Daniel Greenfield
August 08, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki warned that her administration was
“flagging problematic posts for Facebook" and urged, "you shouldn't be
banned from one platform and not others."
Psaki was not just
advocating a theoretical approach, but discussing the shared
infrastructure built by Big Tech monopolies, the United Nations and
assorted governments for doing just that.
In his PJ Media article,
Tyler O’Neil dug into the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism
(GIFCT) which is funded by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and currently
chaired by Twitter. Its advisory committee members include the United
Nations, the European Union, and the British, French, and Canadian
governments as well as the National Security Council in the U.S.
GIFCT
had been set up by the industry in response to pressure from
governments to remove Jihadist propaganda, but its Hash Sharing
Consortium, a secret database of terrorism content to be immediately
removed when its 13 dot com companies come across it, is secret, and so
there's no way for anyone to know if they've been targeted and no appeal
from the secret list.
The creation of a secret “No Fly List” for
the internet by the biggest monopolies which control over 80% of social
media content and much of the self-created video content on the
internet would be troubling enough, but by 2019, Facebook, Twitter,
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon had joined the Christchurch Call which
advocates not just banning terrorist material, but fighting its root
causes by strengthening "inclusiveness" and fighting "violent
extremism".
To that end, the Dynamic Matrix of Extremisms and
Terrorism (DMET) was deployed which goes through 4 different levels
beginning with "partisanship" and ending with terrorism. DMET defines
the initial levels of violent extremism as using "dehumanizing language"
which can be described as nearly any criticism of a group.
Big Tech has built its own matrix. And we’re all in it.
As O'Neil documented the
resulting “matrix” is a dangerous and bizarre list which classifies
Sinn Fein and the Scottish National Party, alongside NARAL and
"Anti-Vaxxers" as partisans on the first level of DMET. It's unclear
what a top pro-abortion group, the ruling leftist party of Scotland, the
political face for the IRA, and opponents of vaccination have in
common, but out of such confusingly disparate material, Big Tech has
built its censorship matrix.
At the second level, alongside
Neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18, the Bundy Family (a family, not an
organization) and the Animal Liberation Front, which actually is a
terrorist organization, is Jihad Watch.
The respected counterterrorism blog by
historian and researcher Robert Spencer and his associates (I have been
among them) has been an invaluable resource for chronicling Islamic
terrorism and colonialism and represents the opposite of violent
extremism.
As Robert Spencer wrote on Jihad Watch, "This is pure libel. We have never advocated or approved of any violence or any illegal activity of any kind."
The
DMET is just a more sophisticated pseudoscientific database of the kind
that the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose materials have contributed
to it, has deployed over the years.
One such database listed my blog,
Sultan Knish, as a hate group, alongside a brand of gun oil, and a bar
sign in Pennsylvania. These databases may have a Kafkaesque absurdity,
but the consequences to lives, livelihoods, and careers are all too real
with my blog showing up on the Color of Change list pressuring
Big Tech monopolies to cut off funding and access to my site, as well
as Jihad Watch, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and many other
conservative groups.
Big Tech companies have begun building their
own databases in coordination with governments. And these secret
databases determine who has access to the public square of the internet,
who can earn a living, and who ends up being deplatformed and
unpersoned.
“If we are ‘extremist,’ so is the U.S. Constitution,
for we are trying to defend the freedom of speech, the freedom of
conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law,”
Robert Spencer wrote. But DMET, GFICT, and other interfaces between
governments and tech monopolies aren’t using the Constitution. They’re
censoring based on United Nations law.
When Facebook’s Oversight Board issued its verdict on
censoring President Trump, it did not list a single item of United
States law, including the First Amendment, but cited the Rabat Plan of
Action, and articles of the UN's International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR).
GFICT’s DMET matrix cites the Rome
Statue of the International Criminal Court to declare that preventing
"dehumanization" is an "imperative under international law". Like
Facebook’s decision to censor the former president, there’s no mention
of the Constitution, but international law is repeatedly cited. Most
disturbingly, a GFICT attempt to define terrorism collates a variety of
definitions including attacks "against social cohesion" which the UN
itself has noted is used to censor speech and political opponents as
well as efforts to suppress Mohammed cartoons.
Tier 4 of the
Content Taxonomy for what gets censored by Big Tech includes only one
example targeting a group: “fear of Muslims is rational" thereby
essentially banning most counterrorism, advocacy against unlimited
immigration as well the Trump political campaign.
While Americans slept, Big Tech adopted UN standards to eliminate the Constitution.
Big
Tech monopolies are no longer just enforcing local laws, moderating
content in America or in the European Union based on the different
standards in each country, instead all speech on the major platforms is
being policed in line with the United Nations and its “international
law”.
No black helicopters or blue helmets were needed. United
Nations law came to the United States through the Big Tech monopolies
that we turned over our speech and economy too.
Facebook now censors a former president in line with UN regulations. And censors all of us too.
GFICT
is another example of UN regulations controlling our speech. We’re all
drones living in the UN’s “Matrix” now as companies more powerful than
governments impose international law.
Big Tech’s censorship
matrix targets Robert Spencer and critics of Islam because censorship of
dissenting religious views has been a longtime project of Islamic
groups within the UN.
“They have all the power, and they mean to
shut down dissent, and that means our days here are numbered,” Robert
Spencer wrote. How long will it be until Did Muhammad Exist? Did An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins,
the newly revised and expanded version of Spencer's classic work, is
censored the way that Amazon, which dominates the ebook market,
suppressed Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the
Transgender Moment.
Libertarians and some establishment
conservatives keep protesting that private companies have the right to
censor whom they please. But the UN is the opposite of a private
company.
When massive monopolies act in concert with governments
and multinational alliances, like the EU and the UN, to eliminate free
speech in line with UN international law, that’s not private action. If
we don’t have the courage to confront the ‘matrix’ of big governments
and Big Tech, of Google and the UN, or Amazon and the EU, we will lose
our rights, our identity, and our nation.
Tags:
Big Tech,
censorship,
recent,
UN
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
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