Social Media and Social Control: how Silicon Valley serves the US State Department

Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the parameters of users’ thinking.

by Morgan Artyukhina

Part 16 - Assembling Google News Initiative

In 2015, Google launched its own media pruning organs, First Draft and the Google News Lab, in conjunction with Facebook, Twitter, the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the Omidyar-funded Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, another billionaire philanthropist known for founding the website Craigslist. The two projects’ goals will by now sound familiar: aiming to coordinate “efforts between newsrooms, fact-checking organizations, and academic institutions to combat mis- and disinformation.”

That same year, Google launched its Digital News Innovation Fund, which was later folded into the much larger Google News Initiative along with Google News Lab.

Through DNI, Google funneled €115 million to 447 European media outlets in every single European Union member state to “support high-quality journalism through technology and innovation.” However, with a majority of the funds going to media establishment staples like The Thomson Reuters Foundation and Telegraph Media Group, the move was widely interpreted as Google’s attempt to woo European media into a more friendly disposition.

That expanded to a much larger $300 million commitment in April 2018, when Google News Initiative was launched, and included a program to mass-train tens of thousands of fact-checkers to “monitor disinformation” in elections around the world.

This kind of talk is really code-speak for what in the minds of security state thought police has become the perennial bugbear of Western civilization: “Russian meddling.”

Source, links:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/social-media-control-how-silicon-valley-serves-us-state-department/263267/

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