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December 28, 2020 - 3:39pm
Recently, in the comments underneath our LockdownTV YouTube videos, people have been saying that our videos are being ‘downrated’ on YouTube search. Type in Aella, or Michael Levitt, for example, and videos come above ours in the search results that are much older, viewed much fewer times, and come from channels that have much smaller followings. I hate the idea of being conspiracist, and feel it’s a bit rich to make accusations of censorship against a platform that has brought us so many views and followers, but could it be that heterodox channels like ours have found their way onto a blacklist of channels that should be ever so gently… suppressed?
This was one of the questions I put to Glenn Greenwald — one of the world’s better known free speech and civil liberties advocates. Talking from his home in the mountains outside Rio di Janeiro, his answer was unsettling: “You don’t need to be a conspiracist to believe any of that. They acknowledge that they are doing all the things that you just described.”
The pandemic has brought this issue to the fore even more visibly, with channels and videos regularly being taken down having been judged as dangerous to public health, and the YouTube CEO announcing earlier in the year that anything that fell foul of WHO guidelines would be removed (notwithstanding that organisation’s patchy, to say the least, record during this pandemic).
“It’s incredibly dangerous,” says Greenwald. “What competency do tech giants have to arbitrate over science and health policy? … How did they get into a position of some sort of philosopher-king to be able to sit in judgement as overlords of our discourse and decree not only what is permissible but what is true and false when it comes to highly complex questions such as how to manage a pandemic, or whether vaccines are safe and effective, or whether the balances of a lockdown are justified by their cost? These are incredibly complicated decisions that a society ought to be debating.”
It becomes even more concerning when it dovetails with party politics. Greenwald sees the merger of the Democratic Party and the tech platforms as a serious threat to free speech:
To me, that censorship episode involving the Hunter Biden reporting in the weeks leading up to an election was one of the most alarming and significant events to take place in politics in years. That one of the primary means that citizens have to communicate with one another was simply manipulated to prevent incriminating reporting about the candidate that the employees and executives and shareholders of those means of communication wanted to win the election. It was pure brute censorship of the most toxic and damaging kind.
The prognosis, according to Greenwald, is not good. Instead of being magnanimous in victory, he predicts that the Democrats are likely to use their influence to further shut down discourse they find unacceptable.
“It’s like a tide that keeps coming in. You hope that it doesn’t get to you. As long as it doesn’t you feel free on the beach, but you see the water inching ever closer.”
Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
freddiesayers
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SubscribeWell, yes, and those of us who follow US politics and podcasters etc very closely have known about this for a couple of years. How many people in Europe – even Unherd readers – are aware of the way in which Big Tech simply shut down the Hunter Biden story? And that Glenn Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, which he himself founded, because they wanted to edit his work so as to omit mention of the Biden corruption?
As styhexenhammer666 (whose podcasts on YouTube are shadow banned) said today in a video about a citizen journalist in China who has been locked up, the West is little better than China or Russia these days. It’s just that the authorities don’t (yet) lock people up. That said, they have locked up Assange and his imprisonment may well kill him.
Interestingly, it seems that some of those at Twitter/You Tube/Facebook charged with doing the censoring, shadow banning and de-monetising etc have started to believe the conservative or non-permitted views they are being exposed to. They then have to be re-educated.
That should be “styxhexenhammer666″ and he suggests watching his stuff on B1tchu7e (a UK based site, no ad revenue going to California), to avoid the censors.
As for government suppression of free speech, unfortunately, if you compare the Russian government with that in the UK (population 67m), in 2016, the police arrested and questioned over 3300 people for online comments. The equivalent number for the Russian Federation (population 142m) was 400 people. The chance of you being bothered by the police for what you write online is an order of magnitude greater in the UK than in Russia.
Kind of romantic. Like Julia in 1984 and her work in the Fiction Department.
Don’t think Assange was locked up for his journalism. He first went into voluntary imprisonment to escape a rape allegation. He was imprisoned in the UK for breaking bail.
