This story was originally published by the WND News Center
(WND News Center) — The United States government, back in the day, fought “misinformation” being spread by ISIS by creating military-grade artificial intelligence that quickly identified and censored the ideologies the radicals were disseminating.
Now the feds’ plan is to adapt that tech so that Americans who dissent from the politically correct lines on vaccine safety and election integrity can also be censored.
That’s according to a new report from Just the News which cited grant documents and cyber experts.
The report said the National Science Foundation already has handed out millions of dollars to “universities and private firms” to build tools “eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
At that time, it was running the Social Media in Strategic Communication program, and those tools helped “identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information.”
They were used during the Arab Spring uprisings when the turbulence in the Middle East spawned ISIS. The report said back then that the idea was to track and minimize the impact of “dissidents” who wanted to overthrow U.S.-friendly regimes.
DARPA’s objectives included to detect and classify the spread of ideas or memes and “deceptive messaging,” and to identify “persuasion campaign structures” and those running such programs and counter their messages.
Similar schemes now are being used against Americans’ speech, Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online told Just the News.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of the Convergence Accelerator Track F domestic censorship projects is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad,” he explained in a report.
He told Just the News, “DARPA’s been funding an AI network using the science of social media mapping dating back to at least 2011–2012, during the Arab Spring abroad and during the Occupy Wall Street movement here at home. They then bolstered it during the time of ISIS to identify homegrown ISIS threats in 2014–2015.
The new version, he said, targets “those wary of potential adverse effects from the COVID-19 vaccine and those skeptical of recent U.S. election results.” He warned it’s actually treating “domestic populism” as if it was a “foreign national security threat.”
Benz said while the Trump administration created something called the Convergence Accelerator to address “quantum technology,” Democrats under President Joe Biden “basically took this infrastructure for multidisciplinary science work to converge on a common science problem and took the problem of what people say on social media as being on the level of, say, quantum technology.”
The alarming part is, he said, the belief that “if trust in the government or trust in the media cannot be earned, it must be installed.”
Benz said censorship became the norm during COVID, and the 2022 election.
“What’s happened now is the government says, ‘Okay, we’ve established this normative foothold in it being okay to [censor political speech], now we’re going to supercharge you guys with all sorts of DARPA military grade censorship, weaponry, so that you can now take what you’ve achieved in the censorship space and scale it to the level of a U.S. counterinsurgency operation,’” he said.
Reprinted with permission from the WND News Center.