The Biden administration, led by Democrat President Joe Biden, is providing funding to various organizations that are involved in the development of a network aimed at censoring what they consider to be “misinformation” in private messages exchanged by the American people.
A former official from the State Department, Mike Benz, who currently heads the Foundation For Freedom Online, has disclosed that the Biden administration has been intensifying its efforts to censor the American public. Rather than distancing themselves from this unconstitutional practice, officials at the White House have been devising more sophisticated strategies to undermine the public’s right to free speech.
Recent reports have surfaced regarding the hiring of companies tasked with creating extensive databases of supposedly undesirable speech found in private conversations on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. These instances of dissenting opinions are compiled and stored with the help of users who effectively act as spies and report on one another.
Benz refers to this system as a “network of citizen informants” who act as snitches. The information obtained through this process is then analyzed using some form of artificial intelligence (AI), which enables the identification of trends related to what they consider to be “misinformation.”
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 the companies involved in this endeavor is the Algorithmic Transparency Institute.
Funding for this operation is provided by organizations that have been chartered by Congress and receive grants funded by taxpayers through the Biden administration.
The reason for resorting to traditional citizen-informant methods is due to the nature of the platforms that the government intends to monitor and flag content for potential censorship. These platforms include encrypted private messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. The unique characteristics of these messaging apps make it impossible to utilize the established monitoring techniques used on platforms such as Facebook or YouTube.
Critics of this so-called “civic listening” approach draw comparisons to how authoritarian regimes historically employed citizen surveillance even before the digital era. Unfortunately, some countries still engage in such practices.
Now, the surveillance methods once employed by figures like Stalin and the Nazis have made their way to America. The concept is straightforward: in areas where the government lacks direct access, users of private chat apps are encouraged to report any concerning conversations or content. The flagged data, categorized as “misinformation,” is then fed into a censorship system that utilizes AI analysis and creates databases.
The Foundation For Freedom Online has identified the US-based non-profit organization Meedan as a key player in establishing this reporting network. Meedan received a grant of $5.7 million from the Biden administration through the National Science Foundation (NSF), making them one of the primary recipients of tax-funded support.
Among the items targeted by these “censorship mercenary firms” are memes and various claims that are deemed problematic.