No idea what the US will do to him when they finally get him. I don’t think imprisoning yourself time can be deducted from the sentence.
Really? Does that mean they will also realize the election was rigged and that there has been corruption, fraud, and intimidation on a massive scale to effect that? So massive that the courts are petrified of lifting the lid on the tens of thousands of sworn affidavits? Petrified at the thought of overwhelming left wing violence?
These censors now have to remove anything which mentions election fraud. Just imagine how much about that they must be reading!
I genuinely don’t understand. I’m very aware of the Hunter Biden story. My recall is that I received the information via the BBC, Guardian, Sunday Times and other ‘mainstream’ news outlets. I’m not saying Big Tech didn’t shut down the story from their own platforms. I feel like it was out there.
What big tech are doing is a matter of fact not feeling so it is not a case of paranoia. The reality is that news and information published or broadcast by any media outlet has and always will be subject to some form of censorship, journalistic licence (ie economical with the truth) and political bias. But facebook/youtube also engage in a more sinister and menacing practice which is the manipulation of viewed content via algorithms to influence the thinking and actions of an extremely large audience. We have good reason to feel distrustful and fearful but definitely not paranoid.
Yes, I agree. The large tech companies are now not only manipulating speech and out put on their platforms but are increasing looking to manipulate behaviour as well. Having just read ‘surveillance capitalism’, perhaps Shoshana Zuboff might be an interesting person for Unherd to interview.
The one area in this interview that I would have been interested to hear discussed is the delicate area where posts violate the law.
‘The Social Dilemma’ goes into this behaviour manipulation quite well, and it’s watchable.
Excellent interview. While Freddie is probably right that many people who disagree with the information in the Hunter Biden reporting would object to its censoring, the evidence presented is hugely incriminating and it’s not Russian disinformation, as Hunter’s dad claims. This makes that censorship all the more obscene. It may have been enough to make Trump lose the election.
“While Freddie is probably right that many people who disagree with the information in the Hunter Biden reporting”
This is a nonsensical argument. How can anyone “agree” or “disagree” with information that has been suppressed?
Maybe it’s not entirely suppressed.
Trump didn’t lose the election because of that. The way Big Tech behaved gave it greater publicity. Trump won by a landslide. The way this resounding victory was reversed in the middle of the night and in the succeeding days is what Big Tech are now censoring. They themselves say they have already destroyed 8,000 videos about what went on. They are also removing anything to do with “Stop the Steal” – mass peaceful rallies, really peaceful, not in the CNN sense of “mostly peaceful”.
The new aspect is how obvious and how widespread this has become. The digital version of the cultural revolution is underway, aided by numerous political figures who are okay with their opponents being hounded or un-personed. It’s the sort of thing associated with history’s most noxious regimes, yet a large swath of the left is rushing to repeat it.
By the way, the weak excuse that “well, they’re private companies” never seemed to work with things who to serve at the lunch counter, and it falls equally flat here. Besides, culture is always ahead of politics and what’s happening here is echoed in entertainment, academia, and the media itself, so thinking it can extend to govt is not farfetched.
Their employees are overwhelmingly progressive, overwhelmingly liberal, overwhelmingly Democrat …
Strange that should be the case always imagined that IT was complementary to the free thinking or inquisitive mindset and not the group-think of authoritarianism.
Academia. Orwell talked of how they churn out Lefties, and it is 1000X more so now days.
I think it was all Frankfurt School, their ‘Critical-Theory’ Weimar/Marxist philosophy (ha), moving to Columbia University in the 50s, and with the policy of ‘Entryism’, that main tool of Marxism (Corbyn the best recent example) they slowly took over academia.
The 11 point plan is too real to just be conspiracy loons.
You are about 25 years behind the curve.
That is why I said strange, talk about being behind the curve Brexit agreement mentions Netscape Navigator as an up to date browser.
Yes, nut, please remember we are talking Californian here.
