Dam breaks on Fed censorship
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Dam breaks on Fed censorship
When the Feds tell us they’re coordinating with Big Tech social media to censor their opponents, maybe the Feds are in fact coordinating with Big Tech social media to censor their opponents. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[From Epoch Times]
Over 50 officials in President Joe Biden’s administration across a dozen agencies have been involved with efforts to pressure Big Tech companies to crack down on alleged misinformation, according to documents released on Aug. 31.
Senior officials in the U.S. government, including White House lawyer Dana Remus, deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty, and onetime White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt, have been in touch with one or more major social media companies to try to get the companies to tighten rules on allegedly false and misleading information on COVID-19, and take action against users who violate the rules, the documents show.
In July 2021, for instance, after Biden said that Facebook was “killing people” by not combating misinformation effectively, an executive at Meta reached out to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee, to say that government and Meta teams met after the remarks “to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.”
The same executive later wrote to Murthy saying, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the ‘disinfo dozen,'” including removing pages linked to the group.
The White House publicly pressured social media companies to take action against a group officials dubbed the “disinformation dozen,” which a nonprofit claimed were producing the bulk of “anti-vaccine misinformation” on the platforms. Also in July 2021, Murthy said Facebook had not done enough to combat misinformation.
Rob Flaherty, director of digital strategy for the White House, told Slavitt and others in April 2021 that White House staff would be briefed by Twitter “on vaccine misinfo,” with the meeting including “ways the White House (and our COVID experts) can partner in product work,” according to one of the messages.
In another exchange that year, a Department of Treasury official working on “mis, dis, and mal-information” told Meta workers that the deputy treasury secretary wanted to talk about “potential influence operations.”
In a text in February 2021, meanwhile, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly, wrote to another agency official that she was “trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to better understand the mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to prebunk/debunk as useful.”
The documents were part of a preliminary production in a lawsuit levied against the government by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, later joined by experts maligned by federal officials.
“If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official Covid messaging, that doubt has been erased,” Jenin Younes, a lawyer with the New Civil Liberties Alliance who is representing some of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “The shocking extent of the government’s involvement in silencing Americans, through coercing social-media companies, has now been revealed.”
‘Censorship Enterprise’
Plaintiffs said the massive pressure campaign amounted to a “Censorship Enterprise” because it involved so many officials and agencies.
Government lawyers only identified 45 officials at five agencies—the Department of Homeland Security, CISA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Murthy’s office—who communicated with social media companies on misinformation, but documents they produced showed others were involved, including officials at the Census Bureau and the Departments of Treasury and State.
Responses from the Big Tech companies also revealed more officials involved with the effort.
Meta has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials, including top officials at the White House and the Food and Drug Administration, were in communication with it about content moderation. Many of the officials were not identified in the response by the government.
YouTube disclosed 11 officials not disclosed by the government and Twitter identified nine, including senior officials at the State Department.
“The discovery provided so far demonstrates that this Censorship Enterprise is extremely broad,” plaintiffs said, adding later that “it rises to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, including numerous White House officials.”
Additionally, the FBI was not identified even though the agency recently said, after Meta CEO revealed that the bureau reached out before the 2020 election, that it routinely issues communications to social media companies.
More discovery is needed to uncover the full breadth of the pressure campaign, plaintiffs told the judge overseeing the case.
“When the federal government colludes with Big Tech to censor speech, the American people become subjects rather than citizens,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican, said in a statement. “The [U.S. Department of Justice] must not be allowed to hide behind the vail of executive privilege, especially when there is already compelling evidence that the people’s government colluded with these social media companies to suppress their right of free speech.”
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For some background of my own censorship and First Amendment lawsuit…
Dam breaks on Fed censorship
This is utterly corrupt and evil. He must be exposed so it could never happen again
This is an interesting article from AI & Society published
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-021-01306-w
Speaks of "reframing truth" consensus truth. The author's truth shared with others of her ideological bent. I find great insights reading researched pieces like this of those who I disagree with that informs me of how they think, how they weaponize information against those they disagree with. You must know your enemy to defeat them. Many personnel in this administration and in positions of power within the government have come in from Big Tech/Big Media and share the beliefs and values this writer shares.
