EMERGENCY: BIG TECH’S PLOT TO KILL FREE SPEECH REVEALED
Online digital rights are in turmoil and we must act now
BY PAUL JOSEPH WATSON
SEE: https://www.infowars.com/emergency-big-techs-plot-to-kill-free-speech-revealed/; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
The biggest and yet least talked about issue facing conservatives and Trump supporters heading into the mid-terms and the 2020 presidential elections is social media censorship and big tech’s efforts to rig elections by manipulating their algorithms.
In association with Mike Adams, Infowars has published a detailed master compendium on censorship that will serve as a roadmap for lawmakers and for President Trump as we begin the fight to return the battleground of ideas to a level playing field.
The original document is embedded below and should be read in full. What follows below is a brief summary of the major talking points of this document.
Slaves to the algorithm
Algorithms are the most pernicious form of censorship because the target cannot conclusively prove they are being censored yet experience the impact of censorship anyway.
As Robert Epstein has documented, “Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated.”
Epstein asserts that Google has the power to flip over 25% of elections worldwide and that “The search giant’s algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day.”
By favoring certain search results over others, Epstein and his team discovered that Google could, “boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session.”
“More alarmingly, we also demonstrated this shift with real voters during an actual electoral campaign—in an experiment conducted with more than 2,000 eligible, undecided voters throughout India during the 2014 Lok Sabha election there—the largest democratic election in history, with more than 800 million eligible voters and 480 million votes ultimately cast. Even here, with real voters who were highly familiar with the candidates and who were being bombarded with campaign rhetoric every day, we showed that search rankings could boost the proportion of people favoring any candidate by more than 20 percent—more than 60 percent in some demographic groups.”
In other words, it’s entirely possible that Google determined the winner of the largest democratic election in history and could do so over and over again.
During its back and forth conversation with CNN, Facebook admitted that it artificially demotes Infowars content to censor our reach.
“We work hard to find the right balance between encouraging free expression and promoting a safe and authentic community, and we believe that down-ranking inauthentic content strikes that balance,” said Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson. “In other words, we allow people to post it as a form of expression, but we’re not going to show it at the top of News Feed.”
As Mike Adams’ master report documents, Facebook has already de-platformed countless prominent natural health and conservative political channels.
Google intensifies its crackdown
Over the course of the last year, we have also noticed a clear change in Google’s search results in which mainstream media articles that denigrate Infowars appear well above Infowars in search results, even when one specifically searches for an exact headline from Infowars.
Google is already directing teams of employees to flag content that is deemed “upsetting” or “offensive” and bury such websites in order to “improve the quality of its search results”.
“The new “upsetting-offensive” flag instructs quality raters to “flag to all web results that contain upsetting or offensive content from the perspective of users in your locale, even if the result satisfies the user intent,” according to the Associated Press.
One of the examples cited that would get flagged is a website that criticizes the religion of Islam.
Google-owned YouTube has also deliberately ranked legacy media-produced videos above independently produced videos about major news events, even when the independently produced videos are more popular.
As we reported in February, Robert Thompson, CEO of News Corp., the publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, brazenly admitted that big corporations are pushing for the likes of Google and Facebook to censor alternative media outlets so that News Corp-owned publications can make more money.
Thompson complained that “misinformation” is being promoted at the expense of media properties such as the Wall Street Journal (which just happens to be owned by News Corp).
“The potential returns for our journalism would be far higher in a less chaotic, less debased digital environment,” he asserted, acknowledging the financial incentive behind censorship.
The tyranny of partisan “fact checkers”
Google has also hired so-called “fact checkers” from the Southern Poverty Law Center to police content on YouTube. The SPLC is a hyper-partisan left-wing organization whose business model revolves almost exclusively around fanning the flames of hysteria about “hate speech” and defaming good people as extremists.
As we have previously documented, another fact checker being used by Google, Snopes.com, presents itself as a non-partisan outfit, yet has proven itself to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party and the left on numerous occasions.
Snopes previously tried to “debunk” claims that the New York Times had colluded with Clinton’s campaign by warning them in advance about potentially negative stories that were about to be published, despite Wikileaks emails proving this to be true on two separate occasions.
As the Daily Caller reported, Kim Lacapria, Snopes’ main political “fact checker,” describes herself as “openly left-leaning” and a liberal. She has previously equated Tea Party conservatives with jihadists.