One of the early signs of the stupidity of Bay area culture in which the Google’s (i.e. companies that produce code-based products and services — is this really “tech”??) of the world emerged was their slogan “don’t be evil”. This was an early (and obvious, to me at least) example of “virtue signaling” — the most idiotic and superficial kind of self-centered phoniness I have ever witnessed in such breadth.
It was always clear to me that Google itself was certain to emerge as the evil that they were so prepared themselves, from the beginning, to divert attention from. Some call this “projection”.
Google’s business model is still predominantly based upon replacing the old “classified” ad’s and the like from print media. Facebook is also largely ad-based, but I guess they make a lot of their revenue by selling personal data — again, this is notably quite legal and so-called “privacy” rights are not such, in the US anyway. There are some limited protections of limited forms of privacy that are statutory (and largely pretty recently passed into law), but there is no such thing as a concept of protected privacy enshrined in the US Constitution as a right. I do not think there is much of this in most state constitutions either.
Call me nuts, but the idea of advertising and social media as anything but a supplementary nicety for a rich society seems like nonsense to me. Essential goods and services suppliers are the basis/foundation of a healthy sustainable economy, I think. It is frightening how unappreciated this has become as we have allowed our core economy to be gutted out, but acute and severe coming events may remind us.
Peter Thiel”right wing libertarian Peter Thiel”sued Gawker out of existence.
And more recently Tim Cook reportedly put the kibosh on an Apple TV production based on the notoriously snarky gossip website Gawker. The Apple CEO ” who, along with his company, had been a frequent target of the now-defunct website ” learned about the production and the project was quietly canceled, according to The New York Times.
Freddie, regarding your stated reluctance to accept “conspiracy theory” types of notions, this is something that I think is very common.
The problem is that large institutions, and particularly those who make a living (usually as employees) from them, contain masses of people who have a naturally common interest, and hence behavior. I think that this is insidious and largely unconscious.
And the large percentage of modern economies that are really not wealth-producing, but rather are tied to government and its power to tax, contain many large “industries” of such institutions. There is government itself, of course, but also the medical industry and academia/schools and military industry and accounting (largely dedicated to taxes) and banking/finance and so on. All of these are heavily dependent upon government and its tentacles.
I heard Marc Faber (for those who know of him) recently comment upon the “viciousness” of bureaucrats, and little could resonate with me more. This is a knee-jerk type of behavior, but one that has been reinforced by the approval of orthodoxy more and more in recent times. It is entirely one of self interest and entitlement and sheer arrogance on the part of those in the bureaucratic world, as opposed to those who toil still in the world of true markets. A local talkshow host (in Boston) calls this the “dreaded private sector” (DPS), and for good reason albeit humorously so.
Bureaucrats are indeed more powerful, arrogant, and vicious than ever before. The Fed and other central banks are amongst the best and most important examples of such bureaucrats. Few would consider such people malicious or ill-intended, but they are certainly hugely misguided and their “policies” have fueled a fast-growing divide in society which is now commonly remarked upon. Few understand the transmission mechanism from central bank reserves (created by computer keystroke, or out of thin air) to a few in finance that are the beneficiaries, however.
IMO what some tend to think of as conspiracy-like movements, that are real enough, are naturally evolved coalitions of large numbers of people with common interests tied to their livelihoods, and human instinct makes us all very protective of our livelihoods. This is survival in the modern world for us.
Those of us who toil in the DPS are just as protective instinctively, methinks. But we are pretty powerless relative to the bureaucrats these days. I only hope that this changes for the better, for all of us inlcuding same bureaucrats who otherwise will cause much damage to entire societies including themselves.
There is still a massively prevalent view that regulators and bureaucrats are somehow still absolutely vital to protect against the nasty, evil corp’s, and otherwise benign. I think this is simply the result of ignorance and unawareness and too little observation and decades of successful brainwashing these days.
Freddie
It will simply not do to automatically attribute some benign motive to Bill Gates – it is not particularly obvious that this accumulator of wealth, power and influence is simply operating for the benefit of humanity (or even with the best motives achieving benefit rather than harm). How about checking out the journalism of Tim Schwab who has written about Gates in such places as Columbia Journalism Review or The Nation? Gates btw who is now telling us we should all remain locked down to summer 2022.
