{"id":105948,"date":"2018-02-05T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T12:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=105948"},"modified":"2018-02-12T10:21:58","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T10:21:58","slug":"thought-police-for-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/02\/thought-police-for-the-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Thought Police for the 21st Century"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mr. Fish \/ Truthdig<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Jan 2018<\/em>\u2014The abolition of net neutrality<\/a> and the use of algorithms<\/a> by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of speech. Any state that accrues this kind of power will use it. And for that reason I traveled last week to Detroit to join David North<\/a>, the chairperson of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, in a live-stream event<\/a> calling for the formation of a broad front to block an escalating censorship while we still have a voice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans,\u201d Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said in a statement issued in support of the event. \u201cBetween the democratization of communication and usurpation of communication by artificial intelligence. While the Internet has brought about a revolution in people\u2019s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. While still in its infancy, the trends are clear and of a geometric nature. The phenomena differs in traditional attempts to shape cultural and political phenomena by operating at scale, speed and increasingly at a subtlety that eclipses human capacities.\u201d<\/p>\n

In late April and early May the World Socialist Web Site<\/a>, which identifies itself as a Trotskyite <\/a>group that focuses on the crimes of capitalism, the plight of the working class and imperialism, began to see a steep decline in readership. The decline persisted into June. Search traffic to the World Socialist Web Site has been reduced by 75 percent overall. And the site is not alone. AlterNet\u2019s search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News is down 72 percent, Global Research and Truthdig have seen declines. And the situation appears to be growing worse.<\/p>\n

The reductions coincided with the introduction of algorithms imposed by Google to fight \u201cfake news.\u201d Google said the algorithms are designed to elevate \u201cmore authoritative content\u201d and marginalize \u201cblatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.\u201d It soon became apparent, however, that in the name of combating \u201cfake news,\u201d Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are censoring left-wing, progressive and anti-war sites. The 150 most popular search terms that brought readers to the World Socialist Web Site, including \u201csocialism,\u201d \u201cRussian Revolution\u201d and \u201cinequality,\u201d today elicit little or no traffic.<\/p>\n

Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in a hearing Wednesday<\/a> that Facebook employs a security team of 10,000\u20147,500 of whom \u201cassess potentially violating content\u201d\u2014and that \u201cby the end of 2018 we will more than double\u201d it to over 20,000.\u00a0Social media companies are intertwined with and often work for U.S. intelligence agencies. This army of censors is our Thought Police.<\/p>\n

The group, Bickert said, includes \u201ca dedicated counterterrorism team\u201d of \u201cformer intelligence and law-enforcement officials and prosecutors who worked in the area of counterterrorism.\u201d She testified that artificial intelligence automatically flags questionable content. Facebook, she said, does not \u201cwait for these \u2026 bad actors to upload content to Facebook before placing it into our detection systems.\u201d The \u201cpropaganda\u201d that Facebook blocks, she said, \u201cis content that we identify ourselves before anybody\u201d else can see it. Facebook, she said, along with over a dozen other social media companies has created a blacklist of 50,000 \u201cunique digital fingerprints\u201d that can prevent content from being posted.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence,\u201d she told the committee. \u201cThat\u2019s why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCounterspeech\u201d is a word that could have been lifted from the pages of George Orwell\u2019s dystopian novel \u201c1984.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Eric Schmidt, who is stepping down this month as the executive chairman of Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet, has acknowledged that Google is creating algorithms to \u201cde-rank\u201d Russian-based news websites RT and Sputnik from its Google News services, effectively blocking them. The U.S. Department of Justice forced RT America, on which I host a show, \u201cOn Contact<\/a>,\u201d that gives a voice to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist voices, to register as a \u201cforeign agent.\u201d<\/a> Google removed RT from its \u201cpreferred\u201d channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked the Russian news service agencies RT and Sputnik from advertising.<\/p>\n

This censorship is global. The German government\u2019s Network Enforcement Act fines social media companies for allegedly objectionable content. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to remove \u201cfake news\u201d from the internet. Facebook and Instagram erased the accounts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator of the Chechen Republic, because he is on a U.S. sanctions list. Kadyrov is certainly repugnant, but this ban, as the American Civil Liberties Union points out, empowers the U.S. government to effectively censor content. Facebook, working with the Israeli government, has removed over 100 accounts of Palestinian activists. This is an ominous march to an Orwellian world of Thought Police, \u201cNewspeak\u201d and \u201cthought-crime\u201d or, as Facebook likes to call it, \u201cde-ranking\u201d and \u201ccounterspeech.\u201d<\/p>\n

