Censorship Industrial Complex
New WEF report suggests leveraging ESG scoring to enforce globalist ideas on online platforms
From LifeSiteNews
Unelected globalists like those at the World Economic Forum are attempting to associate ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ with human rights abuses to empower themselves and silence dissent online.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) says that environmental, social, and governance metrics (ESG) can prove valuable for evaluating platforms on their handling of disinformation, hate speech, and abuse material, in a new report.
Published on June 6, 2024, the WEF white paper, “Making a Difference: How to Measure Digital Safety Effectively to Reduce Risks Online,” says that, “In an increasingly interconnected world, it is essential to measure digital safety in order to understand risks, allocate resources and demonstrate compliance with regulations.”
If measuring digital safety is considered to be essential, what then are the actual online harms that would necessitate measuring digital safety?
The latest white paper only gives three examples: disinformation, hate speech, and abuse material – as if they were all equal under the banner of online harm.
“ESG metrics present another valuable perspective for evaluating online safety” — How to Measure Digital Safety Effectively to Reduce Risks Online, WEF, June 2024
One method for evaluating online safety described in the latest WEF white paper is to leverage ESG scoring, which is basically a social credit for companies to make them fall in line with unelected globalist ideologies, even when these ESG policies are detrimental to their bottom line.
“Within ESG investing, companies are assessed based on their environmental impact, social responsibility and corporate governance practices,” the report reads.
Similarly, online platforms could be evaluated based on their efforts to promote a safe and inclusive online environment, and the transparency of content moderation policies.
Online platforms can also be evaluated based on their processes, tools and rules designed to promote the ‘safe use’ of their services in a manner that mitigates harm to vulnerable non-user groups.
And who will be evaluating online platforms in this Orwellian dystopia? Why, the unelected globalists themselves, of course!
No need to put it to a vote. The people can’t be trusted to decide their own fate for themselves.
Best to leave these decisions and all the power to bureaucrats that have our best interests at heart for the greater, collectivist good.
“An increase in the speed of content removals may reflect proactive moderation efforts, but it could also hint at overzealous censorship that stifles free expression” — How to Measure Digital Safety Effectively to Reduce Risks Online, WEF, June 2024
The WEF considers disinformation, hate speech, and abuse material as all being online harms that need to be measured and rectified.
But why do they lump everything together under this vague, blanket term of digital safety?
It is so that unelected globalist NGOs like the WEF can have more power and influence over government regulators concerning what type of information people are allowed to access through their service providers.
According to the report:
Digital safety metrics reinforce accountability, empowering NGOs and regulators to oversee service providers effectively.
They also serve as benchmarks for compliance monitoring, enhancing user trust in platforms, provided they are balanced with privacy considerations and take into account differentiation among services.
For the unelected globalist bureaucrats, measuring digital safety is about empowering themselves and forcing people into compliance with unelected globalist ideologies (with the help of regulators), all while balancing privacy considerations that are antithetical to everything they’re trying to achieve with the great reset and the fourth industrial revolution.
In a leaked recording of a private WEF Young Global Leaders indoctrination session, Klaus Schwab promises new recruits that their "avatars" will continue to live on after they die, and that their brains "will be replicated through artificial intelligence and algorithms".
"You… pic.twitter.com/c8qEBctl15
— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) June 12, 2024
WEF founder Klaus Schwab has stated on numerous occasions that the so-called fourth industrial revolution will lead to the fusion of our physical, biological, and digital identities.
Schwab openly talks about a future where we will decode people’s brain activity to know how they’re feeling and what they are thinking and that people’s digital avatars will live on after death and their brains will be replicated using artificial intelligence.
How’s that for balancing privacy considerations in the digital world?
“Digital safety decisions must be rooted in international human rights frameworks” — Typology of Online Harms, WEF, August 2023
While the latest WEF white paper only lists disinformation, hate speech, and abuse material, it builds upon an August 2023 insight report entitled “Toolkit for Digital Safety Design Interventions and Innovations: Typology of Online Harms,” which expands the scope of what constitutes online harm into various categories:
- Threats to personal and community safety,
- Harm to health and well-being,
- Hate and discrimination,
- Violation of dignity,
- Invasion of privacy,
- Deception and manipulation.