Or how about the other Schwab (Klaus)? We are told that his Great Reset via the World Economic Forum is just an economic rescue package for the Covid disaster but if you actually go to the Great Reset pages of the WEF it does not pretend to be anything other than a global totalitarian project. It is woolly and lame to imagine this is some liberal project which you don’t have to worry about.
It is also poor to automatically attribute malice or incompetence to those concerned about the safety of vaccines and the roll out of rushed to the market products using entirely new technologies. What do you know about it? Has it registered that when vaccines were rushed out in the swine flu scares of 1976 or 2009 they went wrong? Now we are trying to vaccinate an entire global population against a disease about which much still has not been explained using ill-tested methods.
I think you should not continue to bask in the security of your own insights. Even Glen Greenwald seems to be naive in addressing the politics of the WHO, which was exposed long ago, for instance in British Medical Journal. Or perhaps you just think because Unherd has not touched on the dire manoeuvring of global bodies during this crisis, and their corporate sponsors, that it deserves to be let off. To understand global politics you surely have to look at the motivations of its most powerful people, and then ask if liberal democracy is going down the sink as well as the accountability of institutions is it an accident? Perhaps if you were doing a competent job you would be even further down the Google rankings.
Please re-post this in your native tongue.
A good interview, but I was surprised that Freddie didn’t ask Greenwald about the recently announced EU tech policy that actually expects the tech companies to do MORE censorship. I wonder how they can win ? On one side they are compelled by law to do more censorship and on another by the likes of Greenwald to do less and effectively just be an enabler of discourse. Tricky.
A great interview Freddie, as always. It should not be forgotten that the big tech companies cannot be ‘independently blamed’ – they have to dance with (several powerful) governments, and even if they step on each others’ toes quite often, they will continue to dance. Citizens should wake up and pay attention to what their govts are doing, and what laws are being passed in their name, by their representatives, instead of sleepwalking into dictatorship. Some scary laws have been passed in ‘nice countries’. The pandemic is a further, and a very strong, conduit for weakening of democracy. Greetings from Australia!
Just listened to first couple of minutes or so. My sense is that the interviewee is someone with whom I will largely agree.
He made one key error, however, IMO. He referred to “rights” in the context of censorship by private entities. And these are NOT rights. They are mere expectations that we have taken for granted for a long time now.
There has been an epidemic of describing much, over the last several decades, as rights which are NOT legal rights in US or in most other Western countries.
We are experiencing a social phenomenon of lack of vigilance (by irresponsible citizens), lack of knowledge of history, and so on. It is scarily similar to the French Revolution in many ways — an unthinking mob mentality which is unskeptical of dogma and bureaucracies and similar (perceived) orthodoxies in the extreme.
My disrespect for the likes of what comprises the Google’s and Facebook’s of the world knows almost no bounds, but they owe me nothing either legally or otherwise and I can begrudgingly admire their business models and monopolistic success. And they would not have this success if most were like me, because I use their services and products very little — nearly not at all.
I have not avoided their services due to idealogical animous … they simply do not appeal to me in the least. Obviously I am a bit of a weirdo, or at least not in the mainstream.
I am able to be cautiously still somewhat optimistic that there will be some oncoming of common sense in the general population that will avoid a mob-frenzied meltdown, but I am amazed at how complacent and compliant Western societies have become. Maybe the fall of the Soviet Union was a bad thing for us (in the West) for this reason.
The “talking points” of the left are just the same as the old “party line” of the Leninist commies. Why isn’t this obvious to more?
We are living in an age of massive fraud perpetrated by powerful bureaucracies (who are legally indemnified, it is important to recognize). As long as the forces remain naturally cohesive, promoting their own interests over those of everyone/everything else, there will be continued seduction of the complacent conformists and increasingly vicious persecution of the limited minority who dare to challenge.
