When Too Much Creates No Choice at Law

The worldwide web was supposed to open minds to new experiences, learning, exploration and discovering new truths. It was a marvel, able to access books, expertise, data and hordes of information, taking people to knowledge sources in democratic freedom. As you watch Facebook shares plummet by almost 20% because of that company’s utter failure to control its role in the dissemination of “fake news” (not the Trumpian-labeled kind… but that which truly false and misleading, which often emanates from Trump himself), bots customizing fake news to cater to the gullible searching for confirmation of inane conspiracies, and Twitter that foments mass followings of mendacity – the modern versions of the golden calf (Bible: Exodus 32:4), a fake religious vector demanded by the masses – something has gone terribly wrong.

Russians have mastered using the Web to decimate our democratic basics and filter disinformation (based on data-scraping personal information on millions of Americans) to influence our election process. Polarized Americans now routinely refuse to consume any content that contracts their calcified view of what they believe is supposed to be. Fox News is a very strong example of a once-independent news services that has morphed into the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, a problem only exacerbated by the President’s castigating the rest of the free press and the “enemy of the American people.” Fox New followers treat its “report only what the government wants people to hear” as their news gospel, despite a tsunami of false and biased reporting.

Too much information has resulted in Americans’ reducing and narrowing their focus. Instead of using the Web to generate information to help them make better decisions, so many Americans have simply pushed anything that contradicts their expectations out the window, never to be seen, read or understood. In short, we are dumbing down based solely on bias and opinion.

But the ability to track and filter out “objectionable material” is now being aided by software originally created to allow parents to protect their children from porn and predators. The July 28^th FastCompany.com provides this real-world example: “Netsweeper, a company in Ontario, Canada, has touted its internet filtering software as a way for institutions like schools and hospitals to block pornographic, exploitative, or illicit websites, or help governments collect taxes on e-commerce sales. It says that its artificial intelligence software can filter the web in real time while receiving requests for ‘approximately 22 million new URLs each and every day’ from over 500 million end users.

“Increasingly, many of those users are living in countries where authoritarian and otherwise troubled political regimes are using Netsweeper and similar tools to block a range of ‘controversial’ content, including political campaigns, media websites, and even search terms like ‘LGBTQ,’ ‘gay,’ and ‘lesbian.’

“An April report by researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto identified 10 countries where the company’s tools ‘appear to be filtering content for national-level, consumer-facing ISPs’ [Internet Service Providers] amid acute human rights or security concerns: Afghanistan, Bahrain, India, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, UAE, and Yemen. Except for India and Pakistan, all of the countries are ranked ‘authoritarian’ by the Economist Democracy Index.

“‘It does appear that Netsweeper has no aversion to selling to clients in authoritarian regime contexts, within which there is a growing appetite to censor the internet,’ says Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, the internet watchdog group behind the report, ‘Planet Netsweeper.’

“Filtering the web like this ‘appears inconsistent with core corporate responsibilities to respect human rights such as freedom of opinion and expression and non-discrimination,’ the researchers wrote…

“Netsweeper is far from the only company that sells internet-filtering technology to governments. As with systems sold by companies like Blue Coat Systems, SmartFilter, and Sandvine—which also has its headquarters in Ontario—Netsweeper’s products are marketed at a wide range of clients, like libraries, schools, hospitals, and businesses, meant to keep users ‘safe’ from malware and objectionable content, like pornography or violent imagery. In recent years the firm has also marketed its filtering technology as a way to help governments collect taxes on cross-border e-commerce sales. ‘Netsweeper is here to enforce the internet laws of your country,’ the firm said in a 2016 promotional video… But the same tools are also used by governments and ISPs to monitor and filter political, social, and LGBTQ content across whole countries.”

Individuals will soon be able to guarantee that they don’t even get any information from any source that contradicts their world-view. They can censor their family, and a U.S. government with authoritarian leanings can apply some of their filters against MSM (mainstream media) that they so violently oppose. The Western notion of democracy is struggling to survive, but the very technology intended to enable maximum free expression is producing very much the opposite result.

I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly what are the values, the very form of government, that we are passing down to the next generation of Americans?