Wednesday Morning Guest Rant [Joe Mannix]

Free speech hasn't exactly been robust for the past decade or so. Cancel culture, asymmetrical enforcement of "terms of service" on social media, institutional capture of the television and movie companies, the lock-step narrative compliance of the news and everything else with which we're all so familiar have all been just so many arrows plunged into the shambling corpse of our fundamental right to speech. Late last month, the US government escalated the assault pretty meaningfully, loosing several more arrows into the body.

The "Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency" (CISA) put out a description of "Mis-, dis-, and mal-information," (MDM) ostensibly as it related to foreign election interference. This triple classification marks a formal and official US government action against free speech. But what exactly is MDM? From CISA:

• Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.
• Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
• Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.

So misinformation is wrong, disinformation is a lie and malinformation is merely derogatory even though it is true. And it is now a formal definition of a Very Bad Thing per the government and is targeted for destruction. Not being wrong, not lying, just being opposed to whatever the state wants.

Last week, the DHS jumped on board to exploit the framework put into place by CISA. In their terrorism threat bulletin, they call out that the threat in the US is "heightened" due to MDM:

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.

So the CISA defined it and called it out as a risk for elections (no doubt inspired by those six-figure Russian ad buys back in 2016), and then the DHS exploited the new lingo to generalize it against the American people. Anything that questions public institutions, the government or - by extension - the official narrative is now a terrorism threat. Any derogatory information that could "undermine public trust" is now terrorism. In other words, your speech - even if truthful - is now a targeted "threat." And the government isn't shy about recruiting the private sector - in this case, it's likely Big Tech and the telecoms - to help make sure this dreadful MDM risk is contained:

DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continue to share timely and actionable information and intelligence with the broadest audience possible. This includes sharing information and intelligence with our partners across every level of government and in the private sector.

Good thing they're just "sharing information" and not formally acting against free speech that might be derogatory to the government complex's messaging. I'm sure everything is still just perfectly fine and this isn't at all the tremendous escalation against civil rights by a tyrannical government that it appears to be.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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