The fight against disinformation (and hate speech) is a central political strategy of woke activists. According to the Duden Diversity Lexicon, disinformation is “deliberately false information intended to deceive”.112
In particular, populists allegedly spread lies deliberately, thereby endangering democracy. Militant democrats must devote themselves to combating disinformation, right-wing extremism, and hate speech to counter support for allegedly anti-democratic positions.
In the fight against disinformation, so-called “fact-checkers” from civil society, NGOs, or intelligence services are to be empowered to decide what constitutes disinformation.113 A conglomerate of influential NGOs has now emerged.114 With the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), laws already exist with which Germany and the entire EU have committed to the political fight against disinformation.115 The World Economic Forum (WEF) also sees targeted misinformation as the greatest threat.116
From a liberal perspective, this is an alarming development: only in authoritarian states does the state prescribe which information is true and which is not. In a constitutional state, public courts always decide whether statements are covered by freedom of opinion; according to the Basic Law, state censorship does not occur in Germany.
The possibility that woke activists could enforce global information censorship in the political struggle for discursive hegemony poses an existential threat to freedom of thought. For woke activists, disinformation is the politically correct, euphemistic term for forbidden thoughts. The extent to which state-affiliated censorship of relevant content in the name of disinformation has already occurred was made public through the scandal of the so-called Twitter Files.117 State censorship can now occur digitally without the broader public noticing. No one can yet predict what will be censored as part of the fight against disinformation by powerful individuals and organisations.
In the so-called Westminster Declaration, prominent intellectuals, journalists, and dissidents warn of the dangers posed by a global industrial censorship complex legitimised as a fight against disinformation.118