The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used hundreds of thousands of taxpayer funds to develop a “counter-disinformation” video game targeted at American children aged 6-9 in 2022, per a recent report by the Foundation for Freedom Online. The revelation highlights the federal government’s increasingly alarming desire to control the minds of the American populace by smearing critics of the state as spreaders of “disinformation.”
According to Foundation for Freedom online journalist Oscar Buynevich, the DHS awarded the video game developers $750,000 under their Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Program (TVTP). “The project, titled ‘Defenders Against Disinformation: Defeating Disinformation with Digital Gaming’ used the funds to create a video game that pitted ‘superhero’ governments, industry partners, and legacy media companies against disinformation,” reported Buynevich.
The game will give students examples of “new emerging threats of disinformation” to tackle in the game. The “disinformation” used in the game will be determined by so-called “disinformation experts.” (Note that during the Covid pandemic, the “experts” falsely labeled things like vaccine injuries and the credible Covid lab leak theory “disinformation.”) Students will also be prompted to combat speech that is “fairly harmless offensive rhetoric” and not just false or “harmful” rhetoric. Ultimately students will be taught not just how to recognize and reject disfavored information, but also how to “prevent and defeat” it.
Defenders Against Disinformation was created by the Wilson Center, “a purportedly non-partisan nonprofit established by Congressional charter in 1968,” noted Buynevich. The Wilson Center relies on Congressionally appropriated funds for one-third of its budget and has a 30-year rent-free lease at the Washington D.C. Ronald Reagan Building.
In a public statement, the Wilson Center admitted that the game received funding from DHS’s counter-terrorism program known as the “Serious Game” initiative, which is “aimed at examining violent extremism and how it could be ‘exacerbated by…misinformation [and] disinformation….’” The Wilson Center also insisted in its public statement that the game is “in line with our nonpartisan, scholarship driven mission.”
Buynevich believes the “Serious Games” initiative is further evidence that the federal government is trying to “psychologically ‘inoculate’ members of the public (in this case, schoolchildren) against alleged disinformation.”
“Psychological inoculation” is used to turn the public off to certain ideas or viewpoints “by exposing them to deliberately weakened versions of them ahead of time,” explained Buynevich. The Wilson Center even admitted in its DHS application that research on “psychological inoculation” informed its development:
“This program would build off of previous practices to combat disinformation. Studies have illustrated an effective prevention method for disinformation is to use media to 'inoculate' key audiences against disinformation, such as through watching videos that identify common strategies for disinformation so that the audiences are aware of malign actor strategies (Lewandowsky & Yesilada, 2021) or playing games the pre-bunk players and make them more resilient in the face of disinformation (Basol et al., 2020). This line of research suggests that through exposure to disinformation, the audience will become more resilient in the face of disinformation.”
The Wilson Center’s Defenders of Disinformation game grant is also categorized under the funding track for “media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives.”
As Buynevich explains, “‘Media literacy’ is the idea of psychologically training citizens not to trust or access certain types of establishment-disfavored media.” Media literacy initiatives are already prevalent in classrooms across the country. Media literacy service NewsGuard has partnered with the American Federation of Teachers as a client. Moreover, “states such as California are passing laws mandating the study of ‘media literacy’ in schools in an effort to pre-bias children against certain information sources” and Washington State “is one of the leading states in passing legislation to develop “media literacy” education,” reported Buynevich.
The Wilson Center’s Defenders of Disinformation game was created for classrooms in the North East Washington Education Service District 101, which included over 28,414 students in their target population from 6th to 9th grade. However, the Wilson Center indicated that their ultimate goal is to distribute the game across all of Washington State and the rest of the country.
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