Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship - It doesn’t matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak...
Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out
on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by
Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all
too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical
of official western narratives over the last few years.
“My blog
posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares,” Cook
writes. “Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they
throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. ‘Going
viral’ is a distant memory.”
“I won’t
be banned,” he adds. “I will fade incrementally, like
a small star in the night sky — one among millions — gradually eclipsed as its
neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so
slowly you won’t even notice.”
Cook says this began after the 2016 US election, which was when a major narrative push began for Silicon Valley corporations to eliminate “fake news” from their platforms and soon saw tech executives brought before the US Senate and told that they must “quell information rebellions” and come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord” online.
Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11
and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions
concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of establishment
politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any
online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the
same news outlets who’ve lied to us about every war has seen their
view counts and new follows slashed.
By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across
ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership
like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching
for the subjects they reported on.
“In case anyone wants to know how Facebook suppression works — I
have 330,000 followers there but they’ve stopped showing my posts to many
people,” Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp tweeted in January 2018.
“I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB
unsubscribes people without their knowledge — so my total number never
increases.”
I saw my own shares and view counts rapidly diminish in 2017 as
well, and saw my new Facebook page follows suddenly slow to a virtual
standstill. It wasn’t until I started using mailing lists and giving indie media
outlets blanket permission to
republish all my content that I was able to grow my audience at all.
And
Silicon Valley did eventually admit that it was in fact actively censoring
voices who fall outside the mainstream consensus. In
order to disprove the false right-wing narrative that Google only censors
rightist voices, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted in 2020 to
algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of
Google-owned YouTube acknowledged that
the platform uses algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while
suppressing “borderline content” not considered authoritative, which apparently even includes just marginally
establishment-critical left-of-center voices like Kyle Kulinski. Facebook
spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that
if the platform’s fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management
firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been
posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the distribution of
all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”
People make a big deal any time a controversial famous person gets removed from
a major social media platform, and rightly so; we cannot allow such brazen acts
of censorship to become normalized. The goal is to
normalize internet censorship on every front, and the powerful
will push for that normalization to be expanded at every opportunity. Whether
you dislike the controversial figure being deplatformed on a given day is
entirely irrelevant; it’s not about them, it’s about expanding and normalizing
internet censorship protocols on monopolistic government-tied speech platforms.
But far, far more consequential than overt censorship of
individuals is censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as
much real-world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and
information which aren’t authorized by the powerful are being actively hidden
from public view, while material which serves the interests of the powerful is
the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures that public
consciousness remains chained to the establishment narrative matrix.
It
doesn’t matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak. Even
in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth you can say whatever you want
alone in a soundproof room.
That’s the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources everyone goes to for information (and even actively helping them along that path as in for example Google’s research grants from the CIA and NSA), it’s possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident information exists online, but nobody ever sees it.
You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve tried to search YouTube for videos which
don’t align with the official narratives of western governments and media
lately. That search function used to work like magic; like it was reading your
mind. Now it’s almost impossible to find the information you’re looking for
unless you’re trying to find out what the US State Department wants you to
think. It’s the same with Google searches and Facebook, and because those giant
platforms dictate what information gets seen by the general public, that wild
information bias toward establishment narratives bleeds into other common areas
of interaction like Twitter as well.
The idea
is to let most people freely share dissident ideas and information about
empire, war, capitalism, authoritarianism and propaganda, but to make it
increasingly difficult for them to get their content seen and heard by people,
and to make their going viral altogether impossible. To avoid
the loud controversies and uncomfortable public scrutiny brought on by acts of
overt censorship as much as possible while silently sweeping unauthorized
speech behind the curtain. To make noncompliant voices “disappear from view so
slowly you won’t even notice,” as Cook put it.
The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying, we appear
to be rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontation between
nuclear-armed nations, and our world is rife with injustice, inequality,
oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the public
begins awakening to the problems with the current status quo so we can begin
organizing a mass-scale push toward healthier systems. And that’s never going to
happen as long as information is locked down in the way that it is.
Whoever
controls the narrative controls the world. And
as more and more people get their information about what’s happening in the
world from online sources, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation
has already become one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.
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