Julian Assange: AI Censorship By Facebook And Google Will Keep Elites In Power

In a startling statement read at the Organising Resistance to Internet Censorship webinar in January 2018, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange warned of how “digital super states” like Google and Facebook “have been working to re-establish discourse control.” Assange went on to describe how artificial intelligence censorship will give the monopoly of how information is shared back to the global elite.

Assange continued to describe how the elite’s manipulative attempts to regain control of discourse in the information age has been “operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears likely to eclipse human counter-measures.” As established power structures use more advanced forms of artificial intelligence, the more capable they are of controlling the ideas and information, and, of course, hiding information that is a threat to their global power structure or preferred narratives.

This is not the first time that Assange has cautioned about these developments. In an appearance via video link at the musician and activist M.I.A.’s Meltdown Festival in June 2017, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief expounded in far more detail about his thoughts on the potential for artificial intelligence to be used for controlling online information and discourse in a way human intelligence can’t hope to keep up with.

Pointing out how AI can already outmaneuver even the greatest chess players in the world, Assange describes how programs which can operate with exponentially more tactical intelligence than the human intellect can manipulate the field of available information so effectively and subtly that people won’t even know they are being manipulated.

People will be living in a world that they think they understand and know about, but they’ll unknowingly be viewing only establishment-approved information. China has had its share of Ponzi-like investment scheme blow ups in the past… “When you have AI programs harvesting all the search queries and YouTube videos someone uploads it starts to lay out perceptual influence campaigns, twenty to thirty moves ahead,” Assange said. “This starts to become totally beneath the level of human perception.”

To be clear, this is already occurring. Due to the shift in Google’s “evaluation methods”, traffic to left-leaning and anti-establishment websites has plummeted, with sites like WikiLeaks, Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, Truthout, and WSWS losing up to 70 percent of the views they were getting prior to the changes. Powerful billionaire oligarchs Pierre Omidyar and George Soros are openly financing the development of “an automated fact-checking system” (AI) to hide “fake news” from the public.

Whenever they are accused of censoring anti-establishment narratives, these “digital super states” have been consistently denying participating in censorship themselves and instead blaming the algorithm for the information’s disappearance from public view. But what does that mean, exactly? It means “It wasn’t me censoring you! It was the AI!” Which is the exact threat that Assange was pointing to here.

To make matters even worse, there’s no way to know the exact extent to which this is going on, because we know that we can absolutely count on the digital super states in question to lie about it. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked point-blank if Twitter was obstructing the #DNCLeaks from trending, a hashtag people were using to build awareness of the DNC emails which had just been published by WikiLeaks, and Dorsey flatly denied it.

That afternoon, users noted, #DNCLeaks was trending. By evening, it vanished completely. More than a year later, we learned from a prepared testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism by Twitter’s acting general counsel Sean J. Edgett that this was completely false and Twitter had indeed been doing exactly that to protect the interests of US political structures by sheltering the public from information allegedly gathered by Russian hackers.

“With respect to #DNCLeak, approximately 23,000 users posted around 140,000 unique Tweets with that hashtag in the relevant period,” Edgett said. “Of those Tweets, roughly 2% were from Russian-linked accounts. As noted above, our automated systems at the time detected, labeled, and hid just under half (48%) of all the original Tweets with #DNCLeak.”

So this is happening for some time now. There’s no way to know exactly to what extent at this point because these powerful corporations are hiding behind so much dishonesty and opacity, but it is occurring without question. Imagine going back to a world like the Middle Ages where you only knew the things your king wanted you to know, except you could still watch innocuous kitten videos on YouTube.

That appears to be where we may be headed, and if that occurs, the possibility of any populist movement arising to hold power to account may be effectively locked out from the realm of possibility forever. To claim that these powerful new media corporations are just private companies practicing their freedom to determine what happens on their property is to bury your head in the sand and ignore the extent to which these digital super states are already inextricably interwoven with existing power structures.

In a corporatist system of government, which America and the West unquestionably have, corporate censorship is government censorship, of an even more pernicious strain than if Jeff Sessions were touring the countries burning books. The more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the more adept these power structures will become at manipulating us. Time to start paying very close attention to this.

yogaesoteric
February 4, 2020