The writing of the text that follows below was motivated by my listening to an uncommonly rich material in a program at the Swedish public radio (56 minutes) on May 17, 2024 with the tile The battle for truth ahead of the EU [European Union] elections. It is a program in Swedish language but with several informative interviews with peopIe who are heard speaking English, and therefore can be understood by listeners. I saw it as related to several of my own papers under a new banner that I had already included in my updated presentation of my doctoral dissertation on Quality-control of information. What impressed me was that I had not yet become conscious of the width, if not the treacherous depth of spread in our western society of the term “disinformation”, which was barely mentioned in the everyday life by the time an article appeared mentioning the related term “misinformation”, in Russell Ackoff’’s widely commented Management misinformation systems (1968). The pun was that “MIS” was at the time the widely known acronym of the trendy concept of Management Information Systems. It is a concept that because of technological development has today evolved into what can be understood as today’s trendy artificial general intelligence that I survey in one recent paper on the issue.

My main point with the present text is to offer to professionals in the broad field of information some material that details the references made in the radio program, and in great part can substitute the listening of the program for those who are not sufficiently clarified by its parts in English language. I have used the references given in the programs by finding their associated keywords in the form of links to texts on the Internet. I hope to be able later to update the text with some of my comments to each entry. The knowledge that I consider as a pre-requisite for understanding my message and conclusion below is contained in my following related papers. Since I do not have the resource in time and energy for incorporating right now the detailed message in all these texts into my own comments, I offer here the reference to the following links to my papers. For the time being they constitute my implicit comments, and the frame of what is meant by myth as explained in the conclusions:

Data security and privacy

Quality-control of information: On accuracy and precision

Information and debate

Conspiracy theories

Information and theology

The Russia-NATO-Ukraine information crisis
Information: Israel-Hamas and mass media

Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT

And now an introductory text for meditation during the reading of the rest of this paper:

On May 20, 2024, the author and intellectual historian Jan Olof Bengtsson published in his blog the following presentation (my trans. with DeepL) of political scientist Glenn Diesen. Please note that his presentation in Wikipedia is qualified by the sentence “Diesen has faced criticism for allegedly promoting Russian propaganda”. And it is symptomatic that this anonymous qualification illustrates this text of mine in that it has made me until further notice to hesitate in adding Diesen’s as yet unread works to my own essay on the Russia-NATO-Ukraine information crisis. I suspect that some of my readers may be prone to classify some of my own writings as disinformation because these readers paradoxically and tautologically can only see it as politics that I reject the reduction of theology and religion to politics. And here follows Bengtsson’ presentation of Diesen, a presentation that can be completed by visiting Diesen’s own YouTube channel:

Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen must be one of the most important in his field in the Nordic region today. Alongside his many and very rapidly published books - Russia's Geoeconomic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia (2017), EU and NATO Relations with Russia (2017), The Decay of Western Civilization and Resurgence of Russia (2020), Russia in a Changing World (2020), Europe As the Western Peninsula of Greater Eurasia (2021), Russian Conservatism (2021), Great Power Politics in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (2021), The Return of Eurasia (2021), Russophobia: Propaganda in International Politics (2022), The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War with Russia (2023), The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order (2024) - he has become known for his constant presence in numerous podcast interviews on the internet.

Here follows my elaboration of numbered references to the material mentioned sequentially in the audio program at the Swedish public radio about the information war in view of the EU elections in June 2024, which I hope to be able to complete later with some comments for each reference. But the reader should consider that the problem is analog to the information war prior to the re-election of Donald Trump as USA president starting 20 January 2025. A track of what happened can be seen in some articles such as “Nobody was tricked into voting for Trump: Why the disinformation panic is over” (in Politico, Jan 2, 2025), “Trump’s victory has opened the disinformation floodgates” (in Foreign Policy, Nov 25, 204), “Disinformation enabled Donald Trump’s second term and is a crisis for democracies everywhere” (The BMJ, Nov 12, 2024), and the more EU-official “Trump disinformations ‘magaphone’”, European Parliament, Feb 2021)

Those who cannot afford to listen and understand the one hour’s program (in Swedish language, see the link at the title here below, on The battle for truth) will meet difficulty, but not impossibility, in understanding the numbered list of short references. They will yet be able to absorb the meaning of the text in the last two chapters jumping to An European Democracy Shield, or by jumping to the Conclusion right away.

