The Highwire with Del Bigtree - SOCIAL CREDIT SCORES BEGIN IN THE WESTERN WORLD

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

With China already implementing a social credit score system before COVID, western countries are following in their footsteps within the private sector. #BBCVerify #NewsGuard #SocialCreditScoreBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Let's be clear about something. COVID killed the media, the legacy media. COVID killed the legacy media. They're done. Now, clearly they've been dying a slow death. They've been losing viewership for a long time before COVID, but that accelerated it. So, you know, why? During COVID, the legacy media got everything wrong.

Masks didn't work. The vaccine didn't stop transmission. Lockdown destroyed the economy. And they pushed for all of those things simultaneously. They didn't change their view, even when the science showed that their view should change it was the alternative community it was citizen journalists that were really taking that and champion those those points forward so now we're at an inflection point we're at a point now where journalists media organizations that so let's just say got it wrong they can say we got

it wrong we're going to try to do better we're sorry or they can double down so the people that got it wrong are starting to sound like this this is marianne cloick and she was at a national citizens inquiry in ottawa and this is this was just a couple days ago this is what she had to say. She's a veteran CBC journalist. You know, I know that as a public broadcaster, you expect us to be telling you the truth, and we'd stop doing that. And there was another number of stories that I had put forward that were blocked, but it seemed to me, as a journalist who'd been there 34 years, it's like the rules had changed overnight, and it changed so quickly that it left me just dizzy and disbelief.

I was blocked and prevented from doing stories that I had pitched that I'd put forward. They never saw the light of day. They never made it to air or print. And some of those stories were protests against vaccine mandates, people's safety concerns about the vaccines, and also the many problems with that reporting adverse reactions in Canada. You know, I would say this. If a journalist or reporter you trust isn't saying that to you in public, you should never trust them again.

If they are not coming clean and say, you know, either I was trying to tell these stories it wasn't allowed to or I did, you know, end up telling false stories and now I realize I was wrong. This is what every journalist should be telling us around the world. If they're not, their networks should be destroyed, burned and thrown in the dustbin where they belong. And it's all up in the air right now and where are we going to land. So not only is the CBC having some issues with this, obviously. She left. Marianne left and hats off to her. She's standing in integrity and a truth.

BBC had the same problem with this. The BBC in the UK, this is one of the headlines there, how the BBC lost its way on COVID. And the byline says, I've seen from the inside how the corporation has failed in its reporting on the pandemic. This was from someone that worked on the inside. He wrote under a pseudonym, false name. And he was saying how they just dropped the ball during that. And what was the cost? I mean, we saw people protesting the CDC during the pandemic because of their lives,

but they had legit job cuts. They lost revenue. And so this is what happened after that. BBC News and BBC World News presenters among 70 staff facing SAC. There was a lot more when you read in the article that left. So now the BBC- We watch the same thing as CNN. We've watched this, you know, clearing Don Lemon, and, you know, all these different, you know,

spokespeople losing their jobs. I mean, it's been a disaster for mainstream media. Absolutely. in the failed launch of CNN Plus. So now we go back to the BBC. Let's focus on them for a second. So they got it wrong in a spectacular way. They got it so wrong they lost so many viewers

that they had to cut their staff. So now they're back. And are they apologizing like Marianne? Well, you be the judge. Take a look. All right. Welcome to BBC Verify. Like you said, we are a team of investigative journalists

here at the BBC. We are also a new brand and we are a physical location above the newsroom in London. And the point of the team, as you said, is to verify video, to fact check, to counter this information, and to analyze really complex stories so we can get to the truth of what's going on. I'm going to give you a bit of a flavour of the kind of work that the team are doing. So we're able to look at maps to geolocate

specific situation, stuff that's going on. This is just a map of central London, where we are now, and this is New Broadcasting House, where I'm speaking to you from. And it's not so important, perhaps, for the centre of London, but it is when we're analysing war zones or what's happening, happening in hard to reach places. And there's a story on the BBC website today. It's looking at Russian fortifications on the front lines in Ukraine. And you can read more about it there. And there are other ways that we also are able to interrogate what's going on,

including on social media. I have some undercover accounts that I've set up for the BBC's AmeriCast podcast. And we use these kinds of undercover accounts. These are the characters that the accounts belong to, to be able to really understand polarization online and how, what's happening on our social media feeds and what we're being recommended and push to us can affect all of us. And they don't offer us a totally exhaustive insight into what's going on, but they can help us understand just how social media works. And then

