NBC and Brian Stelter: Will Twitter Just Allow Tucker Carlson to Speak Without "Policing," in a Speech "Free for All"?!!

NBC and Brian Stelter (of course) demand to know if Tucker Carlson will just be allowed to speak freely without his speech being policed by leftists.

Will Tucker Carlson be permitted to exercise his rights as an American citizen, without a veto threat from the hard left and the Censorship-Industrial complex?

NBC's Tom Costello worried Tuesday that Daily Caller co-founder and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson will not be policed for his speech on his new show.

Carlson announced Tuesday that his show will air exclusively on Twitter going forward.

"As of tonight, there aren't many platforms left that allow free speech," Carlson said in his announcement video. "The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are now. Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops. Twitter is not a partisan site -- everybody's allowed here, and we think that's a good thing."

Carlson said his show will air "soon."

Costello grew animated over the news during Tuesday night's segment of "Hallie Jackson NOW."

"Okay, well listen, Twitter was already under fire for misinformation, disinformation, all-out lies, anti-Semitism [and] racism before Elon Musk took over, and now it's gotten kind of crazy -- seemingly unmoored, if you will. Will anybody be able to police what Carlson says, or is this the point? It's just a free for all?" he wondered.

"I think this is the point, it is a free for all, it's what Elon Musk wants to provide," former CNN host Brian Stelter said, arguing Carlson's announcement "may cement" Twitter as a "right-wing website."

Can you imagine such a thing? A "free for all" where Americans are allowed to speak freely without interference or threat from Censorship-Industrial Complex?

I can -- it was the way America was until 2016.

Kurt Metzger quotes someone else, who says the media is in the process of "Vaticanization:" They are setting up their own weird hierarchy of bishops to determine who is allowed to speak, and a college of Speech Cardinals to decide what is the official view of The Church of Media.

Meanwhile, at Racket, Matt Taibbi lists the top 50 most important members of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Naming names.

Taibbi starts off by recounting Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military-industrial complex" and the threat it poses to democracy.

He then introduces the concept of "hybrid warfare," which has seized the imagination of the intelligence agencies and national security state -- the idea that Future War is not just about tanks and infantry, but of words and ideas spread online, and to fight the Future War, we must declare merciless war on the Bad Words and Wrong Ideas.

In this way, he directly connects the Censorship-Industrial Complex to the Military-Industrial Complex -- they're both obsessed with winning the Future War. It's just that the Future War will now be largely fought on the "battlefields" of FaceBook comments areas.

I recommend reading all that.

Picking up with Taibbi after he establishes this framework:

In March of 2017, in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on hybrid war, chairman Mac Thornberry opened the session with ominous remarks, suggesting that in the wider context of history, an America built on constitutional principles of decentralized power might have been badly designed:

Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives...

Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests...

The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.

Around that same time, i.e. shortly after the election of Donald Trump, it was becoming gospel among the future leaders of the "Censorship-Industrial Complex" that interference by "malign foreign threat actors" and the vicissitudes of Western domestic politics must be linked. Everything, from John Podesta's emails to Trump's Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events.

This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn't accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping "mis-, dis-, and malinformation," while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with "information warfare" missions.

The "Censorship-Industrial Complex" is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the "hybrid warfare" age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the "defense" sector, the "anti-disinformation" complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have "military limitations." The CIC [Censorship-Industrial Complex], however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign "disinformation." It's become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy's undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like "toxicity monitoring," replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a "nose for news" with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like "newsworthy claim extraction," and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the "redirect method," which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward "constructive alternative messages."

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a "shared vocabulary" of information disorder, or "credibility," or "media literacy."

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building "resilience" to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the "marketplace of ideas" (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense....

In place of competition, the groups we've been tracking favor the concept of the "shared endeavor" (one British group has even started a "Shared Endeavour" program), in which key "stakeholders" hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.

He then begins list the 50 most important members of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, giving a mission briefing about each enemy of freedom.

I'll just note a few of them:

​1.​ Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University (formerly, First Draft):

Link: https://sites.brown.edu/informationfutures/ / https://First Draftnews.org/

Type: A university institute, housed within the School of Public Health, to combat "misinformation" and "outdated communications practices." The successor to First Draft, one of the earliest and more prominent "anti-disinformation" outfits.

