The whole essay may not be worth reading for most, but I wanted to call out these bits where he gives some of the more amusing and\/or troubling recent excesses of the journalistic consensus given in NYT, WaPo, etc:<\/p>\n
Consider, for example, a Washington Post<\/em> story<\/a> about a New York University report calling claims of conservative censorship on social media \u201ca form of disinformation.\u201d The report<\/a> says:<\/p>\n
The claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it. No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
What I find troubling about that one is that it demonstrates how the term “disinformation” is being stretched lately to cover way too much.<\/p>\n
I’m posting this next section specifically for the links:<\/p>\n
As The Narrative gets more things wrong, the enforcement has become increasingly Kafkaesque. Today, you\u2019ll get banned on social media for sharing statements<\/a> by the WHO from a few months ago, or unedited vaccine trial results<\/a>, on grounds of contradicting the WHO<\/a>. This week\u2019s front-page news<\/a> was last week\u2019s cancel-worthy conspiracy.<\/p>\n
In the face of the public\u2019s revolt, there is a growing inclination in the media to jettison objectivity<\/a> in favor of antagonism. As a Times<\/em> staffer said<\/a>: \u201cWe\u2019re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?\u201d According to The Narrative, there are only two sides: for or against The Narrative. Everyone on the other side is the same<\/a>. When Elon Musk tweeted a meme<\/a> about rejecting The Narrative, the Times<\/em> responded with an article that consisted of his name and a salad of loosely connected words with negative associations<\/a> like \u201cincel,\u201d \u201cTrump,\u201d and \u201cracist.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A number of the links are to Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter feed — she’s been great recently about calling out these sorts of developments (her Substack<\/a> is also terrific).<\/p>\n