The battle for truth ahead of the EU elections [June 9, 2024]

[Swedish orig. archive: Kampen om sanningen inför EU-valet]

1.The Voice of Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_European_politics

” “The main purpose of Voice of Europe was to spread the frame that peace is only possible if Ukraine gives up the right to defend its sovereignty and integrity”

2. Troll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)

Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial.^[9] More potent acts of trolling are blatant harassment or off-topic banter.^[10]However, the term Internet troll has also been applied to information warfare, hate speech, and even political activism.^[11]

3. The Swedish Institute of International Affairs

https://www.ui.se/english/about/

Hedvig Ördén

hedvig.orden@svet.lu.se

https://www.ui.se/english/about/staff/hedvig-orden/

https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2021/01/what-is-so-foreign-about-foreign-influence-operations?lang=en

”When combating influence operations, focusing on discouraging misleading digital market techniques is a more versatile, effective strategy than focusing on whether foreign or domestic actors are involved.”

“Influence operations are increasingly seen as a threat to democratic societies because they can corrupt the integrity of political deliberation. As individuals engage in debate on social media, political deliberation becomes vulnerable to potentially destructive forms of interference.”

[My first comment, as I hope to comment later several other items in this numbered list:]

In the radio program where Hedvig Ördén was mentioned, she was the only one who approached my conclusions (below) in that I understood her saying that flowers must be sown in mature soil, otherwise if we turn a blind eye they will bloom in cracks that we should have first repaired to begin with. Cf. also above my reference to “information and debate” related to “worldly wisdom”. For the rest: “corrupt the integrity of political deliberation” is an elegant way to avoid stating the rare insight into that “the already corrupt interaction between humans who believed that logic argumentation on supposed facts would be a substitute for the search of friendship or Christian agape”. As exemplified in my “Information and Debate”, or explained in “Reason and Gender or “Logic as Rape”, and today practiced in the hype of “Artificial General Intelligence”. It is in turn a cause of mistrust and suspicion, which lead to higher risk of being victimized by outright paranoia.

4. European Digital Media Observatory - EDMO

Paula Gori

https://www.eui.eu/research-hub?id=european-digital-media-observatory-1

This project has received funding from the European Union

The European Digital Media Observatory brings together fact-checkers and academic researchers with expertise in the field of online disinformation, and is open to collaboration with media organisations and media literacy practitioners. It promotes scientific knowledge on online disinformation, advances the development of fact-checking services and supports media literacy programmes. EDMO also supports public authorities in assessing the implementation of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.

5. The 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation

[Archived page here]

The strengthened Code aims to ensure that purveyors of disinformation do not benefit from advertising revenues. Signatories commit to stronger measures avoiding the placement of advertising next to disinformation, as well as the dissemination of advertising containing disinformation. The Code also sets up a more effective cooperation among the players of the advertising sector, allowing stronger joint action.

6. Denialism [of climate, and LGBT, Russian disinformation, etc.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality as a way to avoid believing in a psychologically uncomfortable truth.^[1] Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.^[2]

In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated.^[3] The terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism describe the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters,^[4] and the term climate change denial describes denial of the scientific consensus that the climate change of planet Earth is a real and occurring event primarily caused in geologically recent times by human activity.^[5] The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.^[6]^[7]

The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance in psychology terms.^[8]^[9]

7. Ukraine’s “Ministry of Truth"

A satirical name for Ukraine’s Ministry of Information Policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Information_Policy_(Ukraine)

The ministry was created concurrently with the formation of the Second Yatsenyuk Government, after the October 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election. The ministry's task was to oversee information policy in Ukraine. According to the first Minister of Information, Yuriy Stets, one of the goals of its formation was to counteract "Russian information aggression" amidst pro-Russian unrest across Ukraine, and the ongoing Russian military intervention of 2014.^[3]^[5] Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko mentioned that the main function of the ministry was to stop "the spreading of biased information about Ukraine".^[6]

Research at the Ukrainian Anti-Disinformation Agency - Yana Bazhan - Head of research

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Countering_Disinformation

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ukrainska-varningen-sverige-ar-redan-under-informationsattack--wyn23a

8. USA’s “Ministry of Truth”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Board

a satirical name for the United States Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board

