Yes, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 24, 2020
The manner in which free speech has been coming under attack over the past several years makes it easy to forget that this is not the only era of the internet and social media when this has been happening.
Different approaches and debates about how to handle what is, or is seen as “misinformation” and “disinformation” (used by most censorship champions interchangeably these days) have existed in the past as well, as have attempts to justify limiting freedom of speech protections provided by the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
And in the US, the go-to “crutch phrase” used by those favoring the stifling of speech over promoting freedom of expression has been to explain it as the need to sanction those who are, proverbially, “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
The expression is derived from a 1919 US Supreme Court case, US v. Schenck, during which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked that, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”
The phrase would in the meantime all but inevitably appear whenever an argument is being made that censorship is acceptable and needed in order to prevent some type of harm. But the use of “shouting fire in a crowded theater” in this way is itself a form of disinformation.
Charles Schenck got himself in trouble, and in jail 100 years ago not by literally starting any fires, but by opposing the WW1 draft policy of his government, and putting together a pamphlet to this effect. Schenck v. The United States held that the defendant’s speech opposing the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment.
Some of the slogans he used are fairly universal, though, and can be applied to a variety of issues, including the present-day curtailing of online speech: messages like, “Do not submit to intimidation,” and, “Assert your Rights.”
Schenck was put on trial and found guilty under the Espionage Act, but in 1969, the US Supreme Court ruled on the issue of inflammatory speech in the Brandenburg v. Ohio case to annul the validity of that decision, when it established that the First Amendment does in fact protect free speech, all the way to the right of Ku Klux Klan members to advocate violence – unless there as a direct threat of “imminent lawless action.”
Although the expression about fires in crowded theaters never carried actual legal weight, the 1969 decision should have also made it less and less appealing to censorship proponents. However, it is still going strong.
There are several cases when the phrase was used in the last decade by officials and commentators, such as a Twitter user accused of spreading disinformation during Hurricane Sandy, WikiLeaks and its activities, and a pastor calling for the burning of Qurans.
In internet years, 2012 is today a distant past, however, the same issues concerning free speech and transparency around attempts to suppress it online were taking place at the time as well. What’s changed in the last eight years is the intensity of the argument that the only way to deal with misinformation or disinformation is to obliterate such suspected content in acts of, by and large, unaccountable censorship, particularly that taking place on social media.
In the US, this has become an often fear mongering campaign that promotes the notion that other approaches would directly and dangerously undermine democracy. In reality, though, it’s the rampant censorship that is more likely to achieve this; even Justice Holmes eventually came round to the idea that “free trade in ideas” was preferable to their suppression, when he later dissented in a case similar to Schenck’s.
The best, and likely the only truly legal and legitimate way to deal with false information on social media is to identify and expose it, rather than censor it, or prosecute its authors.
As for the “crowded theater” phrase, these days it is almost exclusively used in the media to heap criticism on US President Donald Trump, such as this recent Vanity Fair article that calls him “The Human Embodiment of Yelling ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Theater.”
This was said in the context of the coronavirus epidemic, and, of course, a particularly heated election campaign that is fertile ground not only for censorship but also for using strong and suggestive language like this – whether or not it has any legal, or ethical relevance.
Why I’m ALMOST Ready to Vote for Trump
By Kevin Barrett | May 14, 2023
Donald Trump is, in many ways, an odious figure. A narcissistic semi-literate scoundrel who doesn’t even pretend otherwise, his primary redeeming qualities are a talent for channeling populist outrage and a certain reluctance to engage in bloody, pointless wars.
Normally I only vote for people I like (i.e. Cynthia McKinney and RFK Jr.) which is why I’ve never voted for a major-party candidate in a general election. I doubt very much that my first-ever vote for a mainstream candidate will be for the loathsome Trump. But the fake-left oligarchs and their lapdog media are working overtime to convince me to at least entertain the possibility.
The thing is, the media, legal, and political landscape has grown so grotesquely one-sided that Trump’s claims that the system is rigged against him, which once seemed whiny and petulant, are increasingly being validated. Big media’s Deep-State-assisted suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was, for many of us, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Since that election-deciding outrage, it has been obvious and undeniable that just because Trump is paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get him.
And the outrages just keep coming. As J-Mike Springmann and I remarked on False Flag Weekly News, the week’s two big Trump events—his civil conviction for libel and sexual assault, and his CNN Town Hall battle with Kaitlan Collins—almost seemed to have been orchestrated to spotlight Trump’s unfair treatment at the hands of the Establishment.
Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing statutes of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t like? The move seems especially egregious because it involved an almost three-decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even remember which year the alleged assault happened, and has no evidence whatsoever other than her word against his. If you’re going to do something as extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so you can prosecute a specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some evidence?
My advice to the Democrats is that they might as well go all the way and prosecute Trump for murder. Why murder? For one thing, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so they won’t have to bother suspending it. And just as Trump once said a stupid thing about grabbing women’s genitals that made him sound like “the kind of person who might do something like that,” he also once said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” So why not bring an evidence-free prosecution against him for shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue? Just find someone willing to claim they saw Trump shoot someone to death in the middle of Fifth Avenue in 1995, or was it 1996? It will be their word against his. And we all know Trump is a liar. Why? Because the media never stop telling us so. No New York jury could possibly fail to convict. And no New York judge could resist sentencing Donald J. Trump to death. (Yes, I know New York suspended the death penalty in 2004, but they could temporarily change that, just like they temporarily removed the statute of limitations, in order to dispose of Trump.)
Once Trump has been convicted and sentenced to death, we’ll all be able to breathe freely and get on with our lives, right? Not so fast! Trump’s lawyers will undoubtedly find a way to string out the appeals process, allowing him to become the first-ever candidate to run for president from death row. But what happens when he wins the election and his scheduled rendezvous with the electric chair happens to coincide with inauguration day? Will Trump be helicoptered to Washington, DC in handcuffs on January 20th, 2025, frog-marched into the Capitol, administered the oath of office, and then strapped into a special portable electric chair designed just for him and zapped like a bug? Will his hair turn an even brighter shade of orange as it bursts into flame? The Democrats would no doubt view it as inadequate payback for the horrors Trump unleashed there on January 6, 2021. But still…think of the ratings!
FBI Contractor Created Fake Online IDs to Join Chatrooms Run by Groups Organizing Against Vaccine Mandates
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 12, 2023
An FBI surveillance contractor infiltrated the chatrooms of two airline industry groups opposed to vaccine mandates to collect intelligence on the groups’ organizing activities, investigative journalist Lee Fang reported.
The contractor, Flashpoint, which in the past infiltrated Islamic terror groups, now focuses on “anti-vaccine” groups and other domestic political organizations, according to Fang.
In a webinar presentation for clients last year, which Fang analyzed on his Substack, Flashpoint analyst Vlad Cuiujuclu demonstrated his company’s methods for identifying and entering encrypted Telegram chat groups.
He explained how the company attempted to join chatrooms of transportation workers resisting the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Fang described the presentation:
“‘In this case, we’re searching for a closed channel of U.S. Freedom Flyers,’ said Cuiujuclu. ‘It’s basically a group that opposed vaccination and masks.’
“As he clicked through a database, Cuiujuclu showed a chat group on Telegram sponsored by Airline Professionals For Justice, another group formed by airline industry workers opposed to the mandate. The forum, he added, provided useful insights, including Zoom links for meetings of the grassroots organization.
“‘Private chats,’ said Cuiujuclu, ‘require for you to have an invite link,’ which he noted can often either be found by scrolling through public forums or by ‘engag[ing] the admin of that channel.’”
Flashpoint also offers clients artificial intelligence and internet scraping tools.
According to Fang, the firm is a leader in the “threat intelligence industry,” a growing number of security and surveillance firms that create fake online identities to infiltrate Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums and dark web message boards to gather information for clients, including corporations and the FBI, to monitor potential threats.
Joshua Yoder, president of US Freedom Flyers, said he is aware that Flashpoint infiltrated private chat groups associated with his organization.
Yoder told The Defender :
“Tradecraft and other strategies are often used to gain inside knowledge of conservative organizations with the intent to disrupt, mislead and otherwise thwart effective campaigns.
“Infiltration is a tactic used by the deep state to prevent the truth from being told by attempting to destroy the advancement of the message. The team at US Freedom Flyers has been successful in recognizing these attacks and we have taken decisive actions to protect the organization and our members.”
Aviation industry workers were some of the most vocal and organized against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
They wrote an open letter to the aviation industry signed by thousands of organizations, physicians and pilots. They also organized research on the risks of vaccines for pilots, spoke publicly about the “culture of fear and intimidation” around the mandates in the industry, and filed multiple lawsuits in Canada, the Netherlands, and the U.S.
US Freedom Flyers brought a lawsuit against Atlas Air, one of the largest air cargo carriers in the aviation industry, in May 2022.
