> Intelligence agencies backed new startups designed to monitor the vast flow of information across social networks to better understand emerging narratives and risks.
The onus is on the people here, reading this, to actively fight to counter any attempts to create this form of infrastructure (and never participate in building it)
> An FBI official interviewed by The Intercept described how, in the summer of 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, he was reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence services to monitoring American social media accounts
This shows that the threat comes from the right just as much as the left. Once the infrastructure is in place, it doesn't matter who it was initially targeted against. This is why people need to seriously consider the impact of assenting to one political group using it to screw over the other. The extreme polarization of American society has allowed the intelligence community and executive branch to pit political groups against one another in order to increase the breadth and depth of centralized control of the internet. Take Palantir for example, it's a company that outwardly touts its own conservative values, yet participates in employer surveillance, union busting, and predictive policing. The intelligence community relies on them for building this infra[1].
> The strategy identified a “broader priority: enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”
The executive branch is essentially using divisions in American society as a justification to annex more control of social media platforms. It's hard to read the words "enhancing faith in government" and not think of Orwell
There's a growing strain of authoritarianism in this country. Notice how the language has changed in the past couple years, and how we see more whining about "faith in government" or "trust in institutions". The internet has established itself as a revolutionizing force and the current establishment and moneyed class clearly feels threatened by it
I'm surprised The Intercept has decided to report this and not sweep it under the rug. It's good to see more investigative journalism instead of the nauseating lockstep media outlets have put themselves in recently in the name of achieving their desired political change "at any cost"
The onus is on the people here, reading this, to actively fight to counter any attempts to create this form of infrastructure (and never participate in building it)
> An FBI official interviewed by The Intercept described how, in the summer of 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, he was reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence services to monitoring American social media accounts
This shows that the threat comes from the right just as much as the left. Once the infrastructure is in place, it doesn't matter who it was initially targeted against. This is why people need to seriously consider the impact of assenting to one political group using it to screw over the other. The extreme polarization of American society has allowed the intelligence community and executive branch to pit political groups against one another in order to increase the breadth and depth of centralized control of the internet. Take Palantir for example, it's a company that outwardly touts its own conservative values, yet participates in employer surveillance, union busting, and predictive policing. The intelligence community relies on them for building this infra[1].
> The strategy identified a “broader priority: enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.”
The executive branch is essentially using divisions in American society as a justification to annex more control of social media platforms. It's hard to read the words "enhancing faith in government" and not think of Orwell
There's a growing strain of authoritarianism in this country. Notice how the language has changed in the past couple years, and how we see more whining about "faith in government" or "trust in institutions". The internet has established itself as a revolutionizing force and the current establishment and moneyed class clearly feels threatened by it
I'm surprised The Intercept has decided to report this and not sweep it under the rug. It's good to see more investigative journalism instead of the nauseating lockstep media outlets have put themselves in recently in the name of achieving their desired political change "at any cost"
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-inves...