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If you care about book challenges and censorship, one Supreme Court case you should familiarize yourself with which hasnt been cited nearly during this flux of challenges is Board of Education, Island Trees School District vs. Pico (Island Trees). This landmark 1982 case was the first to address the removal of books from school libraries across the country. Though it was a 5-4 split within the court, the ruling in favor of Pico meant that no school board could remove books from a library once itd been added, simply because they disagreed with the content within it.

Justice Brennan, in announcing the judgement which did not have a majority opinion to it, stated:

The Island Trees case came from an incident in the school district located in Levittown, New York, in 1975. A group which called themselves Parents of New York United submitted a list of 11 books they considered inappropriate to the school board, which then removed the books from the library and proceeded to send them through the review committee. Even though the committee said five of nine titles should be returned to shelves, the school board overruled the decision, returning only two (the other two books in question were a book in the junior high school that contained the satirical essay A Modest Proposal, and a book in the 12th grade curriculum, and both were removed).

The school board made this decision because they were anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic, and just plain filthy, according to the case syllabus.

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High school senior Steven Pico, in the case, helped bring the voices of four fellow high school students and one junior high school student into the story. All of them pushed back against the boards decision. They believed thanks, in part, to the precedent set with the Tinker vs. Des Moines case that their First Amendment rights were being violated.

One possible reason why this case hasnt been cited is that it wasnt legally binding because there wasnt a majority opinion. But because it also hasnt been challenged, it stands as a powerful reminder of a few things: this isnt and never has been the first time books in school libraries have been challenged, let alone that books by authors of color have been at the center of the discussion (the 11 titles included books by Piri Thomas, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Childress, and Eldridge Cleaver); its not the first time that students have been forced to speak up for their First Amendment Rights; its noteworthy that the ruling stated this means books cannot be removed from school libraries because of disagreement with what they present (i.e., stories of those from the global majority and queer stories); that school boards have exerted more power than granted to them; and more.

When and if we begin to see lawsuits arising from todays censorship landscape, watch for Island Trees to be cited and revisited. The Supreme Court isnt stacked in favor of intellectual freedom right now, given the appointments made by the treasonous former administration, but prior rulings give weight to the reality that book censorship denies rights granted to young people in the First Amendment.

Onto this weeks book censorship news, with a toolkit for how to fight book bans and challenges, as well as how to spot fake news sites many of which are fueling these censorship attempts. Note: This will be the final roundup of 2021. Roundups will continue beginning the first full week of 2022.

Heres this weeks intellectual freedom hero:

And a couple more must-reads from authors experiencing challenges or outright censorship: author Jo Knowles talks about two of her queer-positive books being challenged in Texas and Derf Backderf talks about why his graphic memoir My Friend Dahmer has been banned.

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Can The 1982 Island Trees Case Impact Todays Book Censorship? This Weeks Book Censorship News... - Book Riot

Author and journalist Jemimah Steinfeld said in an interview with the Stockholm Center for Freedom that the jailing of journalists in Turkey is worrying and that Index on Censorship has been closely following the country for 10 years and will continue to do so in the future. What is happening in Turkey has obviously been very upsetting. In countries like Turkey there is, of course, a lack of plurality of the press, and the circumstances are very challenging. We will continue to monitor Turkey and highlight problems associated with press freedom in the future, she said.

As part of SCFs interview series Freedom Talks, our research director Dr. Merve R. Kaykc talked to Jemimah Steinfeld about freedom of press and the suppression of journalists in Turkey.

Steinfeld is the head of content at Index on Censorship, a nonprofit that campaigns for freedom expression worldwide and publish work by censored writers and artists. She has lived and worked in both Shanghai and Beijing, where she has written on a wide range of topics, with a particular focus on youth culture, gender and censorship. She is the author of Little Emperors and Material Girls: Sex and Youth in Modern China, which was described by Financial Times as meticulously researched and highly readable. Steinfeld has freelanced for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Vice, CNN, Time Out and the Huffington Post. She has a degree in history from Bristol University and went on to earn an MA in Chinese studies at SOAS University of London.

You work at Index on Censorship. How are organizations like yours important in monitoring media freedom and advocating for improvement?

