Fighting misinformation: Joe Biden, Elon Musk and the Disinformation Governance Board

US President Joe Biden’s approval ratings are barely 40%. Opinion polls indicate that the Democrats could lose both the House and the Senate in the 2022 mid-term elections. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Two days after Elon Musk bought Twitter, the Joe Biden administration announced the creation of  a “Disinformation Governance Board”. US President Biden’s critics do not believe this is a coincidence. This new board has already been nicknamed the “Ministry of Truth” by some US media, in a reference to the government department in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eightyfour that was in charge of propaganda and disseminating lies.

The board’s first mission will be to fight “misinformation” in the midterm elections later this year for the Senate and the House of Representatives. It has not been revealed exactly how it will do so.

The fact is that Biden is in trouble and so is the Democratic Party. Inflation is at a 41-year high, and the US economy actually shrank in the January-March quarter. The president’s approval ratings are barely 40%. Opinion polls indicate that Democrats could lose both the House and the Senate in the coming elections. And whether the setting up of this new board has anything to do with “free speech absolutist” Musk’s acquisition of Twitter or not, it is the Democrats and left-liberals who have been most upset about the deal.

Musk has often criticized Twitter’s censorship—“content moderation”—policies as opaque and favouring left ideologies. It is expected that under him, more right-wing voices will be allowed to speak more freely on the platform.

But this “misinformation” business raises some questions. Biden has hardly been the most truthful of American politicians. He has been unable to fulfil most of his promises, from Covid to rescuing US citizens trapped in Afghanistan, but flatly denies his failures.

Among other things, he claims that his $3.5-trillion spending bill costs “zero dollars” (it costs $3.5 trillion), that inflation is not a cause for concern (food and fuel prices have been rising steadily in America for more than a year now), that the economy is showing “enormous growth” (it shrank by 1.4% in the last quarter), and so on.

Donald Trump was pilloried every day for his wild claims and outright falsehoods, but Biden is no less a fabulist. His 50-year-long political career has been marked by an astonishing series of lies, about both his personal and professional lives.

He has claimed many times that he participated in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in the 1960s, and that, as a lawyer, he represented the Black Panthers, the radical African-American party. But he did none of these things. In fact, he has proudly stated that he had been a close friend of infamous racist Alabama governor George Wallace and even boasted his home state of Delaware was on the pro-slavery side in the American civil war.

He has said that he was arrested several times—as a civil rights activist and while trying to meet Nelson Mandela in prison in South Africa. There is no record of him ever being arrested.

In his 1988 presidential campaign (yes, he’s been at it for a long time), he claimed that he went to law school on a full academic scholarship—"the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship”, that he figured in the top half of his class, won the award for outstanding student in the political science department, and graduated with three degrees.

But he did not get a full academic scholarship, finished 76th out of the 85 students in his class, won no political science award, and graduated with a single BA degree. He was also caught for plagiarising on a paper he submitted.

Plagiarism seems to have been a favourite activity. During the 1988 campaign, he lifted an entire speech of Neil Kinnock, the British Labour Party leader, including appropriating a coal miner ancestry—Kinnock’s forefathers were Welsh coal miners, while there is no evidence that anyone in Biden’s family had ever been near a coal mine. Kinnock mentioned that his ancestors spent eight hours underground every day and then played football in the evenings. An inspired Biden claimed that his ancestors worked 12 hours every day in the mines and then played football for four hours. It did not even strike him that British football—soccer—is a rather different sport from American football.

Some of Biden’s lies seem quite strange because they seem gratuitous and unnecessary. He said he was a full professor for four years at the University of Pennsylvania, whereas he was a guest faculty for two years (and got paid nearly $1 million for it) and did not take a single class. He says he drove an 18-wheeler tractor trailer as a summer job, when what he did was drive a school bus. He says he hit a home run—a 368-foot shot, no less—in a baseball match between Congressmen. He did no such thing, in fact he couldn’t strike a single ball in that game.

Last December, quite out of the blue, he said that he had acted as the liaison between Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and the Egyptians during the 1967 six-day war. But he actually met Meir for the first time in 1973, six years later.

The most disturbing lie that he has persisted with for decades now concerns the most tragic event in his life. In December 1972, his wife Neilia and baby daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident, and his young sons Beau and Hunter seriously injured. Police inquiries proved that Mrs Biden had driven into the path of an oncoming truck. Investigators never assigned any blame to the truck driver Curtis Dunn.

But after Dunn’s death in 1999, Biden started saying publicly and regularly that Dunn had been driving drunk. The Dunn family was shocked and wrote to Biden, asking him to stop. He did not stop. According to a 2010 Biden profile in The Atlantic:

“For many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and their daughter as drunk, which he apparently was not. The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add in a baseless charge? The family of the truck driver has laboured to correct the record, but Biden made the reference to drunkenness as recently as 2007, needlessly resurrecting a false and painful accusation.”

This is truly deplorable behaviour, to try to twist a terrible event into a martyrdom story and defame a dead man for personal political mileage. How much would you trust such a man when he wants to combat “misinformation” to save democracy?

And interestingly enough, Nina Jankowicz, who will head the new board, gave an interview last week to National Public Radio, where she said: “I shudder to think about (what will happen) if free speech absolutists (like Elon Musk) were taking over more platforms.”