Censorship Industrial Complex
World Economic Forum pushes digital ID for global metaverse governance: report
From LifeSiteNews
Apart from tracking every interaction, another major part of this digital ID scheme for the metaverse includes an agenda for complete traceability of all transactions. They call this empowerment.
Under the banner of establishing global governance in the metaverse, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is pushing digital ID for all users, so all blended reality interactions and transactions can be tracked-and-traced.
Published on November 19, the WEF report, “Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet” expresses the desire to establish global governance in blended reality, which requires digital identity for all users to keep track of their interactions and transactions:
Digital spaces have long been a forum for pronounced cyberbullying, harassment, abuse, exploitation, privacy violation, etc. Physical-digital blended spaces will see exacerbated forms of these issues.
When it comes to future interactions in the metaverse, the report asserts that some people will behave badly and that some people won’t know how to deal with what they experience, and for those reasons, digital ID should be a prerequisite under a global governance framework to ensure user safety.
According to the report, “In blended reality, people cannot ‘unsee’ or ‘un-experience’ interactions. While people cannot unsee or un-experience reality today, the types of spatial experiences an individual could be exposed to bring dynamic, evolving, palpable and visceral experiences. This underscores the urgency of refining and implementing a set of guiding commitments.”
The unelected globalist desire for global governance over the future of the internet is exemplified by what they call “fragmentation” when it comes to how each nation chooses to govern, whether it be a mandate from the people or from authoritarian regimes:
Hardware devices – such as smartphones, biometric and IoT sensors, and XR headsets – play a pivotal role in this transformation by reshaping how individuals interact with the internet and each other. These technologies are blurring the line between online and offline lives, creating new challenges and opportunities that require a coordinated and informed approach from stakeholders for effective navigation and governance.
One example of fragmentation has to do with how different regions regulate data collection and privacy, with a particular focus on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) scheme.
Using GDPR as a starting point, the WEF report says, “Fragmentation of national frameworks can hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of global internet governance and the ability to address transnational issues such as cybercrime, digital trade, online harms, secure and trusted cross-border data flows, and the protection of intellectual property.”
In order to address this so-called challenge, the unelected globalist solution states that “it is imperative to establish a common set of governance commitments that all stakeholders can execute via tailored strategies, approaches and policies that are aligned with jurisdictional values and establish common objectives for cooperation.”
All roads lead to digital ID; this is also true for financial transactions in both the physical and digital worlds, including where they overlap.
The WEF report recommends eight commitments that “stakeholders” should apply to global governance in the metaverse – stakeholders being governments, academics, and civil society – the latter of which consists of NGOs like the WEF itself.
These commitments don’t come from the will of the people; they come from unelected technocrats looking to influence policies from the top-down:
Rallying behind these governance commitments will enable technically and jurisdictionally appropriate governance guardrails to be put in place as individuals start to engage in blended reality experiences and move around immersive spaces – bringing with them their identity, money and digital objects.
Source: WEF “Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet“
It is crucial to explore considerations around addressing the provenance, authenticity and protection of physical and digital assets. This includes data, identity and intellectual property (IP), and other forms of assets to ensure possession, access, transactions, transferability and accountability for individuals, entities and common resources.
Central to global governance in the metaverse, once again, is digital ID, which is also referred to as “identification management” in the WEF report.
According to the report, identification management “involves enabling appropriate and suitable identity access management measures of individuals interacting with information technology (IT) systems to enable governance through such systems. This might include, as necessary, aspects of personal identity, digital identity, entities or digital assets and their associated ownership.”
The authors claim that digital identity is necessary for:
Employing traceability and visibility mechanisms to implement appropriate enforcement, redress and remediation.
In this way, digital ID is being pushed forth as a something that will protect individuals, rather than addressing all the ways it can enslave them.
Apart from tracking every interaction, another major part of this digital ID scheme for the metaverse includes an agenda for complete traceability of all transactions.
They call this empowerment.
Empowerment through traceability and control: This involves enabling the attribution of lineage and authenticity of digital and physical interactions and assets.
Keeping in mind that total traceability and control is not just for the digital realm, but also the real world and where the two intersect, the WEF report says that “tracing the ownership and transfer history of assets through mechanisms like distributed ledger technology or digital certificates” will create a chain of custody.
This chain of custody includes:
- Authenticity: establishing proof of personhood and humanity, especially in the context of AI-generated assets and digital representations
- Proof of value: establishing verifiable and quantifiable value for both physical and digital asset
- Proof of ownership: clear assignment and verification of ownership
- Proof of transaction: comprehensive records for transaction history and settlement
In other words, there is to be no distinction between the physical world and the digital one when it comes to buying and selling.