The first issue of our magazine came out in 1972. The organization was founded in 1971, and right from the start it has been about addressing censorship in all forms, while some of the early foundations of Index and the idea behind Index was to smuggle writings from and work with writers from Iron Curtain countries. We look at censorship in its entirety. Censorship is not a right problem or a left problem. We look at it globally and from the top down, for instance, an autocrat imprisoning a writer. But also, from the bottom up, for instance, weve had cases with LGBT people from China who dont feel like they can come out to their parents because there is too much pressure on them to have kids. Freedom of speech is probably the most important human right because without free speech you cannot talk about other human rights. Media freedom really sits at the center of free speech because journalists really are the people who hold power to account in the most visible, open way they are the ones who investigate whats going on. Journalists are so crucial to free speech that they are quite often the first people to be punished when there is a dictatorship. They are the first people to be arrested and to be told that their words need to be changed. Therefore, media freedom fits in the broader structures of power and coercion.

We have a magazine, where in each issue we work with up to 40 journalists and we pay everyone because we see that as really, really important to media freedom. I mean, one of the things thats happened in the last few decades, especially with the increasing use of the Internet, is that journalists often dont get paid for their work. And that in and of itself is a way of silencing journalists and making it incredibly hard to be a journalist. Paying journalists is really key to treating them with respect.

Do you think media freedom is at the point it should be in liberal countries, or are there still steps that can be taken for improvement?

It would really depend on the different countries. Even in liberal countries there are laws that can be very punishing to journalists. For instance, at the moment we are leading an initiative called SLAPP, which is short for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

One of the most important cases is that of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed on October 17, 2017. She got into her car outside her home, and it exploded. Killing her basically silenced her because she was a very daring, courageous and brilliant journalist who had been exposing a lot of corruption. Around the time she died there were 40 lawsuits against her.

Powerful individuals and organizations resort to these lawsuits with the aim of physically and financially exhausting journalists even if there isnt really a case against them. They want to intimidate journalists into silence, and other journalists who witness such lawsuits may self-censor to avoid them. Such lawsuits are currently perfectly legal in many countries.

Of course, the situation is still better than in places like China. Ive worked in a newsroom in China that was censored, and I have worked in newsrooms in the UK. I have seen what happens, and it is not the same thing. However, that does not mean we are at a perfect place in the UK.

A final thing is lots of journalists and particularly female journalists in places like the UK and the US are subjected to online harassment. Such harassment is vicious, and its particularly vicious to women. Journalism is a more high-profile profession, and lots of journalists are putting their names and faces out there in the public.

They are uncovering things that people dont always want to read and hear. Therefore, the online world has made it easier for journalists to be harassed. I have heard of journalists in the UK who have quit their jobs because of this. I think the harassment women face is quite often more problematic than what men face because it can be particularly vicious for the women.

If a journalist is working on exposing corruption and taking a very critical lens to aspects of society, I would not say this is an easy job even in places like the UK. However, it is still a lot easier than in authoritarian countries.

A worrying trend especially in Turkey is broadcasting bans, particularly when it comes to sensitive topics like femicide or child abuse. Almost every time there is an incident concerning women or children, the media is not allowed to broadcast details of the news. Why is it that authorities issue such bans? Doesnt the public have a right to know, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable members of society?

They [the authorities] often make out that theres some moral reason behind broadcasting bans, but its often quite convenient for them. They dont want such news to be shown because maybe it reflects badly on the government in some way, or because theyre trying to control, and police, society.

Index on Censorship condones broadcast bans. We dont think that just anything should be broadcast at any time. I wouldnt want my three-year-old son to be watching certain things. So Im absolutely fine for certain things to come on at an hour when kids will probably be in bed so that theyre not exposed.

But I think that broadcasting bans need to go through a rigorous, open, transparent decision-making process. There should be external regulators as part of the decision-making process as well. One of the biggest problems with many countries where there are broadcast bans is that the broadcasters are often tied to the state. So the decisions are directly linked to the government.

Essentially, if the decision is made in a transparent way from an external regulator that has no vested political interest, then that is less problematic than the reverse, which is what quite often happens with these bans.

Turkey is currently one of the worlds biggest jailers of professional journalists and is ranked 153rd among 180 countries in terms of press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders. Would you like to reflect on the current state of journalism in Turkey?

