Thought Police for the 21st Century
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
DETROIT-The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by
Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from
progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign
agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and
imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of
speech. Any state that accrues this kind of power will use it. And for that
reason I traveled last week to Detroit to join David North, the chairperson
of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, in a
live-stream event calling for the formation of a broad front to block an
escalating censorship while we still have a voice.
"The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines
and machines that control humans," Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks,
said in a statement issued in support of the event. "Between the
democratization of communication and usurpation of communication by
artificial intelligence. While the Internet has brought about a revolution
in people's ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting
democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core.
Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially,
logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to
re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action.
Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an
existential threat to humanity. While still in its infancy, the trends are
clear and of a geometric nature. The phenomena differs in traditional
attempts to shape cultural and political phenomena by operating at scale,
speed and increasingly at a subtlety that eclipses human capacities."
In late April and early May the World Socialist Web Site, which identifies
itself as a Trotskyite group that focuses on the crimes of capitalism, the
plight of the working class and imperialism, began to see a steep decline in
readership. The decline persisted into June. Search traffic to the World
Socialist Web Site has been reduced by 75 percent overall. And the site is
not alone. AlterNet's search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News'
traffic is down 72 percent. And the situation appears to be growing worse.
The reductions coincided with the introduction of algorithms imposed by
Google to fight "fake news." Google said the algorithms are designed to
elevate "more authoritative content" and marginalize "blatantly misleading,
low quality, offensive or downright false information." It soon became
apparent, however, that in the name of combating "fake news," Google,
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are censoring left-wing, progressive and
anti-war sites. The 150 most popular search terms that brought readers to
the World Socialist Web Site, including "socialism," "Russian Revolution"
and "inequality," today elicit little or no traffic.
Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, told the U.S.
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in a hearing
Wednesday that Facebook employs a security team of 10,000-7,500 of whom
"assess potentially violating content"-and that "by the end of 2018 we will
more than double" it to over 20,000. Social media companies are intertwined
with and often work for U.S. intelligence agencies. This army of censors is
our Thought Police.
The group, Bickert said, includes "a dedicated counterterrorism team" of
"former intelligence and law-enforcement officials and prosecutors who
worked in the area of counterterrorism." She testified that artificial
intelligence automatically flags questionable content. Facebook, she said,
does not "wait for these . bad actors to upload content to Facebook before
placing it into our detection systems." The "propaganda" that Facebook
blocks, she said, "is content that we identify ourselves before anybody"
else can see it. Facebook, she said, along with over a dozen other social
media companies has created a blacklist of 50,000 "unique digital
fingerprints" that can prevent content from being posted.
"We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment
by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of
violence," she told the committee. "That's why we support a variety of
counterspeech efforts."
"Counterspeech" is a word that could have been lifted from the pages of
George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984."
