In the Battle for Free Speech, It's Later Than You Think

Official misinformation incoming........

Greetings, Screamers! Apologies for not getting this article out yesterday, but there was BRAND NEW INFORMATION about the topic that took a lot of time to digest and ended up being most of the story — it’s long so we’re diving right in! (Note: Turns out it’s so long some graphics are added after publication. Check out the site or the app for the best version of this article.)

On Sunday I wrote about Dublin’s knife attack and subsequent rioting, as well as the media’s reaction to the story. (If you haven’t read that article, I suggest doing it before moving on!)

These events have kicked off another round of “hate speech” discussion in Ireland — and reading the bill they’re discussing, it’s easy to understand why the law would be extremely dangerous for free speech in the country:

Not only does the state get to set the extremely subjective bar of “likely to incite violence or hatred”, they also presume to know the intent of the memes on your phone!

But don’t worry, citizen, they’re restricting freedoms for the common good!

The deal is that if somebody feels unsafe, the authorities get to dig through your phone — after demanding your password — for anything they can call hateful. There’s no possible way this could be abused to censor the completely peaceful and legal speech of citizens……..

Gerry Carroll of People Before Profits

…….because they don’t actually even need to pass the law to treat you like speech criminals. The narrative-setters get to decide what is racist and what is “counterpoised to movements against the oppression faced by black people and other ethnic minorities.”

As the kids say, “I’ll just leave this here.”

Isn’t calling the Irish people a bunch of racists inciting hatred against an ethnic minority? Arrest Gerry Carroll! (Who just happens to be a BLM supporter — and was himself investigated himself for hate speech. Luckily for him, ignorance IS an excuse!)

These obvious double standards bring us to the second half of our story. Yesterday Public published the first (hopefully of many) articles about the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) Files. The article is long but extremely important — it’s also public (har har), so no excuses!

CTIL Files #1: US And UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan For Global Censorship In 2018, New Documents Show

Numerous passages in the article provide further evidence of one of my “favorite” topics to Scream about: Online censorship at the behest of the US Government. Although the CTIL was ostensibly created to fight covid disinformation and save hospitals (lol), the project was actually trying to set the narrative long before the covid panic:

Terp’s view of “disinformation” was overtly political. “Most misinformation is actually true,” noted Terp in the 2019 podcast, “but set in the wrong context.” Terp is an eloquent explainer of the strategy of using “anti-disinformation” efforts to conduct influence operations. “You're not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time. Most of the time, you're trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really, uh, deeper than that, you're trying to change, to shift their internal narratives… the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture. So that might be the baseline for your culture as an American.”

No big deal, just some yahoo censoring true information in order to shift the internal narrative that forms the baseline of our culture as Americans, no big deal.

The article also lays out exactly how government attempts to get around the First Amendment — just delegate the Constitutional violations to private citizens:

When asked whether Terp or other CTIL leaders discussed their potential violation of the First Amendment, the whistleblower said, “They did not… The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination.’”

Unsurprisingly, this framework was eventually adopted into the Department of Homeland Security, as conveyed by Matt Taibbi in his Twitter thread and this (very long) video about the story:

For those who don’t have time to watch the whole video, Taibbi explains the basics of this very complex story, playing some shorter clips from his Twitter thread along the way. This particular panel caught my eye, although for different reasons than Taibbi highlighted below:

Click to enlarge

“Are there countermessages we can put out on the main hashtag?”

This describes an attempt to basically takeover trending topics and “flood the zone” with approved messaging. Frequent Twitter users know this tactic well, with many “countermessaging” posts saying things to the effect of “Idiots making [#whatever] trend — what idiots lol.”

Many people involved in CTIL were corporate marketers familiar with brand management, and that’s what this project basically was — brand management of the narrative. (Even if that meant attempting to sell the war in Afghanistan.)

“Can we frig the searches for the hashtags, phrases, terms involved?”

This means CTIL was actively preventing people from finding information they were looking for - exactly like google putting up “results are changing quickly, check back later” for breaking stories that are detrimental to the brand. (Such as the CTIL Files!)

And make no doubt about it, people in the CTIL believed they were part of the intelligence agencies and saving the world. “We are good, so what we believe is right and good. If you don’t think like us, you’re wrong and bad.” This is not much of an exaggeration — the thinking really was that shallow.

