1. The United States DOES NOT HAVE a national counter-disinformation strategy. I say again, for the people in the back: the United States does NOT have a whole-of-government, whole of society, whole-of-anything strategy to address the grave threats posed by disinfo.
2. This is odd. It is infuriating. It is not surprising. The current president's national security strategy identifies fighting misinformation as a priority, although it treats MI as though it's an attack vector, rather than an emergent global condition hsdl.org/?abstract&did=…
3. The @nsa, @ncscgov, and @cisa have done well -- credit to them -- in fortifying physical critical infrastructure from external and internal sabotage. The @fbi and @DHSgov have the helm inside the country. This is basically all they do, though.
4. Press releases. With officious language. Telling us what we already know. Their solution: The FBI "urges the American public to critically evaluate the sources of information they consume." Well -- yes. Thanks. How?
5. State and local election officials have basically no money to condition the public about what havoc misinformation might wreak on election night. And no one has trained them in the art of combating misinformation. (The great @USC_TrueVote initiative is as close as we've got.)
6. The media is all over the place. Crazed and confused. Unsure of how to report ABOUT misinformation without amplifying it. Unsure of how to condition their audience for various election night outcomes without confusing them. Unsure of how to build and sustain trust.
7. Our chronic information disorder, a consequence of 30+ years of truth decay (@RANDCorporation's coinage), platform-mediated information flows, deliberate efforts to undermine government sources of raw data, post 2000 asymmetric polarization... theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
8.... is obvious to anyone who glances at the @CDCgov home page. The sense that, in future national security/ public health emergencies, people will turn to the government instead of to "trusted" friends and neighbors on social platforms has been vitiated.
(Begin parenthetical: And yes -- of course -- the current administration, willfully and through mistakes, has made all of this so much worse. Anyone who reads this already knows; not going to dwell on the point. I want to move forward. End parenthetical).
9. This is especially true during what scholars who work at @zittrain's Assembly Program have called "news voids" - when people really NEED info but no one HAS it -- this is the moment when misinformation spread is most harmful because whatever people hear first will stick,
10. ...because it's right at this point where bad actors can easily inject misinformation into high-velocity, high-impact channels.... because people are cognitively unprepared to be critical thinkers when they are in limbic hijack....
11. Platforms are just now starting to introduce friction during these moments americanprogress.org/issues/technol…
12. But for a myriad of reasons, they haven't figured out how to scale the technology solutions to reduce the incentives for engaging with misinformation during emergencies. time.com/5884804/mark-z…
13. Facebook (to focus on one platform) has thousands of people working on this. They work hard. And people still get hurt. buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…
14. There is NO national strategy here. There are national strategies elsewhere. (cf, Taiwan, Sweden.) I fully appreciate that a national strategy to fight against an international chronic condition that has its own physics won't be sufficient. But is IS necessary.
15. It will engage/pressure the platforms. It will completely revamp essential USG public communication. It will extend its reach from public schools to the nuclear decision handbook carried by the Milaide (though that part might be classified.) Its goal should be...
16. ... nothing less than a major update to our mental software, where digital competence is deemed critically essential AND where students are taught from an early age about the physics of cause and effect in the digital dimension.
17. It would recapitalize local journalism. Local journalists are THE counter-disinformation army. There are thousands of fewer combatants; we need many more.
18. It would ensuring that the public gets access to accurate information in crises must be a NATIONAL ESSENTIAL PRIORITY. Those three words have meaning to folks who write government strategies.
19. This can be done. It can. Really. We can do it without the government becoming a content moderator. We can do it WITH political uncertainty (@Aelkus) still existing as a perpetual feature of human interaction. But we can't do it without bottom-up and top-down pressure.
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