Insulating the public from dissident views; the EU’s quest to monopolise the doctrine of the Truth
The insidious campaign to demonise dissident voices as conveyors of disinformation
Army of Fact Checkers
In recent years globalist institutions – including the European Union Commission have become obsessed with the circulation of disinformation. In particular, they point the finger of blame on outside external actors whose fake news supposedly threatens the very existence of democracy. According to the EU Commission ‘Foreign information manipulation and interference is a serious threat to’ European values. It claims that ‘it can undermine democratic institutions and processes by preventing people from making informed decisions or discouraging them from voting[i].
The narrative of foreign misinformation is invariably used to discredit political parties and electoral results that are not to the liking of the centrist technocratic elites that run the EU as well as numerous western governments. Foreign information manipulation served as an excuse to bar a populist candidate from running for the post of the President of Romania. Since by all accounts he was the likely winner of this contest his elimination from the race could be interpreted as a soft coup d’etat. Similar objections were made about foreign interference during the referendum for Brexit as well as during the recent elections in Moldavia and Czechia.
Alarmist accounts of the threat posed by foreign information manipulation rest on the claim that the circulation of so much unreliable information makes it impossible for people to make an informed choice. Yet the electorate has always faced the challenge of having to distinguish factually accurate claims from false ones. Public life was always forced to confront the problem of who to believe and whose words are trustworthy. Throughout history different actors and technologies were blamed for misleading people with false information and dangerous ideas. In ancient Greece it was the smooth-tongued demagogue who could effortlessly and purposefully transmit lies to capture the attention of the public, who served as the personification of misinformation. During the centuries to follow the finger of blame has been pointed at books, mass-publication newspapers, radio, television and now the Internet
Since information manipulation has played an important role in the political life of western societies since the 18th century, it is far from evident why the contemporary public should no longer be able to make ‘informed choices’ and why they should feel discouraged from voting? Despite the recent EU Commission induced panic about information manipulation, the percentage of people voting in the 2024 EU elections was 51 percent, the highest rate of turnout since 1994, when it was 56 percent.
People have always had to contend with fake news and propaganda. So why should they be more likely to be fooled by it today than in the past? The standard argument used to justify this EU elite promoted panic is that new technologies ‘have made it possible for hostile actors to operate and spread disinformation at a scale and with a speed never seen before’[ii]. It is worth remembering that the same arguments were used to warn against new information technologies since the 19th century. Even in the late 20th century the media was blamed by politicians for their electoral failures.
Kirsten Drotner has used the term media panic – that is a panic about the media -to highlight the recurrent tendency for change and innovation of the media to incite anxiety and fear[iii] . Such reactions were a response to the expansion of both publishing and the reading public in the 18th century. The expansion of the media and its commercialization created an environment where competing views and opinions helped foster a climate where the question of which sources could be trusted were raised time and again.
A new media – particularly when it assumes a mass form – represents an implicit challenge to the prevailing political and cultural establishment. Through providing a medium for communication it offers new opportunities for discussion, which in turn may raise questions about the legitimacy of the political order. This is precisely what has happened with ascendancy of the social media. Whereas the ruling elites found it relatively easy to control and regulate the legacy media they have found it difficult to impose their authority on the internet.
The social media has allowed millions of people to bypass the elite dominated sources of information. It has provided an opportunity for dissident voices to appeal directly to a new audience of voters. The success of populist parties during the past decade has been made possible to the access and support they have gained through their social media platforms. No doubt there is a lot of misinformation circulating on the Internet but what misinformation-alarmist are really worried about is the attraction of dissident populist sentiment to a wider public.
Concern about misinformation should be interpreted as an indirect expression of trust. In effect it is the loss of trust in the authority of the elites and their institutions that has led to their understandable concern about their ability to influence society. Their version of events no longer possesses a commanding influence which is why they wish to prevent alternative views from gaining influence and authority. Condemning views that they represent as false is their way attempting to undermine them.
Throughout the modern era the question of gaining authority over public opinion has represented a major challenge to society’s elites. The liberal utilitarian philosopher James Mill alluded to this problem back in 1825 when he expressed the hope that elite opinion will prevail over the lower orders. He wrote:
‘The opinions of that class of the people, who are below the middle rank, are formed, and their minds directed by that intelligent and virtuous rank, who come most immediately in contact with them, to whom they fly for advice and assistance in all their numerous difficulties, upon whom they feel an immediate and daily dependence, in health and in sickness, in infancy, and in old age: to whom their children look up as models for their imitation, whose opinion they hear daily repeated, and account it their honour to adopt[iv]’.
