Orwell's Ministry of Truth
1984 and the current socio-political landscape.
“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”
George Orwell, “1984” — Part II, Chapter IX
In January of 2017, George Orwell's, “1984”, a book that's 70 years old, entered at no. 1 in the US bestseller's list.
In 2021 it topped Amazon's bestseller list as well.
I can take a guess as to why it keeps topping these lists, the similarities between what's happening today and the world presented in 1984 are absolutely staggering.
The political structure of 1984's, “Oceania” is simple:
The Inner Party, made up of the upper-class who make the rules and establish “truth”. Their truth having little to do with actual facts and more with Party agenda.
The Outer Party, composed of the members of society who are responsible for implementing the Party's policies, in other words, the state administrative jobs.
And, The Ministry of Truth, involved with news media, entertainment, the fine arts and educational books. In light of the Schellenberger report, I think it's fitting to focus on this particular Ministry.
The Ministry of Truth is an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete rising 300 meters into the air, on the outside wall are the three slogans of the Party: “WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”.
Our protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so that they match the constantly changing, Inner Party narrative.
This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs, mostly to remove "unpersons", people who are no longer accepted by the Party.
Sounds familiar.
On March 9th, Michael Schellenberger presented his testimony at the US House of Representatives in the ongoing hearing referred to as, “The Twitter Files”.
In it, he clearly identifies what many call, “The Censorship Industrial Complex”, a network of Academic Institutions, and Nongovernmental Organizations, funded by Western Intelligence Agencies.
These groups are tasked with the job of determining what is, ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’, and the newly coined, ‘malinformation’, and taking the necessary steps to remove it.
Schellenberger even names names, The Alliance for Securing Democracy, The Center for Combating Extremism, American Enterprise Institute, Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika, University of Washington Disinformation Lab, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, New Knowledge and, The Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.
And he says there are dozens more.
“It is important to understand how these groups function”, he testified, “They are not publicly engaging with their opponents in an open exchange of ideas. They aren’t asking for a national debate over the limits of the First Amendment. Rather, they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists”
According to his testimony, in 2020, an organization by the name of, The Election Integrity Project, or, EIP, claimed to have classified 21,897,364 individual posts comprising what they're now calling, “misinformation incidents”, within a 5 month period. That’s 21 million.
These incidents came from a larger set of 859 million tweets, which were spreading, to use a term also coined by them, “misinformation narratives.”
And just in time for the election.
“Their goal, clearly, is not protecting the truth but rather persuading the public. That is the purpose of open debate and the free exchange of ideas. Persuasion by covert means is censorship.” continued Schellenberger.
“These organizations and others are also running their own influence operations, often under the guise of ‘fact-checking.’ The intellectual leaders of the censorship complex have convinced journalists and social media executives that accurate information is disinformation, that valid hypotheses are conspiracy theories, and that greater self-censorship results in more accurate reporting. In many instances, censorship, such as labeling social media posts, is part of the influence operation aimed at discrediting factual information.”
The argument being made here is simple, no one has the rightful authority to decide truth from falsity or good intention from bad intention, that can only be determined through a free exchange of viewpoints and opposing ideas.
Which just so happens to be the very definition of Democracy.
Schellenberger reaches the conclusion which for many of us has become exceedingly obvious, “fact-checking” social media posts is simply, “…an ‘influence operation’ aimed at discrediting factual information.”
Today’s Landscape
First of all, let's make something abundantly clear, today's definitions of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are not the historical definitions of Left and Right; these are newly created tropes, dumbed-down stereotypes, used to further divide and discredit anyone who holds even the slightest semblance of any of these opinions.
We no longer even need to ask what these tropes are, we all know them by heart; we hear them every single day from every media outlet who announce them again and again; fascist, racist, climate-denier, anti-science; woke, snowflake, social justice warrior, pro-science.
We can't escape them.
And I am not a person who subscribes to either side of these new versions of the political parties.
In my recent forays into Parler and Mastodon however, something has become abundantly clear, the New Right platforms are the only ones that seem to be presenting actual information; undercover video evidence, declassified documents, leaks, whistle-blowers, exposes, senate hearings, court releases, anything you could imagine that tries to prove a point.
Whereas the New Left platforms reveal shockingly little aside from angry spouting of ideology; even worse, they're disqualifying factual evidence based simply on the fact that it's coming from a source they’ve pre-emptively discredited as falling into these unfavorable tropes.
I sometimes wonder if the right-wing platforms are the new Wikileaks, maybe that's what Assange has been doing while locked away in that embassy for so long, secretly trickling information to these newly created platforms.
At one time journalists agreed that they had a professional obligation to report on leaked documents whose contents were in the public interest.
In 2020, the Aspen Institute and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center urged journalists to stop covering leaked information. The reason? The prevention of the spread of “disinformation.”
Whistle-blowing is now considered, according to these organizations, the spreading of dis-information.
Which is simply astonishing.
The New Left however, is eager to oblige and as we’re about to see, in full support of Institutions and billion dollar Industries…
Last week, The New Statesman declared, “We have lost Russel Brand” stating that, “This once-sexy communist has become an American culture wars pundit”.
