What Happened At An Academic Expert Disinformation Summit

We—but not Anon, who reports below—missed the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, held the last week of July (Videoes).

Conference organizers described their sensitivity soirée thusly:

Strategic disinformation is an accelerant for major societal problems such as climate change, extremism, polarisation, fraud, and suppression of rights. It is exploited across all information dissemination platforms, including social media, news media, financial and non-financial reporting, and other broadcast vehicles.

Accelerant!

That “suppression of rights” bit is also curious, given that the Feds cooperated, or should one say directed, social media companies to suppress speech and cancel its enemies, as the Twitter Files revealed (and that’s a Guardian link, friends).

It is natural the FBI, CIA and the like should do this, because as I’ve said too many times, in order for there to be Official Disinformation there must necessarily be Official Truths, and thus there will be an agency or agencies in charge of producing, promulgating, and policing them. Police them they did, and well, in 2020 (and of course before and after). It was one of their vote fortification tricks.

The USA does not labor alone. This kind of thing Expert control of discourse occurs all over the world. In China, as almost goes without saying; in Ireland, the Netherlands, UK, and so on and such forth. Governments are, after all, in the business of defining Official Truths. Which is dandy fine, as long as those Official Truths are true.

Alas, et cetera, et cetera.

Believe me, I am more weary of repeating all this than you are of hearing it. What we want to know is if these fine Expert academics, people who have made careers from studying Disinformation, and self-label as Experts, would discuss this most important facet of this most consequential topic—none more consequential in an Expertocracy, the (not-so) secret move by rulers to police speech in social media?

Far as I can figure out, they did not. Not our sense. In anything, they were for it, and wanted more such policing. How odd.

Anon gutted out the conference for us. He reports (I’ve edited it slightly, with Anon’s approval, to remove any possible identifying information):

The summit was embarrassing. The speakers talked about easy topics, and they all agreed with one another. It was obvious that they represented the mainstream left wing. There was no challenge or criticism. A few speakers came from the private sector but they were clearly there for decoration.

If academics want to do something about “disinformation” they should clean up their own act. They should improve editorial quality in their journals. How many studies are based on manipulated data? How many studies don’t replicate? Academic publishing is filled with garbage. Fix the mess in publishing before you complain about social media.

Then they should purge the colleges and universities of the charlatans. Get rid of tenure and fire the frauds. But are the academics who showed up here ever going to reform themselves? Nope. If academia had rigorous standards, half of the professors speaking at the summit wouldn’t have been hired as researchers to start with. They want to keep their privileges and tell the rest of us what to do. They don’t want any consequences for themselves.

Anon also says “There is going to be another summit at the University of Zurich, where research and policy proposals will be presented.”

The keynote of the conference was from that big-jawed Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, whose message was there was not enough censorship of Official Disinformation.

Frances became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety and putting people’s lives at risk…claiming that the company has been misleading the public and investors on how it handles issues such as climate change, misinformation, and hate speech, and the impact of its services on the mental health of children and young adults.

The organizer (on YT’s page) said Official Disinformation “killed” his nephew. (Maybe the Fabulous Fauci’s corpus of papers dropped on the nephew’s head?)

I was curious enough to click on a few of the participants. Clicking Jessica Zucker’s name brings us to the headline “Meta’s Jessica Zucker joins Ofcom to power the drive for online safety”. What an easy job. Since unless you’re using your computer in a pool during a thunderstorm being online poses no risks whatsoever.

One Joshua Braun, Associate Professor of Journalism, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has a peer-reviewed paper “Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: The Case of Sleeping Giants“. Which opens ” This study examines the international activist movement known as Sleeping Giants, a social-media ‘campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable’…”

I got bored of looking after that. We’ll let Anon have the last, and most apt, word:

After attending the summit, I have been convinced that professors should be more heavily regulated. Professors who abuse their positions should be jailed – the same penalty we give to bad bankers.

Academia is a civilizational threat. I am not exaggerating at all.

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