Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter may have capped the opening chapter in the Information Wars, where free speech won a small but crucial battle. Full spectrum combat across the digital landscape, however, will only intensify, as a new report from the Brookings Institution, a key player in the censorship industrial complex, demonstrates.
First, a review.
Reams of internal documents, known as the Twitter Files, show that social media censorship in recent years was far broader and more systematic than even we critics suspected. Worse, the files exposed deep cooperation – even operational integration – among Twitter and dozens of Government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, DOD, CIA, Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and, of course, the White House.
Government agencies also enlisted a host of academic and non-profit organisations to do their dirty work. The Global Engagement Center, housed in the State Department, for example, was originally launched to combat international terrorism but has now been repurposed to target Americans.
The U.S. State Department also funded a U.K. outfit called the Global Disinformation Index, which blacklists American individuals and groups and convinces advertisers and potential vendors to avoid them. Homeland Security created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab – which flagged for social suppression tens of millions of messages posted by American citizens.
Even former high Government U.S. officials got in on the act – appealing directly (and successfully) to Twitter to ban mischief-making truth-tellers.
With the total credibility collapse of legacy media over the last 15 years, people around the world turned to social media for news and discussion. When social media then began censoring the most pressing topics, such as COVID-19, people increasingly turned to podcasts. Physicians and analysts who’d been suppressed on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and who were of course nowhere to be found in legacy media, delivered via podcasts much of the very best analysis on the broad array of pandemic science and policy.
Which brings us to the new report from Brookings, which concludes that one of the most prolific sources of ‘misinformation’ is now – you guessed it – podcasts. And further, that the underregulation of podcasts is a grave danger.
In ‘Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims,’ Valerie Wirtschafter writes:
Due in large part to the say-whatever-you-want perceptions of the medium, podcasting offers a critical avenue through which unsubstantiated and false claims proliferate. As the terms are used in this report, the terms ‘false claims’, ‘misleading claims’, ‘unsubstantiated claims’ or any combination thereof are evaluations by the research team of the underlying statements and assertions grounded in the methodology laid out below in the research design section and appendices. Such claims, evidence suggests, have played a vital role in shaping public opinion and political behaviour. Despite these risks, the podcasting ecosystem and its role in political debates have received little attention for a variety of reasons, including the technical difficulties in analysing multi-hour, audio-based content and misconceptions about the medium.
To analyse the millions of hours of audio content, Brookings used natural language processing to search for key words and phrases. It then relied on self-styled fact-checking sites Politifact and Snopes – pause for uproarious laughter… exhale – to determine the truth or falsity of these statements. Next, it deployed a ‘cosine similarity’ function to detect similar false statements in other podcasts.
The result: “Conservative podcasters were 11 times more likely than liberal podcasters to share claims fact-checked as false or unsubstantiated.”
One show Brookings misclassified as “conservative” is the Dark Horse science podcast hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Over the past three years, they meticulously explored the complex world of Covid, delivering scintillating insights and humbly correcting their infrequent missteps. Brookings, however, determined 13.8% of their shows contained false information.
What would the Brookings methodology, using a different set of fact checkers, spit out if applied to CNN, the Washington Post, the FDA, CDC, or hundreds of blogs, podcasts, TV doctors, and ‘science communicators’ who got nearly everything wrong?
Speaking on journalist Matt Taibbi’s podcast, novelist Walter Kirn skewered the new AI fact-checking scheme. It pretends to turn censorship into a “mathematical, not Constitutional, concern” – or, as he calls it, “sciency, sciency, sciency bullshit”.
The daisy chain of presumptuous omniscience, selection bias and false precision employed to arrive at these supposedly quantitative conclusions about the vast, diverse, sometimes raucous, and often enlightening world of online audio is preposterous.
And yet it is deadly serious.
The collapse of support for free speech among Western pseudo-elites is the foundation of so many other problems, from medicine to war. Misinformation is the natural state of the world. Open science and vigorous debate are the tools we deploy to become less wrong over time. Individual and collective decision-making depend on them.
Bret Swanson is President of the technology research firm Entropy Economics LLC and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and first appeared on the author’s Substack.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
This kind of thing is getting frustrating to read from a site called The Daily Sceptic.
