You can’t have a proper tyranny without a vast network of informants ratting out friends and neighbors, but the Twitter files and interviews with folks like Mike Benz have put a hitch in the surveillance state’s steps. Encrypted chat apps are another problem, but the uniparty is nothing if not persistent.
Under the brand of “Civic Listening,” informant networks are now coming to the West. The concept has been embraced by the censorship industry’s network of nonprofits, research institutes and private companies that work to shut down disfavored political speech online. Spurred by concerns about the growth of private discussion groups on platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, the censorship industry has turned to the cultivation of snitches to gain access to U.S. citizens’ private conversations.
One of the organizations at the forefront of creating this snitch network is Meedan, a San Francisco based nonprofit. The organization has received one of the largest federal grants ever awarded for a censorship program: $5.7 million in taxpayer dollars was awarded to it by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its work to tackle “hate, abuse, and misinformation with minority led partnerships.” Meedan also received a smaller ($144,850) grant from the government-funded Open Technology Fund for a “claims and memes database” to monitor “fact-checked claims and debunked visual misinformation from internet repressive countries.”
These groups operate in at least two spheres. The first is as a tip-line to which the snitch sends the offending content or commentary. The AI-powered engine then generates a response the snitch can share to counter the misinformation.
Another function of the Civic Listening propaganda project is prebunking “the censorship industry’s plan to brainwash the public at scale by feeding them weakened versions of disfavored narratives before they encounter the real thing, biasing them ahead of time.”
Funding so-called NGOs helps them get around the more direct action we saw revealed in the Twitter files with the combined result of chilling speech and making it more difficult for the average citizen to filter the noise they create.
It is devious and sinister, and you should be on the lookout for local evidence of it. That might require some folks to sign up and use these apps and tools to filter for responses that we can then look for in the digital universe. When you see them, we can say hey, that sounds exactly like the response coming from the government-funded censorship industrial complex.
Provide a screenshot, call them out, and maybe ban them from your Telegram, Messenger, Signal, or WhatsApp channel. Your call. We’re just here to let you know that this is out there, and I bet we’ll see it rear its head everywhere conversations are allowed, perhaps even in our comment section.
I do invite them to try. Our readers are not easily moved by watered-down arguments meant to pre-bunk or debunk. And they will bring receipts. But not every forum will be so well informed.
And please, let us know if you see any evidence of the pre-bunking apps especially applied locally.
One more. Trusted Messengers looks like another effort in the same vein. More on that here.