You may have read about them when: You first heard the terms Mis-, dis-, and malinformation. The term was coined by FD Director Claire Wardle. IFL/FD are also the only academic/non-profit organization involved in the Trusted News Initiative, a large-scale legacy media consortium established to control debate around the pandemic response. Wardle was Twitter executives' first pick for a signal group of anti-misinformation advisors it put together. She also participated in the Aspen Institute's Hunter Biden laptop tabletop in August 2020 (before the laptop story broke). IFL's co-founder Stefanie Friedhoff serves on the White House Covid-19 Response Team. First Draft staffers were also revealed in the #TwitterFiles to be frequent and trusted partners to a leading public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, now of Stanford University.

What we know about funding: First Draft was funded by a huge number of entities including Craig Newmark, Rockefeller, the National Science Foundation, Facebook, the Ford Foundation, Google, the Knight Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, Open Society Foundations, and more. Funding for the IFL includes the Rockefeller Foundation for a "building vaccine demand" initiative.

What they do/What they are selling: IFL/First Draft position themselves as the vanguard of disinformation studies, acting as key advisors to media, technology, and public health consortiums, bringing together a wide range of academic skill sets.

Characteristic/worldview quotes: High use of terms like coordinated inauthentic behavior, information pollution, the future Homeland Security catchwords mis-, dis-, and malinformation, and information disorder.

Gibberish verbiage: "The most accessible inoculation technique is prebunking -- the process of debunking lies, tactics or sources before they strike."

In the #TwitterFiles: First Draft is featured extensively in the files. They were the first proposed name when Twitter decided to assemble a small group of "trusted people to come together to talk about what they're seeing," were part of the Aspen Institute's Burisma tabletop, and appeared in multiple emails with Pentagon officials.

...

Closely connected to: Almost all the leading lights of the CIC, including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Trusted News Initiative, Shorenstein Center, DFRLabs, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Institute, Meedan, and Bellingcat.

In sum: With a strong ability to both know and direct emerging trends, and with a large array of elite networks in tow, the IFL will continue to serve as one of the key tastemakers in the "anti-disinformation" field.

6.​ Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLabs) of the Atlantic Council

Link: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/programs/digital-forensic-research-lab/

Type: Public-facing disinformation research arm of highly influential, extravagantly funded, NATO-aligned think tank, the Atlantic Council.

You may have read about them when: In May of 2018, Facebook announced a "New Election Partnership With the Atlantic Council," to "prevent our service from being abused during elections." The announcement was made by former National Republican Senatorial Committee Chief Digital Strategist Katie Harbath, weeks after a contentious hearing in the Senate in which Mark Zuckerberg answered questions about the "abuse of data" on Facebook. The Atlantic Council's DFRLabs at the time included such figures as Eliot Higgins (from Bellingcat) and Ben Nimmo, future Director of Investigations at Graphika. This became a watershed moment, as Facebook soon after announced a series of purges of accounts accused of "coordinated inauthentic activity," including small indie sites like Anti-Media, End The War on Drugs, 'Murica Today, Reverb, and Anonymous News, beginning an era of mass deletions.

DFRLab was a core partner for Stanford's "Election Integrity Partnership," and the "Virality Project." The Atlantic Council also organizes the elite 360/Open Summit whose 2018 disinformation edition included the private Vanguard-25 forum that brought together Madeleine Albright, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the head of the Munich Security Conference, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, Edelman (the world's biggest PR company), Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Bellingcat, Graphika, and more.

What we know about funding: "DFRLab has received grants from the Department of State's Global Engagement Center that support programming with an exclusively international focus," Graham Brookie of DFRLabs told Racket. The Atlantic Council receives funding from the U.S. Army and Navy, Blackstone, Raytheon, Lockheed, the NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence and a long list of other financial, military, and diplomatic entities.

