The Disinformation Governance Board: Necessary Safekeep or Orwellian Nightmare?
Washington is abuzz over the newly christened “Disinformation Governance Board,” an advisory group within the Department of Homeland Security with a less-than-obvious purpose.[1] Coming out of the gate, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that its ultimate goal is to “more effectively combat [the threat of disinformation], not only to election security but to our homeland security.”[2] Others, predominantly on the political right, see it differently: “Rather than police our border,” said Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, “Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority.”[3]
“I think we probably could have done a better job of communicating what it does and does not do,” lamented Secretary Mayorkas to CNN.[4]
So what exactly is the Disinformation Governance Board purported to accomplish, and was its inception a good idea? We now know that the media landscape during the 2016 presidential election was infested by disinformation, with reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee finding that foreign actors, particularly from Russia, sought broad influence over the electoral process.[5] Researchers have found not only that the same interference occurred during the 2020 election, but also that the tactics employed by Russia were similar and more intense than four years earlier.[6] 2020 also saw an increased involvement by American right-wing groups who promoted doubt about mail-in voting and election integrity writ large.[7] While some blamed the individuals or state actors producing content, others pointed to media platforms like Facebook as complicit for failing to remove posts containing false or misleading information that were subsequently viewed billions of times.[8]
Regardless of blame, this so-called “fake news,” whether intentionally created or negligently proliferated, had observable impacts on the American electorate, facilitating false narratives and deepening partisan polarization.[9] The Pew Research Center found, through its own investigation in The Pathways Project, that voters felt increasingly exposed to false information across the internet and were more likely to view it as unreliable depending on the political disposition of its source.[10] Perhaps more concerningly, the respondents to Pew’s survey of all political stripes were far more likely to label a news story as made-up if it did not fit into their preexisting worldview, “regardless of whether the information was actually made up.”[11]
It would seem apparent, then, that the creation of the DGB is a response to calls to action for the government to do more to curb the scourge of disinformation.[12] According to Homeland Security, the Board will focus predominantly on two major areas of national security concern: the aforementioned meddling in American domestic politics by the Russian state, along with disinformation pertaining to U.S. border policy.[13] Citing instances where migrant communities were misled to believe that the southern border was “open,” officials are concerned that human smugglers are using online misinformation to facilitate business, and the Board will seek to counteract those efforts.[14] Additionally, the war in Ukraine has made the Russian government even more aggressive with its misinformation campaigns, meaning the Board will play a key role in guarding the integrity of the upcoming midterm elections.[15]
The effects of online misinformation are concrete and empirically observable, both in elections past and the present day.[16] Despite critics who lambast the DGB for its supposed ineffectiveness,[17] it is necessary that the government take steps to develop an infrastructure to combat false information, regardless of whether the project’s scope and power is enough to remedy the issue entirely. Failing to do so could result in even more severe threats to our democracy’s integrity than we have already seen[18] and a vulnerability to foreign interference with untold consequences.
Footnotes