Probably not as frustrating as it is for Ukraine to live through them…..
Or the Russian speaking population who had their language deemed illegal and any opponents of the regime were murdered by nazi death squads but don’t let the facts get in the way
Which is now what is happening to Ukrainian speakers in newly conquered territories around the Donbass
It is true that the Russians have a history of trying to force the Russian language on Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the 19th century under the Russian Empire and especially in the Baltic States under Stalin in the 1940s. This helps explain the popularity of the German invaders in 1941.
The history of eastern Europe is complex and often dark to say the least.
Russia may have imposed Russian as a common language, but they never discouraged or outlawed the speaking of another language.
Not true. In 2017 Putin said that children should not be compelled to study languages that are not their mother tongues and that are not considered official state languages.
There are approximately 35 languages that are considered “state languages”. More than 100 others spoken in the country do not have official status under Russian law. Those languages are now being repressed.
Even for the 35 state languages, the time spent on them in the curriculum has been compulsorily reduced.
https://www.rferl.org/a/a-language-scholar-s-suicide-draws-official-disdain—-and-brings-hope-to-russia-s-minority-groups/30197171.html
Neither side is perfect but making out that Ukraine is some poor defenceless country despite the facts is ridiculous
Defenceless, no. Heavily outgunned, definitely.
Nobody rated Ukraine even in the top 10 armies before this invasion.
Evidence?
This is what Russia’s counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva has to say:
“For twenty years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy, but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on 24 February of this year.
The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine, and in fact against the entire Western world, is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia, with a bold letter Z crossing our all hopes and prospects for a prosperous free society in our country.
Those who conceived this war want only one thing – to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity.
To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this.”
He’s just resigned.
What an incredibly powerful and astonishingly brave statement, one which will be recorded in the history books.
Thank you for pointing it out.
So he’s saying that if Russia hadn’t invaded their vulgar yachts would have been lost?
That makes absolutely no sense.
Putin wants to stay in power. A war is great way to do it.
Which must mean that non-war-mongering Trump didn’t want to win but instead embraced the election fraud.
You might want to watch this documentary about ukraine from Oliver stone.https://youtu.be/9E9i24XhWtw
Once you have seen what the petite you are supporting have done I doubt you’ll want to keep that ukraine flag up
I suspect that the actual Russian ambassador to the UN knows about 1,000x more about the real situation than sensation-seeking American film-make Oliver Stone.
He was not the Russian ambassador; he was a counsellor, i.e an expert on a particular topic.
Have you got a name for this paragon of virtue? or is it Grauniad / Al beeb facts?
His name is Boris Bondarev.
Quoted in many places.
Oh look,the Wussian Ministry of Foreign affairs doesn’t show him, hes not even a deputy deputy minister, either a very low level functionary or a BBC factchecker fact methinks.
You’ll need to use a VPN as access to factual details is blocked for some bizarre reason totally unrelated to stopping people finding out stuff not conducive to the narrative.
www mid ru/en/about/structure/deputy_ministers/
Is this a BBC story?
It’s not a story, it’s a quote.
Having their language deemed illegal happened not only the Russian speakers in the East, but also the Hungarian speakers in the West.
Speaking Russian wasn’t made illegal but Ukrainian was adopted as the only official language in various areas. The Russians have done the same in reverse.
Or Russians in the Donbass region, who’ve been hiding in basements for 8 years.
And the 14000 dead Donbassians whose basements just weren’t deep enough.
Yep.
Nothing to do with the actual Nazis fighting for Ukraine.
Toby Young just can’t get over his Russophobia. Must be Cold War trauma.
As a non-Brit I think it looks great and there should be more of it.
I guess you mean the flags.
Just in case it didn’t get noticed: English trans-woman in love with woke politics are not representative for the inhabitants of continental Europe, not even for those originating from there who presently live in England.
I think the Indian trans woman should button it.
From John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee, “Citizen Clem”:
On New Year’s Day 1948, a year before George Orwell published his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government unveiled a billboard poster that was put on advertising hoardings across the country. In true Big Brother fashion, it had a photo of the prime minister [Attlee] inscribed with his latest call to arms: ‘This year let us all put into our work the spirit that has made our nation great. An all-out effort will increase our production by the 10 per cent we need to turn the tide.’
