Taxpayer-Funded, Government-Authorized "Researchers" Are Devising Fresh New Schemes to Censor the Right -- and Hiding That Censorship From Us, So That We Cannot Complain

Might as well enjoy your next several years of censorship -- you're paying for it.

'Virality Circuit Breakers:' Taxpayer-funded researchers devise new stealth censorship strategies

Taxpayer and billionaire-backed researchers admit new techniques could allow Big Tech to minimize "public relations challenges" from direct removal of social posts.

Note that "researchers" here is a euphemism. Matt Taibbi has demonstrated ably that most people calling themselves "researchers" into "misinformation" were simply noisy and underemployed and unaccomplished leftwing Twitter addicts who one day decided to claim they were "misinformation researchers" in their Twitter bio and poof, just like that, they were.

A digital free-speech watchdog is warning that federally funded researchers have captured and examined millions of Twitter posts they deemed to be "misinformation" during the 2020 election and used them to devise new strategies that one day could empower Big Tech to censor or throttle content while keeping the affected users and the public in the dark.

The Foundation for Freedom Online says the work done last year by members of the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public after receiving taxpayer grants devised new strategies like "virality circuit breakers" and "nudges" that could prevent certain users from spreading content without any apparent evidence they were being censored.

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.

Much of the academic research was published in a little-noticed article published last summer in the journal Nature Human Behavior entitled "Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation" that identified a cocktail of four tools that the researchers projected could reduce the spread of content deemed misinformation by as much as 63% without direct removal of posts or time-consuming fact checks.

"Fact" checks are already a sham -- claims aren't being checked against facts, but instead the opinions of a Consensus of Establishment Liberals.

And now they say, even that's too much work -- we want to just suppress this speech as "misinformation" without even having to pay some leftwing college-educated-but-failed-career idiot to make up a reason why it's "misinformation."

The researchers -- who included the University of Washington's Jevin D. West and Kate Starbird -- acknowledged the new tactics like "virality circuit breakers" were less detectable to users and the public and therefore could spare social media giants the public outcries that occurred in 2020 when stories like the Hunter Biden laptop were publicly removed from platforms.

"This approach allows platforms to consider ethical ramifications while minimizing the public relations challenges accompanying direct forms of action," they wrote.

The government extracts money from you at gunpoint and then gives it to thugs to slander, silence, and humiliate you.

posted by Ace at 01:10 PM

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