13 ways of looking at disinformation

Last week Tablet published Jacob Siegel’s “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” Subhead accompanied by the profile of a blackbird’s head: “Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation.” (The subhead and graphic allude to the Wallace Stevens poem). Siegel’s magnum opus runs to some 13,000 words. The introduction is followed by a table of contents with links to the chapters:

I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary “Disinformation”

II. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”

III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?

IV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon

V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!

VI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended

VII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”

VIII. The NGO Borg

IX. COVID-19

X. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule

XI. The New One-Party State

XII. The End of Censorship

XIII. After Democracy

Appendix: The Disinfo Dictionary

It is essential (weekend) reading.

Matt Taibbi followed up with Siegel in the Racket News post/interview “Tablet’s Grand Opus on the Anti-Disinformation Complex.” Taibbi has also produced that post in podcast/video form (below, narrated by Jared Moore).

Taibbi’s introduction to the interview is particularly useful. Taibbi writes: “Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.”

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