Turkey has been one of our focus countries for several years at Index on Censorship. By several years, I mean at least 10 years. We have a wonderful contributing editor to the magazine called Kaya Gen, who writes in every issue. What is happening in Turkey has obviously been very upsetting.

As you rightly point out Turkey is one of the main jailers of journalists. Its not the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. Such places usually include Mexico, for instance, where a journalist is more likely to get killed.

But in countries like Turkey there is of course a lack of plurality of the press, and the circumstances are very challenging. We will continue to monitor Turkey and highlight problems associated with press freedom in the future.

Many journalists critical of the Turkish government and its regime are being imprisoned for terrorism. When we look at the accusations, they usually include aspects of their journalistic work. What can the international community, civil society and journalists outside of Turkey do to protect their colleagues and make their plight heard?

People can sign petitions and raise their voices. We also publish work from Turkish journalists on our website. We try to offer them outlets for their stories, because sometimes writing for non-Turkish outlets may be easier and less dangerous. We also want to make sure they can still find work through these outlets and their stories are heard.

One of the worrying things in such countries where media freedom is in peril is that people stop hearing about the countries and the terrible things that are going on. As people hear less about it, the situation gets worse, and we see a vicious cycle.

How important are social media platforms and online news sitesin ensuring that the public stays informed? Do Twitter, Facebook and other platforms really have a positive impact on peoples access to news and also their access a variety of coverage of the news?

I think social media is one hundred percent important in ensuring the public stays informed. Especially with Twitter, we cannot underestimate its news sourcing. Also, young people are increasingly using social media.

Twitter and Facebook have been instrumental in changing the proliferation and the access to news. And that puts them in such a difficult place because they are both serving the public and acting as a publishing platform. So they have to straddle being both private and public. While this is quite troublesome, its also exciting as we try and figure out what role they have and how we should work with them to ensure that all the brilliant stuff can stay and be celebrated, whereas the more challenging aspects are improved.

How has feminism reshaped media, or has it? Is feminist journalism possible and what would it look like?

Thanks to the Me Too movement there has been quite an awakening. Also, 40 to 50 years ago there werent many female journalists in the UK. The entire feminist awakening has helped women get into journalism. But there are still important problems. For instance, some aspects of journalism, such as political and foreign correspondence is very punishing on family life. This creates quite a pressure on female journalists because unfortunately we do not live in an equal world, and women still do more of the housework. This means that they might not always be in a position to take those jobs.

We work with lots of countries where its still very hard to work in media as a woman. We are doing quite a lot on Afghanistan at the moment. Since the Taliban takeover in August, the number of women in the workforce has dwindled. Change is not always linear. So although Me Too and feminism have improved some conditions for women, there is still a lot of work to do.

Finally, it is important that we are holding conversations about [online] harassment against female journalists and other forms of pressure.

In a previous article you say that we need to increase awareness around the world about the current state of press freedom during the coronavirus crisis, as well as to raise awareness more broadly about the importance of media freedom and the challenges that journalists face.But how can we do this? How can we mobilize to protect freedom of the media, especially in contexts where violence against journalists is commonplace and journalists face serious risks of being prosecuted for their journalistic activities?

Well, thats the million-dollar question, isnt it? As I said earlier journalists are often first in the firing line. This is usually because someone very powerful, high up, is worried what they will expose, such as corruption and inconsistencies. What happened, especially at the beginning of COVID-19, was that people were being told things they didnt want to hear.

As a result, it was very easy to target the media. The government obviously doesnt want journalists in the room because if they are mishandling the situation, then journalists can expose them. There were plenty of countries that were claiming they had no COVID-19 cases. There were journalists who proved this to be wrong. Of course, governments were furious about this. However, ordinary people, too, blamed the media and accused them of blowing the issue out of proportion. They said that the media was stirring this up and it was the media to blame for the crises.

I think as a solution one of the main things to do is to educate people in media literacy. Ideally, it should be something thats taught at a young age in school. I hate it when people use the term, the media is one monolithic group, because there is a huge difference between all the different newspapers and magazines that are out there. And they have very different editorial processes, although the majority of them are brilliant. So even if you just assume all media is great, people need to see the rich diversity within the media. Some media has a less rigorous editorial process than others. There is a tendency that if there is one bad news story amongst millions, then all the media gets dragged down by that one news story.