Fang told The Defender the targeting of American citizens resisting the vaccine mandates fits into a long history of surveillance being used to subvert democracy. He said:
“There is a long sordid history of informants and surveillance contractors working to undermine democratic engagement in this country.
“The push against regular citizens opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates has come in many forms: censorship, demonization and in this case, surveillance.”
The growing market for spying on domestic dissent
Flashpoint advertises its surveillance success on its website, providing examples of its work undermining environmental activism, G20 protests and protests against the aviation industry.
The webpages describing these activities were taken down after Fang published his investigation, but they can be found on the Wayback Machine internet archive.
For example, Flashpoint described its capacity to monitor activists organizing against pollution and the aviation industry. The website said:
“By monitoring the situation and assessing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP’s), Flashpoint was able to assess the impact of upcoming protests, and determine that these groups would likely continue to protest and attempt to impede airport construction and expansion projects through direct action. …
“Based on this information, Flashpoint customers were able to take actions to help control the impact to business operations, and to ensure the safety of their employees and facilities as well as the safety of those protesting.”
Flashpoint was founded by Evan Kohlmann, former NBC News contributor who investigated Islamic terror groups and whom The Intercept described as “the U.S. government’s go-to expert witness in terrorism prosecutions.”
Jack Poulson of Tech Inquiry, a group that researches the surveillance industry, told Fang that “Flashpoint has been selling its chatroom infiltration services to companies and governments for years.”
But, he said, it has shifted its focus from “surveilling Muslims after September 11” and “followed the money into both the Pentagon’s information warfare programs and the business of monitoring domestic protest groups.”
Last year, Flashpoint acquired Echosec Systems, another intelligence contractor, and last month it formalized a partnership with Google Cloud.
These acquisitions come in addition to “a steady stream of contracts to Flashpoint in recent years from the FBI, the Department of Defense, Treasury Department, and Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies,” Fang wrote.
Fang also spoke to Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine at Stanford University, research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Bhattacharya said:
“This kind of domestic spying violates the implicit protection Americans have in these kinds of settings.
“This isn’t terrorism, this doesn’t have anything to do with national security.
“This is a private set of employees, workers who are trying to maintain their jobs in the face of unscientific demands for COVID vaccinations.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Robert Kennedy Jr. is the only presidential candidate to still be banned from Instagram
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | May 12, 2023
Robert Kennedy Jr., a Democratic candidate for the 2024 United States presidential election, revealed that his account is till banned from Instagram and accused the tech giant of preventing him from accessing the site, despite him being a contender for the White House.
This makes him the only 2024 US presidential candidate that’s unable to post to the influential social media platform and currently being subjected to direct Big Tech censorship.
Former President Donald Trump, who is running for president in 2024 as a Republican candidate, was suspended from Instagram on January 6, 2023 and banned on January 7. However, his ban was lifted on January 25, 2023.
The other 2024 presidential candidates, Joe Biden (D), Marianne Williamson (D), Larry Elder (R), Nikki Haley (R), Asa Hutchinson (R), Vivek Ramaswamy (R), and Corey Stapleton (R), all have active Instagram accounts.
Kennedy was banned from Instagram in February 2021 for violating the platform’s strict speech rules related to the coronavirus and vaccines. The ban came after several Democratic senators and 12 state attorneys general demanded that Kennedy and other Covid vaccine skeptics be deplatformed by Big Tech. Before the ban, Kennedy had over 800,000 Instagram followers.
Instagram’s failure to reinstate Kennedy since announcing his presidential campaign means that he won’t be able to directly post his message to the social media platform’s sizeable audience of two billion monthly active users.
Brazilian Justice Will Punish Tech Companies That Criticize Government’s Censorship Law
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 11, 2023
Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, also the president of the country’s Superior Electoral Court, told tech platforms not to campaign against a proposed internet censorship bill.
If they do, he’ll punish them.
Moraes said that the tech companies were undermining Brazil’s democracy.
“The big tech platforms have been challenged and they will be penalized. They will be held accountable, to guarantee the voter’s freedom to vote,” Moraes said, speaking to judges and government employees studying electoral law.
He added that Big Tech platforms, “believe no jurisdiction in the world can oversee them.”
The proposed “Fake News Law” aims to put the responsibility of finding and reporting illegal content on internet platforms.
Non-compliance with the extreme measures would result in fines.
Tech platforms have obviously campaigned against the legislation, claiming it would lead to more censorship.
