In August 2021, The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder released their Final Report on dis- and mis-information (available here), which was commissioned by Katie Couric and Prince Harry, among others, as detailed in the latest release of the Twitter Files.

Commissioners like Harry “contributed to the report throughout the process through research, deliberation and discussion, and collaborative working groups, which produced the draft recommendations… [Commissioners] were not required to fully endorse every recommendation and insights contained in the final report.”

The State Department and USAID use taxpayer money to fund the Aspen Institute to the tune of millions of dollars annually. Its Final Report recommends, among many other things:

• The government passes a law mandating social media firms to provide unfettered access to data, or empowers the FTC in this regard

• The government should be involved in restricting “false information” “even if it means losing some freedom”

Taibbi implies that this would enable serious abuses of power such as those the FTC is currently attempting, as it demands Twitter “identify all journalists and other members of the media” involved in the Twitter Files.

The Institute’s Final Report is over 80 pages long and has been publicly available since November 15, 2021. Prince Harry joined its Commission on Information Disorder in March 2021, and it was covered by the press then.

While Taibbi’s screenshots do appear in the publicly available Final Report, it contradicts Taibbi’s implications many times throughout, such as when it says “The Commission recognizes that in a free society there are no ‘arbiters of truth,’ and “our task is not to eradicate every half truth or willful misrepresentation of the facts — a task that is not only impossible but even desirable in a free society.” Additionally the Report recommends that the government “implement protections for researchers and journalists who violate platform terms of service by responsibly conducting research on public data of civic interest.”

In today’s Twitter Files, Taibbi calls the Commission, and others, an “incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back, claiming a special right to… be fact-checked only by themselves.”

-Brandon Gorrell