And this is again where it comes back to media literacy. If people were trained even for a short period to know what to trust or not trust and to know what to be looking for in a news source, that would really be helpful.

We should also keep praising media organizations and stressing the importance of media freedom. We clapped for healthcare workers during the pandemic. In a similar way we could clap for journalists who are out there day in and day out reporting stories and putting themselves on the line. I think people dont necessarily see this. They dont associate what theyre reading with these challenging situations.

The Nobel Peace Prize this year went to journalists, which shows that what journalists are doing is amazing.

How can ordinary people support organizations like Index on Censorship?

People can support organizations like ours in two main ways. They can donate to our organization. We are a not-for-profit and nongovernmental organization, and we therefore rely on charitable donations, grants and the goodwill of people.

So we encourage people to give as little or as much as they can. These donations go to keeping Index in business.

The other way is to subscribe to our magazine, and you will be supporting the magazine and also getting a really good read. Apart from its importance in human rights advocacy, the magazine also includes some of the worlds best writers, such as Margaret Atwood. There are other less famous but equally good writers who also contribute to the magazine.

Finally, people can support our causes by following us on Twitter or Facebook, and sharing our content. People can sign our petitions when we mention a petition.

Do you think press freedom can rebound after an authoritarian rule is over?

I said earlier that change is not always linear so it can go backwards but it can also go forward. One of the ironies of Index on Censorship is that were all a generally cheerful bunch. We, work with these really depressing stories, but we work with the most brilliant people all around the world in really hard situations.

But whilst there are brilliant people, we can always dream there will be progress. Weve seen plenty of places that have come out of authoritarianism to have more freedoms. For instance, ever since Donald Trump left office, have we heard a story about a journalist being kicked out of the press room?

This is not to say that everything is perfect. There were problems in the US with press freedoms prior to Donald Trump. And there are problems still today. But we can go into dark times and can come out. So we shouldnt give up hope.

Hope is what moves us forward, its the human condition.

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[Interview] Index on Censorship will continue to monitor government suppression of the media in Turkey: Jemimah Steinfeld - Stockholm Center for...

LinkedIn has admitted it can make mistakes after becoming embroiled in censorship accusations. This week the accounts of three prominent Scottish hospitality leaders were removed following viral posts calling out the Scottish government's Covid-19 policies.

In a statement to The Drum about the individual cases, a LinkedIn spokesperson said: "We know we wont always get it right and when we do make a mistake, well work directly with the member to correct it.

The LinkedIn accounts for the Scottish Hospitality Group (SHG), founder of The Scottish Gin Society Steven White and Bucks Bar Group owner Michael Bergson have been suspended with limited communication from the platform.

LinkedIn's statement added: We are focused on keeping LinkedIn a safe, trusted, and professional platform. We have clear terms of service and Professional Community Policies that outline what we expect from all our members, including that member profiles must represent a real name and identity."

On Tuesday (December 14) Stephen Montgomery, leader of the SHG, was unable to access the SHG LinkedIn account and asked to verify his identity by submitting a passport photo. The SHG account was also not searchable for the time Montgomery was blocked from the account. At the same time, Twitter took down Montgomerys personal account which was later restored.

Montgomery told The Drum the SHG account had ramped up its communications on both Twitter and LinkedIn over the weekend to campaign against government guidance change on hospitality.

When youve got three big voices in hospitality saying the exact same thing it begs the question why certain social media platforms are taking down our posts and locking down our accounts, Montgomery said. Nothing Ive posted is derogatory or defamatory, its all issues relevant to the pandemic to give people information.

White, a less vocal member of the Scottish hospitality community, claimed his most recent posts had been taken down on Wednesday (December 15) and his account deactivated. He raised a complaint to the platform but was told there was nothing wrong with the account, the posts and account have since been restored.

The missing entries followed Whites LinkedIn post on Friday (December 10) calling out the Scottish government's guidance to cancel Christmas parties. By Sunday the post had been viewed 130,000 times and White was featured on the front page of Scotland on Sunday.

I cant find another explanation for it other than someone making some serious complaints to LinkedIn about our activity, White said. I never use foul language or make accusations or do anything that would get me in trouble Im acutely aware of that stuff.

