Posted on 06/26/2017 7:11:08 AM PDT by Lorianne
The New York Times is cheering on the Orwellian future for Western “democracy” in which algorithms quickly hunt down and eliminate information that the Times and other mainstream outlets don’t like ___
Just days after sporting First Amendment pins at the White House Correspondents Dinner – to celebrate freedom of the press – the mainstream U.S. media is back to celebrating a very different idea: how to use algorithms to purge the Internet of what is deemed “fake news,” i.e. what the mainstream judges to be “misinformation.” The New York Times, one of the top promoters of this new Orwellian model for censorship, devoted two-thirds of a page in its Tuesday editions to a laudatory piece about high-tech entrepreneurs refining artificial intelligence that can hunt down and eradicate supposedly “fake news.”
To justify this draconian strategy, the Times cited only a “fake news” report claiming that the French establishment’s preferred presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron had received funding from Saudi Arabia, a bogus story published by a Web site that mimicked the appearance of the newspaper Le Soir and was traced back to a Delaware phone number.
Yet, while such intentionally fabricated articles as well as baseless conspiracy theories are a bane of the Internet – and do deserve hearty condemnation – the Times gives no thought to the potential downside of having a select group of mainstream journalistic entities feeding their judgment about what is true and what is not into some algorithms that would then scrub the Internet of contrary items.
Since the Times is a member of the Google-funded First Draft Coalition – along with other mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post and the pro-NATO propaganda site Bellingcat – this idea of eliminating information that counters what the group asserts is true may seem quite appealing to the Times and the other insiders. After all, it might seem cool to have some high-tech tool that silences your critics automatically.
But you don’t need a huge amount of imagination to see how this combination of mainstream groupthink and artificial intelligence could create an Orwellian future in which only one side of a story gets told and the other side simply disappears from view.
SNIP
I can make an algorithm about who should be allowed in a WH press briefing and who out of those should be allowed to ask questions. And nobody could look at my algorithm and say it’s biased. They may see bias in the results. I may have even intended bias against the NYT but you won’t be able to tell by the algorithm.
I wonder what the NYT would think about me presenting that “unbiased algorithm” to the WH.
Purging fake news is one thing. However, the Google people have come up with a way to filter comments for ‘offensive speech’ (whatever the definition the users of the software determine it to be). This allows, according to the shtick, admins to eliminate or ‘crop’ comments quickly, thus allowing more stories to have a comment section.
The next iteration will, apparently, be able to inform the commenters if their post will be ‘offensive’ before it is posted. So they can self-censor. Free speech is dead, long live free speech.
“But you don’t need a huge amount of imagination to see how this combination of mainstream groupthink and artificial intelligence could create an Orwellian future in which only one side of a story gets told and the other side simply disappears from view. “
Norman Spinrad had a term for this sort of thing in his novel “Little Heroes”. Official Reality. A small select group of people defines what Reality is supposed to be, and then they use all information sources to make it be the Official Reality.
The media also support laws that divulge the names of individuals or businesses who contribute to various non-partisan political campaigns. Done in the name of “transparency,” it is actually an effort to discourage conservative participation in politics because of the fear of bad publicity, hostile editorials, boycotts, protests, vandalism, and so forth.
Alternatives exist. Some are just starting but I don't even post on some anymore:
BUDDYLIST Alternative to FACEBOOK, just getting started
There are MANY alternative video posting sites that replace YOUTUBE. This video for example was banned by YOUTUBE. WHY? One of the reasons MAY be that some complained they did NOT want someone saying that the biggest mystery in history is a scam (YOUTUBE only tells you that their "rules" have been violated but NO reasonable explanation is offered). And not just saying that we were lied to, showing how to PROVE that we were lied to which has hid the truth about the biggest mystery in history. My YOUTUBE channel had a million views when they shut it down.
Proving the biggest mystery in history is a lie
It is so very easy to lie to Americans, you only have to control the press and the masses will fall in line.
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