Tag Archives: misinformation

When Our Government Works Against The Interests Of The Voters

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On November, The Washington Examiner posted an article about the partnership between an agency in the Department of Homeland Security and several university centers to identify online content worthy of censorship. Why is our government working with universities to censor free speech? Might that be part of the reason our colleges have become indoctrination centers?

The article reports:

An agency within the Department of Homeland Security partnered with several university centers to identify online content worthy of censorship, according to a new report from the House Judiciary Committee.

The report, a project of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, detailed how the federal government formed a partnership with the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, and other groups. Titled the “Election Integrity Partnership,” the consortium aimed to identify election-related content that needed to be censored.

The report said the partnership was established in July 2020 by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a small agency within the Department of Homeland Security. The partnership then worked with social media companies to throttle content that questioned the integrity of the election process.

“The federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions,” the report said. “This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefited one side of the political aisle: True information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors.”

The article also notes:

The report named several prominent politicians, people, and conservative news outlets that had been targeted for censorship, including former President Donald Trump, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the Babylon Bee satire site, and Newsmax.

“Stanford and others, in collaboration with the federal government, established the EIP for the express purpose of violating Americans’ civil liberties: Because no federal agency ‘has a focus on, or authority regarding, election misinformation originating from domestic sources within the United States,’ there is ‘a critical gap for non-governmental entities to fill.’ CISA and Stanford created the EIP to bridge this ‘critical gap’ — an unconstitutional workaround for unconstitutional censorship,” the report said.

The report contained numerous screenshots of emails between government officials and employees of Twitter, Facebook, and the university “misinformation” centers, many of which included direct requests to censor content.

One of the things that was censored was any reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Government agencies knew the laptop was real and probably anticipated the information on it being reported before the election. The letter from the retired intelligence agents came out in October 2020, just before the election. Any valid information on the laptop was censored. At some point, American voters are going to realize that they have been manipulated and lied to by their own government. That will be interesting to watch.

Disinformation And Misinformation

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I apologize in advance for the length of this article, but there is a lot of information in the article linked.

On April 26th, PC Magazine posted an article titled, “Why Disinformation and Misinformation Are More Dangerous Than Malware.”

Here are some highlights from that article:

“The overwhelming majority of people who are ever going to see a piece of misinformation on the internet are likely to see it before anybody has a chance to do anything about it,” according to Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter.

When he was at Twitter, Roth observed that over 90% of the impressions on posts were generated within the first three hours. That’s not much time for an intervention, which is why it’s important for the cybersecurity community to develop content moderation technology that “can give truth time to wake up in the morning,” he says.

“It’s a hacking of people problem,” lamented panel moderator Ted Schlein, chairman and general partner at Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity venture capital firm. “In my view, if we spend so much time, energy, and dollars fighting to protect our technology and our systems, shouldn’t we be doing the same for people?”

The cybersecurity community should focus on creating ways to detect and shut down disinformation while mitigating its effects, Schlein argued. Presumably, this call to action includes targeting misinformation, which differs from disinformation as it relates to intent. (Misinformation is defined(Opens in a new window) as “incorrect or misleading information,” regardless of intent. Disinformation is a lie told deliberately to influence opinion or cover up a fact.)

I totally disagree with his perspective. The responsibility is not with the platform–the responsibility is with the reader to take the time to evaluate the information and do their own research. Saying that a platform should detect and shut down disinformation leads to censorship. It also brings  up the question of who decides what is misinformation or disinformation. Remember that during the 2020 election, articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop were censored and declared misinformation or disinformation. How did that work out?

The article also notes:

Here are some recent examples of disinformation campaigns and misinformation spreaders caught in the act:

Why is the platform required to protect their users? The users can make decisions as to what they choose to believe and which platforms they choose to frequent.

Mr. Roth also stated that truth can change. If truth changes, was it truth to begin with?