On Tuesday, Telegram Brazil posted to the Telegram app and said that “democracy is under attack in Brazil,” claiming that the bill would “kill the modern internet” and “put an end to freedom of expression.”
Moraes quickly went further and directly threatened messaging service Telegram with a nationwide ban unless it removed the post on its platform.
Telegram retracted the message and posted a state-ordered message.
Google recently deleted its criticism of the law after the legal threat of fines.
Pakistan’s top court orders release of ex-PM khan, declares his arrest ‘invalid’
Press TV – May 11, 2023
Pakistan’s top court has ordered the anti-graft agency to release former Prime Minister Imran Khan from its custody amid violent and widespread protests sparked by his detention.
The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Imran Khan’s arrest earlier this week, which sparked deadly protests across the South Asian country, was “illegal and invalid”.
“Your arrest was invalid so the whole process needs to be backtracked,” Pakistan’s Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial told Khan, who has been in custody since Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, the court directed the the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to present the former premier before the court.
Subsequently, Khan was presented in court amid tight security about 5:45 pm local time. The top court’s order on Thursday came after Khan’s legal team challenged his arrest by the NAB on Tuesday.
The shock arrest has triggered violent protests across the country, prompting the government to call out the army to help restore order.
Tensions remained high on Thursday with paramilitary troops and police on the streets in big cities.
Supporters of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party have attacked military establishments and set other state buildings and assets ablaze.
A total of nearly 2,500 people have been arrested so far and at least 11 killed and dozens injured. Authorities have also arrested at least three senior leaders of PTI party as of Thursday.
Footage shared by an Islamabad police official showed military vehicles with mounted guns lined up on the side of a road and soldiers holding assault rifles.
Mobile data services remained suspended and schools and offices were closed in two of Pakistan’s four provinces. Social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram have been blocked.
More than 100 police cases have been registered against Khan by the government since his removal from power in April 2022 after he lost a confidence vote in parliament.
Pakistan’s President Arif Alvi, who is also a senior PTI leader, said he was “alarmed, shocked and deeply disturbed” over the situation in the country.
After his ouster in April last year, Khan accused an unnamed “foreign power” — in a clear reference to the United States — of funding a “conspiracy” to topple his democratically elected government.
Khan insisted that the “foreign power” sent millions of dollars to opposition parties to launch a no-confidence vote against him in the parliament.
The former prime minister has declared he fears for his life if detained, and that authorities want him jailed to prevent him from contesting an election.
Last year, Khan was shot in the leg during a political rally. Previous attempts to arrest Khan from his home in Lahore saw clashes between his supporters and security forces.
Vice President of Imran Khan’s Opposition Party Arrested in Pakistan
Sputnik – 10.05.2023
Fawad Chaudhry, the vice president of the opposition Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in Pakistan, has been arrested from outside the Supreme Court premises, Pakistani media reported on Wednesday.
Chaudhry was arrested late Wednesday night after he came out of the apex court premises after having spent over 12 hours inside the Supreme Court in a bid to evade the arrest, media reported.
It was earlier reported that Shah Mahmood Qureshi, the vice chairman of the PTI, and PTI Secretary-General Asad Umar were also arrested in Pakistan.
The Pakistani authorities said Monday that former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan had been taken into custody following a hearing of the Islamabad High Court in the Al-Qadir Trust case.
PTI called on citizens of Pakistan to gather for mass protests, demanding Khan’s release.
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s authorities said Khan was facing an inquiry by the National Accountability Bureau in the Al-Qadir Trust case, related to a settlement between the PTI government and a property tycoon, which reportedly caused a loss of 50 billion Pakistani rupees ($17.6 million) to the national exchequer.
The actions spurred mass protests across the country, with activists setting police vehicles on fire and damaging government property and the police using tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd.
Andrew Bridgen MP Joins Reclaim Party and Announces He is Suing Matt Hancock for Defamation
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MAY 10, 2023
Ex-Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the party for criticising the Covid vaccines, has announced he’s joining Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party, making him its first member of Parliament. At a press conference today Bridgen said he would be standing at his North West Leicestershire constituency at the next General Election. He also confirmed he would be suing Matt Hancock MP for defamation over an allegation of antisemitism.
At the press conference this morning Bridgen confirmed he has decided not to appeal his expulsion and blasted the Conservative Party. He said:
Even if I were to be given a fair hearing, which I doubt, I would not wish to rejoin the party after the treatment received by myself and my family over the past few years.
I feel now that the party no longer represents the people of this great country. If I am to represent my constituents and countrymen it must be from outside the party which I have served dutifully for many decades.
