The UN and Big Tech are running a secret “No Fly List” for the internet.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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.
Wellington says
Bottom line: As matters stand now, Big Tech is an enemy of liberty. It has become a tyrannical substitute by Leftist forces in America (and in the entire West), which have previously been primarily governmental and only secondarily to be found in academia and the media—and in Big Tech.
But, yes indeed, tough call in our era whether here in America Big Tech or the federal government is the greater enemy of liberty. Reasonable minds can differ (what’s left of them).
This much I know, to wit, US government agencies I used to trust, examples being the FBI, the CIA, the FDA and CDC, I no longer trust at all. In the court of common sense, such agencies are now guilty until proven innocent.
Psaki/Zuckerberg. Two sides of the same totalitarian coin. Choose which poison is worse but that both are spokesmen for poison can no longer be doubted by anyone who has a knowledge of the past (key), a proper moral sense and common sense.
Very fluid times in which we live. The “great question” is whether freedom can survive. Not sure. But meanwhile the ever parasitic Islamic world is “licking it chops” to finish Western freedom, as are your standard authoritarian regimes in countries like China and Russia who have never learned what the Founding Fathers of America grasped long ago. In brief, Xi and Putin can’t hold a candle to Franklin and Jefferson. God, just so depressing how man never seems to learn. And then there is the monster religion which is Islam—but enough for now so sick am I of man’s overall stupidity.
mortimer says
Excellent thoughts from Wellington, but all is not lost. We must fight for liberty or lose it. If they are crafty enough to crush us, with enough effort and thought, we will eventually be clever enough to overthrow their tyranny.
Bikinis not Burkas says
Just a quick reply but a pertinent one, about 10 years ago a Muslim Cleric was on television here in Sydney Australia boasting that they were using our laws against us!
He was right, the Government of Australia is complicit in a future Islamic take over!
Luckily that I am old and don’t have too many years left in me, I would hate to be here to see the blood bath that will happen!
mortimer says
Big Tech, Big Money and Big Tyrants all want the little people to be censored so that they may be pushed around without their having any recourse but to submit to the tyrants.
This is the REVERSE of the foundational principle of the United States, namely, that the people are the sovereigns of the government, not the other way around.
This is a political coup by Big Tech, Big Money and the Big Tyrants of the world.
This is tyranny and we must stop them now.
JCA Reid says
The End Times are progressing. Muslim Countries which have contributed nothing to Humanity, only 50 odd in the UN & they dictate Policy to the rest of us. Dystopia is the norm.
mortimer says
CNN, Facebook, Twitter and Psaki are all the devil’s pulpit. If you get anything besides propaganda, then it is lucky.
They used to say that the only truth in Pravda and Izvestiya was the sports scores. Everything else was propaganda. That’s where we are now.
James Lincoln says
mortimer says,
“They used to say that the only truth in Pravda and Izvestiya was the sports scores. Everything else was propaganda.”
That is true of today’s mainstream media.
What you can trust:
1. Sports scores.
2. DJIA, S&P 500, NASDAQ indices
3. Local weather
4. Flyer from J C Penney’s.
5. Etc.
What you cannot trust:
1. Any news that contains unbiased journalism.
gravenimage says
Grimly this is all too often the case. News stories seldom contain outright lies–but the omission and insinuations are often so thick these days that the implications are anything but honest.
Infidel says
James
There used to be a joke in Soviet times that
– Pravda, which means truth, contained anything but the truth;
– Izvestiya, which means news, contained anything but the news
mortimer says
Psaki begs all platforms to impose bans on enemies of the Dems. Psaki is the heir of Joseph Goebbels.
In 1933, the Nazis imposed GLEICHSCHALTUNG on Germany. They banned anyone who didn’t belong to a Nazi organization of some sort (trade union, professional organization, etc.) from having a job or place in the civil order. Only Nazi thought could be expressed.
The Dems are trying to impose THEIR thoughts and ONLY their thoughts on ALL of society and the greatest threat to us is that most of the Dems and their followers don’t realize that this is an AMERICAN VERSION OF GLEICHSCHALTUNG !!!
gravenimage says
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.”
………….
How is the the job of the White House–to censor American citizens?
Infidel says
Since it’s unconstitutional for them to do it, they’ve outsourced that job to the Twitters and Facebooks of the world. Except that SCOTUS has already ruled that practice illegal: if you’re not allowed to do something, you can’t contract someone else to do it
gravenimage says
I hope so, Infidel–not sure this will stop; them, though. Doesn’t sound like it in the story above.
gravenimage says
Big Tech is Censoring Americans Using UN Law
……………..
Utter insanity. Thanks for the work from Daniel Greenfield.
libertyORdeath says
Taken right out of the 1984 playbook.
The Ministry of Peace pursues nothing but war
The Ministry of Truth spreads nothing but lies
The Ministry of Plenty produces nothing but famine
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTHl
Alfredo says
We are witnessing before our very eyes the destruction of everything we hold dear, things we once took for granted like freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of assembly and many more. But now the greatest threat to the Republic is coming not from external enemies, but from the internal enemies.
The Democratic Party in conjunction with Big Tech are working to censor all dissenting voices labeling them “terrorists” while the real terrorists are running rampant wreaking havoc.
Isn’t that what the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile called and later appropiated by Benito Mussolini what Fascism is all about?
He rightfully called it Corporatism. That is “the merger of state and corporate power.” That is what is being imposed by hook or crook right before our very eyes. All this is happening because as William Butler Yeats insighfully observed in his famous poem “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of burning intensity.”
These restless times are what turning points in history are made of, the choice for all freedom loving people could not be more stark, will they submit to tyranny like obedient slaves or will they resist like free people?
Giacomo Latta says
Move the UN to some place like Pakistan or Iran. Most of those leftists who enjoy a near-permanent vacation in the US as much as they enjoy spreading the latest in anti-semitism and social justice would soon decide to find a career elsewhere. Those who love the UN enough to stick around would be free to spout their thoughts on things like women’s rights and genders other than male and female, for a while. Then we would see which ones are believers in their version of religion and thus ready to die for their principles and which ones are merely mercenaries.
OLD GUY says
Mankind lived thousands of years with out the internet and could do it again.
Let’s show these big tech a message and shut off FaceBook and Twitter for a couple days.
While we are at it let’s DEFUND CONGRESS instead of the POLICE. Our police actually work.
Thank a police officer today for risking their lives to protect ‘us’ from criminals and idiots.