Ben Weingarten: The US Government Is Funding Foreign Entities Which In Turn Censor American Citizens

The old CIA trick of getting foreign governments and organizations to do what they are technically forbidden to do themselves.

I say "technically" because they're not actually forbidden to spy on US citizens or use their government power to strip US citizens of their free speech rights. They do it every single day. They just pay foreign cut-outs to undertake these unconstitutional, treasonous actions for them.

I mean, the law really should forbid this, but "the government of the people" has decided that our secret police are duly authorize to conspire with foreign secret police to strip us all of our rights.

Ben Weingartner for RCI:

On the eve of a highly-anticipated live X "Spaces" conversation between Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump, the powerful European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton warned in August that authorities would be "monitoring" the conversation for "content that may incite violence, hate, and racism."

While reminding Musk that the EU was already investigating X for alleged failures "to combat disinformation," Breton said he and his colleagues "will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox ... to protect EU citizens from serious harm."

The European Commission distanced itself from Breton, who would eventually resign his post while facing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers for threatening Musk and Americans' free speech and interfering in domestic politics. But the EU probe of X, which could result in crippling fines, persists.

Although litigation, congressional oversight efforts, and reportage led by the Twitter Files have helped expose the U.S. government's efforts to pressure social media companies to censor protected political speech, the recent rumblings from Europe underscore the escalating challenges American-based social media platforms are facing from foreign authorities -- not just from repressive regimes such as China and Iran, but also from the EU, the U.K., Brazil, and other democracies.

Free speech advocates warn that foreign demands that tech companies comply with their censorious legal and regulatory standards that violate the First Amendment's protections will hamper the ability of Americans to communicate freely in the digital public square. Facebook's Community Standards, for example, "apply to everyone, all around the world." Academics have termed the tendency of companies to apply the strictest local guidelines globally as the "Brussels Effect."

Mike Benz, a former State Department cyber official and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, argues that foreign efforts to cast populist narratives on matters such as election integrity, immigration, and public health as mis- and dis-information constitute a surreptitious "transatlantic flank attack" on American speech.

However, evidence suggests that U.S. authorities and U.S.-supported NGOs that have sought greater restrictions on speech have, at minimum, indirectly supported these foreign efforts, creating a backdoor method to suppress protected speech at home.

For instance, the White House pressured platforms to censor content pertaining to COVID-19 and election integrity. Agencies from the Justice Department to the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Communications Commission have probed Musk's enterprises during the Biden years.

The U.S. government has used the FBI and the State Department, among other agencies, to coordinate counter-disinformation efforts globally with other nations. The goal is said to build "a more resilient global information system, where objective facts are elevated and deceptive messages gain less traction," in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

...

The European Union's Digital Services Act is seen by champions of stringent content moderation standards and critics alike as the strongest global effort to regulate speech.

Adopted in 2022 and praised by former President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the measure imposes a slew of regulatory requirements on the more than a dozen social media platforms and search engines that have at least 45 million users in the EU.

...

The DSA also references a Code of Practice on Disinformation, under which Big Tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft have agreed to demonetize purported disinformation pursuant to European Commission guidance.

Notable signatories and contributors to the "self-regulatory" code include the U.S.-based NewsGuard (which took issue, to a degree, with the final product) and the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index -- both of which have received U.S. government funding -- and the Brussels-based World Federation of Advertisers.

These organizations have each allegedly targeted the advertising revenue of independent media outlets -- with NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index disparaging RealClearPolitics -- by working with major brands and advertising agencies to blacklist outlets that publish work that challenges official narratives.

The DSA suggests that compliance with the Code of Practice on Disinformation may satisfy its "risk mitigation" standards. European regulators have called for formally incorporating the "voluntary" code into the DSA's "co-regulatory framework."

"Voluntary."

...

He likens the model created by the Digital Services Act in Europe to the "whole-of-society" model to stifle disfavored information -- a system of censorship pioneered by the U.S. government in the run-up to the 2020 election and codified in the Biden administration's National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The Digital Services Act, Candeub notes, mandates this architecture by creating "a surveillance structure in which there is intimate government involvement at multiple layers."

George Washington University Law School Professor Dawn Carla Nunziato concurs that "the DSA's substantive content moderation and notice and take down provisions will likely incentivize the platforms to remove large swaths of content -- including political speech, criticism of political figures, parody, and pro-LGBTQ+ speech -- that may be flagged by private entities as illegal under EU countries' laws."

Some American players who favor greater content restriction welcome the Brussels Effect. "If it weren't for the European Union and the Digital Services Act, I don't know that we'd have much hope of rectifying" the spread of mis- and dis-information, George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics Director Rebekah Tromble said during a panel discussion on the Center for Democracy & Technology's Report.

"Hopefully," she added, "as the DSA begins to come into force and the platforms feel the real pressure of actual enforcement action," it would spur them to re-staff relevant positions and re-focus on content moderation.

Tromble did not respond to RCI's request for comment.

When asked whether it would defend American companies targeted under the regulatory regime, a State Department spokesman told RCI, "We are engaging with our European colleagues on some specific concerns on the DSA ... which we believe would make it easier to achieve transatlantic cooperation and alignment on these critical issues."

Oh, once everyone "voluntarily" brings themselves into compliance with the US-funded European censorship boards, we'll all be brought into "alignment."

And isn't that the most important thing in a supposedly-free democracy? That our government works with foreign intelligence services to coerce us into "alignment" with our foreign overseers?

Look, I can't tell you to read the whole thing, or at least give it good skim.

What I can tell you is that if you don't, this is you. This is what you are:

You like that, cuz? You like being a Jive Turkey?

Matt Taibbi delivered an absolute barnburner of a speech on the Government-Censorship Complex. See the link for the full speech, but here's the key part.

WE IGNORE LAWS. It's what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you're upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

Let me pause to say something about America's current intellectual class, from which the "anti-disinformation" complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of "content moderation" everywhere is that it's a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It's telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

My pants just got tight.

Does that make me gay?

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America's self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They're simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

Those patches are snatched.

Yeah I'm gay.

They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they're afraid of each other, but they're also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: they believe things with blinding zeal until 51% change their minds, and then like deer the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can't remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for "disinformation studies," really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set -- what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the "Utopia of Scolding."

"Freedom of speech" is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it's being replaced in the discourse by "disinformation" and "misinformation," words that aren't beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the Nosey Parker, the snoop.

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the "haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy." That streak of our early European settlers unfortunately survives in us and keeps surfacing through moral panics. Four hundred years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then "the devil's music," comic books, booze, communists, and now, information.

Because "freedom of speech" is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination -- the UN High Commissioner Volker Türk scolded Elon Musk that "free speech is not a free pass" -- it's becoming one of those soon-to-be-extinct terms. Speech is mentioned in "reputable" media only as a possible vector for the informational disease known as misinformation. Soon all that will remain of the issue for most people is a flutter of the nerves, reminding them to avoid thinking about it.

The end game is not controlling speech. They're already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.

More at the link. He passes from rhetoric to tracing the birth and death of free speech.

posted by Ace at 01:22 PM

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