Worth watching - Unherd investigation - Inside the 'disinformation' industry. Kathleen Stock specifically mentioned.

The should be made to list every item of 'disinformation' they believe Kathleen Stock has put on UnHerd and to provide factual corrections in each case. That will be enlightening.

I don't wholly agree with this Chris Williamson and Gurwinder Bhogal discussion (mostly because their grasp of history of media and comms is incorrect but that's also because they're younger than I am) but find it thought provoking about reporting, censorship, and media. One of the reasons that I disagree is that it's proved trivially easy to restrict Unherd, unseen until Unherd forced it into the light and there's no mechanism of appeal. Sayers' experience is a showcase for how the levers of indirect censorship are very powerful.

So censorship would have worked very well 100 years ago when there was a centralized authority which passed information down to everybody, whether it was via printed leaflets or television screens. Information was very central. It was very centralized. But that system no longer works because the reason it worked in the past was because since the authorities provided a single system of information. For instance, think about the TV. In the UK, the TV tended to only have four channels originally when I was very young. Those four channels all tended to have the same narrative. If you wanted to censor certain information, You could just basically pass a law because this was broadcast media, so they were beholden to government interventions. You could pass a law saying that the four channels are not allowed to talk about this. Therefore, now, none of that information is going to get beamed into people's homes.
[00:39:16]Now, nobody can ever know what that information was. But that centralized information structure no longer exists. All information in the West, at least, is decentralized. Or it's decentralisable in the sense that somebody can pick up on anything now and make it go viral. Now, censorship doesn't work. Now, what happens is people are well aware of what's being censored.…Streisand effect…All it takes is just one person to spill the beans, and then that's going go viral. Everybody's going to find out about it.
[00:40:31]…As soon as one organization tries to censor something, other individuals will immediately raise the alarm. As soon as that happens, everybody now wants to know what that thing was censored. They want to know why it was withheld from them. This is this thing called reactance, sometimes called the backfire effect, where when you withhold, when you say people can't have something, they become even more adamant that they want it. They want it even more. This leads to essentially a backfire. That's what it's called, the backfire effect. What happens is that people will then decide that, hang on a second, if this is being withheld from me, then it's going to obviously... I'm going a little bit, I'm veering off a little bit from the original thing. That's one aspect of it. But another aspect of this whole censorship thing is that when people realize that they can't say certain things, they instead will lie, and they're not going to change their beliefs.
[00:41:58]Like I said, the backfire effect means that people don't become... If you censor people, they're not going to become less likely to believe that thing. They're going to become more likely to believe that thing. The only thing that's going to change is that if they know that they're going to get banned for saying something, they'll just lie. But it's not going to change their thoughts. In fact, the opposite is happening. And so it's a counterproductive thing to do in the digital age. That's why censorship just doesn't work in the digital age. Because although you can control what people say online, you can't control what they think. In fact, what you do is you make people more adamant to think what they want to think.

https://www.happyscribe.com/public/modern-wisdom/742-gurwinder-bhogal-17-shocking-lessons-about-human-psychology

Just watched the video. The idea that we still live in a democracy is becoming more untenable by the minute.

How on earth can we get a grip on this?

Is that the irregular verb theory in action? (Open to suggestions.)

I am firm, you are stubborn, he/she is a pig-headed, rigid, anally retentive stick-in-the mud. (Blue Genes, Val McDermid)

I stand in the proud historic tradition of having patrons, personal subscriptions and non-directed funding from learned societies and funding award panels to support my production of works of art, profound thought, and civic participation in society.

You are a producer of work who is scraping by, constantly attempting to justify your existence and on an anti-hedonic treadmill of constant report writing and funding applications.

He/she is a grifter, abusing the limited resources of the vulnerable and gullible.

The more and more these virtuous moral arbiters try and rule over us the more fucking rageful and vengeful I get.

Who the fuck do they think they are?

In the words of Withnail and I, they can fuck off and shove it up their arse.

It struck me reading that bit by Matthew Good win above, that this may explain to some extent there seems to be an increasing gulf between men and women in terms of politics.

Increasingly women are dominating universities, and men are not attending. The statistics on this are clear, and I see it around me too, including with my own kids - two girls at university and a boy entering the trades.