He added: Yes Im criticizing the Scottish government but Im very measured.

The third hospitality leader, Bergson, has had his account taken down for up to 14 days while LinkedIn reviews his appeal. After two days of his account being deactivated LinkedIn sent an email which said: Your account was restricted due to multiple violations of Linkedlns User Agreement and Professional Community Policies against sharing context that contains misleading or inaccurate information.

The posts in question were as follows:

Bergson admitted he had been vocal about the Scottish government's Covid policies on LinkedIn but said in the days preceding the account deactivation his posts were becoming more viral. He says the trio didnt have any article simultaneously shared, we dont collaborate in what we are saying.

Reported LinkedIn content is reviewed by its Professional Community Policies based on four pillars: Be Safe which includes sharing harmful material or inciting hate; Be Trustworthy which includes sharing misleading information and creating fake accounts; Be Professional includes sharing explicit or inflammatory content and Respect Others Rights which covers intellectual property rights and privacy laws.

In October Microsoft closed LinkedIn in China after it was called out for blocking access to US journalists for its China-based users.

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LinkedIn hit with censorship accusations for removing critics of government Covid policies - The Drum

The corruption-plagued Cyprus government is tearing up textbook pages and seeking to censor artist Giorgos Gavriel.

Dr. Miranda Christou is a Senior Fellow at CARR and Associate Professor in Sociology of Education at the University of Cyprus.

The far-right party of ELAM is growing in Cyprus, the government is mired in corruption scandals and the Ministry of Education is tearing up textbook pages because they mention Atatrk. The artist and teacher, Giorgos Gavriel, has been capturing the spirit of the times in his provocative art, only to face disciplinary action for offending national figures. His artwork is featured in this article

The National Popular Front in Cyprus (Ethniko Laiko Metopo) ELAM doubled its representation in the Cyprus Parliamentary elections in May 2021, with a share of 6,78% (4 MPs). ELAM, an offshoot of Golden Dawn in Greece, is an ultra-nationalist, nativist and anti-immigrant party that maintains a hardline opposition to the bizonal, bicommunal federation as a solution to the division of Cyprus despite this being the official, established framework since the 1970s. More importantly, it has kept itself under the radar by avoiding the brazen neo-Nazi symbolism and violent outbursts of Golden Dawn, focusing instead on building an image of the good kids as the Cyprus Archbishop once called them.

This serious Golden Dawn of Cyprus is now heading an ad hoc parliamentary group on the demographic problem after tipping the scale to help the centre-right party of Democratic Rally (DISY), currently in power, win leadership in the Parliament. This move reflects a mainstreaming of ELAMs alarmist rhetoric on the arrival of refugees and asylum seekers whom they refer to as illegal migrants.

In their Fascism is website article, ELAM claims that: Fascism is when your country is in danger because of low fertility rates, when citizens are deprived of basic things but you continue to accept illegal immigrants, and, on top of that, to give them money when you have clearly exhausted the limits of your hospitality.

This twisting and upending of words by ELAM pushes further to the right the boundaries of public discourse on human suffering in a country that has constructed its ethnic identity around the pain and trauma of 1974 refugees. Recently, the Minister of Interior rushed to defend the government amidst reports that the authorities have been illegally pushing boats of asylum seekers back to the Lebanon shores or callously endangering children and minors by keeping them waiting at sea, under the harsh Cyprus sun. This same Minister had dabbled in apartheid politics and the Great Replacement language when he issued a decree that asylum seekers were not allowed to settle in a village area because their arrival caused social problems and demographic change.

Moments like these require unrelenting truthtelling. We take pride in being reader-funded. If you like our work, support our journalism.

The hypocrisy of those who proclaim faith in Christian values but maintain racist posturesELAMs slogan is country, religion, familyis called out by one of Giorgos Gavriels paintings which shows Christ in a refugee holding facility. Much of his work is provocative: a painting of Christ naked or a dog urinating on the Archbishop.

In September 2021, the Ministry of Education and Culture announced that Gavriel had to appear before the Educational Service Committee to apologize for an array of disciplinary charges, including insult to civil-religious institutions, religious symbols and historical-national figures of Cyprus. Following intense public outcry, the Presidents cabinet called off the investigation. The government was already exposed since the issue went all the way to the European Parliament and the Chair of the Committee on Culture and Education had raised concerns about violations of Gavriels freedom of expression.

