GREG MAYBURY—And who can forget the infamous “integrity initiative” that preceded it, whose lofty ambitions aimed to ‘defend democracy against disinformation’? This is faux-elite code for limiting—if not eliminating—free speech; this is already happening at a rate of knots, with the powers that be ‘setting up new perimeters’ online and offline. The prevailing efforts by a range of people to make it a crime to criticise Israel or boycott the country is arguably the most egregious example. The efforts by the MSM to designate genuine, independent analysis by alternative media as “fake news” is another one. The BigTech behemoths increasingly draconian attempts to control the flow and substance of free speech does not go unnoticed.
Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today—afforded increasingly by ‘computational propaganda’ via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and AI algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths—it’s become one of the most troubling aspects of the technological cum social media revolution.