A free-speech watchdog is warning that the U.S. government has funded research intended to develop stealth censorship programs – ways to censor what Americans say, and see, without letting the speakers know they’re being stifled.
It is John Solomon at Just the News who has reported on the warning from the Foundation for Freedom Online.
That organization, focusing on digital free speech, has confirmed researchers, using tax money, already have captured and examined “millions” of Twitter social media comments from during the 2020 election season that they described as “misinformation.”
A wide range of censorship programs already has been confirmed as being implemented by government agencies under Joe Biden’s direction, mostly by having government employees turn their complaints over to private foundations, which then insist social media companies take down, suppress, or even delete information with which the Biden administration disagrees.
Several of the administration’s targets have included COVID-19 information, and facts about treatments, the outside influences present during the 2020 presidential race, and more.
Just the News explained the new schemes “one day could empower Big Tech to censor or throttle content while keeping the affected users and the public in the ark.”
The Foundation for Freedom Online, in fact, documented work at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, working on tax funding, to develop “virality circuit breakers” and “nudges” that could censor information.
Mike Benz, a former State Department official, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television program that the scheme focuses 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.”
In fact, there are multiple lawsuits pending now, as well as a high level of interest in Congress, because the Biden administration’s programs to have private interests demand censorship on social media, something the Constitution doesn’t allow the government to do directly, because the censorship schemes became known.
The report explained some details come from an article last year in Nature Human Behavior.
There were identified “four tools” including those “circuit breakers” that could censor “misinformation” by as much as 63%.
Just the News explained, “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.”
In that situation, the FBI interfered in the election by warning media companies to suppress what proved to be accurate reporting on the Biden family scandals revealed in a laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop. A subsequent study revealed had the information been routinely reported, Joe Biden almost certainly would have lost the 2020 election.
Congress even now is in the middle of a long list of investigations into those scandals, including charges that Joe and Hunter Biden each were paid $5 million bribes by Ukrainian officials to make a corruption investigation go away.
In fact, Joe Biden threatened Ukraine with the loss of American aide if officials there didn’t fire the prosecutor. They did.
West, Just the News reported, “considered criticism of the work to be disinformation.”
The work also acknowledged it was done with several National Science Foundation grants.
The researchers also made clear their political intentions, “Our results highlight a practical path forward as misinformation online continues to threaten vaccination efforts, equity and democratic processes around the globe.”
Benz told Just the News the groups look like they’re working on an “information purgatory to place largely conservative, populist or heterodox opinions and to stop them from going viral.”
“They explicitly say that the purpose of this censorship psychology study is to eliminate resistance to vaccination efforts, equity and democratic processes, meaning elections,” Benz said. “So they want to be able to control and prevent all opposition to election procedures that they want in place, to vaccination campaigns and to what appears to be racial and climate equity initiatives.”
In one of the cases challenging the Biden administration’s censorship schemes, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty wrote that Biden “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
This post originally appeared on WND News Center.