Everything You Need to Know about Disinformation in 2 Minutes
The topic of disinformation is a very complicated one. Essays, lengthy papers and whole treatises have been written on the subject. But the very length of most discussions overwhelms people, so that they never get an accurate picture of what disinformation looks like.
So I thought I'd take a crack at a very simple definition of disinformation, something that is short enough to read in two minutes.
Disinformation is:
* Repeating the same factual claims over and over even when people have proven that such claims are contrary to the evidence (for example, the claim that no planes hit the Twin Towers)
* Spending more energy causing in-fighting and disruptions then helping to promote the truth, and causing dedicated activists to waste time rebutting obviously false claims and theories
* Unnecessarily alienating large sections of the population by attacking victims' families, certain religious or ethnic groups, or political parties with no reason
* Calling someone names instead of addressing that person's theories or claimed facts
* Making knowingly false statements about someone
* Threatening people or their families with violence, job loss, or other forms of intimidation or harassment
* Acting as provocateurs to disrupt peaceful groups or gatherings
People who repeatedly do one of the above things even after people have pointed out what they are doing, are spreading disinformation -- consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, because disinformation may be an unconscious activity, I prefer to call it "disruption". These actions disrupt the ability to spread 9/11 truth and to obtain justice against all of those who carried out the attack.
No matter how much seemingly good 9/11 truth work someone has done in the past, if someone starts causing more disruption than good, than he or she should not be followed any more. This is especially true if people have pointed out that person's disruptive behavior, but he or she has carried on disrupting 9/11 truth work anyway.
This is part 1 of a 3-part introduction to disinformation for busy people. Part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.
So I thought I'd take a crack at a very simple definition of disinformation, something that is short enough to read in two minutes.
Disinformation is:
* Repeating the same factual claims over and over even when people have proven that such claims are contrary to the evidence (for example, the claim that no planes hit the Twin Towers)
* Spending more energy causing in-fighting and disruptions then helping to promote the truth, and causing dedicated activists to waste time rebutting obviously false claims and theories
* Unnecessarily alienating large sections of the population by attacking victims' families, certain religious or ethnic groups, or political parties with no reason
* Calling someone names instead of addressing that person's theories or claimed facts
* Making knowingly false statements about someone
* Threatening people or their families with violence, job loss, or other forms of intimidation or harassment
* Acting as provocateurs to disrupt peaceful groups or gatherings
People who repeatedly do one of the above things even after people have pointed out what they are doing, are spreading disinformation -- consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, because disinformation may be an unconscious activity, I prefer to call it "disruption". These actions disrupt the ability to spread 9/11 truth and to obtain justice against all of those who carried out the attack.
No matter how much seemingly good 9/11 truth work someone has done in the past, if someone starts causing more disruption than good, than he or she should not be followed any more. This is especially true if people have pointed out that person's disruptive behavior, but he or she has carried on disrupting 9/11 truth work anyway.
This is part 1 of a 3-part introduction to disinformation for busy people. Part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.
11 Comments:
The "no planer" example is a poor example:
There is more to this than people think.
George(sic), One thing you failed to point about about disinformation which seems rather essential. First and foremost something which is disinformation is a in one form or another a LIE!. I haven't read this edition, but I suspect it is similar to the first: See Chapter 10 on LIES. I certainly don't agree with the distorted view of history represented in his discussion of Hitler, but that is rather immaterial to the overall essence of what Steiner has to say.
Taken from:
http://www.public-action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum/library/martin1.html
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Seventeen methods of truth suppression.
Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party.
1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen.
2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "how dare you?" gambit.
3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors." (If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")
4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.
5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nut," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and of course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the "more reasonable" government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down.
6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not).
7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.
8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."
9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets.
10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.
11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. For example: We have a completely free press. If they know of evidence that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) had prior knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing they would have reported it. They haven't reported it, so there was no prior knowledge by the BATF. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press that would report the leak.
12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. For example: If Vince Foster was murdered, who did it and why?
13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing distractions.
14. Scantly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting.
15. Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite way of doing this is to attribute the "facts" furnished the public to a plausible-sounding, but anonymous, source.
16. Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5, have your own stooges "expose" scandals and champion popular causes. Their job is to pre-empt real opponents and to play 99-yard football. A variation is to pay rich people for the job who will pretend to spend their own money.
17. Flood the Internet with agents. This is the answer to the question, "What could possibly motivate a person to spend hour upon hour on Internet news groups defending the government and/or the press and harassing genuine critics?" Don't the authorities have defenders enough in all the newspapers, magazines, radio, and television? One would think refusing to print critical letters and screening out serious callers or dumping them from radio talk shows would be control enough, but, obviously, it is not.
Anyone who has clicked here on this article is interested in the truth.
A common catch phrase about the truth is, You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!
And this is likely true for most of humanity.
The premise of this article, Everything You Need to Know about Disinformation in 2 Minutes delivers the reader into the very bosom of what is wrong with human reason, and why it is so difficult for human beings to handle the truth.
The article title asserts for us, here is everything you need to know about disinformation, implying by knowing what the article describes as lies being told to all of us, that we can know the truth.
But my fellow human seekers of the truth, there is and can be no sustainable logical premise or assertion that will ever allow anyone to be sure they know the truth based upon a lie they have heard, and thought they recognized as a lie.
From a lie, does not and cannot possibly spontaneously spring forth knowledge of the truth.
But most everyone who reads here will come away with the impression that they still can know the truth by their assessment of lies.
