I have railed against Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube for censoring conservatives and their voices on the Internet. I also don’t like the fact that the Russians, Chinese, Iranians and the North Koreans are all messing with our accounts and spreading massive propaganda out on the Internet. But calling for the regulation of the Internet hands the oversight of it over to big government… or ‘the swamp’ if you will. That’s a catastrophic idea, especially if the leftists regain full control. And of course it’s one that Senate Democrats embrace. Enter Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), who has for some time now been pushing for exactly that.
A leaked memo has been circulating among Senate Democrats over this. A copy made it’s way to Axios and then to Reason, where I learned of it thanks to a friend who gave me a head’s up on it. That memo contains a slew of simply insane authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms. All in the name of fighting Russian intervention by bots and fake news. That’s not it at all… it’s to silence conservative voices out there once and for all. Take the freest communication platform in the world and give oversight to the feds and there goes your freedom of speech. To ostensibly save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into online media and markets, including “comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation” of the sort enacted in the E.U. That right there is a door to globalist intervention and one world government.
The paper is entitled, “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms.” Sounds benign right? It’s no such thing. You can read the leaked paper here. It starts out by noting that Russians have long spread disinformation, including when “the Soviets tried to spread ‘fake news’ denigrating Martin Luther King.” Some of that was fake and some of it wasn’t – that’s another discussion for another day. It’s replete with justifications and if you think social media is bad now, just wait until something like this is enacted. A couple of weeks ago, Twitter purged millions of accounts they said were bogus. Today, Facebook purged seventeen they said were foreign propaganda accounts. But liberals are being judge and jury here on those platforms. They probably are what they say they are, but after the way leftists on Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube have shadow banned, purged and censored those on the right the way they have, do you trust they’ll do the right thing here?
“Today’s tools seem almost built for Russian disinformation techniques,” Warner opines. What he should have said was they were built for leftist fascism techniques as well. Get everyone hooked on them and then close the gate, since there are no viable conservative outlets out there. Warner claims that other communication platforms on the way will be even worse and we must ‘do something’ now, damn it! Not.
From Reason:
Here’s how Warner is suggesting we deal:
Mandatory location verification. The paper suggests forcing social media platforms to authenticate and disclose the geographic origin of all user accounts or posts.
Mandatory identity verification: The paper suggests forcing social media and tech platforms to authenticate user identities and only allow “authentic” accounts (“inauthentic accounts not only pose threats to our democratic process…but undermine the integrity of digital markets”), with “failure to appropriately address inauthentic account activity” punishable as “a violation of both SEC disclosure rules and/or Section 5 of the [Federal Trade Commission] Act.”
Bot labeling: Warner’s paper suggests forcing companies to somehow label bots or be penalized (no word from Warner on how this is remotely feasible)
Define popular tech as “essential facilities.” These would be subject to all sorts of heightened rules and controls, says the paper, offering Google Maps as an example of the kinds of apps or platforms that might count. “The law would not mandate that a dominant provider offer the serve for free,” writes Warner. “Rather, it would be required to offer it on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” provided by the government.
Other proposals include more disclosure requirements for online political speech, more spending to counter supposed cybersecurity threats, more funding for the Federal Trade Commission, a requirement that companies’ algorithms can be audited by the feds (and this data shared with universities and others), and a requirement of “interoperability between dominant platforms.”
It’s also putting forth that tech platforms would have to turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,” scams, “user propagated misinformation” and harassment—data that could be used to “inform actions by regulators or Congress.” All of this entails more revisions to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, recently amended by Congress to exclude protections for prostitution-related content. In this revision, users could demand that content be taken down and if a platform doesn’t do so, they could be sued or held liable. An admission is made that “attempting to distinguish between true disinformation and legitimate satire could prove difficult.” Ya think? It is ripe and primed for abuse.
Read the full story from NoisyRoom.net
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