Aletho News

US agencies working directly with Big Tech to police Internet content

By Drago Bosnic | November 1, 2022

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the United States effectively became a police state. Government control and direct surveillance, the legality of which remains questionable at best, has been the norm ever since. With the advent of new technologies and the expansion of the so-called Big Tech (Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, etc.), the government managed to acquire unprecedented access to the personal information of not just its own citizens, but hundreds of millions of others around the world as well.

For decades, Big Tech denied any involvement with US agencies, despite it being common knowledge for the vast majority of users. However, the level of cooperation and integration between the US government and the aforementioned Internet giants (all of which are private companies) has been truly staggering.

Back in August, while on the Joe Rogan podcast, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the FBI worked with the company to suppress so-called “Russian propaganda” shortly before the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was published by the New York Post. However, new reports now indicate that this Big Tech-US government collusion goes much deeper, according to the leaked documents acquired by The Intercept. Their investigation revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is “quietly broadening control over speech it considers dangerous.” Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

According to the report, the work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”, a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens US interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the US government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information, The Intercept reports.

During a March 2022 meeting, FBI official Laura Dehmlow warned that the “threat of subversive information on social media” could undermine support for the US government – stressing that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.” Interestingly, Dehmlow’s insistence on preventing the fall of support for the US government is clearly a priority over telling the truth. What’s more, the US agencies seem to have a strict bias towards certain power structures within the US establishment, primarily those dominated by the DNC neoliberals and partially the GOP neoconservatives. This was particularly noticeable during Donald Trump’s presidency, when undermining the 45th US president through disinformation and conspiracy theories such as the alleged “Russian election meddling” wasn’t seen as a “threat to our democracy”.

Expectedly, the Big Tech companies denied involvement. Twitter told The Intercept that they “do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions” and that they “independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules.” However, the claim doesn’t seem very convincing given the sheer amount of coordinated efforts by the Big Tech companies (seemingly unrelated, as they are all officially separate private entities) to suppress so-called MDM (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation). Having every Big Tech corporation banning or restricting millions of users in a virtually identical manner can only be described as a cooperative effort directed by the same authority. The Intercept report indicates that this authority is none other than the US government itself.

The issue at hand is the fact that various interest groups within the US establishment are controlling what hundreds of millions of people get to see as the “undeniable truth”, or worse yet, billions when taking the global scale into account. Whether it’s the election meddling designed to push their preferred candidates or promoting wars around the world, these entities should be denied such a tremendous amount of power.

The so-called “struggle against MDM (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation)” has become the No. 1 pretext to suppress any information deemed as such. This has gone so far that private companies are now fining their customers, with PayPal deducting $2500 from anyone’s account for “spreading MDM”. It’s clear that such a level of control is quite uncomfortable, to say the least. The question is, where does it stop?

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 1, 2022 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Amazon, Apple, DHS, Facebook, FBI, Google, Human rights, United States