More reports are emerging about the various forms in which the Big Tech/government collusion is taking place in the US.
It’s not just directly pressuring, or “communicating with” – as current White House officials like to put it, social sites; reports are now emerging about companies getting hired to make massive databases of supposedly unlawful speech that are compiled thanks to users effectively spying and reporting on each other on messaging platforms like WhatsApp.
Former State Department official, now executive director of Foundation For Freedom Online, Mike Benz, calls this “a snitch network of citizen informants.” Information thus obtained is then analyzed using some form of AI, resulting in identification of “misinformation trends.”
One of these companies is Algorithmic Transparency Institute. The money comes from firms that receive government funds and congressionally chartered organizations.
The need to resort to “old school” citizen-informant methods arises from the nature of the platforms the government would like to spy on, and get content flagged and eventually censored. It’s the likes of WhatsApp and Telegram, where, due to the nature of (particularly encrypted) private messaging, the now established forms of “monitoring” places like Facebook or YouTube cannot be used.
Hellbound and Down 