I created a Meetup group called “Covid Contrarians” in New York City. The idea was just to meet other people like me, who thought our governments were overreacting to the Covid situation. My big plan was no more than, get together and schmooze over coffee or a beer. The group lasted a few weeks before Meetup declared that it was spreading misinformation, and erased it from the website.
The House Report indicates that CISA was a central actor in censoring criticism of the Covid regime in the ensuing months and years. The agency is representative of the cabal of censorial and unaccountable officials engaged in public-private partnerships designed to keep us in the dark.
CISA Was Behind the Attempt to Control Your Thoughts, Speech, and Life Read Journal Article
As Dr Narayanan indicates, ChatGPT’s responses to some computer science examination questions he posed to it were spurious, but they were phrased in such a specious manner that their falsity was not immediately apparent, and he had to check them three times before being certain that this was the case. So much for ChatGPT’s vaunted capacity to ‘replace’ humans.
Under these circumstances, those who do their own independent research, rather than uncritically swallowing whatever “official authorities” tell them, are not the “cranks” and “conspiracy theorists” they are being made out to be, but citizens who actually understand the predicament they find themselves in, and have the courage to think for themselves, even when it draws down ridicule, censorship, and alienation from “respectable” society.
Could it be that we are being misdirected to look the wrong way, and the greatest existential threat to our survival as a species comes not from AI’s superior intelligence, but its crass stupidity?
My Conversation with ChatGPT on Death Rates Read Journal Article
Will future campaigns to control Wikipedia narratives rely on this technology? What is the future of a crowd-sourced knowledge base such as Wikipedia that depends on the high cost in human time and social interaction of making an edit to a controversial topic when the ability to automate this makes it close to free?
This agency was created in the waning days of the Obama administration, supposedly to protect our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks from computer viruses and nefarious foreign actors. But less than one year into their existence, CISA decided that their remit also should include protecting our “cognitive infrastructure” from various threats.
Facebook responded to the White House’s incessant and abusive demands for more censorship with, “We hear your call for us to do more, and as I said on the call we are committed to working towards our shared goal.” This after a triple punch of threats were lobbed by the White House and the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG), Dr. Vivek Murthy, at social media companies in mid July 2021.
The Deplatforming of the “Disinformation Dozen”: More Coverage From Tracy Beanz Read Journal Article
The withdrawal of Twitter’s signature from the Code is a highly theatrical, but essentially empty gesture, which will undoubtedly serve to shore up Musk’s free speech bad-boy bona fides, but has virtually no practical consequences.
Complying, Not Defying: Twitter and the EU Censorship Code Read Journal Article
Biden even accused Facebook of “killing people” and the next day threatened Section 230 action on social media companies that didn’t comply with their demands.
The Australian stereotype of mocking self-important authorities was tepid at best during the crisis, and what questioning of authority did take place appears to have been quickly memory-holed by the spell-checkers-turned-fact-checkers at the Department of Home Affairs “Extremsim” team. With each passing day, Idiocracy is looking more and more like prophecy.
The Covid Censorship Requests of Australia’s Department of Home Affairs Read Journal Article
Who is to say something is misinformation, who is the arbiter of that? Well, there you have it. In the case of Twitter and all the platforms cooperating with the EU, the European Commission is the arbiter of that, since it is the Commission that will decide if Twitter and the other platforms are doing enough to combat it.
What about the Permanent Task-Force on Disinformation? A Question for Elon Musk Read Journal Article
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