Platforms are here to devour your speech, no matter how egalitarian, libertarian the Selected Few may sound. What is it that compels us to acknowledge the Selected Ones?
Opening Day 1937
A better more robust culture, it required more of you.
You Threaten Democracy By Questioning the Vote, But Also By Wanting Local Property Rights
In Michigan, law makers now say due process and the exercise of “democracy” delays the agenda. They forget that they said democracy is what they protect when they reject people such as we who believe in Natural Law, the rule of law, and well, our state laws.
https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/commentary/is-democracy-too-messy-in-michigan
There was a consistent thread in the Michigan Senate Energy and Environment Committee meeting Tuesday: Democracy is too messy. When it comes time to decide the siting of large-scale wind and solar projects in Michigan, it’s best to let the experts decide.
Despite that effort at balance, Sen. John Damoose, R-Harbor Springs, saw the end game: Lansing, not local communities, would have the final say.
“What I’m concerned is that this effort allows the public to go through the motions of being involved, but at the end of the day, their opinion really doesn’t matter,” Damoose said.
CISA, EIP, DHS, They All Are Watching. Still
While we party on the fumes of freedom not knowing the tank is almost empty, nothing has changed despite Elawn taking over Twitter. This is not freedom taking hold and shining the light of scrutiny, it is a shut down operation. Matt Taibi reports more devastating news. Interesting – isn’t Elawn working with Stanford University on AI as well? Guess what, Stanford is involved on Twitter in disturbing ways.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/taibbi-big-brother-flagging-you
“We just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA,” wrote Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council on July 31, 2020, according to a devastating new House report:
So much for “CISA did not found, fund, or otherwise control the EIP.” That’s what the public was told in March, after Michael Shellenberger and I testified to Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government Committee about the ubiquitous presence in the Twitter Files of the the Election Integrity Partnership, a cross-platform content-flagging operation set up ahead of the 2020 Trump-Biden election.
Nominally run by Stanford University, the EIP is really government censorship in a ski mask, a creature of the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Despite media protestations to the contrary, this has never really been in doubt. Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos told the world EIP was formed because CISA “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do its “necessary” work:
The Platforms are censoring without our knowledge.
Stealth Censorship
The study is a roadmap on “how to censor people using secret methods so that they wouldn’t know they’re being censored, so that it wouldn’t generate an outrage cycle, and so that it’d be more palatable for the tech platforms who wouldn’t get blowback because people wouldn’t know they’re being censored,” Mike Benz, a former State Department diplomat specializing in U.S. foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show Monday night.
AS WE TOLD YOU IN SEVERED CONSCIENCE TWITTER COLLECTS DATA AND PROVIDES LARGE QUANTITIES FOR RESEARCH ON DIS-INFORMATION.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01388-6#Sec2
Our analysis relies on a dataset of Twitter posts collected during the 2020 US election. This dataset was extracted from a broader set of 1.04 billion election-related posts collected between 1 September 2020 and 15 December 2020. To construct our dataset, we first identified 430 incidents—distinct stories that included false, exaggerated or otherwise misleading claims or narratives. Search terms were devised for each incident, extracting 23 million posts generated by 10.8 million accounts from the broader collection. Search terms and incidents were identified through real-time monitoring and updating by dozens of analysts and several community partners as part of the Election Integrity Partnership2. As such, we believe that our dataset provides a thorough—if not comprehensive—overview of misinformation during the 2020 US presidential election.
In an extreme case, a platform could remove or hide all content matching search terms related to an emerging misinformation incident. To simulate this, we ran our model until a given time point at which growth was stopped entirely (Fig. 2a). Our results indicate that outright removal can indeed be effective, producing a 93.8% median reduction in total posts (that is, tweets, replies, quote tweets and retweets) on the topic, if implemented within 30 minutes (89% credible interval (CI), (92.9, 94.4))
…‘virality circuit breakers’, which seek to reduce the spread of a trending misinformation topic without explicitly removing content—for example, by suspending algorithmic amplification
Freedom of Reach, isn’t that a term we’ve heard before? Twitter already practices this approach with filtering. Remember, a Federal court determined that the FBI used deamplication during COVID.
“They explicitly say that the purpose of this censorship psychology study is to eliminate resistance to vaccination efforts, equity and democratic processes, meaning elections,” Benz said. “So they want to be able to control and prevent all opposition to election procedures that they want in place, to vaccination campaigns and to what appears to be racial and climate equity initiatives.”
The research comes as a federal judge has ruled that government agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security Department used third parties as proxies to coerce social media firms into censorship during the 2020 election and the pandemic.