Sweden has established a new Psychological Defence Agency to combat potential Russian disinformation, the London Times reports. The agency hasn’t actually spotted any Russian disinformation yet, the article says, but it knows where to look:
Staff at the agency, which has its headquarters in the western city of Karlstad, are working in a nation increasingly plagued by polarisation and mistrust. Next week, parliamentary elections will take place in a climate of suspicion and division, particularly involving the integration of immigrants and the rise in gang-related violent crime.
In other words, there are serious issues at stake in the election. But you know where the danger of “disinformation” lies:
A coalition led by the centre-left Social Democrats is likely to win. Yet polls show that the Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in the neo-Nazi movement…
Oh, please.
…could expand its share of the vote to become the second largest party in parliament.
To be fair, this is followed by a glimpse of reality:
All the main parties have made cracking down on gang crime and integration failures central to their pitch to voters. The number of violent crimes has risen in the past few years, and reports of shootings — once rare — have become a regular occurrence. The perpetrators are almost all young men from immigrant backgrounds.
The important thing, apparently, is that the Russians not mention what everyone knows.
But this is what really interested me. The quote is from Henrik Landerholm, the head of the new Psychological Defence Agency:
“Good disinformation is actually not false. Good disinformation is basically true and only somewhat tweaked. Getting people to accept facts that are not true is so much more difficult than just tweaking well-known and existing facts,” he said.
That explains a lot! Most of what liberals have labeled “disinformation” here in the U.S. has turned out to be true. I am not sure what “tweaked” means, but I think it probably equates to presenting facts that are true–even “well-known!”–without surrounding them with liberal talking points.
Of course, here in the U.S. there was one massive piece of disinformation that turned out not to be true–the Russia collusion hoax. But maybe that is the exception that proves the rule. Strangely, neither at the time nor at any time since, did our liberal press label the biggest political fraud in American history “disinformation.”
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