I will be standing again in North West Leicestershire at the next election. Not as a Conservative, but as a Member of the Reclaim Party. More than anything, the Reclaim Party stands for freedom of speech.
I will cross the floor today, Wednesday May 10th, and sit on the opposition benches as the first Member of Parliament for the Reclaim Party. I say first because I have no doubt I will not be the last. This is just the beginning.
If the Conservative Party wishes to contest my seat it can do so at the next General Election.
I have more confidence that I will win my seat than the vast majority of sitting Conservative MPs, so I welcome the challenge should the Prime Minister and Parliamentary Party wish to take it.
Bridgen was accused of antisemitism for agreeing in a tweet with an anonymous heart doctor he quoted that the Covid vaccine rollout was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust”.
He has denied the allegation – which we at the Daily Sceptic agree is spurious and an example of a weaponised antisemitism allegation to achieve political ends. This morning Bridgen confirmed that he will be suing ex-Health Secretary Matt Hancock for defamation after the Conservative MP tweeted in January that he was spouting “antisemitic, anti-vax, anti-scientific conspiracy theories”.
In a YouTube video Bridgen said he has submitted a “defamation claim to the Royal Court of Justice against Matthew Hancock MP”. The basis of the claim is that Hancock’s accusation of antisemitism is “a false slur to deliberately try and shut down valid concerns raised by me on behalf of constituents and thousands of others around the world about the safety and efficacy of the experimental COVID-19 injections”.
Matt Hancock in the dock: that’s a court case to look forward to.
You can donate to Andrew Bridgen’s legal fund here.
Leaked Legal Analysis Of EU’s Private Message Snooping Plans Says It Interferes With “Fundamental Rights”
Undermining the EU’s self-described commitment to privacy
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 10, 2023
There are few things the EU Commission (the EU’s executive arm) would like to present more than the bloc and its institutions speaking with one voice, particularly on controversial topics, such as attempts to destroy encryption.
However, documents leaked from the EU Council Legal Service regarding the legality of a proposal known as “chat control” (formally, Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, CSAR), show that there may be “trouble in paradise.”
As digital rights advocate and European Parliament member (MEP) Patrick Breyer of Germany reports, the Service has warned the Commission that its idea probably runs contrary to the fundamental right to respect for private life – meaning that the European Court of Justice would likely annul it.
Summed up, the “chat control” scheme proposes forcing providers of chat, messaging, phone, and email services to screen all private messages in search for illegal content and then inform the police.
But the problem with this, as the Service has noticed, is that it very easily could be interpreted as general and indiscriminate, as well as permanent surveillance, given that the plan gives “generalized” access to every citizen, including those the analysis says are “not even remotely connected with child sexual exploitation.”
And with the high likelihood that CSAR’s “detection orders” would be considered a violation of the fundamental right to privacy and confidentiality of correspondence, the EU court is also highly likely to squash “chat control” as indiscriminate surveillance, the Service warns.
The analysis also notes that while if the justification for “communications metadata screening” is national security, the court allows it – the drastic measures proposed in the CSAR would probably not be considered proportional to their stated purpose.
There’s also the issue of the EU Commission making the dubious claim that the process, rather than generalized, is somehow “targeted” (it does target everyone – so perhaps that’s the sophistry those behind the CSAR chose to go with.)
But the Legal Service’s analysis fears this is actually a “contradiction” between what the Commission is saying, and what the proposal actually spells out.
The Service’s logical suggestion then is to actually target detection orders so that they apply to people “in respect of whom there are reasonable grounds to believe that they are in some way involved in, committing or have committed a child sexual abuse offense.”
Observers have noted that the analysis of the CSAR – whose UK counterpart is the Online Safety Bill, represents serious criticism of similar, encryption-undermining proposals on both sides of the Atlantic.
New Federal Disinformation Offices Created
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | May 9, 2023
The Intercept recently reported the creation of two new federal offices to combat disinformation. The Pentagon will oversee the “Influence and Perception Management Office,” which is consistent with the fact that “Perception Management” is an old DoD euphemism for psychological warfare and deception. According to the investigative journalist Robert Parry, who covered the Iran-Contra Affair, the Reagan and first Bush Administrations adopted the techniques of “Perception Management” for the objective of overcoming the American public’s “Vietnam Syndrome”—that is, its reluctance to get involved in foreign military adventures that were widely perceived as fruitless and likely to end badly.
