Pretend that you are a tyrant in the West. You want to control what ideas people encounter. How do you do it?
Mobile data shutoff is possible but not practical since so many mobile data services exist in the West, and the state owns none.
Throttling, IP blocking, DNS interference, or server name identification blocking? These methods require control at the internet service provider (ISP) level, and we have far too many independent providers to gain influence over them all.
Deep packet inspection? No, that would require the control of peering stations or all ISP providers.
Gain control of every media outlet?…this is even more impractical and fails to address the individuals who will criticize those outlets online.
Currently, the only viable way of controlling information in the modern West is to manage it on the tech platform level. Virtually all news and data passes through just a small number of tech platforms because the digital marketplace (and most sectors of our markets) are monopolies. [1] It logically follows that if you convince just a small number of the dominant tech platforms to control information, you nearly have total control of what is seen or not seen. Control the bottleneck of data.
You only need a small subset of news outlets who are sympathetic to your cause, and those news outlets would then receive preferential treatment across the tech platforms. Their articles and opinions will have special algorithmic treatment or even a special place on the platforms, such as YouTube’s news bar.
This is not merely a thought experiment: this is real and happening before our very eyes. The most bizarre fact of all is the coherence of censorship. All censorship at the tech platform level favors modern leftist narratives. No censorship software or developers exist who want to censor left-leaning or Marxist ideas. This is a concerted effort by the counter-violent extremist community and their partners to silence anything that is anti-establishment, pro-individualism, or pro-freedom.
I have compiled a list of the corporations, firms, and companies that use censorship software or partner with the developer of that software:
- Bing Search [2]
- Coral by Vox Media “provides publishers with world-class conversation tools and strategies. More than 200 sites in 21 countries trust Coral to power their communities” [5]
- Der Spiegel (a German magazine) [5]
- Disqus, “the largest comment hosting service, with more than 50 million monthly comments across 200 countries, 2 billion monthly unique visitors, and 17 billion monthly page views” [4]
- El Pais, “the most-read newspaper in Spanish” [6]
- Facebook [2]
- FACEIT (a gaming platform) [3]
- The Financial Times [5]
- Google Search [2]
- Instagram [2]
- LA Times [5]
- Le Monde (a French publication) [5]
- New York Times [5]
- OpenWeb, “OpenWeb is a leading audience engagement platform that hosts 100 million active users per month. Their clients include publishers like AOL, HuffPost, TechCrunch, Fox News, Hearst, Refinery29, Sky Sports, MarketWatch, Salon, Newsweek, and many others” [5]
- Reddit [5]
- Southeast Missourian [5]
- Taringa (Latin America’s 2nd largest social media platform) 5
- Twitter [2]
- USA Today [5]
- Wall Street Journal [5]
- Washington Post [5]
- Wired [5]
- YouTube [2]
Take note of these giants the market sectors they operate in and ask yourself these questions:
If we wanted to avoid censorship, where would we turn to? If we wanted to end censorship, what would we have to do? (hint)
As I hinted in Part I, something far more sinister than censorship exists online, and the counter-violent extremist (CVE) community is the heart of it as well. This sinister technique to manipulate the public requires the use of keywords. Where censorship and shadowban software uses keywords to silence content and specific users, this technique uses keywords to target the vulnerable for ideological brainwashing. By analyzing keywords, we can narrow down who is being censored, manipulated and what the CVEs believe in. Stay tuned for an investigative series on redirection and more articles on censorship/shadowbanning. At the end of Part I, I left you with four questions and answered one of them in this article. Future articles in this series will address the following:
- Who is targeted for censorship?
- What other CVE projects exist besides censorship and shadow banning?
- Is there federal funding for censorship and other CVE projects? (I found jumbled, plaintext files on the DHS’s website that I was not meant to find).
Be sure to read: The Truth About Censorship and Shadowbanning Part IÂ
You may also like:Â Zero Evidence of Threats to Palm Beach County School Board
[1] The Subcommittee of Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law (2020). “Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets.” Committee on the Judiciary.
[2] Kelly C. Offield. “Shadowbanned.” The ARKA Journal.
[3] Kelly C. Offield. “The US Government’s Role in Censorship and Redirection Online.” The ARKA Journal.
[4] Jigsaw. “Helping Authors Understand Toxicity, One Comment at a Time.”
[5] Perspective API. “Case Studies: How world-renowned publishers, platforms, and researchers are using Perspective API.”
[6] Jigsaw. “Perspective Launches In Spanish With El PaÃs.”
- Who controls you, and how they do it - February 17, 2022
- The truth about censorship and shadowbanning Part II - February 6, 2022
- The Truth About Censorship and Shadowbanning Part I - January 31, 2022