The reason for his cancellation was cited, as usual, as being his alignment with, “Far-Right Tropes.”
They identified these tropes as being…get this…a dislike of the mainstream media, a distrust of the pharmaceutical industry and the support of whistle-blowers.
Could it be that the mainstream media and the pharmaceutical industry had a hand in defining these tropes? The New Left would vehemently disagree.
But I suppose someone’s got to be convinced of the virtues of the Inner Party, otherwise the Outer Party would have no employees.
In his testimony, Schellenberger revealed that, “Every ‘repeat misinformation spreader’ account that EIP reported to social media companies for censorship through de-amplification, espoused right-populist views.”
The EIP was discrediting accurate information and debunking valid theories as, “conspiracy theories”, simply because the person presenting them was labelled as being on the New Right.
Now I’m not saying there aren’t reasons to discredit the New Right, because there are, but I wonder if even this is as straight-forward as we’ve been led to believe…
For example, in July, 2015 a years long study was conducted to determine the number of Flat Earth videos on youtube.
According to the study, “Flat Earth is a relatively recent phenomenon, only gaining ground in 2015, eventually peaking in early 2016, and falling off afterward, but remaining at a relatively high level to the end of our sample.”
What they found was that in August of 2016, hundreds of Flat Earth channels suddenly appeared, resulting in thousands of videos being uploaded virtually overnight.
We have to ask ourselves, what are the odds of hundreds of people all of a sudden, on their own volition, becoming simultaneously inspired to create flat earth videos, then uploading them at exactly the same time?
It’s highly improbable, and statistically absurd.
So the question becomes, who created and uploaded all of these videos? And why did they do it?
One possibility is that it makes it even easier to dismiss people who are suspicious of what we’re currently being told.
Unfortunately, people who question everything, are also susceptible to far out theories like these.
No different than Q-Anon, another extremely successful red herring.
The State of the Internet Today
According to Google, as of August 30, 2021, “there are over 25 billion webpages indexed on the world wide web.”
Try this...
Go to Google
Search for anything. (I searched for, "Cognitive Bias")
At the top of the page it will say, "About 181,000,000 results (0.60 seconds)"
Scroll to the bottom of the page, where it says, "Goooooogle" and click on the last page beneath it. (as of late the results are lazy loaded.. just keep scrolling instead)
Keep clicking on the last page.
Page 20 (approx.) will be the last page of results.
When you've reached the last page, scroll up to the top of the page again.
Now it says, “Page 20 of about 193 results (1.04 seconds)”
Where are the billions of websites they keep reporting on? You know, the ones that used to make up the very definition of the internet?
At the very least, where are the 181 million results they claimed to have found in 0.60 seconds?
A quick glance at the 20 pages, reveals the same massive corporations, online magazines and mainstream news outlets making up the results; no matter what the subject.
There is not however, a single organic webpage to be found among the bunch.
They’re gone.
While researching this article my search for, “the censorship industrial complex”, brought up the following notification:
So what are the implications of this statement? They have determined that the sources they have now are not “reliable” and therefore not to be “trusted”, and that I should come back in a few hours or days, when their “trusted” sources have had a chance to create some “reliable” content.
The question is, reliable and trusted according to who? All I was searching for, was the Shellenberger report, why don’t they want me to have it? And why would they be so concerned about a subject like, “The Censorship Industrial Complex”?
If we apply the same steps I outlined above, despite the announcement of, “6,100,000 results in 0.38 seconds”, all results on this subject ended on page 12.
Big surprise.
But as we all know, most of big tech is in on this.
In April of 2019, Facebook's VP of Integrity and their Head of News Feed Integrity announced a new framework called, “Remove, Reduce, Inform.” which laid out the steps they were taking to, “Manage Problematic Content.”
The policy is simple:
Remove means it comes down.
Reduce means limit its distribution (shadow-ban).
And Inform means label it with a "fact-check".
Schellenberger’s final recommendation to the committee was this, “First, Congress should immediately cut off funding to the censors and investigate their activities.
Second, it should mandate instant reporting of all conversations between social media executives, government employees, and contractors concerning content moderation.
Third, Congress should limit the broad permission given to social media platforms to censor, de-platform, and spread propaganda.”
My friends, we have arrived, welcome to The Ministry of Truth.
Winston Smith works in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing Inner Party narrative.
This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs, mostly to remove “unpersons”, people who are no longer accepted by the Party.
By all accounts, Winston Smith, is a modern-day “fact-checker”.
In today’s sociopolitical landscape, it’s become clear that for some reason, the New Right platforms have been tasked with presenting leaks, then maligned with tropes and off the wall fringe theories, which are used to discredit even factual evidence.
And the New Left platforms have become the definers of “truth”, the judges and the executioners. De-legitimizing information with cancel culture and character assassinations, even in the face of factual evidence.
These are interesting times indeed.
Keywords: disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, misinformation incidents, misinformation narratives, repeat misinformation spreader, problematic content, deamplify, news feed integrity. Wow.
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