Disinformation

“ The origins of misinformation and disinformation are complicated and reflect the underlying purposes of their promulgators. Russian disinformation throughout the pandemic has been frequently alleged. When we speak of threats to the UK, we often talk of 'Russia and China' in the same breath. While each stands in opposition to Western liberal democratic values, the two present very different challenges and engage with the UK in very different ways. ”

“ China has been very keen to promote its role in health diplomacy, to show where it is helping other nations, to amplify, over exaggerate in some ways its work to counter the virus and to develop vaccines, and so on, but it has equally, at the same time, been putting out disinformation to try and sow seeds of doubt about the origins of the virus, to try and get its audiences in its own terms to believe that China was not at fault with this and to promulgate fake news and conspiracy theories. ”

“ That same survey in March, just three months later, found that 61 percent of people reported either already being vaccinated or wanting to receive a vaccine as soon as possible. This is an encouraging trend, but we still have more work to do.
Millions of people still have questions about the vaccine, and misinformation and disinformation continues to spread. That is why we are working hard to give people the facts about COVID-19 through a variety of channels, the most important of which is trusted messengers. ”

“ This learning module designed to be used by journalists, journalism trainers and educators (along with their students) provides historical context for the analysis of the 21st century ‘fake news’ crisis. Relevant case studies and a timeline are designed to better inform users about the causes and consequences of ‘information disorder’– from harassment of journalists by ‘troll armies’ to the manipulation of elections and diplomatic crises. ”

“ In place of a culture of conspiracy and misinformation, democracy offers freedom of speech, independent media, and the marketplace of ideas, which can expose and discredit falsehoods, prejudices, and dishonest propaganda. ”

“ I am inclined to think that this swamping of a large part of the world's press by calculated falsehood and partisan propaganda is a temporary phase in the development of the print nexus: nevertheless, it is a very great inconvenience and danger to the world. It stands very much in the way of that universal adult education which is our present concern. Reality is horribly distorted. Men cannot see the world clearly and they cannot, therefore, begin to think about it rightly. ”

“ She sat up very straight in my lap and sing-songed like a schoolgirl: "Where the objective of Cybernetic Democracy is justice impartially rendered, the objective of cybernetic journalism and of the World Press Association is truth impartially told. 'For you will be told the truth, and the truth will keep you secure.' Foof."
"Well, it's—it's true, dammit," I said. "You aren't, you of all people aren't, going to tell me that news isn't just as important as government! ”

“ Finally, the use of truth requires the canalization of propaganda; it is too dangerous to be handled by everyone.
The propagandists of our cause include everyone who speaks to the people, sells a bond, writes, broadcasts, publishes, by executive order or private will; they vary in skill and in detailed purpose; they blurt out prejudices and conceal information useful to the citizen. They have not, so far as any one has discovered, lied to the people of America, contenting themselves at first with concealing the extent, or belittling the significance, of our reverses ”

“ Libels and licentious discourses against the state, when they are frequent and open; and in like sort, false news often running up and down to the disadvantage of the state, and hastily embraced; are amongst the signs of troubles. ”

“ Pretending to be purveyors of unbiased accounts of current happenings, they are in reality merely propaganda organs, twisting, garbling and suppressing facts and information in the manner best calculated to further the interests of the employing class. ”

“ Whatever tends to vitiate our literary taste, our morals, our religious or political principles, may be fairly at the mercy of criticism. So, whatever tends to introduce false science, false history, indeed, falsehood in any shape, exposes itself to the censor's rod. ”

“ Put a case before them of supposed wrong, however preposterous and palpably false, and they will revel in it, print it with capital head-lines, and so capture the imagination of their sentimental, unthinking readers that these will no longer listen to the voice of reason or of truth. We are too proud—or perhaps not clever enough—to combat such barefaced propaganda; a strict censorship may be a crude weapon, but it is the only one at our command. ”

“ More subtle, and more dangerous, is the insidious propaganda everywhere disseminated to poison the public mind and produce a general spirit of suspicion and depression. The country is permeated with whispers. ”

“ There is an increasing number of inquiring minds who have come to look with distrust upon the statements of politicians, the opinions of the press, and that popular judgment which is based upon the misinformation furnished by these. ”

“ Desinformation, deception and errors —————————————————— Always use several sources of information. Some people write to lead you astray. The online world exposed some interesting incidents that came out of the former Soviet Union before the attempted coup in 1991. Desinformation hurts everybody and comes from all sides. Even professional news agencies, like Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, regularly stumble. Most news is written by journalists reporting what they have seen, read or heard. ”

“ Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. ”

“ Now, we who live here know how false these reports are; yet, it shows the nature of the agencies which are at work, and the means wicked men use to becloud the understanding and to stir up the anger of the powers that be—the Government and its agents—to take steps to crush, if possible, this people. ”

“ Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs. ”

“ If they shall find anything proven to our discredit, with a full knowledge of the facts and circumstances before our minds, then such are at liberty to make known to the public their finding. We challenge, and have challenged, the press and our enemies to come and secure the facts, and with the assistance of these facts, and the records of our office, prove anything to our discredit. ”

“ Into such politicians, orders and privileges transform patriots. They assail truth and knowledge, because truth and knowledge assail them. They stigmatize discussion, because it leads to discovery. They foster ignorance, because it is blind. ”