Even so, Attlee was a patriot. Modern leftists would hate him if they knew anything about him.
One could say Attlee was a National Socialist…..
Or a ‘socialist’ with ‘nationalist ‘tendencies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBWXgC-Zn5g
Schwab seems to be emulating a certain Austrian painter?
The Weimar Republic had those, the socialists were, at heart, nationalists. The nationalists, at heart, were socialists.
Go on say it.
Attlee was a member of the war cabinet under Churchill, and then when he was prime minister his government took Britain into NATO, called the 1951 election so as not to risk inconveniencing the royal family (a case of “I’m only following orders”?), deployed the army (and declared a state of emergency) against strikers on several occasions (including in the London docks), policed the British empire by bombing villages in India and massacring strikers in Nigeria, and introduced NHS charges (for prescriptions and dental and optical care) after promising not to.
But what did Scheidemann and Noske do in Germany more than 25 years before?
Tip: some leftwingers are not completely ignorant about the history of social democracy
The enemy within. No wonder this country is in such a bl@@dy state. Academia, the Civil Service, the medical profession, useless politicians… All compromised and disloyal.
Yes every institution is rotten to the core, and unfortunately, theyve taken a whole big load of people down with them. Even many former critical thinkers are now walking around full scale mind controlled. Its tragic and its costing us our freedom.
Disloyal to what? To a billionairess with stolen jewels in her hat?
No. To the rest of us.
No: she doesn’t matter; what is left of our country and our freedom does.
You are Telemachus and I claim my £5.
Do we really classify as a “country” if we are handing over our Health/Vax policy to a sociopathic, retired computer nerd with a God complex and enough money to burn to run his own power station for ten years?
Aren’t we now just a useful operational and experimental base for assorted Globalists/ CIA operatives / Pharma Corporations and US Neo cons?
Only if the few remaining critical thinkers surrender.
What’s the betting that the people who think the union flag represents national-socialism are the same people who promoted lockdown, mask wearing, and vaccination passes?
No – they’re the people flying Ukrainian flags to support the Azov Regiment.
Which they haven’t actually heard of.
Still the Same people.
And wishing they could wear the black serge uniforms with silver piping.
What’s the betting that these people would go absolutely bat shit crazy if some one said anything against gay/trans pride flags? Absolute bunch of hypocrites.
Strange the Britain hating Steve Bray is still living here.
I guess the welfare state elsewhere in Europe wouldn’t keep him in the manner to which he’s become accustomed.
And what’s it got to do with “Libs”? Classical Liberals don’t think like these self-loathing nut jobs.
Take Herbert “it is best they should die” Spencer, for example. He was a liberal.
It’s not the flag, it’s something about the way they’re hung that is vaguely reminiscent….
Back in 2019 one discretely folded flag used to be enough for the modest Theresa May. Johnson started off with a brash, show-off pair either side of him – starting as he meant to go on .
The more flags you need, the shakier the ground you are standing on.
Johnson could easily get another two in each row.
How?
I know it’s completely irrational, but it’s something about the straight down massed banner format that we don’t often see with the Union Jack.
Irrational, well maybe, though certainly not out of character.
You can’t be very old then.
By slimming down a bit.
It’s called bunting – small, simple shapes, squares triangles, Originating from 17th Century navy ships flying pennants – still called bunts.
LOL. Please can we hire Dave Chappelle to do this routine on Jubilee Day on Regent Street via a big sound system.
Dave Chappelle Monkeys and AIDS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7trQURhu5c
Monarchism and nationalism are both poop.
By the way, that German billionairess on the British throne OWNS most of Regent Street.
If there’s anything more sickmaking than watching “peasants” worship the stinking royal family, it’s watching petty bourgeois “I had six of the best every day – it made me what I am” types stand to attention and salute their social “betters” because they think it keeps them a cut above the “scum”, “chavs”, “scrotes”, etc. (Petty bourgeois don’t say “plebs” because they didn’t go to private school and learn Latin. They were too busy whingeing about sending in their VAT returns, and about what a pain in the neck all their “member of the public” customers are.)