Around the same time, officials at the Ministry of Education spotted a blurb in the English Language Textbooks (Oxford University Press) for Lyceum which read Turkeys greatest hero, and included a photo of Atatrk. This apparently rattled some high-ranking officials who issued a memo to schools to tear off that particular page. As the Ministry scrambled to save face, they decided to withdraw the book and order an investigation into decision-making procedures. Throughout all of these, ELAM insisted on censuring Gavriel and ridiculed those who condemned tearing off the pages of the book.

In Al-Jazeeras scathing video The Cyprus Papers, the (now former) head of the Cyprus Parliament was secretly recorded raising his wine glass and winking to seal the deal as a prominent lawyer explains in another scene: This is Cyprus! The context was the orchestration of a fake backroom deal where undercover journalists investigated whether Cypriot lawyers and officials would break the law in order to provide a passport to a shady billionaire character through the so-called Cyprus Investment Program. The answer was: absolutely.

After Al-Jazeera dropped the video, Anastasiades government scuttled to cancel the program and run an investigation. While the President distanced himself from the fiasco, his Golden Passports connections through the family law firm have been called out by anti-corruption groups.

But Anastasiades remains fully exposed: a European Parliament draft resolution on the Pandora Papers deplored his specific naming in the papers which provide financial documents linking political leaders to fishy transactions. The depth of the corruption problem in Cyprus has been duly recorded in Makarios Drousiotis book The Gang. An investigative journalist, Drousiotis had a front seat at the 2013 Eurogroup deals and argues that Anastasiades prioritized the interests of his Russian oligarch clients instead of the well-being of his own people.

Drousiotis was scheduled to appear on a national TV program after the Pandora Papers revelations strengthened his argument in The Gang which is still curiously ignored by the local mediahis appearance was canceled at the last minute due to scheduling conflicts.

Interestingly, in the summer of 2020, a few months before publication of The Gang, Drousiotis reported that he had been the victim of years-long surveillance into his documents and home security system. Drousiotis upcoming book Crime in Crans-Montana seals the deal: it argues that Anastasiades tanked the talks and that he was the one who proposed the two-state solution; an anathema to Greek Cypriots.

These revelations are not your average type of clientelism that has been battering Cypriot life and politics for centuries. They put Cyprus squarely on the level of a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government the way Sarah Kendzior describes USA politics in Hiding in Plain Sight. Notably, ELAM voted with Anastasiades party against registering the issue of Pandora Papers for Parliamentary discussion.

There have been glimpses of hope: Os Dame, (meaning enough!) a loosely connected network of progressive youth groups, organized rallies condemning government corruption and racist politics. In February 2021, the police used a water cannon to disperse their peaceful protest causing severe injuries and the partial blindness of a singer. Gavriel captured the scene: the Minister of Justice and Public Order (until recently, a close friend of Anastasiades daughters) standing over the singers wounded body.

All of these find ELAM in prime position: their rhetoric infiltrates the highest levels of government while they maintain their opposition to Anastasiades handling of the Cyprus problem. In the meantime, they can continue feeding off of the nihilism and disillusionment that has been eroding Greek Cypriot society that comes with the realization that the national interest is secondary to some politicians own self-interest.

This article is brought to you by the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). Through their research, CARR intends to lead discussions on the development of radical right extremism around the world. Rantt has been partnered with CARR for 3 years. Weve published over 150 articles from CARRs network of PhDs, historians, professors, and experts analyzing extremism and combating disinformation.

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The Rise Of Far-Right Educational Censorship And Corruption In Cyprus - Rantt Media

There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.

The Aspen Institutes Commission on Information Disorder recently released a report that blamed misinformation for a range of social problems: Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.

With $65 million in backing from investors such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the newly organized Project for Good Information also vows to fight fake news wherever it roams. As Recode reported, the groups marketing materials claim, Traditional media is failing. Disinformation is flourishing. Its time for a new kind of media. The project is run by Democratic operative Tara Hoffman, whose company ACRONYM created the app that spectacularly bungled the Iowa Democratic caucus vote in 2020.

