The establishment’s false narratives about the world are imploding in spectacular fashion thanks to the Internet, and the establishment’s propagandists are increasingly being called out for their deception. That has the establishment extremely upset. So upset, in fact, that establishment propagandists and the federal government are busy demonizing online freedom and concocting ways to clamp down on voices that expose the false narratives. But Americans can stop it.
From abolishing and censoring comment sections on establishment media websites to squandering Americans’ tax money on stopping online “trolls” and even creating government-controlled troll accounts to manipulate public opinion, the establishment is going all out to prop up the alternative reality it seeks to create in the public consciousness. Overt censorship and war on free speech are increasingly being employed even by Western governments and U.S. tech companies.
But thanks to the World Wide Web and the proliferation of alternative voices, the establishment’s efforts to stop the truth appear to be failing catastrophically in the United States — at least for now. Indeed, just six percent of Americans say they trust the establishment media in surveys. And the numbers keep plunging.
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Of course, it is true that there are “trolls” on the Internet, and that they do try to deceitfully manipulate public opinion. Ironically, though, much of the trolling — in the real sense of the term — appears to be coming from governments and high-priced “public-relations” giants in the employ of governments and mega-corporations. The Kremlin, for example, was widely accused in media reports of operating an alleged “troll army” out of a “troll factory” based in Saint Petersburg. In 2011, meanwhile, a PR firm in Communist China admitted to employing 800 people to operate 20,000 separate accounts to comment online.
More recently, official documents from the U.K. government’s bombastically named “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” exposed the fact that the government in London was operating a massive operation involving “behavioral science,” social-media trolls, and online propaganda. The plot included posting fake comments online. The goal: manipulate public opinion, promote “conformity” and “obedience,” and destroy critics of the establishment narrative at home and abroad.
The Obama administration was exposed before that plotting a similar scheme to operate “sock puppets” on social media that promote Obama’s propaganda. The deception was supposed to be run by the military, though it is not clear what happened to the extremist and unconstitutional plan after it got exposed in the world media. Obama has also been plotting to impose Internet national “IDs” to end anonymity.
With establishment trolls apparently no match for the millions or even billions of real people disgusted with globalism, open borders, perpetual war, political corruption, Big Government, crony capitalism, monetary-system fleecing, and other establishment assaults on humanity, insiders now appear to be trying different tactics. Instead of relying on government trolls and propaganda, or perhaps alongside those tactics, the establishment is seeking to demonize those who do spread the truth as “trolls,” and then crush them and their free-speech rights.
A big step in that direction came on August 18, when the increasingly irrelevant establishment organ Time magazine published a screed alleging that “trolls are ruining the Internet.” Incredibly, in the cover story no less, establishment propagandist Joel Stein described as “trolls” the people who “relish” what he calls “online freedom” — the online ability to speak freely, anonymously, and without establishment gatekeepers to censor thought-crimes. He also deceptively tries to link “online freedom” with “hate” before suggesting that action needs to be taken to keep everyone’s feelings safe from mean old Internet trolls.
Stein first blasts online anonymity, dishonestly attempting to associate it with encouraging depressed people to kill themselves. “Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building,” he writes, after claiming, ludicrously, that “if you tell it [the Internet] you’re struggling with depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself.”
Of course, Time‘s attack on anonymity not withstanding, anonymous speech has been a crucial part of America and the Western world for centuries — since before the U.S. Constitution formally brought the United States into existence, in fact. Leading Founders such as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, for example, published the Federalist Papers anonymously under the pseudonym “Publius.” Unless libel, criminal activity, or other such mischief or crime is taking place, there is absolutely no good reason why Americans should lose their unalienable right to speak anonymously.
What Stein calls trolling is also, at least according to his ramblings, a tool of what the establishment increasingly refers to as “white-male privilege,” the notion that white men have structural advantages over everyone else even in countries such as America (where government-mandated Affirmative Action schemes ensure the opposite is actually closer to the truth). “When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethnic and religious minorities, gays — anyone who might feel vulnerable,” Stein claims matter of factly, right after quoting somebody who said that trolls can be anyone, including women, and then quoting a prominent homosexual activist alleged to be a troll ringleader.
The Time columnist, who is apparently supposed to be funny and drew outrage for what some critics said was a racist attack against Indian Americans, then goes on to quote — anonymously! — sources he claims are Time employees who are allegedly victims of mean trolls. One whined about being called “biased,” as if the far-left writers at the notoriously far-left magazine still had some pretense of objectivity to keep up in the public mind. In a video featured with the online version of the piece, a Time interviewer whines about commentators who have criticized her in the comment section, too.
Then comes the punch: Trolling might, possibly, eventually, somehow, potentially, maybe, at least, lead to violence, or at least really hurt feelings and people feeling unsafe on the Internet. “When people think it’s increasingly O.K. to describe a group of people as subhuman or vermin, those same people are likely to think that it’s O.K. to hurt those people,” Susan Benesch, the founder of something called the “Dangerous Speech Project,” was quoted as saying. The implication is that censorship is needed.