The censorship, justified in the name of combating terrorism by blocking the content of extremist groups, is also designed to prevent a distressed public from accessing the language and ideas needed to understand corporate oppression, imperialism and socialism.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?\u201d Orwell wrote in \u201c1984.\u201d \u201cIn the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one<\/em> word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. \u2026 Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Corporate capitalism, and the ideology that justifies it\u2014neoliberalism<\/a>, the free market, globalization\u2014no longer has any credibility. All of the utopian promises of globalization have been exposed as lies. Allowing banks and corporations to determine how we should order human society and govern ourselves did not spread global wealth, raise the living standards of workers or implant democracy across the globe. The ideology, preached in business schools and by pliant politicians, was a thin cover for the rapacious greed of the elites, elites who now control most of the world\u2019s wealth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The ruling elites know they are in trouble. The Republican and Democratic parties\u2019 abject subservience to corporate power is transparent. The insurgencies in the two parties that saw Bernie Sanders nearly defeat the seemingly preordained Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and the election of Donald Trump terrify the elites. The elites, by attacking critics and dissidents as foreign agents for Russia, are seeking to deflect attention from the cause of these insurgencies\u2014massive social inequality. Critics of the corporate state and imperialism, already pushed to the margins, are now dangerous because the elites no longer have a viable counterargument. And so these dissidents must be silenced.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s so specifically important about this is that in a period of growing political radicalization among young people, among workers, they start to look for oppositional information, they become interested in socialism, revolution, terms like \u2018equality,\u2019 those terms which previously would bring thousands of readers to the World Socialist Web Site, now were bringing no readers to the World Socialist Web Site,\u201d North said. \u201cIn other words, they were setting up a quarantine between those who may be interested in our site and the WSWS. From being a bridge, Google was becoming a barrier, a guard preventing access to our site.\u201d<\/p>\n

The internet, with its ability to reach across international boundaries, is a potent tool for connecting workers across the earth who are fighting the same enemy\u2014corporate capitalism. And control of the internet, the elites know, is vital to suppress information and consciousness.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no national solution to the problems of American capitalism,\u201d North said. \u201cThe effort of the United States is to overcome this through a policy of war. Because what, ultimately, is imperialism? The inability to solve the problems of the nation-state within national borders drives the policy of war and conquest. That is what is emerging. Under conditions of war, the threat of war, conditions of growing and immeasurable inequality, democracy cannot survive. The tendency now is the suppression of democracy. And just as there is no national solution for capitalism, there is no national solution for the working class.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWar is not an expression of the strength of the system,\u201d North said. \u201cIt is an expression of profound and deep crisis. Trotsky said in the Transitional Program<\/a>: \u2018The ruling elites toboggan with eyes closed toward catastrophe.\u2019 In 1939, they went to war, as in 1914, aware of the potentially disastrous consequences. Certainly, in 1939, they knew what the consequences of war were: War brings revolution. But they could not see a way out. The global problems which exist can only be solved in one of two ways: the capitalist, imperialist solution is war and [\u2026] fascism. The working-class solution is socialist revolution. This is, I think, the alternative we\u2019re confronted with. So, the question that has come up, in the broadest sense, [is] what is the answer to the problems we face? Building a revolutionary party.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is going to be, and there is already unfolding, massive social struggles,\u201d North said. \u201cThe question of social revolution is not utopian. It is a process that emerges objectively out of the contradictions of capitalism. I think the argument can be made\u2014and I think we made this argument\u2014that really, since 2008, we have been witnessing an acceleration of crisis. It has never been solved, and, indeed, the massive levels of social inequality are themselves not the expression of a healthy but [instead] a deeply diseased socioeconomic order. It is fueling, at every level, social opposition. Of course, the great problem, then, is overcoming the legacy of political confusion, produced, as a matter of fact, by the defeats and the betrayals of the 20th century: the betrayal of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism; the betrayals of the working class by social democracy; the subordination of the working class in the United States to the Democratic Party. These are the critical issues and lessons that have to be learned. The education of the working class in these issues, and the development of perspective, is the most critical point \u2026 the basic problem is not an absence of courage. It is not an absence of the desire to fight. It is an absence of understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSocialist consciousness must be brought into the working class,\u201d North said. \u201cThere is a working class. That working class is open now and receptive to revolutionary ideas. Our challenge is to create the conditions. The workers will not learn this in the universities. The Marxist movement, the Trotskyist movement, must provide the working class with the intellectual, cultural tools that it requires, so that it understands what must be done. It will provide the force, it will provide the determination, the emotional and passionate fuel of every revolutionary movement is present. But what it requires is understanding. And we will, and we are seeking to defend internet freedom because we want to make use of this medium, along with others, to create the conditions for this education and revival of revolutionary consciousness to take place.\u201d<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=FaERQWrWLO0<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for <\/em>The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and<\/em> The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at <\/em>The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the <\/em>Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The <\/em>Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in <\/em>Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his <\/em>Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at <\/em>The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truthdig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":105949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}