New York Times article suggests Biden appoint ‘reality czar’ to fight misinformation and conspiracy theories

Roose admitted that the plan sounds “dystopian” but argued that readers should “hear them out.”

Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford’s Internet Observatory, is quoted in the article explaining that a “centralized task force” could be useful to effectively tamp down conspiracy theories. DiResta made the case that agencies such as the Federal Election Commission and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could benefit from one overarching conspiracy theory task force rather than combating election and coronavirus conspiracy theories separately.

“If each of them are doing it distinctly and independently, you 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 said.

Other suggestions of ways to combat “misinformation” in the article included “auditing” social media algorithms and enacting federal government programs referred to as a “social stimulus.”

“I’ve spent the past several years reporting on our national reality crisis, and I worry that unless the Biden administration treats conspiracy theories and disinformation as the urgent threats they are, our parallel universes will only drift further apart, and the potential for violent unrest and civic dysfunction will only grow,” Roose wrote about his motivation to reach out to experts in the first place.

The article also quotes a research director at Harvard University who floated the idea of a “truth commission,” similar to the 9/11 commission, in order to investigate the violent incident during a Trump rally on Capitol Hill last month.

The column was met with criticism on Twitter, with some expressing concern about the federal government undertaking such a process.

“A) A writer @nytimes just proposed a governmental ‘reality czar.’” former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson tweeted. “Yay Orwell!”

“A Biden-Appointed ‘Reality Czar’?” National Review’s Kyle Smith tweeted. “Sure, No Way That Could Backfire.”

“TFW the government/media complex establishes its Ministry of Truth, but realizes ‘Ministry of Truth’ sounds too creepy & totalitarian, so calls it ‘the Reality Czar’ instead,” professor Geoffrey Miller tweeted.