Internet Needs More Diverse Censors, Says Democratic Think Tank

Racism, being as all-American as rotten apple pie, has gotten a huge fertilizing boost thanks to modern technology. The Internet has spawned acres upon acres of toxic cyber-orchards which are poisoning millions upon millions of social media users all over this precious Land of the Free. 

With homegrown neo-Nazis to the right of us and Kremlin bots to the right-left of us, how in the world can #Resistance Inc's Democratic Party intelligentsia and their security state cohort combat the rise of online hate?

The Center for American Progress (CAP) has the very facile answer: Facebook and Google and Twitter should hire more Black and Brown people and women to work as censors and algorithm technologists!

Ask not whether the Corporate State censorship of online speech is a violation of our First Amendment rights. Ask instead whether or not Silicon Valley Nation is making the evisceration of the First Amendment diverse and inclusive enough.

 Google and Facebook and Twitter have already hired thousands of "former" government police and spy agency personnel to monitor our Internet speech, ostensibly to weed out the alt-right, but in the process is also shutting down numerous leftist websites and activist groups, such as Occupy London:

  Matt Taibbi‏Verified account @mtaibbi

Occupy London, which claims 151,000 followers, appears to have been taken down by Facebook. A spokesperson for the group confirms it. Awaiting comment from the company.

 According to the CAP position paper posted online last week, this suppression is not a problem. The problem is that there are too many white people doing the censoring and not enough Blacks and Latinos and women shutting down Facebook pages and Google accounts. As a result, the algorithms favoring white supremacy are still reigning supreme on the Internet.

From the CAP report, co-authored by Aastha Uprety and Danielle Solomon:

According to data from 2016, the technology workforce in Silicon Valley was only 2.2 percent black and 4.7 percent Hispanic. This persistent lack of inclusion is a problem that costs companies billions, reduces product quality, and limits the development of innovative solutions to combat online hate and prevent algorithmic bias. To address this issue, the industry must devote significant resources toward recruiting candidates with diverse backgrounds and building safe and inclusive workplace environments. One effective method of recruiting and hiring more diverse candidates is to target multicultural professional associations at colleges and universities. Another option is the diverse-slate hiring approach, which short lists more than one candidate from underrepresented minority groups and can increase the likelihood of hiring a minority. Diverse hiring should be a priority at all levels of employment, from engineers to executives. Recently, Facebook committed to increasing the diversity of its board members, and Google has pledged to focus their efforts on hiring black and Hispanic women.

Big Brother is so sexist. So bring on a glorious Big Sister Rainbow Coalition to shut down the dissent!  Otherwise, as the authors warn, failure to monitor technology will undo "decades of racial progress and further entrench inequality."

CAP, which is the premier think tank of the Democratic Party, blames white racist bros and of course Russia for the entrenchment of inequality. It does not blame the real culprit, which is the unfettered financialization of the economy and the placement of the most wealth in the fewest oligarchic pockets since the last gilded age, paralleled by a new record CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 312 to one. Bosses now earn in a day what most people earn in a year.

  But it wouldn't be a corporate Democratic Party position paper if it didn't pin the election of Donald Trump directly and solely upon white racists, who harbored such an intense hatred for the first Black president. To hear CAP revise it, the whole country is being overtaken by hordes of torch-wielding Neo-Nazis, necessitating even more censorship, instead of, say, a living wage and good benefits.

 No matter that the overwrought forecasts of bloodshed and trouble at last weekend's D.C. rally marking the first anniversary of the Charlottesville rally fizzled right out, and the alt-right bros ending up literally fleeing the scene, as C.J. Hopkins so trenchantly reports. CAP is clinging to its censorship cure of a narrative. Of course, they're not calling it censorship, because this is still ostensibly a democracy. It weasel-words the suppression of thought with the phrase "best practices to address this threat." It euphemizes spying on social media sites with the words "identifying patterns of behavior" online.

 With its generous corporate funding at stake, CAP wants you to be afraid, very afraid, especially of people and things you cannot see:

 The attacks in Charlottesville were a wake-up call revealing the digital world’s potential for incubating violent ideologies and inspiring domestic terrorists. In reality, hate groups have long relied on online technology to advance their agendas; the digital world provides channels through which hate groups can operate anonymously and communicate without detection. Their ability to reach narrow audiences across a large geography allows these groups to raise money, spread racist propaganda, and lure and indoctrinate new followers. Halting the spread of violent white nationalism online will require nonprofits and private sector companies in the media and technology industries to devote substantial resources toward research and the development of best practices to address this threat. This research should seek to fully identify and understand patterns of behavior; platforms for communication and indoctrination; and mechanisms for exchanging money and weapons.

CAP forgot the mention the nearly one trillion dollars which the bipartisan Congress just allocated to Hatemonger-in-Chief Donald J. Trump for the purchase of more weapons, more technology, more bellicose psy-ops propaganda for the indoctrination of US citizens and the instillation of abject terror in oppressed peoples throughout the world.

But due to both domestic racism emanating from a relative handful of disaffected anonymous white dudes and the "dissent-sowing" of a handful of Russian bots and trolls, CAP is calling for a total clampdown. If speech has to be suppressed, if certain innocent media outlets and individuals get caught up in the censorship dragnet, it's for our own protection. 

By advocating for more minorities and women to operate the dragnet, CAP makes censorship seem so liberal, with identity politics being the "lure" it so paradoxically purports to critique. To further spread the gloss of diversity over First Amendment violations, the paper also urges tech companies to be "mindful" about retention, to pay their female and minority censors at the same rate as their white male censors.

The moralizing is, of course, ultimately about suppression of working class dissent by an increasingly fearful oligarchy. The ruling class is seizing upon two scapegoats -- white nationalism and Russia -- to try and deflect our attention from the real agenda, which is total control by the few over the many.

Their crusade against "hate speech" is a red herring, given that hatred is the traditional glue that holds corporate American politics together.

Henry Adams, whose "Education of Henry Adams" has been rated the best nonfiction book of all time by the Modern Library, knew this more than a century ago when he acerbically wrote: "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

Hate speech on the Internet is most assuredly ugly, but censorship by a smarmy self-appointed group of money-controlled experts is far, far uglier.