They honestly believe this. And have taken license to do what she suggests, empowered, emboldened, envirtued by a calling to perform "a greater good," ends justifying the means, using their positions inside government to do this. Which is where they break the law. They break our Constitution. They've done it. The only question is will our courts allow our Constitution to be broken?
"But the difference is not only that end-users themselves influence ideas or drive trends: it is also that their existence as a reified imaginary creates new stakes in controlling the perception of trends. This is why bots and trolls—interveners in trends—are receiving such significant investment from national governments and professional influencers."
"The extraordinary rise of state-promoted bots and trolls (Jankowicz 2020 ["Moaning Myrtle Disinformation Minister Wannabe]) not only stands as proof that power lies in manipulating the iteration of content via ‘computational propaganda’ but marks this power as a fundamental affordance of the digital public environment. Manipulating apparent consensus allows a minor or evanescent intervention in terms of cost and scale to be instrumentalised to disproportionately significant political result."
"Focussing on the effects of digital technologies in isolation can miss the core problem, which is the new potentials offered by the symbiotic relationship between mainstream media and social media. A newspaper, today, is less its print content or its subscriber base than its ability to reciprocally influence and be influenced by vast like-minded networks of digital communities, in processes that are both deliberate and not, and whose effects are typically invisible to their persuasive targets and deracinated from their progenitors. A public shift of attention onto how information is repeated must include information of all kinds, across all media, revealing a complex information environment in which centuries-old methods of influence, protest and opinion-manipulation combine with unprecedented potentials of disproportionate and rapid amplification."
"In Facebook’s own research on ‘fake news’ in April 2017, three out of four of the kinds of fake news it distinguishes are to do not with content, but with how content is shared. It acknowledges the creation of individual falsehoods, or ‘false news’ (i.e. articles intentionally misstating facts to arouse emotion); but then goes on to stress the importance of ‘influence operations’ (deliberate dissemination by governments or other organisations with intent to distort political sentiment); ‘false amplifiers’ (coordinated activity by inauthentic accounts i.e. bots and trolls with the intent of manipulating political discussion); and ‘disinformation’ the intentional spreading of manipulated information."
"In Danah Boyd’s opening keynote speech at the Republica conference in Berlin in 2018, ‘How an Algorithmic World Can Be Undermined’, she said it was crucial that journalists, as 'first stage amplifiers', and social media users, as ‘second stage amplifiers’ (a casual like, share, post or retweet) become aware of the importance of 'strategic silence'. It was essential, she said, that the ‘reporting ecosystem’ stop unthinkingly reporting things simply because they have been reported by others. Eric Boehlert’s blogsite ‘Press Run’, founded in February 2020, seeks to educate news producers and news amplifiers about ‘feedback loops’, seed stories, ‘both sides’ journalism, and clickbait."
"The disruption that results from the production of doubt thus not only serves the interests of tobacco, fossil fuels and other industries eager to delay regulation: in a global digital world it clears the playing field for transnational financial interests who would like to avoid or control the irksome regulation, taxation and oversight of nation state legislatures. Electoral democracy as a political process is less, therefore, at risk of gradual degradation than an unprecedented opportunity offered by digitally mediated cultures to transnational strategic influencers, especially in two-party first-past-the-post systems like the US and the UK, where marginal election results, easily gamable by cynical or external forces, can have disproportionate impacts. Regulation and anti-trust legislation against the monopoly tech platforms, even changes to their business model, will not necessarily change this fundamental conflict of interest between transnational financial stakes and their potential regulation by national governments; nor the underlying problem, which is that many well-funded networked international interests stand to benefit from intranational societal chaos, division, and doubt about matters of fact. By definition, no billionaire can have a relationship to only one nation."