March 21, 2024 - 6:30pm
At the end of last week, the Anti-Defamation League — an organisation once dedicated to fighting antisemitism which is now a node in the Democratic Party-aligned “censorship industrial complex” — posted the following on X:
As digital social spaces, online games should be regulated to address hate & extremism. It’s vital for Congress to examine extremist radicalization in these spaces & we are grateful to @RepLoriTrahan for leading this effort. An important piece to read: https://t.co/LJpLgJSTcB
— ADL (@ADL) March 14, 2024
The post links to an op-ed in The Hill calling on the US Government to regulate online video game platforms and fight “hate, harassment, and the perpetuation of extremist ideologies”. The article references the gargantuan size of the gaming industry ($200 billion in revenue), while noting with some trepidation that online gaming sites act as “social platforms that channel user communication and enable networking and community building” — beyond the prying eyes of the Government.
This article provides a window into a new censorship front in the US: the gaming industry, which is supposedly now a bastion of unregulated speech, or, in Government Newspeak, “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “violent extremism”. The ADL, meanwhile, is an active partner in these efforts.
During a recent social media spat over wokeness in video games dubbed “Gamergate 2”, for instance, X users noted an oddly catastrophising blog post from a “mental health in gaming” nonprofit called Take This. The post warned that an alleged “harassment campaign” against employees of Sweet Baby, Inc. — a “narrative development” studio focused on improving minority and LGBTQI+ representation in video games — was fuelling (and being fuelled by) the 2024 US presidential election, and urged industry stakeholders to “clearly and unequivocally denounce” gamers who don’t want the equivalent of sensitivity readers for their video games.
It turns out, though, that Take This’s self-described mission to “normalize mental health challenges” and “honor intersectional experiences” in the gaming industry is funded by the US security state: the organisation was the co-recipient of a $700,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2022, dedicated to the monitoring of “extremist exploitation in gaming spaces”. Its partners in that project included Middlebury’s CTEC, an academic “counterterrorism” institute, and Logically, a British company which served on the UK Government’s Counter-Disinformation Unit, using AI tools to surveil “journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticised pandemic policies,” according to a January investigation from Lee Fang.
In that role, Logically flagged as mis- or disinformation reports from experts questioning the utility of vaccine passports, social media posts suggesting that the Covid-19 virus escaped from a lab, and arguments against Nato expansion from British anti-war groups. Logically has since graduated to monitoring election-related “misinformation” for a subsidiary of the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit managed by a branch of DHS.
Further, a recently released report from another US Government agency (GAO) stresses the need for DHS and the FBI to develop “strategies and goals for sharing threat information with social media and gaming companies”. The report claims, dubiously, that gaming “promotes domestic violent extremism and has influenced several high-profile attacks” — the “evidence” here being that the Buffalo shooter live-streamed his attack in the style of a first-person shooter game.
A quick look at the list of “experts” consulted for the report, however, gives the game away: in addition to three employees from the ADL and one from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the list is a Who’s Who of the central players in America’s pandemic-era censorship regime, including CTEC (the institute partnered with Logically and Take This on the DHS grant), CIS (the DHS-controlled nonprofit contracting with Logically), and the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab — a member of the Election Integrity Partnership, which served as the US Government’s “deputized domestic disinformation flagger” during the 2020 election, in the words of journalist Michael Shellenberger.
A February 2021 “Disinformation Primer” from the USAID, released last week, similarly urged Government agencies to target “alternative media spaces”— including message boards and gaming sites — as sources of “problematic information”. The same primer recommends a number of sub rosa tactics — such as “prebunking” and “debunking and discrediting” (bureaucratese for coordinated character assassination against alleged misinformers) — in order to halt the spread of false information.
In other words, under the pretext of fighting “domestic terrorism” and “misinformation”, the US Government and its nongovernmental partners — including the ADL and explicitly partisan organisations such as the SPLC — are declaring a national security interest in surveilling and censoring the speech of American citizens while they play Call of Duty with their friends.
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SubscribeReading the acronyms of these bodies (mainly unknown to me, from the UK) my thoughts ran to jobsworths, people finding something to talk about to justify a job that seems primarily to be funded rather opaquely by tax payers.
Who on earth in a position of responsibility thinks it is right and proper to give so much tax payer money to fringe and partisan organisations to foster their continued attempts to find something to witter on about to seem relevant and maintain their (probably quite significant) salaries?
(same the world over, well so called 1st World, certainly in the UK)
I thought the same thing. It’s incredible feat of technology (and enterprise) to have created so much wealth and comfort that people can waste their time trying to shut down people they disagree with.
Indeed.
