Ireland is introducing “hate speech” laws. “Hate speech” laws are not simply censorship. Their deeper purpose is to terminate equality under the law, so the normative indigenous members of a nation are made to feel like an alien underclass.
The US Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) is broadening its efforts to curb “dangerous speech” – misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s artificial intelligence (“AI”) algorithms have given it an insatiable habit for “lies and hate speech.” But the man who built them can’t fix the problem.
One of the latest, and perhaps most disturbing, new frontiers of censorship is the escalating means of excluding citizens from the financial system as extra-judicial punishment for expressing views or engaging in political activism disapproved of by establishment power.
The Exposé has been a victim of this latest new frontier of censorship. A week ago, for the third time this year, The Exposé’s account was frozen and the donations in the account have been “temporarily” blocked. Read more HERE. Support the Expose HERE .
How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation
The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.
[Note: read the article to understand what the author means by “lies” and “hate speech.”]
When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March 2018, it would kick off Facebook’s largest publicity crisis to date. It compounded fears that the algorithms that determine what people see were amplifying fake news and hate speech, and prompted the company to start a team with a directive that was a little vague: to examine the societal impact of the company’s algorithms.
Joaquin Quiñonero Candela was a natural pick to head it up. In his six years at Facebook, he’d created some of the first algorithms for targeting users with content precisely tailored to their interests, and then he’d diffused those algorithms across the company. Now his mandate would be to make them less harmful. However, his hands were tied, and the drive to make money came first.
Read the full article by MIT Technology Review HERE
“Hate Speech” laws: Welcome to Stasi Ireland!
Those who have doubted that Western Civilisation is in the process of being dismantled are about to receive their definitive reply. The supposedly ‘unavoidable’ fire-brigade damage inflicted on our freedoms in the Spring of 2020, which has never been repaired or reversed, is about to be consolidated.
Since those fateful days in the Spring of 2020, this was always going to happen, being baked into the lockdown cake. This is because, if an ‘authority’ suspends supposedly inalienable rights and freedoms, and then, after a long period of withholding them without objectively discernible justification, trickles their simulacrum back out under the rubric of concession, it soon becomes clear that these rights and freedoms have ceased to exist. After that, it is only a matter of carting the husks away.
This week, in my country, Ireland, the bulletin board has overnight been posted with a new set of instructions, concerning what may be written, said or — in the first analysis — thought. It is called the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022, and relates to the issue that has become known as “hate speech,” which refers to the manner in which the citizenry is henceforth to be permitted to speak to and about certain named categories of ‘protected minorities’ whom we awoke not long ago to find unexpectedly in our midst.
Having had an opportunity to read the draft Bill, I believe it to be extremely dangerous and, in fact, capable of, in the first instance, entirely deleting what is left of public debate or discussion on a number of issues: viz, race, “colour,” sexuality, what is called gender, Islam, atheism, et cetera — i.e., “protected characteristics,” which essentially means characteristics protected under Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism – as well as, purely tokenistically, nationality, disability and “descent,” whatever that may be.
Instead of “critical opinions,” however, the Bill uses the term “hatred,” an amorphous term that is nowhere defined other than tautologously, as follows:
‘Hatred’ means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.
In some contexts, by way of offering clarification, readers of the Bill are referred to the EU Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of November 2008, dealing with ‘combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law’. (Confirming that the Bill is, accordingly, the expression of EU policy and mandates.) However, the Framework Decision tells us very little else, its ‘definitions’ being just as tautologous as those in the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022. “Hatred,” for example, is defined in the Framework Decision as follows:
‘Hatred’ shall be understood as referring to hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
This is in no sense a definition of “hatred.” In fact, it tells us nothing of what hatred is, assuming that everyone already knows. The trouble is that when the law starts to trick around with notions that ‘everyone already knows, we very rapidly descend into subjectivism, arbitrariness, and – yes – prejudice.
Read the full article by John Waters Unchained HERE
Big Brother’s Playbook: DHS Efforts to Curb “Dangerous” Speech
The federal government’s guidelines to counter “misinformation” and “disinformation” – what we might more accurately describe as Big Brother’s Playbook – has been released. The US government and its allies, including media gatekeepers and educational institutions and global corporations, have become the judges and juries of “misinformation.” And Big Tech is their executioner.
According to recently-filed court documents in Missouri v. Biden: “The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous.”
It’s especially relevant to the 2022 and 2024 elections:
- DHS is “directly engaging with social media companies to flag MDM.” MDM is defined as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. It is doing so “ahead of midterm elections in 2022” and is readying its efforts with eyes focused on 2024.
- DHS is questioning how to “inspire innovators to partner with the government” without this “being seen as government ‘propaganda’.”
- The DHS focus on disinformation isn’t limited to elections. It is recommended to focus on misinformation “that undermines critical functions carried out by other key democratic institutions, such as the courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public health measures.”
- The DHS plan would “provide financial support” to non-governmental partners who counter “false and misleading narratives.” In other words, US government contractors who would receive funding to suffocate anti-government narratives.
I hope the dangers of these programs and initiatives are apparent. It would be the federal government and its partners who would define misinformation. These aren’t neutral observers; rather, their power relies on a narrative. Perceived illegitimacy is a risk.
In other words, it’s the belief that’s the threat, not the “misinformation” by itself. Thus, the real targets are those who listen and read and watch. Beliefs are shaped by limiting what they can see. Better to keep those dangerous ideas out of public view.
Read the full article by The Reactionary HERE
The Consortium Imposing the Growing Censorship Regime
There has been some reporting – by me [Glenn Greenwald] and others – on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and “false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be “disinformation.”
The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, Bellingcat, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
That these groups are funded by the West’s security state, Big Tech, and other assorted politically active billionaires is not speculation or some fevered conspiracy theory. For various legal reasons, they are required to disclose their funders, and these facts about who finances them are therefore based on their own public admissions. So often the financing is funnelled through well-established front groups for the CIA, the State Department and the U.S. National Security State, such as “National Endowment for Democracy.”
One of the latest, and perhaps most disturbing, new frontiers of censorship is the escalating means of excluding citizens from the financial system as extra-judicial punishment for expressing views or engaging in political activism disapproved of by establishment power. In one sense, this is not new.
In 2012, the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee demanded that financial services companies such as the online payment processor PayPal, credit card companies MasterCard and Visa, and the Bank of America all terminated the accounts of WikiLeaks as punishment.
This year PayPal has expanded the use of expulsion from the financial system as punishment for what it deems “extremist” political views and activities. There is no question that exclusion from the financial system is becoming the tool of choice for Western censors in both the public and private sectors, who work together — just as Big Tech and the US Security State do – to identify and punish dissidents too dangerous to be permitted to speak.