there's also investigating other mistrudes and the real world harm they can cause. At the moment, I'm investigating the UK's conspiracy theory movement. I'm trying to understand more about how it's evolved and intensified since the pandemic here in the UK. I'm looking at the alternative media that finds itself at the heart of this movement and a conspiracy theory newspaper that's a part of that as well. I mean, so they're doubling down. What they think the world wants is just even more fact-checking. I mean, it's incredible. We're going to go after all of those social media sites that got it right all the way through COVID. And we even have this ability to zoom in on your house or probably, you know, where you're writing your blog

from. I mean, it's really scary stuff. I mean, incredible that they, think this is how they're going to save themselves is literally by intensifying the horrible reporting they've done so far. It's funny they're saying this. There's a new brand. And they're looking at the alternative media like it's the spaceship that she's landed. They're like poking it with a stick. Like we've got to find out more information about this. Why all our viewers left to go to this alternative media? And you know, notice she said at the beginning, we're here. We're a big team. We're going to analyze complex stories. Yeah, you're journalists. That's what you do. It's nothing new. And what is that? Google Maps you're using. I don't know. That's great. It's a top.

touchscreen that's fancy and you're going to create fake accounts on social media to get to the truth. That's an oxymoron right there. I mean, no better way to find the truth than to lie about it. Right. And you're giving us these, you know, fake titles like disinformation expert. Is that a college course? What is that? Where are you coming from?

So we go to BBC and the actual website has an article to celebrate this new brand, explaining the how the launch of BBC Verify. It says, in all, BBC Verify compromises about six. 60 journalists. Remember, they lost 70, so they just rehired 60 to do fact checking, who will form a highly specialized operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open source intelligence capabilities at their fingertips. Dell, open source intelligence is basically just looking at what information is out there in the world and creating that to get to the truth. People have been doing that on social media, citizen journalists, regular people. Parents of children with autism had to do open source intelligence medical research because the doctors cast them, aside this is nothing new and BBC is stepping out on this plank saying we're

reinventing what fact checking but the fact checking business is getting pretty crowded these days everyone's jumping in there so if you see people talk about fact checking you're noticing that this they're trying to rebrand because they got it wrong they're losing viewership so this is their new brand and you see this chart here from all sides.com even fact checking has a little bias here so they have to give you a chart to tell you where your fact checker leans is it too far left on the CNN side or is it too far right on the town hall side but sure enough right down the middle the people you can really trust our friends at the Pointer Institute there there's the BBC

right there's there's their new BBC verify I'm sure we can trust them according to this so right that's that's where we're at the news business a major shift is going on right now and you know really when you look at this let's just be honest it's it's about the loss of narrative control it's about the loss of the gatekeeping ability that they have and they're choosing to look at this from a fearful way We can't have disinformation go out there and harm people, but what about the flip side of that? How beautiful is that for everyone to do their own research? Empowerment at the individual level builds resilience. And I would argue that these people are bound by their jobs, by the very jobs that they hold because they have to stay in the narrative.

I'd rather get the truth from people that are not bound by anything that are free to go where the truth goes. So now we have this other piece coming in, this social credit score. So we have fact checkers telling us and trying to cataly. What is truth and what is not? What is narrative? What is not? What you can say and what you can't? But then we have the social credit score. So in the U.S., slowly building from the bottom up, and this is a couple of headlines here. We've covered these in the past, these topics. ESG scores similar to China's social credit system designed to transform society. Think Tank Director says another one, report. America has a social credit system, much like China's, but it was built by Silicon Valley and not by the government. So a fact checker company that's been all over us is NewsGuard.

And this is one of the things that they wrote about us, the high wire and what they're calling the anti-vaccination, misinformation, whatever. It said despite NewsGuard's prior warnings and reports to the WHO, Facebook and Instagram have allowed known anti-vaccine misinformation super spreaders to flourish on their platforms. That's great. Just go with some dehumanizing language. And it says in here, accounts include high-profile purveyors of misinformation. associated with NewsGuard's red-rated websites. So they're really starting to cast people aside. They're putting them in categories such as Children's Health Defense,

175,000 Facebook followers and 272,000 Instagram followers. And it's founder, Robert R. Kennedy Jr., who, despite having been removed from Instagram, for spreading anti-vaccination misinformation, enjoys more than 330,000 followers on Facebook. Also featured are the Inform Consent Action Network. I can pages with more than 50,000 Facebook followers, 48,100 followers on Instagram,

and up to 66 followers, 6,600 followers in February of 2021. ICANN has been identified as spreading health care misinformation and four of NewsGuard's reports to the WHO. I mean, and folks, just so you know, this is part of what, you know, we have to deal with in this work that we do. As you know, we have the High Wire Protocol. And if you aren't, you know, accessing that, all you have to do is give us your email.

