![]() ![]() In the decade that saw Brexit and President Trump, “disinformation” came to signal a wider paranoia about how populism had harnessed social media.įor those appalled by these political developments, “disinformation ”, alongside the trend away from established news outlets, offered a reassuring means to explain away the populist revolt against globalised liberalism. In 2 019, the American news network, NPR, declared “disinformation” to be its word of the year and warned it was a “sign of things to come ”. The word’s recent history provides some clue as to how tackling disinformation came to be abused during the pandemic. There is (surely?) a difference between Brenda in Bolton tweeting conspiracies about vaccines and an Oxford epidemiologist criticising the government’s pandemic policy. How readily can disinformation (spread deliberately) be separated from “misinformation” (spread accidentally)? Then there’s the casual way the word is thrown around regardless of who is accused. There it was understood to be “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion ”. What exactly is “disinformation”? The word itself had smuggled its way through the 2 0th c entur y, with origins in 1920s Soviet propaganda. It’s a tale of incompetence and paranoia that saw the concept abused, stretched and confused by a vast network of fact-checkers, social media reporters and “content moderator s”, from Whitehall to the BBC via Silicon Valley. How we arrived at this farcical episode is the story of the rise and fall of the fight against “online disinformation ”. One unit, tasked with identifying harmful narratives, even flagged up Professor Carl Heneghan, a man who would later advise the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. Over the next two years, they and other government disinformation and media monitoring units would report on everyone from pub landlords and Conservative MPs to Peter Hitchen s’ s tweets. Within a few weeks he and his team, a motley crew of British army reservists, former translators and “cyber expert s”, were sitting in a safe house somewhere in Berkshire monitoring Twitter and other social media sites for any dodgy takes that might undermine the Government’s pandemic response. ![]() What might start trending from the trolls on Twitter and Facebook? The brigadier, who had cut his teeth fighting social media disinformation campaigns by hostile foreign actors, reassured the ministers and civil servants he was here to help. Nothing like lockdown had been tried before and Westminster, incurably online as usual, was paranoid. ![]() Polling suggested public support, but who knew what might happen in the weeks and months ahead? The country was in the early days of lockdown. In late March 2020 a brigadier from the British Army’s 77th Brigade arrived in Whitehall to find a Cabinet Office in disarray. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. ![]()
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