What they do/What they are selling: Long-form reports, list-making, conference hosting, creation of reporter-friendly widgets (e.g. "Foreign Election Interference Tracker," "Minsk Monitor")

Characteristic/worldview quote: On "rumors about Covid-19s origins," particularly the "disinformation" that the virus may have originated in a laboratory: "The cumulative effect of this was to distract the U.S. public's attention away from the federal government's disjointed approach to mitigating the virus and point the blame at China."

Gibberish verbiage: Awesome quantities; site seethes at public's unwillingness to popularize nom d'équipe "Digital Sherlocks"; insists so often it is relying only on "open-source information" that one doubts it; relies heavily on schlock military ("Narrative Arms Race") and medical ("Infodemic") metaphors to describe disinformation threat.

"Hairball" graph: DFRLabs analysis of Wuhan rumors:

I've previously mentioned that I love Matt Taibbi's focus on goofing on these "hairball graphs." These are dangerous. First, because they are fundamentally lies -- they ostensibly show "connections" between people, but we're all literally two steps away from anyone else online; the "researchers" shape these "hairball graphs" to make the connections they want to make.

For example, a hairball graph could show my "links" to garrett, and garrett's links to Fire Island tiki bars and amyl nitrate. While each of these connections might be true, it is not true that I have anything to do with garrett putting on a dress and singing torch songs at a piano bar while high on poppers.

Second, because they "look like math" to the scientifically illiterate and innumerate Arts & Crafts majors of the press corps, who just love being able to look at brightly colored hairball charts and then saying, "Oh, this computer says that Ace of Spades is connected to Richard Spencer...? Oh well, if a COMPUTER said so, it must be true!!!"

These fake "hairball graphs" are deployed precisely because journalists have such stunted intellects and are, um, "visual learners," as education bureaucrats say about the Dumb Kids. They are straight-up propaganda targeting only the least intelligent.

In sum: DFRLabs is not only funded by the Global Engagement Center, and had initial GEC chief Richard Stengel as a fellow, but uses substantial state and corporate resources to evangelize GEC's "ecosystem" theory of disinformation, which holds that views that overlap with foreign threat actors are themselves part of the threat.

Connected to: the Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, Bellingcat, and the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics

​7.​ Stanford Internet Observatory

Link: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io

Type: Academic research institution

You may have read about them when: The SIO is the parent of two foundational efforts at mass content surveillance and censorship: the "Election Integrity Partnership" created ahead of the 2020 presidential vote, and the "Virality Project" that created a single ticketing system for six major internet platforms for "misinformation" related to Covid-19 vaccines. As noted by head Alex Stamos, the EIP came together to "fill the gap" of things "the government could not do themselves." Partners at DFRLabs added that the SIO's Election Integrity Partnership "came together in June of 2020 at the encouragement of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA." Research Director Renee DiResta is a former CIA fellow.

What we know about funding: Five-year grant from the National Science Foundation for $748,437. The EIP and Virality Projects also partnered with Graphika and DFRLabs, themselves recipients of funding from the Departments of Defense and State, respectively. SIO was founded with a $5 million grant from Craig Newmark and also receives funds from Omidyar, Gates, Hewlett and others.

What they do/What they are selling: As noted in two Twitter Files reports (see here and here), the twin SIO projects represented major efforts to build surveillance and flagging to scale across multiple platforms, seemingly as a proof-of-concept for a potential fully government-run enterprise like the Disinformation Governance Board, the program pushed by their partners at CISA.

Gibberish verbiage: Adept at generating imperious synonyms lauding themselves for being smart and from California (e.g. "constellation of problem solvers," "coproducing expertise for critical infrastructure protection"). Birthed idea of "long fuse" of disinformation, suggesting speech dangers need to be cut off early.

"Hairball" graph: EIP analysis of "Glendale mail dump" rumors in 2020 Election, which incidentally were covered by CNN:

In the #TwitterFiles: SIO perhaps appears in the TF more than any other academic, think tank or NGO partner. From an email to Twitter from the Virality Project: Twitter was told it should consider as "standard misinformation on your platform… stories of true vaccine side effects... true posts which may fuel hesitancy."

In sum: The Stanford Internet Observatory may or may not continue to have a high-profile role in building out the CIC, but figures like Renee DiResta and Alex Stamos have already fulfilled a substantial historical function by organizing cross-platform content sweeps for Covid-19 and the 2020 election.

