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James Kirchick: How Lying Became Disinformation
From the moment Donald Trump challenged the validity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Mr. Trump has lied more frequently and egregiously than perhaps any other major figure in American political history. From the relatively trivial lie that began his administration (that 1.5 million people attended his inauguration) to the extremely consequential falsehood that ended it (that the 2020 election was stolen), his presidency was in large part defined by mendacity.
The constancy and brazenness of Mr. Trump’s lies can blind us to the fact that his opponents lie, too. Though she did not descend to the level of Mr. Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris did not strictly adhere to the truth at the presidential debate this month. Mr. Trump, she asserted, had said that there were “fine people” among the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville seven years ago, an oft-repeated distortion of a statement Mr. Trump made at the time that nonetheless remains an article of faith among American liberals. She also deceptively claimed that Mr. Trump had said that there would be a “blood bath” if he was not elected when the original reference was to a loss of U.S. auto jobs.
Graver than Ms. Harris’s cynical mischaracterizations of Mr. Trump’s words was her assertion that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world — the first time this century.” This statement disregards the thousands of American troops deployed in the Middle East since the Oct. 7 attacks, not to mention the service members killed in Jordan in January’s drone attack. Despite these false statements, however, it was only Mr. Trump whom ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis tried to correct.
This highly selective fact-checking is indicative of the double standard that many in the media follow when dealing with Mr. Trump, a double standard usually justified by the supposedly awesome threat he poses to the country. Rather than respond to him as the egomaniacal mountebank he is, many of his opponents see in him an incipient dictator hellbent on destroying the 250-year-old American experiment in constitutional democracy. And because he presents such an extraordinary threat, this thinking goes, only extraordinary measures will suffice in stopping him.
Prominent among these measures is the campaign to suppress misinformation (false information whose purveyor believes it to be true) and disinformation (false information whose purveyor knows it to be false) — terms once used primarily to describe Russian influence operations against the West. The recent federal indictment of two Russians accused of funneling money to right-wing American social media influencers on behalf of the Kremlin-backed RT propaganda network is an example of this phenomenon, which poses a genuine threat to democratic societies around the world.
The conventional perception of misinformation and disinformation, however, began to change during the 2016 presidential campaign, when an analytical framework for understanding the malign activities of hostile foreign powers was appropriated by American political operatives to use against their domestic opponents. Much of what Mr. Trump and his supporters said was classified as disinformation, and tens of millions of Americans came to believe a baroque narrative positing that Mr. Trump had colluded with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to steal the 2016 election (itself, ironically, a form of disinformation promulgated by Mr. Trump’s opponents).
Today “disinformation” and “misinformation” are often invoked by the left in the same way “fake news” is by the right: as derogatory terms for arguments or evidence unhelpful to one’s political tribe. Sometimes, the use of these terms is banal. Firing back against allegations that President Biden was absent from his duties while vacationing last month, a White House spokeswoman indignantly said: “President Biden is on the job wherever he goes. Anyone claiming anything otherwise is either misinformed or engaged in misinformation.”
In other cases, the terms are used to delegitimize truthful information that the public has a right to know. The week before Mr. Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, dismissed videos showing his very obvious decline as “disinformation” and “cheap fakes.” Nine days later, it was her disinformation that became plain for all to see.
In a short period, the popular conception of disinformation transmogrified from something produced by governments to something that governments need to suppress. In 2022, Tim Walz, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, asserted, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy.” Last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was even more explicit, telling Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that Americans who share, knowingly or not, foreign propaganda should face criminal or civil charges. That a potential vice president and a former cabinet official would be so misinformed about the First Amendment is disturbing; that they believe the government has the right to prosecute American citizens for constitutionally protected speech, even more so.
Fortunately for Mr. Walz, the government often doesn’t need to use its formal powers to try to criminalize speech; pressure will do. Weeks before the 2020 election, after The New York Post revealed incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, 51 former intelligence officials — some of whom had contracts with the C.I.A. — released an open letter alleging that the messages had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Though the F.B.I. knew the story was not Russian disinformation, it withheld this knowledge from Facebook and Twitter, both of which took prompt measures to prevent users of their platforms from sharing the Post article, with Twitter going so far as to suspend The Post’s account. (In 2022, The Washington Post published an investigation authenticating thousands of the emails, and the Justice Department has tacitly confirmed that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden.)
Last month, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, told the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire,” and that he regretted not being more outspoken about this coercion at the time.
In some cases, government pressure isn’t even necessary to chill speech. Two days after the events of Jan. 6, Twitter banned Mr. Trump’s account on the specious grounds that his continued presence on the platform posed a “risk of further incitement of violence.” Twitter executives felt no such compunction about the account of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; Jack Dorsey, the platform’s chief executive at the time, characterized Ayatollah Khamenei’s frequent calls for violence against Israel as mere “saber rattling.”
Nor did those executives banish accounts belonging to the sanguinary leaders of Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, all of whom restrict access to Twitter for their citizens. (The ban on Mr. Trump’s account was overturned 22 months later, after Elon Musk bought the platform.) Last year, when CNN hosted a town hall with Mr. Trump, a chorus of journalists denounced the move, with one of the network’s stars, Christiane Amanpour, arguing against live interviews with the once and possibly future president on the grounds that they don’t allow the media “to edit for filibuster and a stream of disinformation.”
A common justification one hears for censoring disinformation is that the internet has made it so much easier to disseminate falsehoods and inflammatory opinions. While that’s certainly true, the internet has also provided a plethora of opportunities for new voices to challenge traditional institutions of authority — whether governments, public health bureaucracies or the mainstream media. Today’s elite obsession with disinformation can largely be interpreted as a panic over this challenge.
For a taste of where the war against disinformation can lead, consider Wales, where the government has pledged to put forward a bill that would prohibit politicians from lying. The jokes — “What do you call a politician who can’t lie? A mute” — write themselves. Indeed, the law sounds suspiciously like the plot of an actual Ricky Gervais movie. But its backers are deadly serious. It’s naïve “to think that democratic traditions are sacred,” one said, adding that “norm spoiling in any form” mustn’t be allowed. Britain’s home secretary is taking things a step further, vowing to “crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence.”
The conflation of “beliefs” and “violence” is a menacing sleight of hand, the predicate to a regime of prior restraint and criminal prosecution of those who espouse whatever the government of the day considers harmful and hateful ideas. Lying is an ineradicable feature of humanity — politics particularly — and attempts to eliminate it by fiat will inevitably result in a smothering of free expression. No single person, party or government authority has a monopoly on truth.
In their zeal to cleanse America of the falsehoods propagated by Mr. Trump and his supporters, his critics should take heed of the fact that those who righteously denounce the disinformation of others are just as capable of peddling disinformation of their own.
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