9. Radio Genoa

https://www.nzz.ch/english/italian-platform-publishes-misleading-anti-migrant-videos-ld.1770233

https://dintentdata.com/propagandist-profiles/radiogenoa/

10. Online Advertising

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising

11. GDI Global Disinformation Index

https://www.disinformationindex.org

https://www.disinformationindex.org/files/gdi_adversnar_report_screen_aw2.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Disinformation_Index

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Disinformation_Index#Reception

https://unherd.com/newsroom/global-disinformation-index-removes-funders-from-website/

In April 2024, UnHerd CEO Freddie Sayers criticized GDI after it placed UnHerd on its dynamic exclusion list, leading to a reduction in UnHerd's advertising revenue. Sayers argued that GDI's determination was based on ideological disagreements rather than factual inaccuracies.^[11]^[25] In response, Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, called for GDI to be shut down.^[26]

Following UnHerd's article, UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch joined around 10 MPs in raising concerns about GDI and their approach to distinguishing between free speech and disinformation.^[27] In response to Badenoch's concerns, Foreign Secretary David Cameron stated that FCDO had ceased funding GDI in 2023 and did not plan to resume funding.^[28]^[25]

Adversarial Narratives

https://www.disinformationindex.org/blog/2022-06-22-disinformation-as-adversarial-narrative-conflict/

https://www.disinformationindex.org/research/2019-4-1-adversarial-narratives-a-new-model-for-disinformation/

https://share.snipd.com/chapter/272e372b-402c-47a3-9a00-cbe1897a6bb2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_Freeman#Views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5M2qKaG2gs

In December 2022, Freeman said there was an "atmosphere of real fear" at the Guardian over its coverage of trans issues, not allowing her and others to write on gender issues and barring her from interviewing J. K. Rowling and Martina Navratilova who have known gender critical views on transgender people. After 22 years of working for the Guardian she left the newspaper when she was refused permission to follow up on the controversy surrounding the charity Mermaids, which supports transgender youth in the UK.[34]

Claire Melford (CEO of the GDI)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_Freeman#Views

https://share.snipd.com/chapter/272e372b-402c-47a3-9a00-cbe1897a6bb2

European Parliament

Defunding Disinformation

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/266243/GDI%20Public%20Hearing%20presentation.pdf

12. UnHerd

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnHerd (Founded by Paul Marshall)

Freddie Sayers: https://unherd.com/author/freddie-sayers/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnHerd#Notable_stories

In 2021, an UnHerd piece criticising the World Health Organization (WHO) for dismissing the COVID-19 lab leak theory in its investigation was marked by Facebook with a "false information" tag; Facebook apologized after UnHerd objected. In an opinion piece about the incident, Financial Times columnist Jemma Kelly noted that three days later the White House expressed "deep concerns" about the WHO investigation.^[12]

In a February 2022 UnHerd piece, Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman wrote that her paper was allowing itself to be bullied over transgender issues.^[13]^[14][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_Freeman#Views]

In July 2022, UnHerd reported that the Ukrainian government's Center for Countering Disinformation had compiled a list of politicians and intellectuals in multiple countries whom they believed were promoting Russian propaganda.^[15]^[16] The list included US senator Rand Paul, former US congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military analyst Edward Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, as well as the former chair of the Indian National Security Advisory Board.^[17]^[18] The UnHerd report included responses from Luttwak, Mearsheimer, and Greenwald.^[15]

Edward Luttwak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Luttwak

John Mearsheimer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer

https://unherd.com/newsroom/global-disinformation-index-removes-funders-from-website/

https://dissidentdialogues.org : Dissident Dialogues (in partnership with UnHerd):

An “European Democracy Shield”?

In May 2024 the European Council on Foreign Relations published a text with the title Digital deceptions: How a European Democracy Shield can help tackle Russian disinformation [archived version here]. The communication was picked up by main news outlets such as Politico’s “Barbarians at the gate: Von der Leyen makes foreign influence a key campaign topic”, Euronews’ “Van der Leyen pitches plan to shield EU from foreign interference if re-elected”, and UnHerd*s already surveyed above, “Ursula von der Leyen launches a new war on disinformation”.

In referring to “foreign influence”, the European Council above does not seem to have taken into account the mentioned excerpt in the section 3 above on The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, about “What is so foreign about foreign influence operations”, that is, the reasons for the ineffectiveness of focusing on whether foreign or domestic actors are involved.

