The Brookings Institution senior fellow Darrell M. West has produced a kind of a “post mortem” of Kamala Harris’ failed presidential bid – and an attempt to “explain” the success of Donald Trump and Republicans.
One of West’s takeaways is that what opponents of such efforts refer to as censorship (i.e., “content moderation”) must continue, and increase in this post election period.
The write-up is titled, “How disinformation defined the 2024 election narrative,” and doesn’t come from just any think tank: Brookings is an influential group funded by Big Tech (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft) but also “philanthropic” arms of financial giants like JPMorgan Chase and Mastercard.
And Brookings has in the past taken a pro-censorship stance, which it clearly continues to do.
Thus, West writes about the need to combat “rumors, false information, and outright lights” as defined by him – a person that also declares that, “people need to be aware of how the current information ecosystem regularly is promoting falsehoods and skewing views about important issues.”
West opens by describing what in fact highly likely crucially contributed to Trump’s triumph: the failure of the Biden-Harris administration on key issues important to voters, such as inflation (standard of living) and immigration, to name but a few.
But, he quickly turns to trying to build the case for “disinformation” allegedly being another important contributing factor.
The interpretation of reality as West sees it – specifically in view of the power and role of “disinformation” – toes the line well-established during the Harris campaign, including fearmongering and exaggerations around “AI” and its abilities and influence, and of course, “foreign meddling” (and no, he wasn’t referencing – for example, UK’s CCHD).
The purpose of the article appears to be to cement these concepts, “explanations” and justifications around what the losing political side in the just held election considers disinformation, and, more importantly, set the stage for what West calls “the coming political battles.”
It seems that nothing has been learned from this massive setback suffered by Democrats and media and think tanks supporting them, and so one solution to the “disinformation situation” is to continue pressuring tech companies to censor content on social media even more stringently – whether or not one can believe that’s possible.
West does. “Companies need to get far more serious about content moderation,” he writes, and also appears to advocate in favor of depriving content creators of revenue:
“Through websites, newsletters, and digital platforms, they make money from subscriptions, advertising, and merchandise sales. As long as spreading lies is lucrative, it will be hard to get a serious handle on the flood of disinformation that plagues our current system.”