Many of the harms listed in last year’s report have to do with heinous acts against people of all ages and identities, but there too in that list of online harms, the WEF highlights misinformation and disinformation without giving a single, solitary example of either one.
With misinformation and disinformation, the typology report states that “[b]oth can be used to manipulate public opinion, interfere with democratic processes such as elections or cause harm to individuals, particularly when it involves misleading health information.”
In the same report, the unelected globalists admit that it’s almost impossible “to define or categorize common types of harm.”
The authors say that “there are regional differences in how specific harms are defined in different jurisdictions and that there is no international consensus on how to define or categorize common types of harm.
“Considering the contextual nature of online harm, the typology does not aim to offer precise definitions that are universally applicable in all contexts.”
By not offering precise definitions, they are deliberately making “online harm” a vague concept that can be left wide open to just about any interpretation, which makes quashing dissent and obfuscating the truth even easier because these “online harms,” in their eyes, must be seen as human rights abuses:
By framing online harms through a human rights lens, this typology emphasizes the impacts on individual users and aims to provide a broad categorization of harms to support global policy development
Once again, the authors are deliberately putting misinformation, disinformation, and so-called hate speech in the same category as abuse, harassment, doxing, and criminal acts of violence under this “broad categorization of harms.”
That way, they can treat anyone they deem as a threat for speaking truth to power in the same manner as they would for people who commit the most egregious crimes known to humanity.
The title of the latest white paper suggests that it’s all about measuring digital safety, but the title can be misleading.
It’s like what lawmakers do when they introduce bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, which had nothing to do with reducing inflation and everything to do with advancing the green agenda, decarbonization, and net-zero policies.
Similarly, the WEF’s latest white paper may have little or nothing to do with reducing risks online, as the title suggests.
But it does have a lot to do with making sure that misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech are associated with human rights abuses and other acts of real criminality.
In doing so, the ESG proponents can swoop in and consolidate more power for their public-private partnerships – the fusion of corporation and state.
Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.
Business
EU Tightens Social Media Censorship Screw With Upcoming Mandatory “Disinformation” Rules
From Reclaim The Net
This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.
What started out as the EU’s “voluntary code of practice” concerning “disinformation” – affecting tech/social media companies – is now set to turn into a mandatory code of conduct for the most influential and widely-used ones.
The news was revealed by the Irish media regulator, specifically an official of its digital services, Paul Gordon, who spoke to journalists in Brussels. The EU Commission has yet to confirm that January will be the date when the current code will be “formalized” in this way.
The legislation that would enable the “transition” is the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), which critics often refer to as the “EU online censorship law,” the enforcement of which started in February of this year.
The “voluntary” code is at this time signed by 44 tech companies, and should it become mandatory in January 2025, it will apply to those the EU defines as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) (with at least 45 million monthly active users in the 27-nation bloc).
Currently, the number of such platforms is said to be 25.
In its present form, the DSA’s provisions obligate online platforms to carry out “disinformation”-related risk assessments and reveal what measures they are taking to mitigate any risks revealed by these assessments.
But when the code switches from “voluntary” to mandatory, these obligations will also include other requirements: demonetizing the dissemination of “disinformation”; platforms, civil society groups, and fact-checkers “effectively cooperating” during elections, once again to address “disinformation” – and, “empowering” fact-checkers.
This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.
The code was first introduced (in its “voluntary” form) in 2022, with Google, Meta, and TikTok among the prominent signatories – while these rules originate from a “strengthened” EU Code of Practice on Disinformation based on the Commission’s Guidance issued in May 2021.
“It is for the signatories to decide which commitments they sign up to and it is their responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of their commitments’ implementation,” the EU said at the time – that would have been the “voluntary” element, while the Commission said the time it had not “endorsed” the code.
It appears the EC is now about to “endorse” the code, and then some – there are active preparations to make it mandatory.
Brownstone Institute
They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
From the Brownstone Institute
By
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
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