The Council document’s reference to the dangers of “AI-powered deep-fakes” suggests that this matter widely exceeds the question of “censorship” and relates to the discussions on the cultural roots and effects of computer and communications technology as overviewed in my essay on Artificial General Intelligence and ChatGPT.

It is unclear for me whether this initiative for an European Democracy Shield is related to what appeared later as the East Stratcom Task Force (Wikipedia article here) which under the aegis of a logotype with the letters EUvsDiSiNFO depicts itself as being part of the EU’s diplomatic service which is led by the EU’s High Representative and illustrates its work here in what I perceive as a confusing and problematic whole picture. A representative example of its work is offered by an article with the title DISINFO: NATO wages a proxy war against Russia (snapshot and screenshot saved here and here) purporting to contradict Russian news (as published by the Russia Today - RT that is censored today in the EU and therefore needed to be) exemplified and summarized at the beginning of the article.

Long after writing the rest of this paper I saw a polemic article that can be seen as a complement to what I wrote above: “Censorship is a Western Value!”.

UNESCO’s handbook on “Journalism, fake news & disinformation”

In 2018 UNESCO specialized agency of the United Nations for promoting international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture, published a multi-language handbook for journalistic education and training (also related to the organization’s text on Response to COVID-19 and, as announced by the GIP Digital Watch Observatory, the to its action plan aimed at “regulating social media platforms”). Its introduction (p.16) explains its basic premises in terms of philosophy of science:

The development of journalistic strategies to combat disinformation should therefore be undertaken in the knowledge that information manipulation goes back millennia, while the evolution of journalistic professionalism is comparatively recent. As journalism has evolved, fulfilling a normative role in contemporary society, the news media has mostly been able to operate apart from the world of fabrication and covert attack, shielded by journalism that aspires to professional standards of truth-telling, methodologies of verification, and ethics of public interest […]

Today, even with a variety of ‘journalisms’, it is still possible to identify the diversity of narratives in real news stories as members of a common family of distinct ethics-driven communications practice which also seeks to be editorially independent of political and commercial interests. But before the evolution of such standards, there were few rules about the integrity of information being put into mass circulation.

This put into evidence a very common positivistic view of truth and science characterized by a sharp distinction and separation between facts and values, or between administration and politics, a separation that has been questioned after the second world war and has recently becomes evident e.g. in the discussion on artificial general intelligence. What invalidates the whole approach is the assumption that there is a particular societal professional group that not only strives, as many others like administrators and engineers, to keep independent of political and commercial interests but also is allowed and able to do it, on the premise that they get their livelihood and their influence on society.

Universal world-ministry of Fact-Checking?

Long after I wrote the main of the present text I had the opportunity to read a carefully and ambitiously written Swedish book published year 2018 by what appears to be a so long independent source, two authors who have been rewarded with prizes including a major journalism prize: Viralgranskarens Handbok (The viral reviewer’s handbook): Asa Larsson and Linnéa Jonjons. Their and Jack Werner’s initiative in a project at the later defunct Swedish newspaper Metro is continued in a later created, avowedly politically independent company named Källkritikbyrån (The Agency for source criticism). It is and will probably be more politicized, after having been already involved in a lighter newspaper debate. The more so when it does not take into account the theological roots of politics and consequently of jurisprudence or the theory of philosophy of law embodied in the difference between positive and natural law (more on this below). It is evidenced in its failed conception of what information, facts and truth are, when divorced from “system/context”.

It turns out that the above is only one instance of what has been going on in a wider world, being illustrated by initiatives with “universal” ambitions such as the International Fact-Checking Network IFCN as presented at Poynter (“Empowering fact-checkers worldwide”), a site that paradoxically does not facilitate fact-checking “about” itself, except for its association with the trio of buzzwords “Journalism, Truth, Democracy”. Whoever wishes more facts about it must initially rely on Wikipedia, which also relates it to the Poynter Institute’s history including its “weaknesses in the methodology” when, in 2019, it published and later retracted a list of over 515 news websites that it had labeled “unreliable”.

Similar universal ambitions also characterize related parallel initiatives such as Snopes (see also here), which has been characterized as the world’s most known fact-checking site, and The Reporters’ Lab, as well as others that can be found in Wikipedia’s (worldwide) List of fact-checking websites that I would complete with the missing link to Brazil’s Boatos.org.

