What About the EU's Disinfo "Task-Force", Elon Musk? Twitter is On It.
Elon Musk appears to have convinced the Twitter masses that he is their champion of free speech, with his recent appearance on the BBC providing yet another opportunity to burnish his bona fides in this regard.
“Who’s to say that something is misinformation?” Musk asked the BBC’s befuddled interviewer, “Who’s the arbiter of that?”
Good point and fair enough.
But the problem is that Twitter itself is part of a EU-Commission-chaired Permanent Task-Force on “disinformation” whose very purpose is to combat the latter and its close cousin “misinformation”. So, who’s to say? Well, apparently as far as Elon Musk is concerned, the European Union is that arbiter of that.
For the details and related matters, see my new article at The Daily Sceptic here.
China has had Chief Censors for 2000 years, usually they were leading public intellectuals with a sense of humor and a thick skin. Their modernized rules apply to media and anyone with more than five thousand social media followers:
No infringing, fake accounts, libel, disclosing trade secrets, or invading privacy;
No sending porn to attract users;
No torture, violence, killing of people or animals;
No selling lethal weapons, gambling, phishing, scamming, or spreading viruses;
No organizing crime, counterfeiting, false advertising or bullying;
No lotteries, rumor-mongering, promoting superstitions;
No content opposing the basic principles of the Constitution, national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity;
No divulging State secrets or endangering national security.
When people complain, the Censor explains. In 2018, he yanked a viral essay about the capital’s migrant workers, "Beijing Has 20 Million People Pretending to Live Here". When the indignant author complained the Censor replied, “Your essay polarizes relations between prosperous Beijingers and the immigrants who sweep your streets, inflaming contempt for these vulnerable people”. In 2019, netizens blamed him for not censoring enough when a female doctor committed suicide after being targeted by social media.
Nor is there any scarcity of information, Says Alice L. Miller: "Virtually every topic of conceivable interest to Chinese politics and policy students now has specialist periodicals devoted to it. This diversity includes publications on previously sensitive issues like foreign affairs and military issues. Since the early 1980s, previously-restricted specialist publications dealing with various aspects of international affairs–journals such as American Studies and Taiwan Studies–and new publications such as Chinese Diplomacy became openly available. In military affairs, the Academy of Military Science’s premier journal, Chinese Military Science, became available for home delivery to Western students of the PLA. In the 1990s, PRC media began routinely to carry opinion pieces by the growing community of foreign policy. National security specialists in China frequently offered competing–even clashing–perspectives on international issues, raising fundamental questions among Western analysts about what political authority to attach to them in Beijing’s policy process… The proliferation of websites hosted by news agencies such as Xinhua has given immediate access to streams of information and commentary far surpassing anything easily accessible by traditional means".
The acid test: Do we trust our privately censored media more than they trust their publicly censored media?
Sadly, no. Public censorship wins hands down. China's media are the most trusted by far, at 80%, closely followed by 71% Singapore. Americans trust in their media? 6%-19%.
The approach to misinformation is the same that is used toward famine or poverty. A paternalistic, patronizing, socialistic approach: schools, mostly run by government, fail to provide education and critical thinking so the government decides to play the role of arbiter and source of the truth. Sounds like Goebbels and Stalin are the inspiratore of this Pravda approach....