If you really want to wind up the “libs”, how about doing a “white power” handsign and pretending it only means “OK”? (Alternatively, grow up and get some decency, some ethics, and some sense.)
Somehow the Monarchy suddenly seems all over – and I used to be an admirer.
Prince Charles now appears to have been just another “pupil” of Klaus Schwab and the WEF, placed around the world .
It may well be all over when the Queen dies. Do we really want that Court Jester on the Throne?
She’s not German. She was born here. So were her parents. So was her grandfather.
You’re a xenophobe and inverted snob.
The fact that she was born here isn’t what proves she’s not German.
It’s her mother.
There was a film about that (and a book), “The Admirable Crichton”. As I remember, the butler said that he wouldn’t want everyone to be equal, as any pleasure he got from being equal to the lords would be set against the fact that he would then be equal to all the other servants. In any case, we know how these enforced equality experiments end up – there are still people who do well for themselves, but only those who game the system or commit crimes.
So far as I am concerned, you can keep your republics. The “United States” is the nearest we’ve had to one working well,, and look at the problems they’ve got!
No doubt our monarchy is far from perfect, but, whatever else changes, whatever they take from us, at least that is something that is our own.
Totally agree. As I have said previously I think the Ekaterinburg solution is the best answer to the Windsor problem.
Nationalism and patriotism are not the same thing, but they get conflated to support false arguments.
Boris Johnson’s first speech as Prime Minister:
“Everyone knows the values that flag represents: it stands for freedom and free speech and habeas corpus and the rule of law & above all it stands for democracy”
BUT DON’T MISTAKE QUANTITY OVER SUBSTANCE
Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales is a globalist (and on a government website):
https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/thegreatreset
All we can say is everything life throws at us now is confusing.
It doesn’t actually stand for anything Johnson claims – it simply represents the Union of the United Kingdom’s three principal Nations and leaves out the Welsh!
If it ever did stand for what he claims, he has ensured that it no longer does.
Perhaps it is more interesting in retrospect that he said it. Mother of parliaments, that sort of thing, you know – meanwhile signing us up to WEF agendas.
Well ……the Truth and Johnson have never been friends , have they?
Even “acquaintances” is pushing it a bit!
Actually, I do think there is something utterly surreal about all those flags after these two years of assault on our national identity, not to mention the shambolic condition of the Royal family. People are supposed to jump to attention on cue, and just what is it they are supposed to be celebrating anway? Frankly, it has all stopped being fun.
Someone commented earlier that there are more than 5 billion different virus circulating in the world
Brilliant then that the virus that turned up was the one they had been taking patents out on for the past few years
It’s not called Organised Crime for nothing
The criminals have been hiding in plain sight since 2020. Funny how they always tell us exactly what they are going to do as a tease!
Surely they have been adding to that number in Ukraine since 2014?
Correction: Putin has not committed “Nazi” ‘War Crimes’ in Ukraine but the self-confessed Azov Nazis have – videos exist- foolish mistake.
Nobody has committed Nazi war crimes as the Nazis don’t exist any more.
Putin has committed Russian war crimes.
In current English usage, especially, American English usage, nazi is basically an adjective meaning really abhorrent.
No of course not just their swastika flag, their runic symbols and their raised arm salutes – all just borrowed symbols in a world of “bricolage” – like the German Army helmets worn by the California “Hell’s Angels”.
Is the “ethnic cleansing” just ‘theatre’ as well then?
Or the abolition of all other parties,. The violent beatings and abductions and intimidation of dissenters. The celebration of war criminals that massacred civilians, the marches through the streets and bonfire black clad vigils, yeah nothing to do with Nazis.
They’re the good guys cause our media, that has been lying about EVERYTHING for two years, told us they were.
Oh and Putin is the real Nazi.
Honestly this site has been flooded with imbeciles.
Evidence of ethnic cleansing prior to 2014 is zero. After the rebel republics were created, there was flight in both directions, as identity suddenly became very important.
In the areas he has recently conquered, Putin has already taken major efforts to suppress Ukrainian language, culture and media.
There has been a massive refugee exodus from Russian territories and the great majority have fled to Ukraine and the west, not Russia.
Russia has a horrible record on its handling of ethnicities going back centuries.
