The Highwire with Del Bigtree - BRAZIL BANS X, PUNISHES CITIZENS FOR FREE SPEECH

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Brazil is the latest casualty in the global attack on censorship with a recent ban on X and restrictions that forced Rumble out, all under the guise of “internet safety” laws. The move has sparked huge protests in Sao Paulo. Meanwhile, a frightening new tactic to censor social media users questioning vaccines is simply removing posts for violating policies for “self-harm, to themselves or others”.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We're going to move into now censorship, but at this point, any politician that's going to take office, or really that's in office, at any level of power, from municipal to the leader of the country, they need to address this head on. They need to be open about this and open about the plans for society moving forward because the implications cannot be understated. And this is, because things are happening in big swaths. Before it was happening in the shadows, literally called shadow banning, things like that. Now there's gigantic, things are moving so fast. Just recently, we had X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, was completely ghosted, is gone in Brazil now. So no longer can over 200 million people in Brazil access this platform. X blocked in Brazil after Supreme Court panel uphold suspension order. Why did they have that? Well, the court asked X to take their moderators

to take down accounts that they said violated political misinformation and hate speech. And they did not do that, obviously. So Supreme Court ruled that this is no longer available to people. In fact, they actually froze the assets of Elon Musk's satellite company Starlink in order to pay for any potential fines. Brazil did that. They're thinking about kicking them out of Brazil completely as far as pulling their license to ever broadcast there from a social media company. So that's, that's very serious. And a lot of people were, a lot of people are, I mean, this is platforms that we're always trying to reach new audiences here at the high wire. These are platforms that we use. People listening right now we're streaming on X. People in Brazil cannot listen to this.

They'll have to go to our website or another place that we're streaming. But there was protests. And you remember when your news agencies, the United States of America, used to use stories like this and opportunities like this to show what it looks like when you don't have free speech and how important it is to live in the United States of America? And thank God we have free speech here and that you're allowed to, you know, state your dissenting opinions, that's not happening. This story isn't being reported. It isn't, in fact, you're lucky if they're not celebrating the fact that Twitter's being

shut down to Venezuela here in the United States of America. I mean, these are all signs, folks. There are all sides that, you know, we are hanging in the balance. Right. And it was about less than 10 years ago that, you know, the idea of free speech and spreading the idea of open debate and free speech, became something that America was proud of to a threat to democracy. And now everybody seems to be on that.

We have to curtail speech in order to save democracy and save people. This is a ridiculous idea. And so in Brazil, there was a rally to protest the Supreme Court's decision. There was a political rally that turned into a free speech rally. Here's, I believe, Rebel News was there out of Canada. There's a, they flew a drone over this rally. Obviously thousands of people show up there. Well, how many citizens care about freedom in Brazil?

Amazing. It's just incredible. And so this conversation, though, is getting a lot of traction and not in a good way. Here in the United States, this is one of the headlines recently. We have former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. He was under the Clinton Foundation. I'm sorry, he was under Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary there. Ex-Laborate secretary, Robert Wright claims Elon Musk is out of control, says regulators should threaten arrest.

These are very strong words in a highly charged climate of censorship right now, because Remember, just two weeks ago, we reported the head of Telegram was arrested out of nowhere in France because basically the same reason that the Supreme Court canceled X in Brazil. It was because the owners are being blamed for what is happening on their platform. So someone post something, political misinformation, hate speech, whatever they want to categorize it at, you're to blame. Elon Musk is the blame. The CEO of Telegram is to blame.

and they're being legally held liable with jail time. So this isn't the only... It'd be like arresting a phone company, by the way, for a count like that two robbers spoke, and therefore you're an accomplice in a bank robbery because it happened and was discussed over a phone line, so let's arrest the head of the phone company. I mean, this type of overreach by governments is the end.

I mean, it is how you bring the whole thing crashing down where no one can move. No one's gonna allow you to speak. Everyone's paranoid, everyone's afraid, and you're arrested if you allow free speech to happen at all. Exactly. And YouTube's biggest competitor, Rumble, is out of Brazil as well.

