No, Biden is not telling kids to report their parents for covid disinformation

August 31, 2022

Comment

Tucker Carlson: “At the same moment that Biden is accusing Republicans of fascism, his DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has published a cartoon on Facebook urging children to report their parents to federal authorities if their parents post something called covid disinformation, because that’s not Soviet or anything. What the hell is going on?”

Blake Masters, Arizona Senate candidate (R): “Now this latest thing, Biden’s DHS, they’re trying to recruit children to rat out their parents for questioning some official covid narrative. This is straight from Mao’s Cultural Revolution. This is Chinese Communist Party stuff.”

— exchange on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Aug. 29

This is a strange one. But it’s a good example of how something pops up in the right-wing universe, gets grabbed and twisted by Tucker Carlson, and then embraced by a Republican candidate.

If this was a surprise to you — that Biden is urging children to rat out their parents — that’s because it’s completely untrue.

Let’s follow the disinformation highway.

This claim appears to have started with a commentary by Michael Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) and a former State Department official in the Trump administration. FFO calls itself “a free speech watchdog” dedicated to a “free and open internet.”

On the FFO website, Benz has argued in several articles that DHS has engaged in internet censorship. One article was titled “DHS Encouraged Children To Report Family To Facebook For Challenging US Government Covid Claims.” That article highlighted a YouTube video titled “Countering Disinformation in Social Media” that was posted June 22, 2021, by DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

We watched the six-minute video, which has only about 6,000 views so far and which you can view below. It’s animated, but you will see why we are puzzled Benz says it is “a cartoon” aimed at children. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

An animated moderator stands in a classroom, as this is a lesson on how to counter disinformation in the age of the coronavirus. In particular, the video seeks to help people separate fact from opinion. About 2½ minutes into the video, a hypothetical example is given of a woman — Benz describes her as “a young female protagonist” — who discovers that “Uncle Steve” has posted this claim: “Everybody knows Covid-19 is no worse than the flu.”

The video warns that “everybody” is a phrase designed to appeal to the emotions of a crowd for an idea to be accepted. The narrator also notes Uncle Steve is incorrectly comparing a pandemic virus to a seasonal virus — described as a “weak analogy” because “the two viruses have telling differences.” The moderator urges viewers to not blindly accept posts but “do your own research” and “rely on fact-based sources,” such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The moderator also says it is important to not make the same mistake as Uncle Steve — relying on sources that confirm what he already believes. “This is called confirmation bias,” the moderator says. When “Susan” corrects Uncle Steve after doing her own research, the narrator says, her uncle rejects her findings (“You’re a sheep if you trust the CDC”) and responds with an “ad hominem, or personal attack, another type of logical fallacy.”

Big words for a supposed children’s video.

The moderator then says: “You can’t win every argument online. You can protect yourself from disinformation. You can stop it from spreading, too.” The video shows a finger clicking “report as disinformation” over the post from Uncle Steve.

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Benz criticizes the video for suggesting that Uncle Steve is part of an influence campaign: “He is just Uncle Steve. And all he did was state his opinion, that Covid-19 is about as deadly as the flu.” That, in Benz’s opinion, does not qualify as disinformation.

For the record, at least 6.5 million people have died of covid-19 since it emerged in early 2020. The World Health Organization estimates that 290,000 to 650,000 people die of flu-related causes every year worldwide.

When CISA released the video, it was not described as a video for children. Instead, it was pitched as a “tool kit” for government officials. “These tool kit resources are designed to help State, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) officials bring awareness to misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories appearing online related to COVID-19’s origin, scale, government response, prevention and treatment,” CISA’s website says. “Each product was designed to be tailored with local government websites and logos.”

On Monday, Benz’s column was cited in an opinion article in the right-wing Epoch Times by conservative commentator Roger Kimball. “For the first time in our history, we have the U.S. government deploying a sort of ‘domestic CIA’ authorized to surveil and censor the ‘lawful speech of U.S. citizens, stopping them from talking freely about their own elections or criticizing their own democratic institutions,’ ” Kimball wrote.

As an example, Kimball noted “a children’s cartoon” that “ends by recommending that ‘Uncle Steve’ be reported for suggesting that ‘COVID-19 is no worse than the flu.’ Talk about creepy.”

Then Carlson took it to the next level.

Somehow, Carlson on his show twisted this into “a cartoon on Facebook urging children to report their parents to federal authorities if their parents post something called covid disinformation.”

Masters agreed, falsely claiming that “they’re trying to recruit children to rat out their parents for questioning some official covid narrative.”

Carlson and a Masters spokesman did not respond to queries. But Masters was so proud of the exchange that he posted it on Twitter.

“This educational video was created as part of efforts to help the general public identify and respond to disinformation online,” CISA said in a statement to The Fact Checker. “It makes evidence-based suggestions like, ‘conduct your own factual research.’ Contrary to the claims of some, it does not in any way encourage any child to report their parents or anyone else to the federal government. All materials, including this video, are subject to rigorous review processes designed to protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”

The Pinocchio Test

Each step of the way, the story got further from the truth.

More than a year ago, the cybersecurity arm of DHS posted on YouTube a rather benign video aimed at adults about how to be smarter about coronavirus claims spread on social media.

For some strange reason, it was described in conservative media as a cartoon aimed at children so that they could report family members to Facebook. In Carlson’s hands, this wrong claim was hyped up even more: that children are being told to report parents to “federal authorities.” Masters eagerly agreed, saying the government was trying to “recruit children to rat out their parents” — a falsehood he then spread on Twitter.

Ironically, this was a video about disinformation. It would be funny if it were not so sad.