Ramaswamy reacts to halt of DHS disinformation board: 'Not a left or right wing issue'
'Nation of Victims' author Vivek Ramaswamy argued the government should not be regulating speech within the public sphere on 'Fox & Friends.'
The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz railed against pernicious, right-wing elements on Wednesday that she claimed doomed the Biden administration's Disinformation Governance Board, but she left out one prominent voice who mocked the short-lived entity: Jeff Bezos.
The multi-billionaire owner of the Washington Post took a shot at the board last week while responding to President Biden's call for corporations to pay higher taxes to bring down inflation.
"The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead," Bezos quipped on Twitter. "Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection."
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ‘DISINFORMATION’ BOARD ON PAUSE AMID FREE SPEECH CONCERNS: REPORTS
Bezos wasn't mentioned in Lorenz's report, which was panned by conservatives.
The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (AP)
Bezos was far from the only non right-wing figure to take potshots at the board, which Lorenz herself conceded on Twitter was a "disaster on all fronts." Yet her piece framed the disinformation board's failure as due to the Biden administration not properly standing up to the "right-wing Internet apparatus," "far-right influencers," "right-wing disinformation" and "far-right social media platforms."
It also pushed the Biden administration line that the board had been mischaracterized by critics as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that would police speech online, and she scolded conservative websites that, as Lorenz put it, "began mining Jankowicz’s past social media posts and publishing articles to generate controversy."
Among the revelations uncovered about Jankowicz was that she had pushed the false narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop first broken by the New York Post was a Trump campaign operation. Lorenz also left that detail out of her report on the "pause" of the Disinformation Governance Board; Jankowicz has also resigned.
In her report, Lorenz touted Jankowicz as a "well-known figure in the field of fighting disinformation and extremism" but painted her as a "victim" of "coordinated online attacks," complaining her appointment "was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating."
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"The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission… but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing Internet," Lorenz wrote Wednesday. "She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral."
Lorenz and the Washington Post did not reply to requests for comment.
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