I was quoting the article – and the Azov have committed Ukrainian war crimes then.
In reality “war crimes” go with “war’.
No war, no “war crimes”.
Please stop feeding the trolls.
Seriously. What is wrong with these people?
They’re happy to see and wave EU (and Ukrainian) flags everywhere, but British flags have them convinced we’re just one step away from Nazi Germany???
“that a totalitarian regime is in the offing”…..It is, but not for that reason.
I’m not a royalist and have to say that I find all the fawning utterly naff, and all the ‘celebratory’ tat to be utterly ridiculous.
But trying to equate it with fascism is equally ridiculous. Hitler was a power-crazed zealot who clearly utterly believed in his repugnant ideology. Johnson is a weak populist who seems mainly interested in getting his end away. Bit of a difference there…
I’ve got a 3′ x 5′ Union Jack and the bunting already.
I was in the presence of HM the Queen two sundays ago and it was one of the best days of my life, military bands, pomp and circumstance.
God save the Queen and time to rout the globalists and fifth columnists.
The Windsors are fifth columnists.
They are now.
But she did assent to giving our sovereignty, which she had sworn at her coronation to protect, preserve and hand on to her successors, to Brussels which that traitor Heath pushed at her.
she could have told him to take it back to the Commons and ask them to confirm that they were asking her to break her coronation oath. If they confirmed that was what they wanted then she’d give her assent, but not before.
Would Heath have done that? Not a chance.
But she didn’t do her sole real job, did she?
Which is why she’s really the Brenda that Private Eye always said she was.
‘Nazi’ Germany has trended every day here in the UK since the 1940’s. There’s at least two UK TV stations that run ‘documentaries’ 24hrs a day about Hitler and wartime Germans. We get high-production Hollywood movies released practically every year. Children have the victor’s account pummelled in their heads at school and even sit exams on it.
Such is the desperation to conflate everything bad in the world with the National Socialists of Germany, they even want us to believe Communist Putin is a Neo Nazi. Those sticking their necks out for the Russians are desperate to conflate the Ukrainians with Neo Nazis.
Seriously. Change the record. Will survivors be blaming the near annihilation of planet Earth on the Nazis when China detonates its nukes?
Yet, Stalin, Mao – both responsible for upwards of 160 million, at a Conservative estimate – nothing.
That reminds me, I must order a massive union jack off the internet to hang outside and irritate all the rag heads.
Meh. More tribalism. Couldn’t give a monkeys, either way. The masses love to get all groupthinky, don’t they?
A pox on your monkeys.
Funny isn’t it, when the state assumed the power to lock people in their homes, or demanded we all undergo medical experimentation in return for our basic human rights, these people were nowhere to be seen. Then as soon as a few flags are flown they warn of the dangers of fascism.
Give me a break. These people are utterly discredited, a joke and should never, ever be taken seriously.
The only thing left now is to punch them hard in the face until they get the message.
I did wonder what happened to those people who had previously been complaining about Henry VIII powers. Anyone see EU flags at the anti-lockdown marches (“Europhiles against lockdowns”)? Me neither.
’Then as soon as a few flags are flown they warn of the dangers of fascism.’
Tyranny R Us. They don’t like competition.
I’m sure EU flags or Ukraine flags would be just fine with them.
It’s Britain these people hate, not nationalism, or flags.
Why do they stay here if they hate it so much?!
I’d like to ask that question of all the Kremlin lovers on this website.
Exactly. I think they have one way of thinking, anti-media. We might have given them too much credit in thinking they were capable of reasoning over Covid.
India Willoughby who declared that “When the Queen dies, wouldn’t be surprised if Boris appoints himself Fuhrer and assumes total control. That’s how close I think Britain is to Nazi Germany.”
nothing like perspective is it, lol, Its interesting they call themselves liberals, on another forum someone said to call them what they are, not liberals but communists.
https://www.nti.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/NTI_Paper_BIO-TTX_Final.pdf
Tabletop monkeypox pandemic exercise, March 2021, sponsored by BMGF
these days when looking at the media all you can do is laugh, you know what coming after researching etc etc.
I was reading about the very same thing here.
It’s enough to turn your blood ice cold knowing that they’re coming for us again.