Every transaction, every change of ownership, everything of value must be digitally tracked and traced and tied back to a person’s digital ID.
Another way in which digital ID is essential to the unelected globalist agenda is to deal with what they call misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech, which is lumped in a category for the metaverse called “experience moderation.”
Experience Moderation – Content and conduct moderation: Prioritizing thoughtful content and conduct moderation that respects human expression while addressing the challenges of harmful content, harassment, misinformation and disinformation, and other harms while ensuring user safety and championing algorithmic accuracy and transparency
But what type of content do these unelected technocrats consider to be harmful?
For starters, if you question any official narrative having to do with climate change, you are spreading hateful and harmful misinformation and disinformation.
If you don’t agree with public health mandates, you are expressing views that harm user safety.
And with a digital ID, if you don’t comply, you can be shut off from goods and services, like we saw with vaccine passports.
Then, in a strange turn of events, the report also mentions the right of the people to not participate in this digital scheme.
The authors call this “Preservation of Choice”:
Preservation of choice: This involves endorsing the development of governance that respects digital autonomy, emphasizing that everyone has the fundamental option to limit or abstain from digital engagement without facing exclusion from essential services such as healthcare, education, utilities, means of communication, emergency response, transport, etc.
But how can an individual have “preservation of choice” when digital ID is required for all interactions – be they online, offline, or in between?
The authors say, “Championing the dignity of choice for nondigital interactions and ensuring that this choice does not preclude access to essential services – this may be accomplished through modernizing infrastructure for processes that enable members of society to reap the benefits of emerging technologies without necessarily needing to interact with them.”
They also add, “Recognizing and affirming the rights to autonomy, agency, mobility and access to information as fundamental human rights in both digital and physical spaces. This includes the right to move and choice of residence, and the ability to seek and impart information through any media, regardless of frontiers (Article 13 and Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights).”
However, all this talk about being able to opt-out of the digital gulag system, along with having the right to move about and having the right to access information, is completely contradicted by everything the WEF and other unelected globalist entities have been pushing for over the years when it comes to digital ID:
This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.
Digital identity is the nexus to an interoperable metaverse. It enables accountability and the capacity to traverse worlds with minimal friction.
Apart from acknowledging that digital ID is exclusionary in nature, the WEF flat-out admits that vaccines passports are a form of digital ID.
According to the WEF report, “Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries,” published in February, 2022, “The COVID 19 pandemic has led to a heightened focus on the power of medical data, specifically so-called vaccine passports.
“These [vaccine] passports by nature serve as a form of digital identity.”
Getting back to the metaverse, the WEF has stated time and time again that digital ID will be central to your daily life and that digital ID will be the “nexus to an interoperable metaverse.”
“A person’s metaverse identity will be central to their day-to-day life.”
If your metaverse identity is supposed to be central to your daily life, and if digital ID is supposed to be the nexus to an interoperable metaverse, how in the hell can they claim there is still a “preservation of choice” for those wishing to opt out?
In a weak attempt to give some consolation to the paradox they invented, the unelected globalists at the WEF are saying in the latest report that there should be a system in place that allows for the deletion and erasure of an individual’s private data after having gone through a process of review, updates, and transfers.
The report describes this with the acronym RUTDE:
Review, update, transfer, deletion and erasure (RUTDE): Enabling comprehensive architecture, processes and privacy controls facilitates:
- Building IT systems to support the review, update, transfer, deletion and erasure of individuals’ information
- Providing documentation, structured processes and supporting information for individuals to manage their digital footprints, including the option to request, review, update, transfer and delete personal data from platforms
But wait a second! Why should we have to manage our “digital footprints” if we have already chosen to opt-out in the first place?
Why would we need to request, review, update, transfer, or delete our personal data if we never consented at the outset?
The whole thing reeks of public-private partnership overreach.
They say we can opt-out of the metaverse digital ID data collection scam while simultaneously telling us that doing so would be close to impossible.
It’s the same type of logic that said nobody forced you to take the experimental gene therapy jab, but if you didn’t, you could lose your job, your freedoms, your livelihood – all of which runs contrary to all previous human rights agreements.
When it comes to digital ID, there is no public consensus, only collusion.
There is no choice; only coercion and contradiction to confuse our cognition towards total control.
Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.
Business
Facebook / Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan Experience
Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg rocked the world of information with the news that Facebook, Instagram, and his other Meta properties would no longer use third party fact checking groups to censor information. As the week wraps up, Zuckerberg sits down for an extended conversation with Joe Rogan. For anyone interested in the world of information, this is a must see / listen.
From the Joe Rogan Experience
Mark Zuckerberg is the chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc., the company behind Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Meta Quest, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Orion augmented reality glasses, and other digital platforms, devices, and services.