Mill hoped that the ‘intelligent and virtuous rank’ could serve as models for the rest of society and that its views would prevail. For better or worse, Mill was part of an elite that actually believed that it possessed a mission to give guidance and leadership to the rest of society. This sentiment no longer informs the behaviour of the contemporary elites. It rightly understands that it no longer serves as a ‘model for imitation’. That is why it has opted to adopt the strategy of insulating the public from dissident voices. The EU Commission offers a paradigm of oligarchy who understands that since it is not a ‘model for imitation’ it must find another way of influencing public life.
Who can you trust
In recent years the EU Commission has adopted programme of information control designed to maintain and protect its political authority. Its initiatives assume the form of well-financed programmes that are designed to secure for the Commission, a monopoly for deciding what is and what isn’t trustworthy information. To realise this objective it aims to harness the moral authority of young influencers – young people with a significant number of social media followers. One of the many EU Programme designed to dominate the information landscape is Building A Trustworthy Social Media Sphere: Countering Disinformation on Social Media. This programme, which has a budget of € 5,985,000.00 aims to target the preferences and media consumption habits of 15- to 30-year olds[v].
The programme aims to encourage the emergence of a cohort of individuals who supposedly possess an expertise in the maintenance of what the EU refers to as information integrity. Accordingly, one of the aim of the programme is;
‘To foster new collaborations between information integrity professionals (e.g. fact-checkers, media literacy practitioners, civil society organisations) and influencers, so that they can join forces and learn from each other on ways to promote media literacy and critical thinking among young Europeans’.
The EU’s goal to cultivate the emergence of a small army of fact-checkers and influencers to promote ‘media literacy and critical thinking among young Europeans’ represents an attempt to present its operatives as reliable, disinterested neutral experts in the business of guaranteeing facts.
In numerous instances EU official documents refer to fact checkers as information integrity professionals. According to advocates of information control, information integrity professionals are essential for the maintenance of a democratic society. Apparently ‘promoting information integrity on social media’ is ‘essential for building societal resilience and robust democratic debate’[vi].
The past decade has seen a systematic attempt to establish groups of so-called ‘fact checkers’, ‘counter-disinformation specialists and ‘information integrity professionals. These individuals are usually made up of activist that are funded by NGOs which are in turn financed by the EU. They along with other trusted collaborators are deployed to make pronouncements about the threat represented by misinformation in a specific event such as the recent election in Moldavia. Whenever a dissident politician or a populist party threatens to make serious electoral headway, groups of organised trusted fact checkers move into action and use the threat of the foreign manipulation of misinformation to discredit their political opponents.
Using the term political opponents to characterise the activities of fact checkers makes perfect sense. Information integrity professionals are political activists who masquerade as professionals. Their role is to politicise information with a view to discrediting the ‘facts’ they don’t like. Information integrity is a pseudo-profession that asserts the claim that it provides as authoritative voice for judging what is true and what is false. However, experience shows that even with the best will in the world the integrity of information cannot be affirmed and secured by heroic experts.
In the end, the integrity of the information landscape depends on the quality of public life, the significance that society attaches to the freedom of speech and public debate. It is through the clash of views that the public learns embrace the choices that are beneficial to society. They are the only guarantors of the integrity of democracy.
The real threat to democracy in western society is not the proliferation of misinformation but the attempt to demonise dissident views on the ground that they are the result of the confusion caused by the falsehoods promoted by foreign powers. There is a very real danger that under the guise of securing the integrity of information, dissident views and sentiments will serve as a target of repression. Society can live with misinformation but its viability as a democratic entity is threatened by the rise of the censorious information integrity professional.
I will be discussing the points above at The Battle Of Ideas- Details below
Misinformation, the media and the fight for truth
Saturday 18 October, 10:15—11:45
https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/session/misinformation-the-media-and-the-fight-for-truth/
[i] https://commission.europa.eu/topics/countering-information-manipulation_en
[ii] https://commission.europa.eu/topics/countering-information-manipulation_en
[iii] Drotner, K.(1999) Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and
Dilemmas of Modernity , Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of
Education, 35:3, 593-619.
[iv] See James Mill ‘Government’(1820) in Essays on Government, Liberty of the Press, and Law of Nations, London, J. Innes,1825, New York, A.M. Kelley [reprint edition] 1967, pp.31-32
[vi] extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/pppa/wp-call/2025/call-fiche_pppa-2025-disinformation-young_en.pdf
Misinformation is whatever the elites don’t want us to hear. It is the lies that most MSM outlets want us to hear. They are scared of us m, the ordinary people.