In other words, what has been happening is the development of a worldwide “industry” of fact-checking, and its reverse: the classification of and a scam-struggle against what different laws and political systems classify as (their) disinformation. All this while its base remains untouched: the (whose?) definition and (whose?) determination of “fact”, to begin with. That is: the base of science itself including the context of a fact and factual confirmation. The difficulty of these questions is a guarantee that they will not be addressed, and even less answered. Those readers who wish to have some more material to examine, and have the determination or courage to approach the questions as they begin to relate to ethics and theology may already exercise their minds by reading my examination of the historical “Galileo affair”. Not to mention the whole question of relation between information and the nowadays ignored theology and religion. In simpler terms, it is a matter of defining facts, and further information in their context, or (scientifically) in the frame of a system as developed in e.g. The Design of Inquiring Systems. They are all questions that match the problem of framing the context of why and how an undefined event becomes a fact in the context of what I describe elsewhere as an impossible “debate”.

Those who wish and dare can exercise themselves by asking e.g. “who started the war between Russia and Ukraine?” relating it, however, to my text in the paper on The Russia-NATO-Ukraine information crisis. Swedish readers can relate to the analog question in the above mentioned Viralgranskarens Handbook (p. 127ff.) of why a husband posted on his Facebook-page a (false or illegitimate?) search of his daughter who had disappeared together with his own wife, a question that is swiftly disposed of by revealing that there was a family conflict as conceived by positive law of the particular country, or by whoever is engaged in it. Likewise, my question of relating fact to context or system (cf. my discussion of AI) is disposed of by the logical exercise (p. 139) in stating that “some false affirmations cannot be guaranteed to not be possibly true in an improbable scenario”. Furthermore, after mentioning (p. 85) some example of USA information warfare by Centcom, it dedicates many pages to Russia’s similar warfare with the assistance of RT and Sputnik networks, while emphasizing (p. 94) Russia having problems with [the western new gods?] “democracy and human rights”. That is, the same basis of possibly claiming that my own paper on the conflict in Ukraine is “Russian propaganda” or, for that matter, that my paper on the conflict in Gaza is “Hamas propaganda”. All kinds of problems are finally swiftly disposed of by stating an “approach” to truth, right and evil in a postmodern spirit, which risks to do away with history, ethics and religion, and explains why fact-checkers may not care for the next, last section (below) of this present paper of mine. Here is the mentioned postmodern approach (p. 133, preceded in the following quotations by similar thoughts on p. 81-83):

The world is full of opinions, beliefs and misconceptions. All in all, there are quite a few of us who don't know much. Who really knows the laws of nature, the human psyche, what happens in the body, how modern technology works? But we have to start from something so we choose a picture of reality to stick to. [...] The future will tell what research will reveal about how we react to data that refutes what we believe. As it stands now, we vote with our hearts, decide complicated social issues with our gut feelings and bicker about the rest. In this storm of emotions online, it can be good to question our own beliefs and check claims as far as possible.

[N]o individual tools or methods will be able to make any judgment of truth either. It is about a whole approach. The problems are many: We generally know quite little, humanity's accumulated knowledge is constantly changing and yesterday's truth may be today's wacky superstition that we laugh at. What you yourself can do is try to be critical, even of what you believe is true and feels right, and try to control what works.

So much buzz on debate and argumentation, and freedom of expression as base of divinized democracy. What is the “picture of reality” that could save us and we should stick to? How much should it matter what we “believe is true and feels right”? Is “check claims” pure logic or also gut feelings? Maybe the Ten Commandments are the answer, after all, as mentioned in the third paragraph of my General Disclaimer. Despite of mentioning the dangers of “deindividuation theory (p. 108) that claims to explain what in the history of psychology has gone historically under the name of crowd-psychology, groupthink, and influences from the collective unconscious, many countries go to war as in Ukraine or Gaza with the support of their own fact-checkers who do not perceive that they themselves are unconsciously “deindividuated”, and that they support conflicting facts according to the explicit and implicit politics, culture or political correctness of their own country or, rather, occasional government.

An example is Sweden that from earlier being formally neutral has become officially and programmatically NATO-allied. Its public radio or television networks offer interviews with faithful members of governmental organs such as the Swedish Defense Research Agency or even from MUST, the acronym for the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service ignoring the earlier internationally hyped (by suggesting Sweden to be the “conscience of the world”) International Peace Research Institute. All this happens while Viralgranskaren warns for not “copying” others’ testimonies (p. 136), ignoring that most of what we believe, and on which modern science relies, is “a social history of truth” as conceived by Steven Shapin.

