The Death Of The Fourth Estate

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.