If university education is where a lot of this indoctrination is happening, and where the social connections are coming from, if more girls are attending we will see more of them espousing this worldview.

And yet when people start their own stuff and try not to rely on advertising, they get called grifters.

The most dangerous thing in the world, a strong woman with an opinion!

Runs screaming to the hills...

Great video - this is so worrying. Why are we allowing companies like the GDI to determine what we watch/ listen to? They get to decide what 'disinformation' is - very telling also that the main reason Unherd got hand slapped is because of gender critical feminists.

We are of course the scariest people on earth and need to be shut up at all costs.

I wonder if there's any way to force them to reveal their judgements and the criteria upon which they based them? And to challenge them and have them remove a diktat?

It's chilling to think that, in the wake of Maya Forstater's and other recent cases, that governments are funding this sinister cabal.

genuinely great video - really worth watching

Yikes. worth watching, thanks.

Basically what happens when you have forced, centralised opinion.

A lesson never to read from just one news source.

I have been really worrying about my mum falling down conspiracy theory black holes since covid. She was always prone to believing rubbish but it went a bit mad. Watching stuff like this makes me wonder how much of her (and others') ramblings I have dismissed because it all sounded mad - this video sounds like one of her crazy conspiracies but is (as far as I can tell!!) frighteningly real.

Telling wheat from chaff due to decent critical thinking abilities is one thing, but if we can't see which wheat has been branded as chaff, we're fucked. Polarisation was already an issue in the world of echo chambers, but this spells out the dangers so clearly.

As soon as I first heard the term "disinformation" I got Orwellian vibes. It's well worth watching the 22 minute long video in the OP.

The values of openness, fluidity, kindness etc are very much associated with the feminisation of society - and as such reveal what some of the negatives of a feminised society look like.

And of course, the flip/shadow side of openness is censorship, of fluidity is intolerance and rigidity, and of kindness is harshness and meanness of spirit.

The irony is that the disinformation Index is supposedly in existence to counter capitalist interests, yet is funded in large part by very wealthy individuals and their family charities. Individuals who have become wealthy through capitalist avenues such as pharmaceuticals and hedge funds.

Who granted these people with such power?

One more reason that I'm concerned…in my role as a reviewer, so part of that epistemic class for health care/medical publications, I wonder how long it will be before I'm issued misinformation and disinformation guidance when reviewing papers for some journals.

Given the age range of the employees and the examples cited for 'adverserial narrative conflict', is anyone else getting vibes of The Crucible?

That is a really good question.

In this section of their website they refer specifically to " anti LGBTQ" content

"This special report includes examples of ad-funded stories promoting a range of harmful adversarial narratives. Please note these are summaries and examples are taken directly from the anti-LGBTQ+ content observed in this study. These stories, and the dehumanising language used within them, fall under GDI's criteria for adversarial narrative conflict. Some of the themes found in this study included:

• Educating children about gender identity is child abuse and/or sexual grooming.
• Books in schools that depict sexual content, pornography or pedophilia are somehow representative of LGBTQ+ persons.
• Gender nonconformity is against nature and similar to “satanic ritual abuse.”
• "Transgenderism" is a "concept" invented and imposed on children by the "Radical Left” intended to destroy the social fabric of society.
• Increasing numbers of young people who identify as transgender is proof that identifying as such is a social choice rather than a naturally occurring state.

https://www.disinformationindex.org/disinfo-ads/2022-08-02-why-is-anti-lgbtq-disinformation-being-funded-by-advertising/

Interesting to see some of the list of organisations funding this 'index'. They include: 'Open Society Foundation'; the 'Bohemian Foundation' ( A Stryker family charity), The EU, and the 'Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office'.

The organisation is predominantly composed of female employees,between the ages of 20 -29.

https://www.disinformationindex.org

It was Unherd where I read about Laura Towler. The creep of these things seems inevitable.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4578817-halifax?page=3&reply=118287696

"I’m going to read a statement out for you,” the manager said. “But I’m not going to be able to answer any of your questions after that.”

He read out:

“We have locked your bank account. We can’t give you any more information. We might be in touch in future with more information. But we don’t know when that might be.”

Could she have her money? No.

But how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business."

https://unherd.com/2020/10/how-corporations-can-delete-your-existence/

But... but... but... they're the Righteous Guys! They're only trying to save everyone's souls or something!