by Ed Thompson, American Thinker:
With Artificial Intelligence we have finally arrived in a world of 24/7 censorship, a place where thought itself can be molded, where whole societies can be pushed and pulled like taffy in any direction or shape desired. If you doubt that this is occurring it is only because you are unaware of the influence, not because it doesn’t exist. Much of what you see and hear through electronic devices can be and is carefully crafted to a predetermined end.
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AI machine learning can control narratives online in real time by dialing viral messages up or down. AI algorithms can scan and ban tens of millions of keywords in posts, shutting down or boosting narratives. AI tools can shape thought and action.
Mike Benz so aptly calls them weapons of mass deletion. Not some happenstance of tech evolution, these tools were developed by DARPA to take on ISIS and are utilized by the CIA, DHS, DoD, and State Department in what Benz calls the censorship industrial complex. An entire malinformation cottage industry has grown into a sprawling beast woven throughout government agencies and third-party NGO ‘researchers’ like EIP, the Orwellian-named Election Integrity Partnership. Fed by government grants and donor dollars, these weapons of censorship are now trained on us. Google controls everything you are shown.
State Department officials lobbied their counterparts in Europe to pass hate speech censorship laws that would boomerang back onto the U.S. A vague 2017 German law turned private social media companies into overzealous censors, with no judicial oversight or right to appeal. In 2022 the EU censorship law called the Digital Services Act created a frenzy of self-censorship by adding steep penalties for disinformation on platforms, all adjudicated by the government.
The UK has overtly criminalized “dangerous” thoughts and speech with fines and jail time penalties. The Public Order Act of 1986 makes it an offense for a person to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress.” You can’t get much more vague and opinion-based than that. Who judges which ideas or speech are crimes? The police who investigate, and the Crown Prosecution Service. No chance that could be politicized or abused. The debate now is whether something said privately in one’s home should be criminalized. That anyone thinks that’s a good idea is frightening.
Canada defines hate crime as speech or writing that “is likely to expose a person or group or class of persons to hatred or contempt.” The law paradoxically states it is not to “interfere with the free expression of any opinion on any subject.” How you parse that is anyone’s guess. A pre-crime law called the Online Harms Act in Canada would allow the arrest and detention of people who might commit a future hate crime.
When it comes to censorship, vagueness is the point. Chilling free speech merely requires creating doubt in the speaker’s mind as to what he may or may not say. Any good totalitarian knows the most effective and complete censorship program is self-censorship.
When a population has built its own cage of tacit taboos, the jailers can relax. Many a long-term prisoner, upon seeing an open door to freedom, would simply ignore it. Others released after years of incarceration are so uncomfortable with freedom that they will commit a crime just to get back into prison. Self-censorship is no different. Go along to get along is nothing less than the defeat of free will.
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