This is the gateway pundit. Rumble is no longer available in Brazil, a direct attack on freedom of expression in yet another country. And you could see this coming as well. They were using certain people on Rumble as examples trying to get the platform shut down. When Russell Brand was a person of controversy

just last year, you had this headline, He's a content creator on Rumble. I'm an online expert. Russell Brand's refuge platform Rumble may be forced offline under new internet safety laws. What they're talking about, of course, in the UK is the online safety bill. And these are the regulators of UK media,

which is the watchdog off-com. And in this article, it's very telling. Look at these words. It says, the new law says internet firms must prevent children from seeing pornography as well as any material promoting eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, violent content, and material, material harmful to health, including misinformation about vaccines, will also be bad.

So right in the middle there, you have suicide, eating disorders, self-harm, violent material. Oh, yeah, and misinformation about vaccines. What? What are we talking about here? We didn't see this one coming, Jeffrey. The whole new issue we have to deal with now. Self-harm. And, you know, I always talk to people about this. And so do you, Dow. We have to look at the health and especially the vaccine space because it's so much, emanates from that when it comes to censorship, when it comes to informed consent, taking your rights away.

And so in 2018, we could see this coming in Pinterest. People had boards on Pinterest, literally titled, looking at vaccine truths and vaccine safety, and they were getting pop-up messages. Their boards were being shut down by Pinterest. Why? Well, because of self-harm. They were violating the policies of self-harm.

And we have a couple of screenshots of that, looking at these boards being, this are the messages people received and they were getting completely just gone. They just ghosted them because of self-harm. And it said, if you're struggling with self-harm of any type, please know there is help. So the person was being labeled. It wasn't they were harming society. It was, something might be wrong with you if you're posting this. And this is a classic trick. We saw this in the former Soviet Union where criticizing at that point political opposition or dissent was a psychiatric problem. And that's what we're seeing here. at this point. And we can see even in psychology today in 2020, as the pandemic was beginning,

we had this headline, why are anti-vaxxers willing to harm themselves and others? You're seeing this narrative created and it's being drawn out to now bigger misinformation conversations. And no one really reported that much back then. In 2019, you had PBS saying how Pinterest beat back vaccine misinformation. They were very happy about that. This is a great accomplishment for for public health, but this whole conversation really looks at, what we're talking about here is whatever label or name or whatever that the censors, the people wishing to censor debate and conversation speech can use, it's increasing. They're using a lot of bigger, just tub of words to accomplish these ends. And so in the United Nations, we had this press release recently on

the day of democracy, artificial intelligence must serve humanity equitably and safely. It says this year's democracy day focused on artificial intelligence as a tool for good governance. Now this is from the Secretary General, the head of the UN. It says left unchecked the dangers posed by artificial intelligence could have serious implications for democracy, peace, and stability. Why is that? Is it going to take our jobs? No, this. This can start with the proliferation of mis and disinformation, the spread of hate speech and the use of so-called deep fakes. So we've heard the two of those before, mis and disinformation. We've heard hate speech. that's been used to pass really crazy laws in Canada, in Ireland, and places like that.

But now we have a new word coming in deepfakes. This is the new word that looks like it's going to be used to try to censor more people and get government control over the flow of information on the internet. And okay, it's the UN Secretary General saying that a press release. All right, well, not too much of a talking point. But now we have another person, very familiar to a lot of people during the COVID response. We have Bill Gates coming out and saying something kind of unusual. just recently. Take a listen.

Every country is struggling to find that boundary. The U.S. is a tough one because, you know, we have the notion of the First Amendment. And so what are the exceptions, you know, like yelling, fire in a theater, you know. And because you're anonymous online, you know, it can be worse. I do think over time, you know, with things like deep fakes, most of the time you're online, You're going to want to be an environment where that people are truly identified, that is they're connected to a real world identity that you trust instead of just people saying whatever they want.

