Taxpayer Funded Research Seeks to Devise New Stealth Censorship Technology

If you’re tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A study, funded by US taxpayers and published in the Nature Human Behavior journal, is exploring “innovative” – specifically, less easily detectable ways to censor people online. As reported by Just The News, the research, conducted by University of Washington (its Center for an Informed Public (CIP), which is a recipient of state-funded grants), is now being slammed as a proposition to introduce “stealth” modes of censorship (that the study itself, naturally, refers to as “misinformation.”) And it would seem that the study itself managed to fly under the radar for quite a while, considering that it was published last year. The upper limit of the amount of unwanted information that would be eliminated from social platforms should this proposed combination of fact-checking, “nudges” and reduced reach be implemented is a whopping 63 percent, the university’s researchers promise. And what would distinguish it from the usual ways users are silenced online is that it would not require traceable tweaking of algorithms, reports analyzing the paper suggest. In order to strip the internet of so much content/information – and, opponents say, in the process completely silence media outlets critical of the current government – efficient “virality circuit breakers” would have to be introduced, the study suggests. Namely, as the paper’s title (“Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation”) indicates, the researchers were looking for methods to more efficiently stop “misinformation” (designated as such…Taxpayer Funded Research Seeks to Devise New Stealth Censorship Technology