By MassPrivateI | Activist Post
For years, Americans have largely ignored corporate social media surveillance. But that all of that is about to change, thanks to President Biden.
No one has taken the White House’s plan to turn Big Tech into a quasi-Five Eyes censorship program seriously despite repeated warnings from journalists and news websites.
Journalist Caitlin Johnstone warned that the White House is pushing for Facebook and Microsoft to censor any social media stories the Feds don’t like.
“After Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted on Thursday that the administration has given Facebook a list of accounts to ban for spreading misinformation about the Covid vaccine, she has now doubled down saying that people who circulate such materials online should be banned from not just one but all social media platforms.”
credit: GIFCT
The Feds want Big Tech to ban stories and people they do not approve of from social media.
“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there,” Psaki told the press on Friday.
Reuters revealed some of America’s biggest tech companies will let “Five Eyes” and the U.N. decide whose stories the “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism” should censor.
“Until now, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) database has focused on videos and images from terrorist groups on a United Nations list and so has largely consisted of content from Islamist extremist organizations such as Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
Big Tech’s GIFCT is essentially a Five Eyes censorship program, masquerading as a Big Tech social media forum to stop terrorism and extremism.
“Over the next few months, the group will add attacker manifestos — often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence — and other publications and links flagged by U.N. initiative Tech Against Terrorism. It will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes, adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.”
Twitter and YouTube are also helping help Five Eyes spy on the world’s social media.
“The firms, which include Twitter and YouTube, share “hashes,” unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it.”
Other companies that have access to the GIFCT database are Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, Verizon Media, LinkedIn, Dropbox, MailChimp, and Airbnb.
Three years ago the mass media warned us about Five Eyes demanding that tech companies give them backdoors to users’ encrypted data, and now they finally got their wish.
The dangers of Big Tech giving URLs, PDFs and personal information to a global intelligence agency will allow governments to secretly track and ID people and organizations they deem a threat.
Radio New Zealand said if one government has access to this information, then other governments will request it as part of doing business with another country.
New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner also warned that there is nothing stopping governments from abusing their access to people’s social media posts. And that is the real danger of letting Big Tech, Five Eyes, and the U.N. decide who is a terrorist or extremist.
“Even then you don’t solve the technical challenge of allowing access for legitimate purposes while maintaining a secure network, and people in the tech industry tell me this is impossible” Privacy Commissioner John Edwards said.
The GIFCT claims to “bring together the technology industry, government, civil society, and academia to foster collaboration and information-sharing to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online.” But what it does not tell you is how they decide to brand someone a terrorist or extremist.
GIFCT admits that Big Tech has been secretly compiling a database of “hashes” or unique digital fingerprints of suspected terrorist/extremist social media posts since 2016.
Big Tech also uses their in-house “Content Incident Protocol” (CIP) to justify sharing hashes of an extremist’s video, and other related content with Big Tech companies, Five Eyes, and the U.N.
If the GIFCT’s secret social media database and CIP sound familiar, that’s because it is.
The United States Postal Service and Fusion Centers across the country have been secretly spying on Americans' social media for years.
Earlier this week, PayPal announced that they are working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities.
PayPal is basically setting up its own version of GIFCT to justify monitoring people’s transactions under the terrorist/extremist umbrella. As the article mentioned, PayPal and the ADL will “uncover and disrupt the financial flows of anti-government and white supremacist organizations” on their own!
“The information collected through the initiatives will be shared with other firms in the financial industry, law enforcement and policymakers, PayPal said.”
It is only a matter of time before GIFCT censorship will be used to monitor and stop protests that corporations and the White House disapprove of.
As Caitlin Johnstone so eloquently put it:
- They said we need internet censorship because of Russia.
- They said we need internet censorship because of COVID.
- They said we need internet censorship because of election security.
- They said we need internet censorship because of the Capitol riot.
- They said we need internet censorship because of domestic extremism.
- Pretty sure they just want internet censorship.
Using the GIFCT to allow corporations and Five Eyes to ban and censor whoever they want, puts everyone’s freedom at risk.
Source: MassPrivateI Blog
