Tangle - The Disinformation Governance Board.

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says it is stepping up an effort to counter disinformation from Russia, along with misinformation that human smugglers use to mislead migrants traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. My name is Isaac Saul and I am your host. And I want to just give you a heads up today. There is some construction going on outside my office. Some guys with jackhammers crushing some light poles and fixtures outside. I have tried everything to make it so you

can't hear them, and I hope you can't. But if you can, I apologize. Anyway, before we get into our main topic today, we do have a correction, unfortunately, from Tuesday. In a reader question on Tuesday, I noted that a lot of folks on the pro-choice side argue that you can't know if you're having twins or triplets until roughly 10 to 12 weeks of pregnancy, which is often a case about the development of personhood and individualism coming after that period that pro-choice people make. Like, you know, in other words, if you can't even know whether you're having your twins at 10 or 12 weeks, how can you know if there's an individual or a person in there? It's just one of the pro-choice arguments that's out

there. But as a reader pointed out to me, it wasn't really an accurate framing of that. It may have been more accurate to say there's no way to know whether you're having twins or triplets because division into two or more organisms has not yet occurred until 10 to 12 weeks, which is typically when a lot of women get their first or second ultrasounds. Anyway, this was just sort of a sloppily worded thing, but either way, the division of a zygote can actually happen as early as four weeks of pregnancy and an ultrasound at five weeks might be able to tell you if you're having twins. So it's just all around not really accurate. I was thinking about making this a clarification. Ultimately, we decided it was a correction. This is our 62nd Tangle Correction in its 145-week history. And unfortunately, our second correction note this

week, I track corrections and place them at the top of the podcast in an effort to maximize transparency with readers. Speaking of abortion, tomorrow we are going to do our reader feedback on the abortion issue we did yesterday. It will be a newsletter only. I'm also recording a podcast interview that's going to be really interesting to a lot of folks later today. But tomorrow there will be no podcast. There will be a subscribers only newsletter edition that is feedback people wrote in about the Roe v. Wade piece that we published yesterday. If you want to get that edition, you need to be a subscriber. Readtangle.com slash membership is the place you can do that. Please go subscribe. We keep most of our work totally free. We have no advertisers,

no investors. Your subscription is the only way we make money. Thanks so much. All right. Today's topic is Biden's disinformation governance board. Before we jump in, though, to that, we, as always, will start off with some quick hits. First up, the Fed raised interest rates by a half percentage point yesterday, the highest in two decades, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell predicted a quote soft-ish landing for the economy. The stock market rallied on the news that harsher rate hikes might not be coming in the future. Number two, Donald Trump Jr. has testified to the House panel investigating the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

has testified to the House panel investigating the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. Number three, the U.S. says it has provided intelligence to Ukrainian allies that has helped them target and kill Russian generals in the war. Number four, the U.S. now says WNBA star Brittany Griner is being wrongfully detained in Russia. Griner has been held for 77 days and faces up to 10 years in prison after being arrested for allegedly having a cannabis vape cartridge in her carry-on luggage. 5. Police vehicles and heavy trucks are now blocking access to the Supreme Court as security is being enhanced following protests on the potential Roe v. Wade ruling. 6. President Biden approved a disaster declaration to unlock federal aid to New Mexico, where wildfires have ravaged more than 300,000 acres this year. The Biden administration is facing fierce backlash for convening a group called the Disinformation Governance Board.

Homeland Security recently rolled out the board, giving few details on how it will function, saying it will examine disinformation about threats, but will not have operational power and will not monitor U.S. citizens. But they are actually going to create in the Department of Homeland Security a bureau of disinformation. It's basically a ministry of truth. And what they want to do is they want to be able to put out false narratives without people being able to speak out and fight back. This is the kind of thing that you see in dictatorships, this ministry of truth, this department of propaganda that the Biden administration has just stood up. And the reason why you see this in dictatorships is because they're afraid of us. They're afraid of the people. The Department of Homeland Security says it is stepping up an effort to counter disinformation from Russia, along with

misinformation that human smugglers use to mislead migrants traveling to the United States-Mexico border. The new board said Wednesday that it will focus on disinformation aimed at migrants that's helped create recent surges at the border. Smugglers often spread disinformation to increase their traffic, the Associated Press reported. For example, last summer, some 14,000 migrants were led to Del Rio, Texas after messages spread widely on Facebook and WhatsApp about changes to immigration policies that might allow them to stay. The DHS said the new board is also going to monitor Russian disinformation threats during