In December 2016, an investigative report revealed how Snopes was accused of using company money to pay for prostitutes.
Snopes’ obvious far-left bias is genuinely disconcerting given that it is being used by the likes of Google and Facebook as a supposedly independent “fact checker” to combat “fake news” online.
As Mike Adams explains, “What Robert Mueller accused the Russians of doing—interfering with U.S. elections—is actually being carried out right now by tech giants, the establishment media and third-party fact-checkers.”
CNN lobbies social media giants to shut down Infowars
Not content with seeing Infowars be disabled in terms of being downranked by algorithms, CNN, along with a media echo chamber that amplifies their narratives, has openly lobbied both Google-owned YouTube and Facebook to shut down Infowars.
Earlier this year, CNN repeatedly contacted YouTube in an attempt to have our channel closed down because we challenged the gun control narrative that emerged after the Parkland school shooting.
At one point, Infowars was one strike away from losing its YouTube presence and being terminated on the platform forever.
After failing to trigger the deletion of our YouTube channel, CNN’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy re-appeared last week, this time attempting to lobby Facebook to shut down Infowars under the excuse of combating “fake news”.
Darcy’s zeal to silence Infowars was so persistent that he eventually forced Facebook to back themselves into a corner and admit that they supported free speech, which is quite the commitment for a company that has been so aggressive in policing the content on its platform.
The fact that an international media brand with vast resources like CNN would direct its journalists to launch a campaign to shut down a smaller competitor is not only chilling, it smacks of total desperation.
In Russia or Turkey, the government shuts down media outlets. In the United States, CNN apparently thinks that’s its role.
The fallacy of fake news
While the legacy media routinely publishes misleading, harmful and downright duplicitous news with wanton abandon, the “fake news” narrative was amplified after the election as a means of discrediting and de-legitimizing the presidency of Donald Trump and populist movements across Europe.
Much like the term “post-truth world,” fake news is a contrived moral panic created by elites to deflect from the fact they are increasingly unable to manufacture consent.
A major Stanford University study found that “even the most widely circulated fake news stories were seen by only a small fraction of Americans,” and that the most widely believed fake news stories were those that benefited Hillary Clinton.
Fake news had virtually no impact on the election, but the establishment media weaponized the term as part of an agenda to silence and censor voices of dissent, including media platforms, that had opposed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
It is completely hilarious to realize that the legacy media created the contrived “fake news” hysteria but thanks to Trump and their own malicious agenda, it just ended up defining them. According to an April poll by Monmouth University Polling Institute, 77 percent of Americans believe that the traditional media is guilty of fake news.
In a 2017 CNN opinion piece written by Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, who are affiliated with the globalist Council of Europe, the authors argued that the term “fake news” had “become meaningless” and lost its power because politicians (primarily Donald Trump) hijacked it as a way to “undermine” the media establishment.
The authors decried the fact that many people now believe the mainstream media peddles “fabricated stories” and that information monopolies are being challenged by the ability for “anyone in the world” to have a platform.
As Sharyl Attkisson documents in her presentation below, the attempt to focus America’s attention on the idea of “fake news” was itself a propaganda effort.
Fake news is a baseless conspiracy theory invented by elites as an excuse to explain why their arguments no longer resonate with a majority of people.
The master document created by Mike Adams explains some of the solutions to these problems – real steps that can be implemented very quickly to turn the tide and return the Internet and social media to a level playing field.
Solutions
They include;
1) Declaring the dominant online platforms to be “public commons” communication infrastructure to protect free speech.
2) Outlawing the censoring of content based on “political views” or “unpopular views”.
3) Requiring social media platforms to make transparent all their algorithms and requiring platforms to disclose down-ranking content policies
4) Requiring complete transparency on all reasoning for shadow bans, content bans and account bans.
All of these measures and more could be introduced in a special Online Digital Rights bill that could be passed and signed into law by President Trump.
“Google, Facebook, YouTube, CNN and even the ACLU are all conspiring to defraud the United States of America by silencing conservative voices, en masse, in the runup to a critical election that may decide the fate of our nation,” writes Adams.
We are running out of time. The mid-term elections are just months away. Every day that goes by without these fundamental problems being addressed, the state of online free speech becomes ever more precarious.
We must act now before it’s too late.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