And so the idea of Providence, who sent me this email, was that really them? You know, we're going to have to have systems and behaviors that were more aware of, okay, who says that? Who created this? I mean, I guess you really don't have to watch the high wire. If you just want to stay informed, just track whatever Bill Gates is telling you. and get very, very afraid. I love the notion of the First Amendment. I guess he's referring to that very important document that our founding fathers created. Oh, I know, that's not it. It's that other one.

The notion of rights. The United States notion of rights written by our founding fathers, a couple of notions we thought could be important if you wanted to be free. So anytime Bill Gates is lecturing you about trust, you know you're listening to the wrong piece here. Let me just write down that notion on a piece of paper at some point and codify it into some. That'd be a good idea. I think it's a good idea. All right, so we have, so the whole idea, backing up just a little bit more, the whole idea of the internet, it wasn't created by Al Gore, as he likes to say.

This was a military creation. This was DARPA, actually created this. We have this headline here, DARPA helped create the internet. This is well known, Siri and drones. Here's what they're working on now. We have this headline, Lockheed Martin develops system to ideas. identify and counter online disinformation prototype by DARPA. So DARPA created the internet, the backbone of the internet,

and now they're being tapped to help create the kind of the censorship algorithms. It says right now in the US, Lockheed Martin, and remember, Lockheed Martin is the United States number one defense contractor, billions of dollars to make missiles, fighter jets, and now disinformation. It says Lockheed Martin is close to completing a prototype that will analyze media to detect and defeat disinformation. The development process is almost over and the prototype is used by the US Defense Department,

US Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency DARPA. And so that obviously seems to be fighting wars and stopping people from speaking online. Those are the two priorities of defense contractors now and the Defense Department of the United States military. This is getting pretty crazy. If you think this is just gonna stay in the military and be used against Russian influence or Chinese influence,

or Chinese influence trying to influence conversation in the U.S. Any politician that sees this algorithm that's working, you cannot help think that they're going to activate this online to use against your regular citizens. And we don't even have to go that far to talk about the military. The artificial intelligence, these language learning models that are being used to develop, you know, when you go to Google and you search a question in there,

you automatically now have AI come up to answer your first. first question. It's on a website. It's an AI generated language learning model answer. And researchers just sent some research on these models, all of them, and just talking about what kind of bias they have. And it says here, AI chat butts have a political bias that could unknowingly influence society. So we're really talking about social engineering here. So looking at the censorship in the, through the lens of social engineering, artificial intelligence, through a lens of social engineering, it gives a whole different view. And what this computer scientist did is they took the 25 leading chatbots out there,

and they gave them 11 political questions that would basically determine someone's bias, left-leaning, right-leaning, libertarian, whatever, and they fed it into these chatbots. And this is the image from the article or from the study that came out. You can see here that every one of them came to a left-leaning bias, which is a problem. And what they further found, with this research, you further found is it didn't take much fine-tuning to steer these language models towards a specific political spectrum. Didn't take much data to input into the system to do this. So there was kind of like an overwatch position where someone could or a group could just lean this a little bit one way or the other. And the implications on society are really, we're so new in this model at this point.

They aren't really known, but it's not good to have any type of leaning, right leaning, left leaning. AIs are supposed to be this neutral kind of basis, but it's not what we're finding here. And this is new research, and this is a space of research that a lot of other people are looking into right now. I mean, it's really, it's really disturbing. I want a free country. All sides need to be at the table. Our founding fathers clearly made a decision to let everyone vote. I keep coming back to this, you know.

they were looking at uneducated people and farm workers and people are just trying to survive, ask themselves the question, should only those of us that own land votes, since obviously we're going to be of higher intelligence, better educations. And really after contemplating it very thoroughly, they said, now everybody should have the right to vote. Every voice should be heard. Every voice needs to be a part of our system. And we'll find our way somewhere in the middle is the truth.

When you no longer have multiple sides, there is no middle, and it all starts only, you're only hearing one story over and over again. You can only find one story, one perspective. You absolutely now are imprisoned. Your mind is imprisoned. Your voice is imprisoned. And it's really time to wake up. I think there's a lot going on here.