the midterm elections. It appointed Nita Jankowicz, who researches Russian disinformation as its head. Jankowicz's appointment immediately drew criticism for erroneous statements she had made about the Hunter Biden laptop story and the so-called Steele dossier. In response to the criticism, the White House has pledged the board will be nonpartisan and apolitical. It's unclear exactly what the board will do when it encounters disinformation or how it plans to limit its spread. Alexander Mayorkas, the head of the DHS, has said the board is an internal working group without operational authority

and will serve in an advisory role. He told CNN the idea is to gather best practices and support counter disinformation activities, not to monitor Americans. Online misinformation and disinformation have both been hot topics of discussion over recent years, but the focus here is on disinformation, information that is deliberately deceptive. Below, we'll take a look at some arguments from the right and the left is worried about rampant disinformation, but skeptical about the board.

Some say to ignore the hysterics from the right and focus on what the board will actually do. Others argue that it's a bad idea, but not for the reasons the right says. Others argue that it's a bad idea, but not for the reasons the right says. The Washington Post editorial board said to ignore the hysteria over the Disinformation Governance Board. Despite what some in the Republican congressional leadership might tell you, the Department of Homeland Security is not starting a ministry of truth, but the agency should be as transparent as possible about what its Disinformation Governance Board actually will be up to, the editors wrote.

The Disinformation Governance Board, whose acronym is the Soviet-sounding DGB, is supposed to aid coordination among DHS offices as they counter viral lies and propaganda that pose a threat to domestic security. Done right, this is a useful function. Mr. Mayorkas mentioned campaigns by human smugglers targeting migrants to trick the Haitian community into thinking they could enter the United States without risk of deportation. Russia's persistent efforts to influence U.S. elections are well known. Studying the best practices for stymieing these attempts and sharing them with the government actors should do a great deal of good. What the board is not tasked to do is to establish what is true

and what is false, or to push internet services or anyone else to take a tougher line on expression in general. Indeed, the board has no operational authority at all, the editor said. The problem is that even after Mr. Mayokris' clarifications concerning the board, the particulars weren't really clear at all. More details later released by the department have helped, but the transparency will be essential as the group goes about its work. As long as fair-minded observers have to guess at what the board's role is, players who have more nefarious agendas will have ample opportunity to, yes, spread disinformation. Eugene Robinson said a disinformation board is a bad name, even if disinformation is a real problem.

Nothing is more important to the future of our democracy than the fight against disinformation, Robinson wrote. But a new Department of Homeland Security unit, ominously called the Disinformation Governance Board, is not helping. The problems begin with the worst name I've ever heard the federal government come up with, and that's saying something. with the worst name I've ever heard the federal government come up with, and that's saying something. Disinformation Governance Board? To call the unit's name Orwellian is an insult to George Orwell. Beyond the issue of the name is the still mystifying question about what the board is supposed to do. At congressional hearings this past week, Mayorkas veered from pitching it as an effort to counteract Russian-style meddling in our elections to portraying it as an effort to protect Spanish-

speaking migrants from lies told by the criminals who smuggle them into the country. He failed to make clear exactly how the board was supposed to accomplish either of these tasks. I don't believe for a minute that the purpose of the board is to somehow police the speech of American citizens, Robinson added, but in the absence of a clear statement of mission and vision from Mayorkas, or for that matter anyone in the Biden administration, the far right is practically being invited to portray the disinformation governance board as part of a vast and imaginary conspiracy to censor conservative voices. Disinformation is indeed a potentially mortal threat to our democracy. democracy. Solutions to the disinformation problem must be found, but surely not by some Department of Homeland Security panel, given the First Amendment's prohibition against government abridgment of free speech. Alex Shepard said it's a bad idea, but not for the reasons Tucker Carlson

says. Naturally, what alarms the right about efforts to bring misinformation to heel is the fact that its political movement is built on a firehose of lies and falsehoods. Case in point, it's depiction of this new disinformation bureau as a kind of cancel culture tribunal where ordinary citizens will have to answer for their thought crimes before a panel of humorless woke drones, Shepard said. All of this clearly overstates the disinformation board's power. There is no reason to believe that it will do anything other than produce documents and media aimed at quickly countering disinformation. But whether this effort will be effective, or that it's even a good idea, is another matter altogether. Such an entity created

by the Biden administration will likely struggle to achieve its intended goals by becoming a lightning rod for conservative culture warriors looking for anything they can to twist into evidence that the federal government has gone woke. Moreover, it's easy to see how such a board could be weaponized by a Republican administration, which would use it to push its own disinformation and to attack immigrants and other vulnerable communities in the process. Besides, for liberals, any expansion of the Department of Homeland Security or its powers should be steadfastly opposed. The department itself, which owes its existence to the authoritarian post-9-11 panic, should be abolished, as my colleague Matt Ford argued back in 2018. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot.

Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. The right says the board is a dangerous idea and is already politically biased. Some call out the historical significance of such a board. Others say it is laughable the Biden administration wants to be the arbiters of truth. Roger Koppel and Abigail DeVereaux

criticized the stated goal and the people running the board. The stated goal combating mis- and disinformation is framed to seem unobjectionable, they said. Who objects to the truth and pines for falsehood? DGB experts will guide the way, separating the informational wheat from the disinformational chaff. But there's one small problem with empowering truth experts. Experts are people, they wrote. By creating the DGB, the U.S. government is creating a crisis monitor with a dial permanently set to existential threat. No one inside the board will have the incentive or the courage to dial it down. The dangers of the DGB will be amplified if it becomes the tool of

partisan political actors, and it already has. Executive Director Nina Jankowicz, who once described Hunter Biden's laptop as a Trump campaign product, has written that America's information landscape includes declining trust in the media fed by the Trump administration's relentless attacks on the fourth estate. She has said, unless we mitigate our own political polarization, our own internal issues, we will continue to be an easy target for any malign actor, Russian or Iranian, foreign or domestic, to manipulate. Yes, you read that right. We must all fall in line because of the many grave threats, domestic as well as foreign, out there, they said. Incorrect political opinions become a national security threat.

The DGB already looks frighteningly similar to the KGB. In the New York Post, David Harsanyi called the plan laughable. It gets tedious to point this out, but you can vividly imagine the thermonuclear meltdown the country would be rightly subjected to if a Republican president assembled a government panel tasked with weeding out disinformation, Harsanyi said. To our technocrats' dismay, this isn't Europe, where the state can dictate allowable speech and sometimes arrest those who don't abide. Here, citizens are the one who called out the state for peddling misinformation, not the other way around. Indeed, these arbiters of truth not only happen to be some of the same people who ran around repeating ludicrous conspiracies about foreign interference for five years, they're also the

same people who used the menace of Russian disinformation to lie and suppress news that undermine their electoral prospects, as they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story. Setting aside such a cynical use of disinformation, are we really supposed to believe that an administration that tells us with a straight face that a $3.5 trillion spending bill costs $0, or that showing your ideas tantamount to Jim Crow 2.0, or that your sex relies entirely on your perception, is going to sort out the accuracy of rhetoric? John Maxwell Hamilton and Kevin R. Kosar said, we have seen this saga before. An episode from over 100 years ago tells us a great deal about how such a venture can go wrong, and to some extent already has, they wrote.

We refer here to the Committee on Public Information created by President Woodrow Wilson on April 14, 1917, one week after the United States entered World War I. This was done through a three-sentence executive order that offered no meaningful specifics other than that the CPI would be headed by the pyrotechnic muckraking journalist George Creel. Wilson seems to have had in mind that the CPI would be responsible for censoring information that compromised military operations, they said. This, of course, was a matter of legitimate concern. But in the next 18 months that the war lasted, the CPI grew willy-nilly into a ministry of propaganda. There was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ, Creel wrote after the war in his book How We Advertised America. It was one of the few times he made an understatement.

The CPI soon began declaring the facts, calling out Americans who dared to dissent, and even chastising small-town editors who took minor exception to administration policy. All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So, uh, it's a big no thanks from me, and it's not particularly close. There are obvious reasons that Americans should have an interest in limiting the spread of bad information. Mayorkas and the DHS have pointed to two solid ones, the campaigns targeted at migrants coming to the United States-Mexico border and the foreign nations like Russia who tried to manipulate our elections. Both of those are very real things,

and I don't want to pretend they aren't, but we should not inch any closer to a world where the government is dictating truth, either in name or appearance, to the American public. As a country, we're already turning more censorious, both culturally and legislatively. On top of that, I'm deeply concerned about the crossover between intel agencies and media, the many former CIA and FBI officials who now work at corporate news outlets, and the many journalists who republish the government line without any context or criticism. So a board with the power of the Department of Homeland Security behind it pledging to suss out the truth is an unsettling prospect, to say the least.