The article reports:

Roth began his part of the panel discussion by noting that it’s natural for knowledge and perceived truths to change over time, and “something that is known to be true with absolute certainty one day could be known to be totally false another.”

Roth cautioned that misinformation is not actually like malware because malware is software that has been designed to generate a specific outcome every time it runs. Disinformation doesn’t guarantee the intended results. Effectively tackling misinformation and disinformation online will require dynamism and flexibility from cybersecurity developers, Roth said.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. There is a section at the end that reminds us of the First Amendment. Not all media platforms are happy that The First Amendment exists. We need to keep that in mind.

The Death Of The Fourth Estate

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On Thursday, Just the News posted an article about the American government’s latest efforts to muffle the free speech of any American who does not agree with the aims of the government.

The article reports:

The government’s campaign to fight “misinformation” has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts.

Some of us have real questions as to what constitutes “misinformation.” Vaccine safety is an issue for those who have been impacted by the side effects of the Covid vaccine. There are an awful lot of people under the age of 40 experiencing sudden (and sometimes fatal) heart problems. Dissent is part of what made America great, and it should not be discouraged. I am all for protests–I am not for riots, and I think it’s time the media learned the difference.

The article continues:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program.

DARPA said those tools were used “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information,” beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago. 

The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms. 

DARPA set four specific goals for the program:

    1. “Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
    2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
    3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
    4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

This sounds like something that belongs in a dictatorship–not a republic.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is frightening. There is nothing in our Constitution that allows this sort of interference with the free thinking of the American people.

This Might Be A Very Interesting Case

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On Tuesday, The Epoch Times reported that Terry Doughty, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, has ruled that Missouri and Louisiana officials can obtain documents to investigate the Biden administration’s alleged collusion with social media giants in an effort to censor and suppress free speech.

The article reports:

The ruling comes after the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri filed a lawsuit in May alleging that the Biden administration “colluded with and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms by labeling the content ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’”

The attorneys general named social media giants such as Meta, Twitter, and YouTube in a press release announcing the lawsuit in May.

They also claimed that President Joe Biden himself, along with other top-ranking government officials, had worked with the platforms to censor and suppress free speech, including “truthful information” pertaining to the origins of COVID-19, the effectiveness of masks, election integrity, and the security of voting by mail, as well as the ongoing Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Among the defendants named in the lawsuit are Biden, former press secretary Jen Psaki, chief medical adviser to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Disinformation Governance Board executive director Nina Jankowicz, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and others.

As someone whose Right Wing Granny group is almost always ‘restricted’ on Facebook, I appreciate their efforts. I have been ‘shadow banned’ for years. It has become a way of life.

Do you honestly believe that if the truth about Hunter’s laptop, President Biden’s mental state, or the honest numbers on Covid-19 had been generally known by the public, the vote for President would have been even close? I don’t believe 2020 was an honest election, but that is another story. A Republic (which America is–not a Democracy) depends on a free, honest press to inform its citizens. We don’t have that right now. The only way you are going to find out what is actually happening is to go to the internet and find news sources you trust. You cannot currently find a lot of truth in any of the mainstream media.

Preparing The Way For “The Ministry Of Truth”

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One America News posted an article today with the following headline, “White House supports social media’s ability to silence ‘misinformation.'”

The article reports:

According to the White House, social media companies have the responsibility of shutting down misinformation. During a press conference Wednesday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Facebook’s decision to uphold its ban of President Trump.

The obvious question here is, “Who decides exactly what is misinformation?”

The article continues:

Specifically, she was asked if Big Tech oligarchs can muzzle a former president, what’s to stop them from silencing anyone? Psaki said she had no comment on Trump, but said Joe Biden’s view is that the major platforms have the job to stop amplifying “untrustworthy content.”

“His view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public,” stated the press secretary.

Remember–this is the same press secretary that has stated that President Biden is simply cleaning up the mess at the southern border that President Trump created. Has anyone bothered to censor her misinformation?