Americans woke up to a new reality last month when US President Joe Biden's administration revealed that it was "flagging" social-media posts it wanted Facebook to censor. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the motive for this unprecedented move was to combat "misinformation" about COVID-19. But after a year in which Silicon Valley oligarchs worked with mainstream media allies to silence legitimate news stories, such as the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop that put their preferred presidential candidate in an unflattering light, the notion that the government is pushing the owners of the world's information superhighway to engage in more censorship is hardly surprising.
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It turns out that Biden and his Silicon Valley allies aren't the only ones trying to play "Big Brother" in the name of suppressing those they claim are bad actors. The Anti-Defamation League is using its standing as an authority on hate to try to shut down speech they deem to be unworthy of protection. The group, which has transitioned from being the apolitical defender of the Jewish community to a partisan outfit allied to the "progressive" movement, is working with some of the same Big Tech oligarchs to engage in an even more sophisticated form of censorship.
The ADL has just been tapped by PayPal to lay out criteria that will allow that giant payment system to prevent any group it labels "extremist" from making use of its services. In an earlier era, when it was a trusted watchdog that stuck to its task of monitoring and speaking out against antisemitism, such a move might have inspired confidence in the company's decisions. However, the ADL's actions in recent years under the leadership of Obama administration veteran Jonathan Greenblatt have made clear it cannot be trusted with this kind of power. Even worse, by acting as a willing accomplice to what seems to be the latest episode in an ongoing corporate assault on free expression it is, ironically, becoming one of the chief enablers of those undermining the democratic values it claims to be defending.
Flying beneath the radar was an effort by ADL in association with Google and a British tech company called Moonshot CVE to "redirect" users from sites that promote what they consider to be "violent extremism" via pop-up ads to those that would supposedly expose and debunk the haters. Like Big Tech's successful efforts to protect Biden during the 2020 US presidential campaign, this effort led not just to abuse and questions about its methods but also questions as to the real motive of the project.
The ADL began promoting internet censorship in 2019, ostensibly to stop Holocaust denial on social media. This helped create a slippery slope that by January 2021 resulted in a sitting president of the United States having his social media accounts shut down just for saying things Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey didn't like. Of course, the Jan. 6 US Capitol riot served as the pretext for the move.
In February, the ADL published a study that documented what it did during a period that stretched from September to December 2020 in which it flagged more than 34,000 internet searches for what it labeled as hate speech.
That might sound like a good idea if you can convince yourself that there are no dangers involved in trying to micromanage what people are allowed to read on the internet. There are issues with this program that ought to be sounding alarm bells, but due to a lack of scrutiny from the media, few know anything about them.
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It turns out that the diversions sponsored by the ADL and executed by Moonshot were not necessarily sending these supposed seekers of hate speech to websites where they would be taught to be nice. In fact, in one documented instance, the would-be high-tech do-gooders sent users to the website of someone called "Beau of the Fifth Column," who posed as a Southern gun owner with progressive views and a large following on YouTube. A closer look at the real person behind the persona, a man by the name of Justin King, revealed him to a left-wing anarchist with a criminal record involving human trafficking. He also regularly promotes antisemitism on his site. It was only by chance that independent researchers already familiar with his activities stumbled across the fact that he was being helped by a program promoted by the ADL.
Google executives were quizzed about this at a congressional hearing but offered no explanation. The same is true of Moonshot and the ADL, the latter of which has refused to comment about it to this day. The same corporate media outlets that are cheering on the administration and Big Tech's censorship efforts have shown no interest in discovering other such "mistakes." Those with knowledge of how their program worked say there is no way of knowing for sure how many other such blunders the project made given its sponsors' partisan blindness to left-wing hate.
Part of the problem is a lack of transparency. No one involved in this program is willing to talk about the details of the algorithm used to produce such a disastrous result or when or how they plan to use it again. What we do know from what the ADL revealed when it trumpeted its involvement in the "redirect" effort is that it is focused on right-wing hate.
Since Greenblatt replaced Abe Foxman as head of the ADL, the organization has repeatedly demonstrated that it is now just another Democratic Party auxiliary. That's a shame since, unlike most national Jewish groups, it still has a job that needs to be done in terms of monitoring antisemitism. By intervening in partisan fights like the US Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, slandering former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as an "Islamophobe," engaging in relentless, dubious efforts to link former US President Donald Trump to right-wing antisemites, and being constantly willing to wink at false analogies between his administration and the Nazis — the ADL surrendered its non-partisan status.
That is the context for understanding how the ADL/Moonshot effort to root out "right-wing violence" worked. It ignored the fact that hate, not to mention antisemitism, is also emanating from the Left. That's the only explanation for why they signed off on criteria for determining whether someone was searching for a hate site that included typing in the words, "the truth about Black Lives Matter." Anyone who was curious about the movement or who wanted to know more about its opposition to the State of Israel and Zionism, or the way critical race theory has granted a permission slip to Jew-hatred, was automatically labeled a hater by the ADL and its partners.
That's more than ironic following the wave of violence directed at American Jews in the wake of Israel's conflict with Hamas terrorists in May, and the way the BLM movement and its most prominent congressional supporters sought to demonize Israel and its supporters.
Yet it is the same ADL that has just been asked by PayPal to set criteria that will allow the global online payment service to shut down financial networks that, according to the group, "support extremism and hate" or endanger "at-risk communities." Again, the ADL isn't saying how it plans to decide who fits that bill. Its record, however, leaves little doubt that the group is being empowered by PayPal to put any group that dissents from its support for BLM or other left-wing causes out of business by pinning the extremist label on them.
That prospect raises more questions about the future of free speech than answers about how to deal with extremism.
You don't have to be a Trump supporter or have the slightest sympathy for actual extremists, whether on the Right or the Left, to understand what this means. The ADL's partnerships with Big Tech should be fueling worries of a growing threat of a liberal corporate tyranny regime that will — in the name of safeguarding democracy, "anti-racism," and opposition to extremism — not merely chip away at free discourse in the public square but shut it down altogether. In what may be the ultimate expression of gaslighting, those, like the ADL, who pose as the defenders of democracy may be a far more serious threat to our freedoms than the marginal groups they claim to be targeting.
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