Connected to: Twitter, First Draft, Graphika, the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, NYU's Center for Politics and Social Media, the Aspen Institute, and the DHS agency CISA.

And here's the one connected to Bill Kristol:

​12.​ New Knowledge AI, rebranded as Yonder AI, acquired by Primer

Link: https://primer.ai/products/yonder/

Type: For-profit internet company that worked for brands and national security entities searching platforms for narrative control, along with detecting narrative manipulation from malign actors.

You may have read about them when: New Knowledge did a much publicized report for the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018 that said Russians saturated U.S. social media with disinformation to influence the 2016 election. Days after research director Renee DiResta delivered the report, the media revealed that New Knowledge, working with a former Obama White House aide, had run an online dirty tricks operation intended to make it appear that the Kremlin supported the Republican running for Senate in Alabama. They did it by creating thousands of fake Russian Twitter followers for candidate Roy Moore, who narrowly lost the race. The operation was funded by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. New Knowledge was paid $100,000 for the Alabama campaign. Tax records show its parent corporation, Popily, Inc., was paid $575,000 for research consulting by Advance Democracy, a non-profit run by oppo researcher Dan Jones, a Democratic Party liaison to Silicon Valley funders. New Knowledge created an election dashboard called Disinfo2018 for Jones' Advance Democracy. (See entry 48.)

Also: New Knowledge founder Jonathan Morgan was one of the creators of the Hamilton 68 dashboard, under the auspices of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Former FBI agent Clint Watts was a frontman for the dashboard and made it among the biggest sources of news in the lead up to the midterm elections. Hamilton 68 claimed to track Russian disinformation by monitoring 644 active Russian accounts. The Twitter Files have revealed that most of the accounts Hamilton 68 monitored belonged to Americans, not Russians.

What we know about funding: Morgan founded New Knowledge in Austin in 2015. He and DiResta have told interviewers they were consulted by the Obama White House as concerns grew about the internet being used by ISIS, white supremacists, and other bad actors. Within a year, it had 50 employees, Morgan told the Austin American Statesman. Some had been analysts in the intelligence world; Morgan had worked on two open-source programs for Defense Advanced Partnerships Research Agency (DARPA), he has said; another senior official spent 15 years at the NSA. New Knowledge had $30 million in investment money. He sought more investments after the Alabama scandal led to a "rebrand" of the company in 2019 to "Yonder AI." Investors include Lux Capital, Geekdom Fund, GGV Capital, Buildgroup, Capital Factory and Kelly Perdew, co-founder of Moonshots, owner of Fast Point Games. Lux Capital advisory board member, and former SOCOM Commander Tony Thomas, also sits on the Primer advisory board.

What they are selling: Management of brand narratives and narrative manipulation detection and analysis. New Knowledge/Yonder searched for certain words and avatars it assessed were often used by particular groups of malign users. Seeking user language that reveals "contextual narratives" helped detect subtle signs of manipulation across accounts.

Worldview quote: "Yonder is on a mission to humanize the world's information and deliver on the promise of a more authentic internet...Yonder will talk to the industry about an ethical framework for AI."

Gibberish verbiage: "The Yonder platform is the first to map the faction internet, finding, describing and measuring the impact of factions on conversations that matter to customers."

In the #TwitterFiles: Former Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, on "Hamilton 68" account owners:

"These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots."
"No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops."
"Hardly evidence of a massive influence campaign."
"I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is."

Read the whole thing.

But not on FaceBook!

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that it's "hate speech" to say that a group of leftwing intelligence agency operatives and their tech monopolist oligarch friends are censoring speech.

And to show you that FaceBook isn't part of some censorship cabal, FaceBook has censored this article, and blocked it from being shared on FaceBook:

Michael Shellenberger talks to Joe Rogan about the Twitter Files' chilling realization that social media censorship was not just driven by woke employees, but by the US government and the Establishment, which was insanely angry at having lost control in the 2016 election and the Brexit vote:

posted by Ace at 02:03 PM

| Access Comments