it with information.

I will say the word “governance” in the name does make me a little nervous as to what authorities this role may have. How does one “govern” information? For those wanting censorship be careful what you wish for. It could be very easy for either political party to exploit this against not only other but also against those not following the party line (ie dems against progressives).
 
AG_PhamD said:
I’m not sure how people have strong opinions for or against a “disinformation governance board” when as far as I can tell no one actually knows what powers and responsibilities this office will hold. For all we know it’s just some advisory position to identify misinformation and counter it with information.

I will say the word “governance” in the name does make me a little nervous as to what authorities this role may have. How does one “govern” information? For those wanting censorship be careful what you wish for. It could be very easy for either political party to exploit this against not only other but also against those not following the party line (ie dems against progressives).
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The DHS Secretary has said it is exactly what you suggested in the first paragraph. If you read or watch any of Nina Jankowicz’s past work, that should confirm that. She was active in spotting and countering disinformation with correct information.

The name and the minimal information about the group … they didn’t do themselves any favors. But the idea that it has anything to do with the government censoring people is not based on anything other than right-wing fear mongering.

Who is it that wants censorship, by the way?
 
SuperMatt said:
And now you come back with the previously debunked talking point as if it was never discussed.
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He's coded in Q-BASIC:

Code: 
10    Post information from crazy right wing sources
20    Refute facts and don't offer legitimate counterpoints
30    GOTO 10


(not QBASIC .... )
 
SuperMatt said:
Here’s a good interview (pre Ukraine invasion) that shows you what Ms. Jankowicz is about, and touches on her expertise on Ukraine, Russia, and disinformation.



Too bad that today the comments are full of such anti-Semitic comments as these:

View attachment 13636

So, for those who mindlessly spout the Fox News talking points: these are your peers. Congratulations. I hope you think about what the attacks on her truly are before joining in.
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This reminds me of a discussion I recently heard about Tucker Carlson’s white supremacy narrative laundering and mainstreaming. While he never explicitly says Jews, they are the “they” he is talking about. Those comments seem to back that up.

I don’t know how the general German population treated the Nazi sympathizers or right leaning political passivists at the end of WWII, but I imagine if a civil war broke out here and at the end of it you had a left leaning voter standing in the rubble of their house next to a right leaning voter standing in the rubble of theirs and the right leaning voter shrugged and said “I don’t know. I just wanted the tax cuts.” they’d receive a fist or something more substantial to the face.
 
DHS is “pausing” the disinformation governance board.

www.insider.com

Nina Jankowicz resigns from the DHS after Disinformation Governance Board is put on 'pause' following right-wing backlash

Right-wing critics began attacking Nina Jankowicz immediately after the Disinformation Governance Board was announced.
www.insider.com www.insider.com

They botched the launch of this. Then they decided to actually give in to the right-wing trolls and walk away from it.

Nina Jankowicz is a highly intelligent person with tons of great ideas on how to counter disinformation from the likes of Russia. DHS really did her a disservice in the way they handled things.

With DHS walking away from this, purveyors of disinformation are made stronger, and right-wing TV personalities will be more emboldened. What a mess.
 
SuperMatt said:
DHS is “pausing” the disinformation governance board.

www.insider.com

Nina Jankowicz resigns from the DHS after Disinformation Governance Board is put on 'pause' following right-wing backlash

Right-wing critics began attacking Nina Jankowicz immediately after the Disinformation Governance Board was announced.
www.insider.com www.insider.com

They botched the launch of this. Then they decided to actually give in to the right-wing trolls and walk away from it.
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Or a couple of well-placed Dems, knowing this will be a drag during the midterms, made some calls to the WH.
 
Herdfan said:
Or a couple of well-placed Dems, knowing this will be a drag during the midterms, made some calls to the WH.
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It’s not “or” - it’s ”and.” That’s probably what it was, which tells you how completely stupid the Democrats are being. Nothing new, I guess. They always seem to make the same mistake: they get screaming outrage from the right, and they cave to the pressure, because “we don’t want to seem too far left.”

Why don’t they get that most people are sick of the far right, and that throwing stuff like this in their face will work a lot better than bowing to the pressure?

Best thing to do? The angrier the talking heads on Fox get, the more they should stay on that track. Instead, they back off in hopes to ”win the middle“ and then watch the turnout of the Dem base slip. They should replace most of the Democratic strategists with potted plants and see if things improve.

Good article about how they let the far right trolls win this.