The commie revolution in Russia led to a loss of several generations of freedom and opportunity for a goodly portion of people on earth. Stalin killed millions by starvation to enforce his (and the Soviets’) belief in an ideology which he truly believed in, and those who died were simple peasants with normal and modest ambitions to make a meager livelihood on their own by traditional means.
Watch out. And don’t expect laws that do not exist, nor laws that are disregarded and unenforced in the interests of bureaucracies and those in political power, to protect one from the unthinking, unskeptical mobs.
Freddie
If you want to understand how far adrift from reality your present talk is try reading:
“Africa to Become Testing Ground for “Trust Stamp” Vaccine Record and Payment System: A new biometric identity platform partnered with the Gates-funded GAVI vaccine alliance and Mastercard will launch in West Africa and combine COVID-19 vaccinations, cashless payments, and potential law enforcement applications.by Raul Diego”
This is hard research, and this where we are going if people don’t wake up. If we are in a mess at the of this year God knows where will be at the end of 2021.
oh yeah and before I forget…
Google workers demand reinstatement and apology for fired Black AI ethics researcher
Timnit Gebru’s departure sparked outrage in the industry as it followed her paper criticizing the company’s diversity efforts
Gebru, formerly the Google AI unit’s technical co-lead, earlier this month said that a senior manager told her that she would have to retract a paper she had co-authored arguing that technology companies should do more to ensure that gender biases and offensive language are not exacerbated by AI systems designed to mimic human language.
“I felt like we were being censored and thought this had implications for all of ethical AI research,” Gebru told Wired after her departure. “You’re not going to have papers that make the company happy all the time and don’t point out problems. That’s antithetical to what it means to be that kind of researcher.
AI to be woke then? The lack of interstellar chatter at SETI has always meant to me that AI finishes off intelligent life just as it gets to the good parts. My theory is it either makes us pets, and keeps us moronically happy, or it thinks of us as a disease and vaccinates the planet. These social media guys are likely to be the cause of humanity being extinct in a few years, in a big bit of existential irony.
Zuckerborg will program it to say, “I’m responsible and I’m sorry,” on endless repeat.
your gibberish is noted…seek professional help before you harm yourself or others.
I’ll start to go along with these workers when they campaign for James Dalmore to be re-instated.
It may just because I’m an old fart so can remember other days but it seems that people these days expect the company to do what they want not them do what the company wants.
In the specific example you quote there’s debate whether she resigned or not before going on holiday. Memory says its reported that she said something like “I’ll think about setting an end date when I get back”
It is somewhat upsetting, to say the least, when the free speech advocate (I think!)Freddie Sayers himself appears to have been “captured,” judging by his very first example of an “obviously” crazy idea that almost everyone would agree is off the charts for being nuts. Namely, the idea that Bill Gates is behind a vaccine with a “chip” in it. Certainly anyone who believes such nonsense deserves to be canceled and shut down.
Unh, Earth to Freddie: “ID2020 and partners launch program to provide digital ID with vaccines”
https://www.biometricupdate…
Gavi, the outfit behind this, is funded by the Gates Foundation. As are virtually all of the major NGOs that have a hand, or a finger, in the public health policy pie, including the WHO. The Gates Foundation is the biggest funder of the WHO. Gavi (funded primarily by the Gates Foundation) is the next biggest funder . . . So it gets a bit circular and incestuous, and those are the realities. See quote below.
Both Freddie and Glenn appear to be treading *very* carefully here.
I wonder whether this comment will even see the light of day here.
============
The ID2020 Alliance
has launched a new digital identity program at its annual summit in New
York, in collaboration with the Government of Bangladesh, vaccine
alliance Gavi, and new partners in government, academia, and humanitarian relief.
The program to leverage immunization as an opportunity to establish
digital identity was unveiled by ID2020 in partnership with the
Bangladesh Government’s Access to Information (a2i) Program, the
Directorate General of Health Services, and Gavi, according to the
announcement.
Digital identity is a computerized record of who a person is, stored
in a registry. It is used, in this case, to keep track of who has
received vaccination.
