Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration is funding several entities that are building a network to censor so-called “misinformation” found in the private messages of the American people.
Biden’s White House has been pumping millions in tax dollars into “censorship mercenary firms,” a former State Department official has revealed.
According to Mike Benz, who now runs the Foundation For Freedom Online, the Biden admin has been ramping up efforts to censor the American people.
Rather than backing away from the unconstitutional practice, White House officials have been working on more sophisticated tactics to subvert the public’s free speech rights.
Reports are now emerging about companies getting hired to make massive databases of supposedly unwelcome speech in private conversations on messaging platforms like WhatsApp.
The examples of wrongthink are compiled and stored thanks to users effectively spying and reporting on each other.
Benz calls this “a snitch network of citizen informants.”
The information thus obtained is then analyzed using some form of artificial intelligence (AI), resulting in the identification of “misinformation trends.”
In a post on X, Benz explains:
“The US gov’t is paying millions of dollars to censorship mercenary firms to build up a snitch network of citizen informants to report private text messages on WhatsApp for ‘misinformation’ — then create a vast database of banned memes & ideas.”
One of these companies is the Algorithmic Transparency Institute.
The money for the operation comes from congressionally chartered organizations that receive taxpayer-funded grants from the Biden admin.
The need to resort to “old school” citizen-informant methods arises from the nature of the platforms the government would like to spy on, and get content flagged and eventually censored.
The targets of the operation are encrypted private messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Due to the nature of these messaging apps, the now-established forms of “monitoring” places like Facebook or YouTube cannot be used.
Critics of this euphemistically dubbed “civic listening” draw parallels with how authoritarian regimes notoriously use people spying on each other even before the digital age.
Some continue to do so.
Now, the spying “format” once used by the likes of Stalin, the Nazis, etc., has reached America.
The principle is simple: In the areas where the government can’t reach, private chat apps’ users themselves are encouraged to report what’s being said.
That flagged “misinformation” data is then fed into the censorship machine with the creation of databases before undergoing AI analyses.
Foundation For Freedom Online singles out US-based non-profit Meedan as being “at the forefront of creating this snitch network.”
The group received $5.7 million in tax dollars as a grant from the Biden admin via the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Among the things flagged by these “censorship mercenary firms” are memes and “claims.”
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