Then, in methodical and calculated fashion, the next blow: “Where we run into the problem is the social-media platforms are very hesitant to step on someone’s First Amendment rights,” complains Mike Bires, described as the co-founder of a “tool” called LawEnforcement.social for police to police the Internet. If only those pesky companies were not so hesitant to censor!
Finally, in the last line, Stein concludes by coming out and bluntly stating, for those too dense to get it earlier, what the real purpose is behind his lengthy screed against online freedom: “maybe, in the information age, sound is as destructive as fury.” By sound, he is referring to criticism and supposedly abusive speech used online by people he and other establishment voices disagree with. It was presumably an effort to sound clever while painting free speech as “destructive.”
Yet, Stein even acknowledges earlier on in the article the political nature of what he is attacking and seeking to destroy. “Trolling is, overtly, a political fight,” he wrote, adding that “liberals” such as a homosexual activist and extreme anti-Christian bigot have engaged in it to demonize politicians perceived as Christian conservatives.
“But trolling has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men’s rights and against immigration,” Stein continued, taking aim at the same target as Hillary Clinton in a recent speech libeling millions of Americans as racists. “Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy.”
Even Trump does it, Stein argues. And so, it must be bad. Then, an obligatory quote from an “alt-right” Trump supporter after the “alt-right” Trump supporter has been sufficiently demonized for allegedly leading an online troll army to make fun of a multimillionaire Hollywood actress. “The trolls are the only people telling the truth,” says Milo Yiannopoulos, an “alt-right” homosexual and anti-political correctness activist who serves as an editor at the popular Breitbart News.
Ironically, Stein acknowledges that trolling has not really been much of an issue for him, having only had one “repeat troll,” a diminutive and shy girl who constantly referred to him as a “disgraced former journalist.” But rather than attributing his lack of attention from “trolls” to his own irrelevance, or pondering whether he might be dishonestly making a mountain out of a molehill in an effort to promote the establishment’s jihad on free speech, he attributes the phenomenon to the fact that he is “a straight white male.” Of course.
It is not just establishment propagandists getting in on the battle against “trolls.” Uncle Sam is, too — even after getting busted plotting to operate a massive troll army to manipulate public opinion and spew pro-Obama propaganda around the world. Indeed, so supposedly concerned is the U.S. government about alleged “trolls” messing up the Internet that it is dropping at least half a million taxpayer dollars into “research” to figure out how to create “trolling-free environments” across the entire World Wide Web.
The unconstitutional National Science Foundation, which styles itself an outfit “to advance the progress of science” (and censorship apparently) using your hard-earned tax dollars, announced a grant last month to two researchers from Northwestern University on “Leveraging Personalized Internet Services to Combat Online Trolling.” “This project explores re-using this extensive tracking infrastructure for the benefits of both the users themselves and web services, with a goal of preventing online trolling (scenarios in which various groups deploy tactics to influence public opinion on the Internet, by leaving biased, false, misleading, and inauthentic comments, and then artificially amplifying their ratings),” explains the grant description.
The researchers then chimed in with their own comments about the scheme to the Washington Free Beacon. “Common for all the above trolling scenarios is not just a fake and biased content; such comments are further ‘amplified’ by voting, a feature often misused by online trollers,” the two complained, with “biased content” presumably a reference to non- or anti-establishment viewpoints. “Resolving the problem of online trolling is therefore fundamentally important for the future of the Internet.” Or at least to the establishment’s narrative.
“Indeed,” the tax-funded anti-“trolling” researchers continued, “organized trolling has already become a serious problem, and some argue that it can have a profound impact on the society.” “While resolving versions of this problem in the past has been done in the context of individual systems, resolving the problem comprehensively at the Internet-scale is of paramount importance for the future of the Internet,” they added.
In simpler terms, the feds want an “Internet-scale” solution to combat online truth-telling because the establishment’s narratives are imploding on the world stage — not because the establishment is concerned about the feelings of overweight actresses or far-left “journalists” who parrot the establishment’s talking points. If they need tax dollars to find it, and even if the money has to be borrowed from Communist China or the Federal Reserve, so be it.
Not coincidentally, the full-blown attack on Internet freedom comes just weeks ahead of the Obama administration’s planned handover of crucial U.S.-controlled Internet architecture to a global organization of “stakeholders.” As long as the Internet remains free, an “Internet-scale” solution to the “problem” would have probably been impossible to implement. But as the United Nations and various globalist outfits prepare to seize control over crucial components of the Internet’s architecture, the prospect of mischief or even outright tyranny and censorship becomes much more realistic.
In Europe, the establishment’s jihad on free speech is far more advanced. As The New American reported in June, U.S. technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and others have already promised to work with the totalitarian-minded European Union superstate to censor “extremism” from the Internet. People are literally arrested for quoting Winston Churchill, the Bible, the Koran, and more.
Outside what used to be called the “Free World,” the situation is even worse. The murderous dictatorship enslaving Communist China, which has its agent leading the UN agency that globalists hope will eventually oversee the Internet, also operates a massive and Orwellian censorship regime. Indeed, the whole world is moving toward censorship under various guises, and the UN is cheer-leading the process at every step.
In short, the only political forces standing between global online freedom and planetary Internet censorship are the free speech-loving American people and the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Americans must continue to resist.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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