“ The collected news of any modern country contains more truth each day than any one man can could read in a lifetime. The reporters, editors, [Pg 117] writers, announcers who collect truth not only collect it; they select it. They have to. Why do they select it? That is the propaganda question. If they select it to "affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose," it is propaganda. If they report that a little girl fell out of bed and broke her neck—with the intent of frightening parents among their listeners into following the Safe Homes Week Campaign—that is propaganda. ”

“ Even the Daily News has been moved to raise a protest against the present state of affairs, and as recently as March 15th declared that the mind of authority "is being fed on selected facts that convey a wholly false impression of things." ”

“ The same consequences follow falsehood and deception, whether practised by individuals or public governors, and they will both find in the end that they have been guided by cunning, and not by wisdom: for although the ignorant part of mankind may, to serve the temporary purposes of a bad government, be acted upon by false alarms of imaginary dangers, yet even these in time will see through the stale tricks and artifices of those whose designs are to gull and impose upon them. ”

“ Where there are lies, they must be shown for what they are. Where there are errors, they must be refuted. It would be a major defeat if the enemies of democracy forced us to abandon our faith in the power of informed discussion, and so brought us down [p554] to their own level. ”

“ Those who are masters in the art, advertise the biggest lies in their business, enter false accounts in their political ledgers with their broadest-pointed pens, launch their newspapers daily laden with untruths, and send preachers abroad to disseminate falsehood like flies carrying pestilential germs. I am a humble follower of these great ones. When I was attached to the Congress party I never hesitated to dilute ten per cent of truth with ninety per cent of untruth. ”

“ Destroy radically belief in chiefs and leaders, parliaments and public unions, newspapers and workers’ federations, exploiters and exploited;
See to it, in a word, without relaxation, that those to whom our propaganda is addressed are turned into irreconcilable enemies, theoretical and practical, of all domination and exploitation of man by man or by his environment. ”

“ Mere knowledge of our public evils, economic and political, will henceforward spread; and though we must suffer the external consequences of so prolonged a regime of lying, the lies are now known to be lies. ”

“ By free argument and debate errors cease to be dangerous, if they are not exploded; but attempts to stifle even errors by power and punishment, provoke a stubborn adherence to them, and awake an eager spirit of propagation. If erroneous positions are published, meet them by argument, and refutation must ensue. If falsehood uses the press to promulge her doctrines, let truth oppose her with the same weapon. ”

“ Contemplate the routine of all the professions which we make and infringe in a single day, in the manifest violation of our inward thought and [225] belief; and we must admit that the world agrees to enact a general lie, alike deceiving and deceived, through terror of being the first to revolt against the thraldom of opinion. The very persons, too, who cherish the profoundest secret contempt for the judgment of the multitude, are generally the loudest and the first in decrying any departure from the standard of public opinion almost as an immorality. ”

“ In regard to propaganda, not only do its interested agents fail to exhibit that rare quality, love of truth, but all too often they devote themselves to a consideration of the relative expediency of different falsehoods. ”

“ Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose profession it is to report the news. ”

“ Were I to make public what I know—even if it were possible—I would be derided, held up to ridicule by press and public. For, despite our vaunted civilization, we are still slaves to superstition and ignorance, ever ready like those of old, to strike down one who dares utter the truth. ”

“ In this ignorance of things which have been disclosed in our publications, those who keep up those Institutions, come in collision with those who endeavour to destroy them without knowledge of their prophetical meaning and of the truth which is behind the vail of the outward form, and without preparation for a better state of human affairs. ”

“ We are more careful than any paper in this town about verifying every statement we make, before we make it. If we should publish a single statement about anyone that was false even in part we would be suppressed. The judges, the bosses, the owners of the big blood-sucking public service corporations, the whole ruling class, are eager to put us out of existence. Don't forget this fact when you hear the New Day called a lying, demagogical sheet. ”

“ Within the guild of the journalists, there is not a man who could not give you a hundred examples of deliberate suppression and deliberate falsehood by his employers both as regards news important to the nation and as regards great bodies of opinion. ”

“ It is possible, however, to minds careless of verity or those dominated by prejudice, to distort facts by exaggerated statement, to deduce erroneous conclusions from improper handling of data, to make wilful and far-fetched conjectures, and to suppress illuminative information in relating incidents, — information which would reveal the true inwardness of a situation otherwise left dark and sinister. ”

“ What unnatural and dangerous currents of opinion set in motion! what false alarms and malicious interpretations of words and facts! And in domestic affairs we are not much better informed than in foreign. As to commercial, industrial, and agricultural interests, political parties and social tendencies, or the personality of [42] public men, it is alike difficult to obtain a disinterested opinion. The more newspapers one reads, the less clearly he sees in these matters. ”

“ Save for rare moments of intense crisis, propaganda can expect to occupy only a small fraction of the audience's attention. In dictatorships, the range of propaganda can be widened by polluting all news, all theater presentations, all churches, etc., with the "Party line," but visitors to totalitarian capitals—of both the Fascist and Communist varieties—report that most of the common people have become calloused with apathy, over-all disbelief, or skepticism as a result of overexposure to official indoctrination. ”