NY governor announces initiative to ‘inoculate’ children against ‘misinformation’

New York Governor Kathy Hochul Tuesday announced a “media literacy” initiative to “inoculate” school children against “conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and online hate.”

Critics are calling the program a “Ministry of Truth” because of its promise to teach children grades K–12 what information online is true and what is not. Hochul said she has ordered the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to develop these “media literacy tools.”

“This will teach students — and even teachers — to help understand how to spot conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and online hate,” Hochul said at a press conference. “Start talking about what we’re seeing out there. Give these teachers the tools they need to help these conversations in school. And by teaching younger New Yorkers about how to discern between digital fact and digital fiction, we can better inoculate them from hatred and the spread of it.”

Former State Department official and Foundation for Freedom Online Executive Director Mike Benz says media literacy is more sinister than it sounds.

“Media literacy says if you don’t read the right media sources — official media sources, official state-backed media or government sources or regime-compliant media — then you are illiterate. You are media illiterate. And you need to get your mind right to read the right media sources. So media literacy is just regime media installation,” said Benz.

Media literacy has already been incorporated into K–12 curricula in California, Delaware, New Jersey, and Texas. One of the ways students are taught to be media literate is to consume strictly mainstream media, though this is not said outright. 

In the SIFT (Stop, Investigate, Find, Trace) method, for example, students are told to look up the source of the information on Wikipedia, a government disinformation tool. When they do, they find all mainstream media sources described as “trusted,” while most alternative media — including all Right-leaning media — labeled as “unreliable” or “conspiracy.”

That is because Wikipedia is often manipulated by government sources. In 2021, for example, the Biden administration commissioned a group named Hacks/Hackers to hire Wikipedia censors — called “Research Coordinators” — for a project called NewsQ. The censors’ job was to list which sources of vaccine information are “credible sources” and which are “unreliable.” Mainstream outlets were labeled “reliable,” while alternative media sources which questioned the vaccine’s safety were labeled “unreliable” or “conspiracy.”

In media literacy students are also told to search for “consensus” between information sources. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) — a partnership between mainstream media outlets, social media platforms, and Google — ensures that not only will the same information be found across all mainstream news sites, but that only those sites will appear on Google’s search engine in response to searches for news items.

In addition, Google will offer “fact checks” among search results which will declare whether information is true or false. The fact-checking industry is headed by The Poynter Institute, the world’s largest fact-checking giant and owner of PolitiFact. Poynter is funded by Google, Facebook/Meta, the US State Department, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ebay´s Omidyar Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), understood to be a CIA front.

“Media literacy is literally about training you to be stupid,” said Benz. “To be dumb. The underlying supposition of the illegitimate field of media literacy is that if you do critical thinking, you will become a heretic. You will become a wrongthinker. A dissident. A heterodox person. If you think critically, if you go down the rabbit hole, if you do your own independent research, you will not trust the regime. You will not trust the system. You will not trust government narratives. You won’t trust legacy mainstream media.”