The specter of automated censorship

Since its inception, the free and open internet has completely devastated the Gatekeepers of information.

Before the development and rapid evolution of the world wide web, the information we received about the state of the world, our leaders and their activities, were taken at face value.  There was no way to verify the facts, weight alternative opinions or that of the rest of the consumers of the news.  Whatever was given, either by radio, television, or newspaper, was taken.  There was no alternative.

Fast forward to the present.  A seemingly endless array of news and opinion sites pepper the web, giving the reader virtually unlimited choices on what to read.  Anyone can start a blog for free.  Freedom of the press has come to mean something revolutionary, a revolution greater than that inaugurated by Gutenberg.  And with the news now comes another glory of the internet era: the comments section.  Here is where the reader can eviscerate Establishment shills, and endlessly debate fellow readers.  No where in the history of civilization has this been possible.  It becomes almost impossible to overstate the revolution that the internet embodies.

The internet finally wrested control of information away from the Establishment and placed it into the hands of the deplorables. Not Trump’s deplorables, but rather what the Elites surely refer to everyone of us as, the taxpayers, those with normal jobs and normal lives, those without political leverage or hidden power, those who make the world that they control, turn.  They have never forgiven us for our use of the internet, and the short work it has made of their designs for our world.  And they’ve worked night and day to find ways of taking the internet away from us.  Of course, just shutting it down would be to overt.  They know that for their plan to be effective, it must be indirect to the point of invisibility.  Whether it be herding us into what Matt Drudge dubbed ‘internet ghettos’, such as Facebook and Twitter, where content can be controlled, the plan must not appear as a plan at all.

And now we have Julian Assange recently warning us of the greatest threat to open discourse online, that of the use of artificial intelligence as a tool of internet censorship. From his Twitter he wrote on January 17th:

A nexus point is being reached, with total surveillance removing our ability to hide from our governments, and artificial intelligence silently reclaiming control over the flow of information online merging, with propaganda immaculately embedded within the flow.

The most perfect prison is one that we don’t realize is there at all.

Author: S. Smith