Who decides what is disinformation?

“Do you know [who] the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government.” 

U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee (Republican), son of Ron Paul, during a May 2022 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.

“So, we’re creating at the U.N. a central capacity to monitor and also have the ability to rapidly react when mis- and disinformation and hate speech is not just threatening our people, our operations, but also, the issues and the causes that we’re working on. But also, we’re going to be gearing up our verified initiative around climate change and developing this U.N. code of conduct on information integrity and digital platforms hoping to set global standards that we can all advocate around so we can collectively work for a more humane internet.”

Melissa Fleming, UN undersecretary-general for Global Communications, at the Nobel Prize Summit in May 2023 in a speech called “Healing Our Troubled Information Ecosystem”.