In the aftermath of the Covid lockdowns, during Bidenism’s brief golden era, much hay was made, in the sphere of “dissident” publications and podcasts, of the efforts by the US government and adjacent entities to fight against what they labelled “misinformation, disinformation and malinformation”. It was pointed out that much that was being attacked under these headings was in fact true, or at least probable: notably the Covid lab leak hypothesis, and various statements about the limits and dangers of the Covid vaccine. It was also noted that the entities hunting the bad information were generally either left-wing political parties or their acolytes, and were accordingly prone to equate right-wing political positions with falsehoods. Lastly, particularly in the US, it was maintained that the practice of government pressuring publishers and platforms to suppress certain statements amounted to illegal censorship.
All of these claims were true, as far as they went. Moreover, because the anti-disinformation actors were Democrat-aligned, the takeover of the US government by Republicans has led to a extensive suppression of the suppressors, most notably in the form of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. This allows us to take stock of what an information sphere looks like when it is extensively liberated from the efforts of government and other monitors to control the spread of alleged falsehoods.
The picture is not pretty—these weeks’ most blatant example will suffice. One need only take one or two steps away from the stuffiest outlets of old media to be assured that the US war on Iran is intimately connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein. The more restrained explanations of this connection involve vague intimations about the “Epstein class” and its members’ need to create a “distraction”. Those who want more precision can then find lurid tales of blackmail and child sacrifice.
We can call this disinformation or lies or madness. What we cannot call it is a reasoned and serious contribution to political debate, that may serve some good end. Nor can we shrug it off as the ramblings of isolated oddballs. In the algorithmic age, the path from isolated oddball to global influencer is an eight-lane highway with no speed limit.
In short, an uncontrolled internet really is awash with misinformation produced by idiots and bad actors, and that misinformation really does gain traction and fill citizens with panicked delusions. That the preceding sentence could also have been applied to the officially backed and expert-approved information produced in the Covid years does not negate its validity when applied to the current bilge rising from the sewers. Worse still, the categories are not mutually exclusive: some of the sewage of the “free” internet is being scooped up and served out by the officials and experts who once sought to control the flow.
We do not trust Western governments to tell us what is true and false, and we are right to deny them that trust. But the problem they were trying to solve was not merely that people were believing the wrong truths, but also that the internet, by its very nature as gamified free-for-all, is terrible at giving truth the upper hand, and terrifyingly effective at spreading gripping lies. “Viral” is indicative: in common parlance, a “virus” is not just a quick-spreading entity; it is a quick-spreading disease.
The choice we face is thus between rule by corrupt commissars, or living in a Wild West with no Gary Cooper coming to drive the varmints out of town. This is merely a choice of poisons, and sanity will be the province of those who can seek prudently for truth somewhere beyond the realm of information.