Paradoxical conclusions

My conclusion, based on reflections about the above that many readers may have already had by themselves, is that the unfortunate term disinformation covers up the relation between technoscience, politics, philosophy, and theology. Because of all this the neologism of the word “misinformation” when, because of some reason lie or falsity were not satisfactory words, can be seen as a neologism for a perceived need and implementation of CENSORSHIP.

It is important to realize that in conceiving the question in this terms, we are questioning if not destroying the basis of the democracy in terms of the freedom of the press and media, and of journalists who want to be seen as relying on that journalism is not a crime as it was broadcasted in cases such as of journalist imprisoned in countries classified by other countries as authoritarian if not dictatorial. Not to mention the cases of desecrations of holy books, which are supported by law and police in western democracies.

In doing so, we can take for granted that the motivation is not an interpretation of the expression that “silence is gold” or of some biblical saying like Proverbs 11:9, 13:3, 18:6. The last section above in my text about an “European Democracy Shield” indicates that censorship is the ultimate bankruptcy of the loose talk about democracy, and of it being grounded in the freedom of expression and logical argumentation. On September 2024 The Economist commented Brazil’s Supreme Court’s ban of the media platform X in an article on “As Brazil bans Elon Musk’s X”, who will speak up for free speech?” and, further, “Free expression has become a culture war, and those who should defend it are staying quiet”. And those few who do not stay quiet seem to defend free expression by means of reference to the necessity of criticizing religions, as done by the “global expert within free speech” Jacob Mchangama, towards the end of a program of the Swedish public radio on the issue of freedom of expression, in the series “Konflikt” on September 14, 2024 (saved archived link here). So much for “democracy”, that also tends to be associated with murder as in the USA seen as the champion of modern democracy when religion and theology are reduced to politics.

In terms of its superficial treatment in the scientific and academic community disinformation can be characterized as a culture war and as being a myth at the edge of being a lie. Myth has a broader meaning as it can be understood in analytical psychology, and historically as in the relation between Mythos and Logos. It may also be seen as an introduction to a deeper understanding of the issues covered by the myth. My own position appears to me in this paper as closest to the above item “UnHerd” and the pronunciation by its editor-in-chief and CEO Freddie Sayers, which I consequently recommend.

There is a most serious consequence of the societal concentration on, and dilution of the problem of so-called disinformation, fake news and related misinformation, and lately malinformation, not to mention other a-theoretical terms such as “information warfare”. I repeat and emphasize that the consequence is that it implies a definite invalidation of the concept of democracy, supposedly our “basic value” that is a product of Christianity but is abused as its substitute. In terms of my previously mentioned dissertation on quality-control of information that defines error as a function of the degree of agreement in the context of maximum possible disagreement, what happens is that the struggle against so-called disinformation, when it is not a (theologically grounded) struggle for morality, paradoxically creates more disinformation, conflict, chaos, and ultimately war. It is a mind-blowing chaos that is rhetorically and paradoxically well illustrated by a weird text on Public relations and the objective reality, from a weird source I-System Trend Compass, which adduces references to, among others, a likewise weird, controversial and interesting Grayzone “American news website and blog”. It seems to not have avoided being politicized in Wikipedia inasmuch as references to Russia’s rationale in the invasion of Ukraine have been classified as Russian propaganda, as my own text on the issue will be, if it not already has also been classified.

The societal answer that we are seeing in western societies amounts then to sheer censorship that is analog to the one usually seen in dictatorship or in what is not usually perceived, such as in “types of democracy” including democraturs or democratic dictatorship. In several of my texts I give a reference to a relevant book by Tage Lindbom with the title The myth of democracy, and now I have also seen Hartmut Rosa’s Democracy needs religion. A cynical approach (not yet translated from the Portuguese) is J. U. Cavalcanti Netto´s book Democracia, um mito. It is the same cynicism that is implied today in the general massive approach to disinformation, or in the war against criminality, or in the failure of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice or International Criminal Court in the context of world conflicts such as the Russia-NATO-Ukraine or Israel-Hamas. This because there is no consciousness of the meaning of “law” and its implementation, i.e. of the difference between the doctrines of positive law versus natural law, as I illustrate in my blog (mainly here, but also here and here). In order to have a chance of being implemented, law must be rooted in humans’ feeling of justice and charity, and not in a myth of democracy.