Understanding reality is not so dichotemized and easy as any of that though.
Still, human beings do seek the truth.
This is our natural instinct.
But we are ever so lazy about it.
The truth does not emerge in 2 minutes.
Readers here would be non-plussed, were I to assert here and now, that everything they have been told their entire lives, and everything they have read during their entire lives is a lie, or at least, it all carried the implication of many, many underlying lies that have distorted beyond most redemptions any value for their common preception of reality and truth.
But that statement is surely a road sign on the path upon which anyone might find truth.
Each of us has been born into an Office of Disinformation, a horribly barbaric place where untruths virtually blanket from us with so many confused lies any possibility of our comprehending truth easily.
For logic, empirical science and even mathematics all have at their base a lie about the truth.
There is but one truth possible, and it is called Categorical Truth, for Categorical Truth is true by definition in every instance without any exception.
And there is nothing else like it that has been heard of in the history of humanity.
Categorical Truth beckons forth a new Enlightenment out of these cold, miserable and bloodthirsty days of the Empirical Dark Ages.
For aside from Categorical Truth, all else is little better than witchcraft, a horrid Kafkesque, H.G. Wells, and Mark Twain described Catch-22 existence made and melded from believing what is otherwise demonstrably unbelievable, and all of it merely disinformation.
But to learn something of Categorical Truth, put aside more than 2 minutes, please.
Categorical Knowledge will engage humanity, encompass it and wholly envelope the next thousand years of human thought.
If there are higher beings in this Universe, they know of Categorical Knowledge.
Categorical Knowledge is what is required for surviving the Age of Empirical Reason.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
#18--God spoke to me--really and told me 19 Arabs did 911 and airline jets can travel 550 mph at 700 ft and cell phones work at 32,0000 ft above and 3 wtc towers fall down by 2 planes and faster than gravity----eeeeeek !
"causing dedicated activists to waste time rebutting obviously false claims and theories"
This quote should have said: Feed or leak false information to dedicated activists to waste time and attention on obviously false claims and theories; then rebuke the "absurd" claims made by these activists in order to mask or hide a related truth that needs to be avoided.
The truth is immutable. One can either accept it in its entirety, willingly obfuscate and deny its existence completely, or cherry pick aspects one finds to be convenient. However, in reality, the truth will always be--the truth.
David Shayler joining the truth movement, pushing the no planes nonsense then discovering he's really god and dragging the truth movement through the dirt.
Pure disinfo, obviously still works for intelligence. David Ike does same ting with his lizard nonsense. All the snide attackers can quote these two lemons as believing 911 was dodgy and bingo, job done to the many who only live on soundbites.
Shayler - nutter
Ike - nutter
911 truthers - nutters
Articles by Arabesque on Disinformation:
9/11 Disinformation and Misinformation: Definitions and Examples
9/11 Truth and Division: Disinformation, Agent Provocateurs, and False Adversaries
Things about the truth, in general:
1. Men are far too willing to ignore, then dismiss, what they don't understand.
2. Most are more interested in sustaining their functional prejudices than they are in any facts.
3. The truth is a burden when you are surrounded by liars and thieves.
Other things about the truth:
Do you realise that the moment when the second plane hit the towers was broadcast on the web, world-wide? I was in Paris getting ready to follow trading on the stock exchange on my PC when I "saw" it happen. But what happened? The fuel made a fireball outside the tower. It was all spent before it could feed a fire hotter than a steel foundry. If airline fuel actually did that, planes would not fly, they would melt.
Subsequently - within about an hour or two - a variety of shots "became available" which showed (over and over) the plane bank and turn in the most amazing display of piloting skill : awesome! I could only exclaim: Damn! Brilliant pilot. I was lost in admiration, dumbfounded. An ace at an airshow in a high-tech fighter would be expected to achieve such graceful, tight, swoops...but a commercial airliner? Is it built to the same high-performance spec?
My point is that you didn't have to know much to know it was a fraud perpetrated on a world-wide audience. You just had to believe your eyes.
And the FBI found the "hijackers' passports" at ground zero? And in 1993 three guys in a white van had, under the direction of an FBI counter-terrorism handler, attempted to blow up the WTC with a load of fertilizer? In the same year two mujaheddin riding motor bikes executed the CIA's Afghan desk man at the very gates of Langley? And got away? So what became of the men in the field who worked as spies and agents for the US in Afghanistan?
1993? Who purged George W's driving and AWOL files? Why so thorough? What else had he done which would emerge if these records remained? You don't have to go too deep into detail to describe the sort of answer you'd get if you knew all there was to know about him: you already know that whatever they had to cover up wasn't pretty, wasn't difficult and wasn't very smart. And that Mission Accomplished codpiece, any clues there? Was he also high on coke, by any chance? That sweaty, manic grin? Believe your eyes: you saw it.
It all stacks up. 1993? Didn't Tricky Dicky Nixon make a sort of a comeback, pull off an inexplicable rehab, get a magical monstrous retread and stride about like an elder statesman? The Gipper had been brain-dead a good while, by 1993.
And that Bush family has - for generations! - always had something sinister to do with banks, come to think of it. Silverado Savings & Loan, Neil Bush. You can bet they're short this market: look at the daily charts, closing volume. Believe your eyes.
The market. El Sadr market. Why does the US always bomb that market? Is it an omen? Is it a clue? Fact is, the more you know, the more you know the US hates and fears The Market.
Have you planted your Victory Garden, yet?
If there's no evidence for it, it MUST be true!
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