Given that the federal government is already a Leviathan of agencies for conducting propaganda, influence, and surveillance operations, one wonders why it is necessary to create new offices for these activities. The new Biden Administration offices are purportedly to keep the homeland and its people safe from dangerous foreign adversaries. More likely they will work round the clock to keep our people insulated from outside sources of information that would serve to counterbalance U.S. government and MSM propaganda.
US developed AI tool to battle ‘Russian disinformation’ – Blinken
RT | May 10, 2023
Washington has developed an artificial intelligence-based system to detect and gather ‘Russian’ disinformation online, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed on Tuesday at the Freedom House 2023 Annual Awards Ceremony.
The State Department has created “an AI-enabled online Ukraine Content Aggregator to collect verifiable Russian disinformation and then to share that with partners around the world,” the US top diplomat said.
The government is cooperating with scholars to be able to “reliably detect fake text generated by Russian chatbots,” he added.
Last year, social media analytics company Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory said hundreds of accounts disseminating pro-Western narratives over the past five were likely being run by the Pentagon’s Centcom unit. In March, news website The Intercept reported on federal contract documents, which suggest that the US Special Operations Command is planning to conduct propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake technology.
Last month, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the US of waging “an unprecedented information campaign” against Russia since the start of the conflict in Ukraine. Washington and its allies “need war at any cost, and their favorite method of solving their own problems is provocations, disinformation and threats,” Zakharova argued.
Speaking about artificial intelligence in general, Blinken warned that the technology can backfire and “amplify discrimination and enable abuses.”
“It also runs the risk of strengthening autocratic governments, including by enabling them to exploit social media even more effectively to manipulate their people and sow division among and within their adversaries,” he said.
Since the release of the artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT last November, the debate over the dangers posed by AI has intensified in the industry and in academic circles. Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as one of the ‘godfathers’ of AI, warned last week that the technology could present a “more urgent” threat than climate change.
In March, several tech industry leaders, including Elon Musk, co-signed an open letter, urging a six-month pause in the development of AI technology more powerful than ChatGPT, and the appointment of an independent regulator to provide oversight in the field.
Paris to Block Websites Sharing News Content of Sputnik, RT France
Sputnik – 10.05.2023
PARIS – France will block websites that share information of sanctioned media, including RT France and Sputnik, under a new law on security of digital space, French Minister for Digital Transition and Telecommunications Jean-Noel Barrot said on Wednesday.
“As part of measures to protect democracy we will also begin blocking websites that share content of media under international sanctions like the ones the EU imposed against RT France and Sputnik. This measure will complement our existing tools to fight the propaganda of the enemies of democracy,” Barrot told a briefing after a cabinet meeting.
The French ministry has claimed the measure will allow the authorities to protect people from disinformation by expanding the powers of Arcom, the country’s media regulator, which will be authorized to impose restrictive measures against media.
The draft law will be submitted to the Senate in early July, Barrot stated.
Since the start of Russia’s special military operation, a number of jurisdictions, including the European Commission, have decided to censor Russian media and affiliated journalists. In early March 2022, the EU banned the broadcasting and distribution of content by RT and Sputnik as part of the sanctions against Russia, applying the restrictions to all means of content transmission and distribution, such as cable, satellite, IPTV, platforms, websites and apps. All relevant RT, Sputnik licenses and agreements are suspended.
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UN declares war on ‘dangerous’ conspiracy theories
‘World is not secretly run by elites’
Free West Media | August 5, 2022
UNESCO says it is seriously concerned about the increase in “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories”. And they plan to put an end to it through a network of informants.
“Conspiracy theories can be dangerous,” the UN agency warned. “Often they ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with dire consequences. This has to stop.”
Unesco’s director-general warned that “conspiracy theories” could cause damage to people as well as to their health. “They reinforce misconceptions about the pandemic, reinforcing stereotypes that can fuel violence and violent, extremist ideologies,” said Audrey Azoulay.
The UN agency has launched a campaign to help people identify, debunk and report “conspiracy theories” to prevent them from spreading further.
This campaign is being carried out in collaboration with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress. The UN has created a toolkit to “debunk” such theories and smear anyone who dares to claim that governments are not fair and transparent.
The UN also warned that George Soros, the Rothschilds and Israel should not be linked to “alleged conspiracies”.
World events “are not secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful players with malicious intent,” the UN agency maintained.
And if anyone therefore comes across someone who believes that the world elite is plotting to consolidate power or direct events, then that person needs to take action. According to the UN agency, when meeting a “conspiracy theorist”, under no circumstances should one enter into a discussion. … continue
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- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