The semantic hodgepodge that portrays the incapacity to understand what is all about is what lies behind the meaning of “myth of democracy”. It is also reflected in the semantically unreflected creation of the word “disinformation”. If in-formation means giving (good) form then, as in the etymologically analog words “function-dysfunction”, disinformation would have been dysformation or disformation. The concept of form being in turn exceedingly complex, and abused today as in the word “design”, should in my understanding be ultimately anchored in Kantian aesthetics, which I problematize in a paper on computerization as abuse of formal science. The concept of information is therefore rightly avoided in a book that goes deepest into the meaning of information, The design of inquiring systems, a title that, else, could have been “the design of information systems”. For the rest I recommend the reader to ponder on the relation between this present text of mine and the case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks as presented in Wikipedia and in my partial analyses in Wikileaks and information plus in Wikipedia democracy and wikicracy. Or, better, in view of the general message of my text on Information and Debate, somebody who is less “diplomatic” could be tempted to think, if not say:

“Shut up about disinformation at least until you have read and meditated further on later history such as in the Wikipedia accounts of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden but especially Robert Oppenheimer. And, or more simply: meditate upon the ultimate meaning and long-run consequences of what is exemplified by the “Controversies and criticism” of the WhatsApp service application.

In my earlier mentioned texts I relate this to the problem of logic and argumentation, but ultimately on the problem of ethics and theology, as I more richly illustrate in my paper on Information and Theology in the last paragraphs of a chapter dealing with the Galileo affair. The basic problem is the breakdown of human communication, not because of the failure of (undefined) “intelligence” but because of lack of reciprocal respect and consideration, which Christian theology equate to love or charity or to the classical concept of agape. This includes the eighth or ninth of the Ten Commandments, or “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”.

This opens the way for a clarification based on a necessarily theological determination of a hierarchy of values where neither democracy nor security stands at the top. There are situations when apparent truths can and should be questioned and require temporarily silence, as I explain for the case of the Catholic Church in the famous historical case of the Galileo affair or as in the “art of worldly wisdom”. But to rely on classification of something as disinformation is an euphemism for censorship, it is analog to rely mainly on the military and the police as a solution for conflicts, invasions, wars and criminality. A poetic and rhetoric exposition of the problem is offered to those who understand Swedish by psychoanalyst and poet Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson – UKON -- in his talk in the series of the Swedish public radio Sommarpratare [Summer talks] at 42:50 minutes of the 89 minutes, or 34 of 72 minutes recording with, respectively without without music, as well as in its plain text, is available until further notice on the net (but archived here). It rhetorically explains the paradoxical “dis-meaning” of “security” and the problem of the increasing loss of trust between humans that I address elsewhere in the context of conspiracy theories that are a sort of “archetypal” disinformation. I cannot refrain from UKON’s sort of poem about “security” [trans. with DeepL]:

Now forty years later [referring to about year 1981], we seem to trust each other less and less. As much at national and international level, as individual. Whose fault is that? Answer. That's exactly where the fault starts. In the tiresomely predictable search for whose fault it is.

Never before - at least in my lifetime - has the world felt so insecure and aggressive and selfish and generally stupid. And because we trust our surroundings so little, we have in recent decades created more and more surrounding external controls.

Yes, it is true that our individualistic and pragmatic age loves all forms of external control, such as these: punch clocks, grades, surveys, states of emergency, security laws, ankle bracelets, literary canons, heart rate monitors, parental controls on mobile phones, shopping behavior algorithms, access cards, bomb shelters, passwords, screen locks for children, search zones, two-step authentication, social contracts, remote batons, micromanagement, genital mutilation, bank ID, surveillance cameras, teen skincare routines, manuals, barbed wire, gate locks, regulation letters, pedometers, sleep sensors, offender profiles, guards, refugee quotas, whistleblower laws, duty to report concerns, firewalls, cybersecurity, policy documents.

But security controls, as everyone knows, are in fact insecurity controls, because you simply don't need any controls if you feel secure; in a similar way that security regulations are insecurity regulations and security companies are insecurity companies.

Of course, not everything I list here is bad, but the flip side of increasing external control is obvious: it is so aggressively defensive that it becomes offensive. And it takes place at the expense of internal control, trust and personal responsibility.

