Green Censors Turn to AI to Shut Down Debate

There is no doubting that, in the face of a significant shift in climate’s place on the political agenda, the Green Blob has regrouped and commissioned a number of new fronts, or perhaps even a rear-guard action. Globally, climate is a much diminished concern as great power politics makes its uncomfortable return. This has obvious implications for a deindustrialised and economically ravaged Europe, including the UK. European countries have found themselves in a new geopolitical context – not the green Utopia they were banking on – unarmed and unable to assert military force to their east, while salvoes of economic sanctions have bounced off their target and caused more self-harm. In Britain, furthermore, the longstanding cross-party consensus on climate change has fractured. And, whereas a decade ago, there was very little critical commentary on what then was not even Net Zero, now there are constant criticisms of climate policy. The Blob has needed to respond.

Tracking media commentary is a time-consuming and expensive process. But the dim sparks of the Green Blob have new technology to help them: Artificial Intelligence. The ‘censorship industrial complex’, as it was dubbed, has summoned up censorship tech entrepreneurs to automate the process of detecting speech crime, both for purposes of regulating unauthorised social media conversations and to beset political opposition. As I have reported here previously, Green Blob front organisations struggle to recruit staff that are capable of reading and parsing abstract prose and formulating a response to political critics, and so