(Article by Didi Rankovic republished from ReclaimTheNet.org)

It’s not just directly pressuring, or “communicating with” – as current White House officials like to put it, social sites; reports are now emerging about companies getting hired to make massive databases of supposedly unlawful speech that are compiled thanks to users effectively spying and reporting on each other on messaging platforms like WhatsApp.

Former State Department official, now executive director of Foundation For Freedom Online, Mike Benz, calls this “a snitch network of citizen informants.” Information thus obtained is then analyzed using some form of AI, resulting in identification of “misinformation trends.”

One of these companies is Algorithmic Transparency Institute. The money comes from firms that receive government funds and congressionally chartered organizations.

The need to resort to “old school” citizen-informant methods arises from the nature of the platforms the government would like to spy on, and get content flagged and eventually censored. It’s the likes of WhatsApp and Telegram, where, due to the nature of (particularly encrypted) private messaging, the now established forms of “monitoring” places like Facebook or YouTube cannot be used.

Critics of this euphemistically (and confusingly) dubbed “civic listening” draw parallels with how authoritarian regimes famously employ(ed) people spying on each other even before the digital age, while some continue to do so.

Now, the spying “format” once used by the likes of Stalin, the Nazis, etc., has reached America. The principle is simple: where the hand (and the ears) of the government can’t reach, private chat apps’ users themselves are encouraged to report on what’s being said.

That flagged “misinformation” data goes into what are by now likely the standard cogs of the censorship machine: creation of databases, “AI” analyses, etc.

Foundation For Freedom Online singles out US-based non-profit Meedan as being “at the forefront of creating this snitch network.”

Things go from bad to worse once it is revealed that the group received $5.7 million as a grant from the US authorities (and taxpayers), specifically, via the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Among the things flagged by some of these “useless (informant) idiots,” as one might call them, are memes, and, “claims.”

Read more at: ReclaimTheNet.org