In re: Two nice links (np) longish (876 words)

[Hübschräuber]

> Rather than “shut up, peasant”, isn’t tagging something as disinformation
> more like “hey, fact to bloviation ratio is low, rabble-rousing quotient
> high, ulterior motives are evident, & presence of patent untruths is
> non-trivial?”

This is very good advice for the discerning reader/viewer/listener. Jacob Siegel is talking about something else, however: Labelling information, truthful or not, as disinformation demonstrably led to the censorship of alternative views, newspapers and renowned professors of medicine. In the three cases named in the quote I provided, the information was truthful - or is anyone still claiming that "Hunter Biden's laptop" was not Hunter Biden's laptop, that the lab leak hypothesis is a "conspiracy theory" (the fact that Trump/the Republican Party indeed used the lab leak hypothesis to concoct an anti-Chinese conspiracy theory is a completely different matter) or that the so-called vaccines prevent transmission? People lost their livelihoods over this, although they were right and have been vindicated.

We now know that the US government, the intelligence services, the media and the internet companies colluded behind the scenes to make sure that certain kinds of information, truthful or not, did not reach the discerning reader/viewer/listener. If they could not prevent the information from being published, they made sure that everybody knew that it was officially labelled as "disinformation", and that everybody who believed it was surely either a Trumpist, a Russian stooge or a "COVID denier". And who would want to be any of those things?

Call me naive, but to me this seems to go against everything the US used to stand for.