And as Ben Smith reported in the New York Times, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has been hosting a series of meetings with major media executives to help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his platforms role in spreading misinformation.

The origin of this new wave of portentous declarations and hand-wringing can be found in the Trump years. In an insightful piece in Harpers, Joseph Bernstein labels this effort Big Disinfo.

Its a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research, he writes. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of toxicity on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it.

As Bernstein argues, As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard.

Big Disinfo has gained in popularity in mainstream media outlets in part because it claims to solve the problem of bad information while placing blame for it on anyone other than mainstream media. In fact, those diagnosing our illness and prescribing the cure are themselves purveyors of the infodemic they claim is upon us.

The Aspen Institutes commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the commissions advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his sites users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Bidens laptop just before the 2020 election.

Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama.

The commissions co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes. She admitted in her recently published memoir that she had removed and edited statements made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes protesting the playing of the national anthem. Ginsburgs criticism of the practice might have angered her fellow liberals, Couric feared.

Commissioner Rashad Robinson, head of the activist group Color of Change, also helped spread misinformation by promoting the hate-crime hoax of actor Jussie Smollett even after it was clear Smollett, who last week was convicted on criminal charges related to the staging of the attack, was lying. And then there is commission member Prince Harry, an expat British ex-royal with few qualifications but a lifetime of evidence of his own questionable judgment (such as dressing up as a Nazi and, more recently, whining to Oprah about the family that funds his lavish lifestyle).

Earlier this year, Harry declared the First Amendment bonkers.

The Aspen Commissions report says there is no such thing as an arbiter of truth, and yet our media gatekeepers have claimed that mantle for themselves with decidedly mixed results for some time.

Consider the fact that Russiagate, a yearslong effort to prove that Donald Trump was being blackmailed and controlled, proved untrue yet was given constant media attention, while the story of Hunter Bidens laptop and its contents, which proved true, was actively suppressed with the explicit purpose of protecting Joe Bidens chances of becoming president. We live in a surreal information moment when the lie was given ample airtime and featured prominently in print, while the truth was smothered and labeled disinformation.

And yet our self-appointed misinformation warriors have proven unwilling to engage in self-reflection. Harvards Shorenstein Center used the New York Posts story on Hunter Bidens laptop computer as the basis for one of its case studies during its recent misinformation sessions.

The lesson that the centers leaders drew, however, was not the one anyone who values the truth should follow. According to the Times, the Shorenstein Center claimed that the Hunter Biden story offered an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns. In other words, the suppression of information deemed by experts to be misinformation was precisely the kind of Good Information objective we should be pursuing. The research director of the center, Joan Donovan, told the Times that the Hunter Biden case study was designed to cause conversation its not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.

But what is there to resolve about the fact that the Fourth Estate eagerly embraced the role of chief information censor on behalf of a Democratic candidate for president?

Misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. Propaganda, political dirty tricks, and deliberate lies have been with us a while and have often been a point of pride for their practitioners. It was not that long ago that Ben Rhodes, then a top aide to President Barack Obama, boasted about creating an echo chamber in the media to spread falsehoods about the details of Obamas Iran nuclear deal.

It is true that misinformation has taken on greater significance thanks to the scale and speed of the social-media platforms that spread it. But the new sanctimony about misinformation should be leavened with some healthy skepticism about the movements major actors.

As Bernstein noted, in some sense the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations. The crusade against misinformation is an approximate mirror image of Donald Trumps war against fake news.

Control of information is control of one of the most valuable commodities in the developed world: peoples attention. And people want their confirmation biases affirmed. But scholars and commissioners studying misinformation also suffer from confirmation bias. Contra the proposals made by panels and commissions on misinformation, the most radical thing we could do right now isnt to give more power to elites or the federal government to control information.

Their record of late Russiagate, Hunter Biden, the Covington kids, the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, Border Patrol officers with whips, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has not been stellar. It would be far better for the health of the information ecosystem that these supposed experts are always invoking if reporters focused on shoring up what were once unassailable tenets of journalism balance, iron-clad sourcing, and critical independence from and skepticism about the powerful. Instead, they are powers handmaidens.

From Commentary

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Inside the hypocrisy of media manipulators, censors who claim to fight misinformation - New York Post