We see that the current administration has their censorship fingers in everything, which really takes the air out of whatever impact they think this has.

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infamouscow 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) was a short-lived DHS advisory group, running from March 2, 2022, to August 24, 2022. It was pitched as a way to combat "misinformation," but let's call it what it was: a top-down attempt to gatekeep truth.

The red team hasn't spun up their own version of this Orwellian nightmare -- probably because they lean on something bigger than bureaucracy, like a belief in free thought or a higher power. Nietzsche said you can't be an elite without faith in something beyond the state.

This isn't engineered; it's emergent. The blue team should be sweating -- their push for control lookied like a fringe fever dream. If you're peddling censorship disguised as safety, the only thing you deserve is a one-way ticket to obscurity, or a jail cell.

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leakycap 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you're alive in '25 and worried about '22, I have bad news for you.

> If you're peddling censorship disguised as safety, the only thing you deserve is a one-way ticket to obscurity, or a jail cell.

Jailing people you don't agree with is certainly a take that puts you in excellent company.

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infamouscow 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which effectively gutted the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act’s restrictions on domestic propaganda, was passed under a blue team controlled executive and senate. This wasn't a bipartisan effort—it was a deliberate move by the blue team to dismantle a post-WWII safeguard designed to prevent the U.S. government from targeting its own citizens with state-crafted narratives.

The original act ensured the U.S. Information Agency’s output, like Voice of America, stayed outward-focused. The 2012 repeal, slipped into a defense spending bill and opened the door for domestic dissemination of government-produced content (read: propaganda).

Why would a single party push this through? Draw your own conclusions, but the implications for information control are hard to ignore. Look at the timing: right as social media was becoming a primary news source.

	▲	leakycap 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh no, not the infamous baby-eating blue team! Care to comment on what happened to Voice of America recently when baby-loving red team had their way?

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legitster 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It was pitched as a way to combat "misinformation," but let's call it what it was: a top-down attempt to gatekeep truth.

Disseminating accurate information and handling misinformation is literally one of the mandates of the DHS. Nobody batted an eye when the government did the exact same thing for the Spanish Flu, or the Boll Weevil blight, or smallpox. It was never perfect, but it was not inherently political in nature until one side laid down on the tracks and voluntarily became a victim.

We can debate all day as to whether the previous administration went too far in regards to Covid, but clearly all of the conspiracy theorists have kept their jobs and stayed on the air so it can't have been that effective. And it's also clearly a different beast to what is happening now, where it's not even done under the auspices of pragmatism but as a way to punish political adversaries only for existing.