Business
Facebook’s New Free Speech Policy Shows Business Getting Back to Business
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Big tech seems to be getting out of the censorship business, and it’s about time. After years of increasingly awkward attempts to placate demands from activist groups and the government to suppress allegedly hateful speech and an amorphous category of “disinformation,” Facebook owner Meta is joining X (formerly Twitter) in substituting user-generated community notes on contested posts for top-down muzzling. There’s no doubt that political shifts in the U.S. heavily influenced the rediscovery of respect for free speech. But whatever the reason, we should celebrate the change and work to make it permanent.
Succumbing to Pressure To Censor
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a January 7 video. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far,” he added.
The implication here is that Zuckerberg and company succumbed to pressure to suppress speech disfavored by the bien pensant class, but rather than satisfying critics, that just fed demand to memory-hole ever more discussion and ideas. The ranks of those demanding that Facebook act as a censor also expanded and became more ominous.
“Even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg noted. “By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.”
This isn’t the first time the Meta CEO has cited government pressure to act as an end-run around the First Amendment’s protections for speech. In an August 26, 2024, letter to the House Judiciary Committee, he revealed that “senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.” He also admitted to suppressing reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop at the FBI’s request.
Succumbing to Pressure for Free Speech
By the time of that letter, the backlash against social media censorship was well underway. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) led to the publication of the Twitter files, revealing government pressure on the platform to suppress dissenting ideas. The Facebook files revealed the same of Zuckerberg’s company. U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty wrote that government pressure on tech platforms “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” These revelations vindicated complaints by critics of pandemic policy, conservatives, libertarians, and other dissenters that their efforts to communicate were being deleted, shadow-banned, and otherwise censored.
As early as 2020, Pew Research pollsters found “roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults say it is very (37%) or somewhat (36%) likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable.”
Which is to say, tech companies’ efforts to escape pressure over allowing users to publish “misinformation” wildly backfired. They came under more pressure than ever from those who objected—often rightly—that they were just trying to share information that others didn’t like.
If pressure led to censorship, it has also led to its reversal. That’s especially clear as Republicans pushed to allow lawsuits over online muzzling and then-candidate (now President-elect) Donald Trump thuggishly threatened Zuckerberg with “life in prison” for his company’s activities.
Zuckerberg even acknowledges bowing to shifting political winds, saying, “the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”
Whatever Mark Zuckerberg’s actual beliefs about freedom of speech, having once given in to political pressure to censor, he’s now succumbing to political pressure to end censorship. As journalist and date-cruncher Nate Silver puts it, “perhaps it’s the right move for the wrong reasons.” It’s quite likely that the Meta CEO’s motivations are pragmatic rather than principled. But at least he’s making the right move.
Zuckerberg now says he’ll follow in the footsteps of Elon Musk, who was the first tech tycoon to push back against pressures for censorship, first in public statements and then in his acquisition of Twitter.
“First, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S.,” he noted in his video statement. He also promised to get rid of restrictions on “topics like immigration and gender” that were previously subject to scrutiny for alleged wrongthink, focus the attention of automated filters on explicitly illegal content rather than general discourse, and stop deemphasizing political content. Facebook will also move its moderation teams out of the ideological hothouse of California to Texas—arguably just a different ideological hothouse, though one better aligned with a country that just voted as it did and generally favors free speech over Big Brother.
Meta Joins Other Companies, Steps Back from Political Alliances
In backing away from a default affiliation with one faction of American politics as well as the government, Zuckerberg joins not just Musk but also executives at other companies who are jettisoning brief flirtations with trendy causes.
“Walmart is ending some of its diversity programs, the latest big company to shift gears under pressure from a conservative activist,” The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Nassauer reported in November. The article attributed the shift to public pressure which “has successfully nudged other companies including retailer Tractor Supply and manufacturers Ford and Deere to back away from diversity efforts and other topics.”
That report came after the election put Republicans back on top, but the cultural winds had already shifted direction. Bloomberg reported in March that “Wall Street’s DEI retreat has officially begun.” A few months later, the financial news service noted a decline in interest in environmental, social, and governance investment guidelines associated, like DEI, with the political left.
As in Zuckerberg’s case, it’s not obvious that the business executives in question had a sincere commitment to the causes they now reject, or that their principles, should they have any, have changed. Instead, they seem to belatedly recognize that allying with one faction in a divided society inevitably alienates others. That’s dangerous when the fortunes of factions inevitably rise and fall, and when potential customers can be found across the political spectrum.
By taking their companies out of the political fray and acknowledging their customers’ right to disagree with one another and with the government, Mark Zuckerberg and other business leaders can leave us room to work out our differences in a free society without worrying so much whether the people to whom we give our money are friends or foes.
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