More than once, CTIL members refer to themselves as doing what the bad guys are doing, but in a good way — because obviously they have the monopoly on truth. (Ironically, the ‘bad guys’ don’t have pipelines to the FBI or shut down the speech of their opponents.) Members refer to separating “work lives” and “real lives” while using burner phones. This goes way past people just passionate about Twitter — and they’re working under direction of government, doing what government isn’t allowed to do.

“…but the US Department of Defense is expressly forbidden by presidential directive and by law from operating against US citizens.” — former Navy commander Pablo Breuer.

Wait, did he just say AGAINST US CITIZENS? Doesn’t that raise any red flags for somebody who swore an oath to the US Constitution? No?

And the “solution” to this problem is to just have random — unelected — people do it instead? For Democracy?

I don’t think that’s how any of this works.

In another video clip, Terp discusses using AI to create “credible sentences” to combat what “the bad guys” are doing — as if you could even get an AI to say many of the things that got you banned from Twitter in the first place. (The group later confirms the use of bots.)

Terp also complained that jokes and satire are a problem for the censorship machine, which might explain the recent attacks on humor.

“Things like satire are really hard. We actually had satire detectors at one thing I worked on because it just shows up as positive even though it's completely negative… irony just doesn't work on machines.”

Damn you humans with your human irony! Censors can’t use the programs to control your speech with all this satire and subtlety! Also, you’re basically drug addicts!

Yes, this is real.

Ultimately what we’ve learned here is that this particular aspect of the war on terror has come home - the CTIL’s language makes it clear that they’re looking for “enemies”, and that the 2020 is an “end of the world type moment.”

Not to state the obvious, but everything is permitted to stop the end of the world. And not only is everything permitted, it’s a MORAL IMPERATIVE. (Review the things WE KNOW FOR SURE they did, and ask if you really think they’d stop at election fraud.)

Trolls and sockpuppet (fake) accounts were used to control narrative - which was twice as effective because the dissenters were banned via the more official channels detailed in the Twitter Files. This establishes fake consensus — exactly as laid out in Manufacturing Consent — which leads to the establishment of the approved narrative online the way that Fauci interviews with softball reporters established it on TV.

This group was working during Russiagate, and in the runup to the election. But never once were there “misinformation attacks” on things such as Hunter’s laptop or Joe Biden’s ties to Ukraine and China, the CTIL just pointed to ‘experts’ (read: high-level liars) instead of actually looking into the truth — because the truth was completely irrelevant.

But if you decide you can censor true things because of X, Y, or Z, you tend to find stray letters all over the place — for the common good, as our Irish friend said above.

So the CTIL manipulated algorithms with mass action — sort of like how Ron Paul won every online poll for 8 years due to RonPaulForums.com — but with this mass action leading to account de-amplification or deactivation, as well as removal of completely true (and/or hilarious) things.

Turns out the “common good” is pretty narrow.

Another important aspect of the CTIL Files are admissions that not only did the CTIL run sockpuppet accounts to control the narrative, they also used them to infiltrate disfavored groups. (Just like the FBI!)

It makes you wonder how many “Boogaloo Boys” were just idiot sockpuppets sitting around trying to stir shit up. (Also just like the FBI!)

For that matter, it makes you wonder — if all these groups were so infiltrated, how on earth can we realistically believe January 6th caught the “authorities” off-guard? It’s not like the protest was a surprise — it was all over the social media sites these people were spending all day monitoring!

While we’re on the subject, what are the odds groups would “sockpuppet and troll” online but not at the actual protest? After all, infiltration and encouragement is standard operating procedure…..

And what did we find during the covid years? People go power-mad with the SLIGHTEST bit of authority over others. (Check Nextdoor if you don’t believe me.) CTIL members are basically hall monitors who think they know everything, therefore they feel justified using whatever means necessary — even violation the Constitutional rights of others — to achieve their goals.

But the CTIL isn’t saving America from misinformation, they’re destroying it with propaganda. This clear, obvious, and admitted election interference was AT THE VERY LEAST encouraged by top levels of government — which for years claimed that a few Russian Facebook ads swung the 2016 election.

Yet we’re supposed to believe the massive influence of the Censorship Industrial Complex — which could ban accounts and remove legal content — led to the “cleanest election ever”?

You’d have to be in the CTIL to say something that dumb — so be sure to use a sockpuppet account.

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Another reason this took so long:

i was helping