Kids also say the stupidest things online, so we’ll now have a cottage industry of ‘prep school consultants’ trained to usher parents through this new progressive ‘domestic extremist hunter’ surveillance net that’s meant to catch their kid uttering a progressive faux pas that conflicts with Progressivism’s Little Red Book:
“Tip Number One: Don’t let your 10 year-old Timmy ever – and I mean ever – play online video games, like Call of Duty. He might unwittingly say something that’s recorded by ‘extremist hunters’ who only get paid or hired if they find ‘extremists’ – as defined by the current progressive fad of the time or at a future time. Timmy may or may not have said something stupid or his words might easily be taken out of context to make sure poor Timmy is flagged within various databases so he doesn’t have a chance to attend his preferred Ivy League college in the future.”
Ya. There is no deep state. Just look away. NGOs are a frickin problem. They destabilize the political process and create the illusion of popular support for causes that simply don’t exist. There needs to be regulation.
Independent regulation obviously – need an NGO for that!
NGOs are part of the Blob, and an arm of the state. Without state funding they would not be able to exist. The Tories have been supporting their own executioners, as ever.
What else are the sons and daughters of PMC mediocrity going to do with their lives?
I’m not a gamer, but after recently witnessing the large population of antisemite extremists who are active within the Democrat Party, and who are also serving in Congress and within the White House (based on their viral antisemitic responses to the October 7 massacre of Israelis and the subsequent war), the heightened focus on acne-ridden-and-minimal-brain-cell teenagers playing video games and saying “dude!” while vegging out in their mom’s basement after school seems to be the logical next step in combatting this antisemitic extremist madness. </s>
We need to get a grip! Humans do not need the state to helicopter parent us! It doesn’t work in the small scale (families) and it will never work on a grand scale! If you want to support mental health, stop sucking the fun out of life. Most abuse during online gaming is not intended to hurt feels, its intended to aid in frustration venting!
Exposing, like this article does, the extent to which the progressive stack (left-elite ideological coordination of government, ngo, media, corporate and education sectors) is using modern warfare tactics to take over and control all social discourse, is an absolute must.
Oppression against gamers may not be the biggest issue of the day, but efforts to do so by the state back in 2014 were just the precursor to the madness we have been seeing in western society ever since.
Media and state attacks on video game playing nerds is just the canary in the coal mine, as it was when Gamergate was retroactively changed by historical revisionism from ‘teenagers complaining about poor ethics in video game journalism’ to ‘organised anti-women harassment campaign and literally terrorism’. Don’t say you were not warned.
Check out Sweet Baby Inc too. They’re a diversity consultancy group that threaten to give low ratings to game developers if they don’t insert enough woke learning points into their games. A player recently caught on to this and published an entire list of games that have been ruined by their wokeism. Many gamers are frustrated as their favorite games are now being used to edutain them. When Sweet Baby Inc found out what was happening they tried to rouse an online mob to close down that player’s account. These are very nasty people who operate like a protection racket.
They’re also trying to shut down the Youtubers who are covering this. And with the help of the gaming press, who of course have no ulterior motive as they lose their own customer base to amateurs with a webcam.
I am cheered by the thought that some governments are so fearful that they try to spy on spaces that they cannot see clearly.
I am fearful that some governments are hell bent on watching everybody for fear of wrongthink.
The Enlightenment, reason and Free Speech. You had a good run but now it seems you must go underground to survive. I wonder if Newspeak governments realise that they are creating the political resistance to their rule?
This exactly. These pathetic attempts at social control do nothing but expose the real fear lying at the heart of their ideology – the fear of being ignored and left behind.
Good. Let’s see more of it. I’m more than a little fed up with alleged supporters of Enlightenment values throwing up their hands and conceding defeat to the blue hair morons.
I can’t think this strain of Puritanism is rooted anything other than the feminization of the workforce brought about by the entry of and then its dominance by middle-class, college-educated women over the past 50 years. It’s too extensive and all-encompassing to be explained in terms of lesser factors.
Yes, the West is turning into a two-tiered society of female princesses and male servants.
Team Morlock!
AWFLs
Affluent, White, Female, liberals.
The Left refuses to grasp that free speech doesn’t just apply to them. The only question is is it a cognitive deficit or cynical, intentional manipulation?
The ADL, The SPLC, and the ACLU are lost, should be defunded and cast to the four winds.They have fulfilled Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy and now only exist to serve the power of their bureaucracy, it’s enablers, and puppet masters, ( not a dogwhistle- in the words of the esteemed Larry David “I’m a big Jew,, big Jew!” ) having long ago abandoned even the pretense of the foundational civic missions that they were created for. Disgraceful.