“We are implementing a forward-looking approach to digital identity
that gives individuals control over their own personal information,
while still building off existing systems and programs,” says Anir
Chowdhury, policy advisor at a2i. “The Government of Bangladesh
recognizes that the design of digital identity systems carries
far-reaching implications for individuals’ access to services and
livelihoods, and we are eager to pioneer this approach.”
Gavi CEO Seth Berkley says that 89 percent of children and
adolescents who do not have identification live in countries where the
organization is active. “We are enthusiastic about the potential impact
of this program not just in Bangladesh, but as something we can
replicate across Gavi-eligible countries, providing a viable route to
closing the identity gap,” he says.”
ETC. ETC.
Actually, this information is now practically mainstream:
Great work as ever, Freddie, thank you. A bit late in the game, however, since this active censorship has been ongoing since the first lockdown in the spring. The media lockdown is so complete that here in a semi-remote British Columbia mountain town, a radio show host at an independent radio channel run by volunteers was fired for expressing opinions contrary to the mainstream Covid narrative. This was formerly a radio station that was known for airing all sorts of non-mainstream political opinion. So, using the Socratic method, why, one might ask, for this one contentious issue out of all the others, was such force brought to bear?
This is a complete destruction of the debate. I am on FB. I was deplatformed there for a month because I stated that there is no research on puberty blockers and no research on cross-sex hormones. They took that down, and I appealed. They put the comment back, but kept me off because I had been deplatformed in the past. Now I have a permanent ban on commenting on the WP. Reason: I said that “BLM means ‘beer liquor merchandize’ and ‘blacks looting at midnight”. The twin electric rails of criticizing trans delusions and criticizing BLM are now the new religious edicts. It’s completely debasing our debate, which occurs on FB and the comment streams of newspapers. The plain fact is that CONSERVATIVE IDEAS ARE NOW CONSIDERED HATE SPEECH.
To eliminate a voice opposing yours, you now simply have to call it “harmful” or “offensive”.
Brilliant interview. This site really is a breath of fresh air.
Subtle changes
Thanks for this excellent video. Yes, it is utterly important to observe and react to the subtle changes that are taking place.
Along with the loss of free speech I will suggest that another equally important change is taking place, also stepwise. I will suggest that reason is gradually being lost. I mean, logic as a heavyweight value in our culture gradually falls out. An argument based on reason now tends, ironically, to be seen as an argument based on personal preference, almost like any other matter of taste. “žSo you prefer to live and argue by reason? Sure, please do (I don’t care)”.
(Admittedly, I do not argue much for my point of view here.)
Wonderful interview conducted by an exceptional interviewer, Freddie Sayers. Beautifully done in softly pointing out to Greenwald that Unherd is doing exactly what he was hoping some outlet would do in the future. And interesting that a presumably well-read journalist such as Greenwald would only mention Unherd’s videos rather than the even more impressive written material. Unherd is still really way too unheard.
So what are we looking at? Rigged elections and democrat majorities from now on in the USA, A militarized and locked down Capital to protect our “betters” from the masses (a USA “green zone”), digital currencies controlled by Facebook-Twitter-Amazon-Google (the new banks), mask mandates, lockdowns, vaccine “passports”, social credit scores, mandatory vaccines, meal worms to replace meat as the main protein source for human consumption, a lack of access to fossil fuels for all but the wealthiest, a lack of air travel for all but the wealthiest, a carefully rationed access to resources for all but the wealthiest, a possible one child policy for all but the wealthiest, a reduction of access to healthcare for all but the wealthiest. So food, resources, and money will be tightly controlled and dished out by the wealthiest. The vast majority will be vastly impoverished. Enjoy your meal worms!
This was such a fascinating discussion. Obviously I’m a couple of months late, but I would love to see you and Glenn revisit this topic in light of more recent events.
In terms of visual quality this seems the best of recent interviews with Greenwald. But in terms of length of interview and scope of content others are also worth checking out. Those on JRE and Matt Taibbi’s Useful Idiots channel are good – but the best one recently it seems to me is with ReasonTV.