It's also true that, as members of the right and left have pointed out, the rollout of this entire thing was laughably bad. The name, the Disinformation Governance Board, is something out of a dystopian novel on how to limit free speech. The description of what the board was going to do was unclear for days and remains so. Just this morning, the Associated Press published a story with the headline, DHS Disinformation Board's Work Plans Remain a Mystery. It's been over a week. How is that possible? Mayorkas tried to explain that the board would examine how the DHS currently counters disinformation and ensure the agency does not infringe on freedom of speech, rights of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. But the DHS already has an Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The woman leading the board, Nina Jankowicz,

does not seem to have a good nose for the very task she's been assigned. Again, it's still unclear what exactly this board is even going to do, which makes the immediate outrage and distrust simultaneously understandable and illogical. But if you're going to roll out a new team with the full force of the federal government behind it, name the Disinformation Governance Board, you better have a good and transparent explanation. The Biden administration hasn't come close. With any luck, they'll take the loss and shut it down before the board actually tries to exercise any power, which would only make the situation worse. All right, next up is your questions answered. This one is from Peter in Lake Isabella, California. He said, I haven't seen any of my usual balanced news collectors,

you, the factual, the flip side, et cetera, cover the Johnny Depp Amber Heard situation. At first, I thought of it just as another celebrity thing that wasn't really important, but the more I learn about it, the more it seems like a really important case that brings to light a lot of issues about how we as a society and a legal system navigate these difficult, emotional, and complex situations. Do you have any ideas on why more people aren't reporting on this? So I can only speak for Tangle here, but we generally try to stick to national politics or cultural issues that touch on national politics. Occasionally, we cover global news, which I know our readers love, but I really do try my best to quote-unquote stay in my lane. I haven't really spoken about this

publicly, but long-term, I do think there's an opportunity to expand Tangle into other areas, like entertainment, sports, global news, state-level politics, etc. I think that would be a very fun growth trajectory to sort of take on a different sector of American life, and I know from talking to regular readers there's some interest in that. I can't tell you, for instance, how many people ask me to write about the Will Smith slap. I started my career as a sports reporter at my school paper, and by the time I was a senior, I had a regular column called A Grain of Saw, which was a great name for the record, where nearly every piece was at the intersection of sports and politics. So I know as well as anyone how these topics overlap, but generally speaking, people come to Tangle to read about politics, and that's

where most of my expertise lies, so I try to stick to it. Also, specific to this, I haven't really watched any of the Depp-Herd trial, and I probably won't. I'm to stick to it. Also, specific to this, I haven't really watched any of the Depp-Herd trial, and I probably won't. I'm not sure why it would be particularly interesting, although I guess there's a lot of domestic violence and marriage therapy stuff going on in there that could relate to some of the ways our laws work. But yeah, I just haven't paid a ton of attention to it. There's been way too much going on in the political space the last few weeks. All right, that is it for our reader question today, which brings us to our story that matters. This is a big one. Academic research has now made official what many long suspected. Remote learning during the pandemic was a failure.

suspected. Remote learning during the pandemic was a failure. On average, students who attended school in person for nearly all of 2020 to 2021 fell short of a typical year's math learning by about 20%, which researchers attributed to the part-time at-home learning and the difficulties of pandemic-era in-person learning. But students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse, losing about 50% of a typical school year's math learning in the same period. The findings are consistent with other studies, the New York Times reports. It's pretty clear that remote school was not good for learning, Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and the co-author of another such study, told the Times. David Lionheart has the breakdown of what we know. There's a link to it in today's

newsletter. Next up is our numbers section. The percentage of voters who said that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned, according to a morning consult poll conducted immediately after the Politico story dropped on Tuesday, is 50%. The percentage who said it should be overturned is 28%, and the percentage who are undecided is 22%. The percentage of voters in Mississippi, which is bringing the Roe v. Wade case forward, who say abortion should be mostly illegal is 55%. The percentage of voters in Mississippi who say abortion should be mostly legal is 39%. The number of people who have reportedly died from pandemic-related causes like overrun hospitals having to turn away patients

is 15 million, according to a new World Health Organization study. All right, last but not least, our have a nice day section. In a major win for consumers, TurboTax owner Inuit has been ordered to pay back $141 million in restitution to millions of consumers who are unfairly charged. The company has been ordered to stop its Free Free Free campaign that lured customers with promises of free tax preparation services only to deceive them into paying. The settlement was announced by New York Attorney General Letitia James on Wednesday. TurboTax was charged with using misleading ads to guide people away from the IRS free file program while promoting a freemium product that wasn't

actually free to most consumers. The settlement applies to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Ars Technica has the story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. District of Columbia. Ars Technica has the story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, that is it for the podcast. Like I said at the top, if you want to hear from us tomorrow and get our reader feedback newsletter on the Roe v. Wade issue, you need to subscribe, retangle.com slash membership. Otherwise, you'll hear from us again on Monday. Have a great weekend. Thanks. Peace. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by

Diet 75. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu.

It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.