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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32062 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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A month or so ago I remember someone here linking to the discovery documents in the Missouri Attorney General's lawsuit against Joe Biden, alleging the government is violating First Amendment rights by colluding with tech companies to censor the speech of private citzens. Those docs are here (warning: 711 page PDF).

At the time I was shocked at how this wasn't apparently a big story. It's trivial to scroll through the email exchanges and find examples of government agents reporting content to tech companies, who would then take the content down. There are obvious First Amendment issues that at the very least need to be publicly discussed, but most likely need to be prosecuted.

Well, it's finally getting some press. Lee Fang at the Intercept published an article today that, among other things, references these docs: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/. The article also includes details on the organizational structures involved, including many documents out of DHS that detail their anti-misinformation operations.

A couple of choice quotes:

During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security, in an email to an official at Twitter, forwarded information about a potential threat to critical U.S. infrastructure, citing FBI warnings, in this case about an account that could imperil election system integrity.

The Twitter user in question had 56 followers, along with a bio that read “dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a parody account),” under a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance of the Denver International Airport.

“We are not sure if there’s any action that can be taken, but we wanted to flag them for consideration,” wrote a state official on the email thread, forwarding on other examples of accounts that could be confused with official government entities. The Twitter representative responded: “We will escalate. Thank you.”

 

“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”

You missed the most egregious quote in my opinion. Here Moldbug's cathedral decides to not even bother hiding that it's a decentralized oligarchy and instead decides to reveal itself for what it truly is.

"Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”"

This is by far the most egregious part of these revelations. It confirms the most bearish allegations of NGOs acting as domestic spy organizations.

Should I know who that alleged oligarch is?

It is pretty funny phrasing. I could charitably read it as “make sure your bulletins pass multiple debunkers” or at least “the seal of approval needs to be decentralized.”

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