[D66] Technology giants hold censorship meeting with US intelligence agencies

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/27/cens-j27.html

Technology giants hold censorship meeting with US intelligence agencies
By Will Morrow
27 June 2018

The New York Times and Washington Post this week published reports of a
private meeting last month between eight major technology and social
media corporations and the US intelligence agencies, to discuss their
censorship operations in the lead-up to the November 2018 mid-term
elections.

The meeting was convened at Facebook's Menlo Park, California,
headquarters on May 23, and was attended by representatives from Amazon,
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Snap, Twitter and Oath, which owns Yahoo and
the telecommunications network Verizon, along with agents from the FBI
and the Department of Homeland Security.

The Post described the meeting, organized at the request of Facebook, as
a “new overture by the technology industry to develop closer ties to law
enforcement.” Both articles were based on anonymous statements by
individuals who attended. One attendee told the Post that the
conversation was a “back-and-forth, with both sides talking about how
they were thinking about the problem and how we were looking for
opportunities to work together.”

The meeting is yet another testament to the increasing integration of
the technology giants with the US military/intelligence apparatus. These
companies, which provide a growing share of the technical infrastructure
for the repressive apparatus of the state, increasingly see the
censorship of left-wing, anti-war, and progressive viewpoints as an
integral part of their business strategy.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to secure control over a $10
billion project to host the Pentagon's Cloud infrastructure, a position
that will literally mean hosting the communications between military
units engaged in battle. Employees at the three companies have also
written letters in recent months denouncing their provision of
artificial intelligence technology to improve drone targeting (Google),
facial recognition of civilians by police agencies (Amazon), and
assisting in the operations of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(Microsoft).

The Times and the Post are the main media voices for the campaign by the
Democratic Party and intelligence agencies for Internet censorship,
under the guise of opposing the spread of “misinformation” by the
Russian government. This McCarthyite campaign is based on the totally
unsubstantiated allegation that Russian “fake news” led to popular
disillusionment with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 vote, and the
subsequent election of Donald Trump. The newspapers' synchronized
reports therefore present last month's meeting as aimed at preventing
Russian interference in the mid-term elections.

But the real target of the censorship campaign is popular access to
left-wing news sources not controlled by the corporate media, and the
proliferation of oppositional social media content, such as videos of
police killings, mass roundups of immigrants, military interventions,
protests and exposures of corporate malfeasance and government criminality.

Since the beginning of the year, Facebook has rolled out a series of
changes to its News Feed, including demoting political content in favor
of so-called “personal moments,” and prioritizing content from so-called
“trustworthy sources”—in reality pro-establishment propaganda
outlets—including the Times and the Wall Street Journal. The social
media giant has also changed its algorithms to reduce the spread of
“viral videos,” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared are “not good for
people's well-being and society.”

Last Thursday, Facebook published an announcement by its Head of News
Integrity Tessa Lyons, announcing a further expansion of these measures,
including the introduction of “fact-checking” for videos and photos. The
post also stated that Facebook is introducing “machine learning to help
identify and demote foreign Pages that are likely to spread
financially-motivated hoaxes to people in other countries.” These will
work alongside Facebook's army of “fact checkers”—i.e., censors—many of
them former security and intelligence agents, who belong to the 20,000
people employed in its “security” and “moderation” department.

The “demotion” of what Facebook calls “false news” was codified in
“community guidelines” published by the company in April. The guidelines
state that because the suppression of “false news” is a “sensitive
issue,” the company does not openly remove news stories, which would be
easily detected by publishers and their followers, but does the same
thing secretly: “significantly reduc[ing] its distribution by showing it
lower on the News Feed.” (See: “Facebook codifies its censorship regime”)

Lyons repeated this line of argument in an interview with PBS' Miles
O'Brien on May 16. Admitting that “censoring and fully removing
information unless it violates our community standards is not the
expectation from our community,” Lyons explained that instead “we work
to reduce the damage it can do” by restricting its proliferation. The
Washington Post reported yesterday that while speaking at the
International Fact Checkers Network conference last week, Lyons “told
attendees that ... [Facebook] will soon use machine learning to predict
pages that are more likely to share misinformation.”

With the official ending of net neutrality this month, the financial
oligarchy that controls both the search and social media monopolies and
internet service providers has further tightened its grip over the
freedom of expression on the internet, with ISPs given the prerogative
to block and throttle internet content at will.

The expansion of internet censorship takes place amidst mounting
pressure on whistleblower Julian Assange, the Wikileaks journalist who
has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London
since 2012, where he was forced to take refuge to avoid being extradited
to the US and charged for publishing evidence of US government crimes.
The persecution of Assange for the “crime” of publishing the truth is
aimed at intimidating whistleblowers and honest journalists all around
the world.

Google , which attended last month’s meeting with the FBI and Department
of Homeland Security, has altered its search engine algorithms to censor
left-wing and anti-war websites, including the World Socialist Web Site,
whose Google search traffic fell by three quarters in response to
changes by the search engine in April 2017. There are indications that
Google has recently intensified its censorship of the World Socialist
Web Site, with search impressions falling by as much as one third over
the past month.

In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to
Google demanding that it end its censorship of the internet, declaring,
“Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent
of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does
not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.”

We urge all readers of the World Socialist Web Site seeking to defend
the freedom of expression online to contact us and join the struggle
against internet censorship.