A piece in the New York Times is calling on the Biden administration to appoint a “reality czar” who will “tackle disinformation and domestic extremism.”
The piece, titled “How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis,” was written by Times technology columnist Kevin Roose. It is based on conversations with several so-called experts about how the Biden administration could help “fix our truth-challenged information ecosystem.”
One of the suggested ideas is the appointment of a “reality czar.” Roose himself grants that “it sounds a little dystopian” but says we should “hear [the experts] out.” According to these experts, the government’s current response to “disinformation and domestic extremism” is disorganized and unnecessarily spread out across different agencies. Roose quotes Renee DiResta, a so-called “disinformation researcher” at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, as saying that a “centralized task force” would remedy this problem.
If each agency is operating a distinct and independent anti-disinformation operation, they “run the risk of missing connections, both in terms of the content and in terms of the tactics that are used to execute on the campaigns,” DiResta says.
Amazingly, the article also comes out and says that this centralized task force could meet with Big Tech platforms “to push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems,” which could then become “the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.” As if we need any closer of a relationship between Big Tech and the government…
Buckle in. It’s going to be a long four years.