Everyone knows that more weapons lead to a greater risk of war. No one claims to want war; everyone is arming up. We threaten the threateners, we hit the fighters, we hit back hard, which hits back even harder, and society spirals downwards.

One question: Will the war end if we exterminate the enemy?

Another question: Will the famine end if we exterminate the starving?

Answer: This will end badly.

In fact, an illustrative example is the reporting or “disinformation” about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine (that I deal with in an own paper) when seen by a controversial source, where controversial means first of all belonging to a minority in a world where a perceived “democratic majority” is right by definition. It is the controversial LifeSiteNews website and news publication publishing an “analysis” with the title “Inside Zelensky’s plan for Ukraine to become ‘Big Israel”. No comments of mine in the present “paradoxical conclusions”, which have already become too voluminous.

The option of resorting instead to “silence” in one way or another reminds what in the best case is an unconscious “archetypal” reenactment of a Plato’s insight, which I had the occasion of quote in a couple of other essays ), from his famous Seventh Letter (341d, and 344c):

If I thought it possible to deal adequately with the subject in a treatise or a lecture for the general public, what finer achievement would there have been in my life than to write a work of great benefit to mankind and to bring the nature of things to light for all men? I do not, however, think the attempt to tell mankind of these matters a good thing, except in the case of some few who are capable of discovering the truth for themselves with a little guidance. In the case of the rest to do so would excite in some an unjustified contempt in a thoroughly offensive fashion, in others certain lofty and vain hopes, as if they had acquired some awesome lore. […]

For this reason no serious man will ever think of writing about serious realities for the general public so as to make them a prey to envy and perplexity.

What is important to note is that, contrary to Aristotle whose logic lured Thomas Aquinas and later Immanuel Kant (as I show in Computerization as abuse of formal science) to try to ground argumentative rationality and even not only theology but also religion on logic, Plato sensed the need of a wisdom whose advent could be understood with the subsequent Christianity. It appears in Plato’s work and conception of information which I have long struggled to understand, that his standpoint was motivated by experience of his own contact with political power in the quality of consultant to Dion, and indirectly to Dionysius in Syracuse. Plato could have chosen between keeping silent, or be censored or killed by Dionysius’ “Ministry of Truth”, or — if not able to afford to think and analyze further — to respond by anonymously launching a conspiracy theory with the intent of socially undermine and injure Dionysius. Wisdom is supposed to keep silent or to be silenced in its contact with political power, and it is therefore that because of the risk of it supporting wisdom, religion tends to be reduced to politics.

In the ongoing gradual secularization and hype of artificial intelligence, our culture is instead searching salvation in a return to “Aristotelian” logical General Artificial Intelligence, which will certainly be or has already been adduced as a tool in the struggle for “security” against disinformation. The final debacle, for those who can and want to see, is unconsciously portrayed in what is happening with the paradoxical conflict between media platforms such as Telegram, and Governments around the world, including those which claim to be democratic while undermining free expression and freedom of the press, which are claimed to be the basis of democracy itself. All this as exposed in an analysis published in the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in September 2024, to which I gave the title of Disinformation and Telegram – Implications.

What the campaigns against disinformation tries to attain in this respect is the same as “security” , which it tries to obtain in the lack of friendship and of quality of information understood as in my Quality-control of information. Or what is meant in the famous quote from T.S. Eliot

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?

She tells them of Life and Death, and all that they would forget.

She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.

She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.

They constantly try to escape.

From the darkness outside and within

By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

(From: Choruses from “The Rock”, VI,

in Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber and Faber, 1936/1963, p.174.).

Please note the last line: “By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

I guess that T.S. Eliot would tentatively agree with a clarification stating “systems so perfect that none of our enemies will need to be good”, since we ourselves are good, as well as our friends and allies, mainly countries of the European Union and NATO with USA, are good. That is: they would never be “barbarian foreign influences”, they neither spy nor lie.

That is: forget the story of “The Mote and the Beam”, which may have been the reason of why Eliot indeed did not “clarify” the last line of the quotation. And it is such a “dream” that justifies here the conclusion that the conception of disinformation is a treacherous, deleterious myth of (I repeat) the bankruptcy of a culture, becoming “paradoxically and/or tautologically” itself a disinformation on disinformation. That is, ultimately a mythical lie hiding what all this is about: acceptance of the unavoidable risks of charity-agape, and of being good.