(paywall removed)
 
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One thing to note: if you don’t think Fox News is straight-up right wing propaganda, here is a snippet from the above article to make you think twice:

The week following the announcement, approximately 70 percent of Fox News’s one-hour segments mentioned either Jankowicz or the board, with correspondents frequently deriding the board as a “Ministry of Truth,” according to Advance Democracy. The Fox News coverage was referenced in some of the most popular posts on Facebook and Twitter criticizing Jankowicz.
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70%!!! It was not a story that demanded even a small fraction of that coverage. This was consistent, deliberate messaging with intentional obfuscation of the actual intent and scope of the governance board. Gee, it’s almost as if a disinformation board could counter such a campaign. No wonder a propaganda outlet decided to make a tiny story their biggest focus for an entire week. When your entire business model is a disinformation-fueled outrage machine, this board could have been considered an existential threat.

And the misogynistic attacks on Jankowicz? Par for the course when it comes to right-wing media.

😡 :brickwall:
 
Herdfan said:
I agree with most of that.

But when the laptop story did surface (and sure it was an October surprise, but that is par for the course and each side would do it if they could), most of the MSM didn't want to investigate it and instead went into default "protect Biden mode" and ignored it. Twitter even locked the NYP's feed because of it. But it turns out that maybe there is something there. Maybe not a "bring down the administration smoking gun", but something that needs investigated by the best investigative journalists on the planet doing their job. It has never gotten that and that alone should bother everyone.
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The laptop story stunk. There were 25 reasons not to report on the story, the least of all that it was so-obviously an October surprise reporting on it was just allowing yourself to be lead around by the nose.

Furthermore, it had all the hallmarks of a GOP dirty tricks effort. I mean, the first newspaper to get it was the New York Post—a Murdoch jam with a barrel-bottom credibility rating.

And, one of Post's own reporters—Bruce Golding—questioned the story, and he refused to add his byline. This is incredibly important.
Furthermore, the two people who brought the story to the Post including Rudy Giuliani, acting as Trump's lawyer and Stephen Bannon—a convicted criminal who was pardoned by Trump. Meanwhile, Bannon ally, Guo Wengui was pushing hard against Biden—working to make sure that every bit of data that could be leveraged against Hunter Biden was on the Internet.

Furthermore, the chain-of-custody for the laptop was ridiculous. The story goes Hunter Biden left laptops at a computer repair shop in 2019 and just abandoned the devices. Later, the FBI came to get the laptops, but the story owner—Mac Issac—made a copy of the drives, which he said he had difficulty recovering after they had liquid spilled on them.

Later, Mac Issac started reaching out to members of Congress, and then Giuliani in Aug. 2020.

The Washington Post was later able to examine the data, and found serious problems with the data, including signs that people besides Hunter Biden had accessed the drive, and "written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI."

As one Republican activist put it to the Washington Post, "others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files."

Or, as one of the experts hired by the Post to examine the data put it, “The drive is a mess.

....The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.
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In October 2020, only the NY Post had the data. The story was sketchy and weird, and had all the hallmarks of a Roger Stone/Russian disinfo operation. Reporting on the story as if the Post's reporting was true would have been reckless, and stupid.

The fact is, the Republican activists who created this story worked hard to make it difficult to assess, and now bitch about how the "MSM" ignored it, or considered it was a Russian disinfo campaign.

Reporters get told insane things all the time. Other outlets fall over themselves reporting on stories that are just wrong. You shouldn't report on anything you cannot confirm.

And, if that means Roger Stone's October surprise falls flat, good. Even if later, it turns out that the emails were mostly accurate. And unsurprisingly, what we all learned was that Hunter Biden was trading on his dad's name, and has a series of addictions. Oh, and apparently, he smokes in the bathtub and has sex.

Notice, however, how the right-wing mediasphere has vastly ignored how Trump Inc. milked the Secret Service for millions, how the Trump family used the office to expand their business empire, getting millions in benefits, during and after the administration ended.

The right-wing doesn't report on those stories, and won't investigate anything. So, spare me the media criticism that a half-baked story at best wasn't covered. It shouldn't have been.
 
hulugu said:
Notice, however, how the right-wing mediasphere has vastly ignored how Trump Inc. milked the Secret Service for millions, how the Trump family used the office to expand their business empire, getting millions in benefits, during and after the administration ended.
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Kushner got $2 billion for his relationship with the Saudi crown prince, which involved trying to downplay his connection to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi (Kushner made secret trips to the kingdom while his father in law was president).

And a recent article shows that Saudi Arabia’s public investment firm strongly recommended against investing with Kushner due to his lack of experience, excessive fees, and the kingdom taking on almost all the risk.

But they were overruled by the crown prince.

$2 billion in literal Saudi blood money to Trump’s family and right-wing media completely ignores the story.
 
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