It's right there in the middle of the page to scroll down to sign up and put your email in there so that you subscribe, and we will give you all the data of all the information that we are discussing on the shows that you can read it yourself. The studies we're talking about are there. It's full transparency. NewsGuard reaches out and gives us these long lists of questions

they want answers to. Where are our sources? We always give them all of our sources, and then they print, as you can see, it doesn't matter what we say. Here's how it works. We will give them all of our sources, and they will say, well, Tony Fauci said,

blah, blah, blah, Therefore, what you're saying is misinformation. I was like, no, we gave you studies by a real scientist, peer reviewed. So what you have is a difference of opinion. Now you could say there's a difference opinion on this subject, but to say it's debunked because Tony Fauci said so. And these reports are going to the WHO. I think the point to make is these unscience-based networks like, you know, BBC or NewsGuard, are reporting people like us to the WHO.

and now we're looking at the WHO wants power of the world. They want to be able to dictate the next pandemic, move the United States of America out of the way. And so what we look at is this may just be words on paper right now, but where is it leading, right? Where is this all leading? Right now, I don't care. And by the way, they reached out to us this last week,

and we finally basically responded and said, you know what? You never end up printing what we say. You still stick to your bias, and you were wrong when we got dinged and reported the WHO when we said, that there was a possibility that this was a lab leak. We're right. They're now wrong.

We said that the social distancing wasn't going to work. We're right. All the science shows, they're wrong. They nailed us when we said that the vaccine would not stop transmission. We're right. They were wrong. Newsguard, you're a bunch of morons. And what's scary is these morons have the level of power that they're reaching out to these bigger and bigger agencies and what happens if our government starts listening to these fools.

God forbid. Absolutely. And it's about deeming who is untrust. and we're seeing it from the bottom up here in the United States. But what does it look like when it comes from the top down? And that's what's happening in China with their social credit score. Take a look at this. A good score brings benefits, but people with low scores lose rights.

The cinema names and shames people consider untrustworthy, blustering their details, even their addresses, across big screens. It's a matter of principle. Those people have to be condemned. Those people aren't honest, so they have to pay the price. It's only right to pay your debts. You have to blacklist those that don't. The Supreme Court has created a blacklist for so-called bad citizens.

Those whose ratings have dropped to zero. On it are companies, but also 23 million people to date. Among them is this journalist Liu Hu. He got a little too close to uncovering corruption among high-profile party members. After being sued for defamation by the subject of a story he'd written, he was blacklisted. He only realized when he tried to buy a train ticket and was told he was banned from traveling.

That tells me I'm still on the blacklist. Punished because he's been branded untrustworthy by the state. Once you're blacklisted, you can no longer get a bank loan, start a business, buy an apartment, or even send your children to a private school. Youhoo is among a tiny minority of people who have dared to criticize the system, which some are calling a digital dictatorship. I worry because I think many people like me will be deprived of individual freedoms, and all of us will live with restrictions of one kind or another.

After our meeting, Yu Hu learned that his name had been removed from the blacklist. but he still has a long way to go if he doesn't want to languish at the bottom of the social credit hierarchy. I mean, as I sat here, and we watched this video when we were preparing for this, but what actually just hit me is we really aren't far from that. If you look at my Wikipedia page, I might as well be on a poster on the side of the highway because every time you look up my name, I have a Wikipedia page that's locked. No one's allowed to change it, and it says a bunch of negative stuff that I spread misinformation, all these things, even though everything that we've done here, we've backed in science, we look, you know,

just this side of immaculate on our reporting over COVID, and every network got it wrong. But these are these shaming sites now where they are the first things that pop up when anyone searches your name. And we're just right around the corner from billboards being out there. There's headlines all over that you'll see by major newspapers that are all a part of this, like the BBC. I mean, it's a hit squad for government. really, or the funded narrative, as we should say. Yeah, and it's very important to continue to drive these points home, the disinformation, industrial complex, or censorship industrial complex.

These things are all converging right now to really curate one narrative, and that's the dominant narrative, which is, as we see in COVID, is often wrong, and they don't ever correct the record very often.