The Rise of Gab

The role of the Silicon Valley tech companies in manipulating public opinion during the Corona lockdowns has thrown a harsh light straight back on their own conduct. The creation of at scale emotional contagion and high levels of compliance in populations, all at the behest of governments and their intelligence agencies, will as sure as night follows day become one of the next scandals to envelop the unfolding catastrophe of Covid-19.  

Only six weeks ago eminently learned academics and well qualified doctors who were querying the wisdom of lockdowns and the financial chaos they create found themselves censored or deleted.

Fast forward through this panic in time and the lockdowns are now routinely being called a reckless and dangerous social experiment, “the biggest mistake in history”. How did quarantining the healthy and crashing national economies ever make any sense as public health policy?

Tens of millions of people around the world now find themselves without work and entire societies face another Great Depression.

Silicon Valley, once seen as the centre of progressive politics, attracting the smartest of the smart, played a significant role in creating compliant populations and is now a target for critics around the world. 

It’s an ill-wind, as the old saying goes, and one of those to benefit from the blatant attempts to control and manipulate the public narrative has been free speech social media platform Gab.

The site claims that more than 1000 people an hour have been joining it since Twitter made the decision to fact-check two of Donald Trump’s tweets.

The intervention infuriated Trump.

As a result Trump issued an Executive Order requiring the Federal Communications Commission to review the protections provided to online platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Section 230 has allowed companies like Facebook and Twitter — and Gab — to avoid legal liability for the material their users post.

The Executive Order declared: “It is the policy of the United States that the scope of that immunity should be clarified: the immunity should not extend beyond its text and purpose to provide protection for those who purport to provide users a forum for free and open speech, but in reality use their power over a vital means of communication to engage in deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints.

“Free speech is the bedrock of American democracy.  Our Founding Fathers protected this sacred right with the First Amendment to the Constitution.  The freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people.

“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet.  This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic.  When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.  They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.

“The growth of online platforms in recent years raises important questions about applying the ideals of the First Amendment to modern communications technology.  Today, many Americans follow the news, stay in touch with friends and family, and share their views on current events through social media and other online platforms.  As a result, these platforms function in many ways as a 21st century equivalent of the public square.

“Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see.

“As President, I have made clear my commitment to free and open debate on the internet. Such debate is just as important online as it is in our universities, our town halls, and our homes.  It is essential to sustaining our democracy.

“Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse.  Tens of thousands of Americans have reported, among other troubling behaviors, online platforms “flagging” content as inappropriate, even though it does not violate any stated terms of service; making unannounced and unexplained changes to company policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints; and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse.”

Gab has been making the most of the Twitter contratempt by rolling out the red carpet for the president, with an account that has already amassed over 37,000 followers.

The account has the same handle and profile picture as Trump’s Twitter account and is mirroring his Twitter posts without interference.

In an email sent to its members on Wednesday night, Gab said that it was “a historic day” for the social network and that it had “reached out to the Trump campaign to let them know that we have an account for the President.”

Gab has been criticised as a “fringe” platform, a far-right social network filled with conspiracy theories, racism and antisemitism.

Founder Andrew Torba is the former CEO of an advertising technology company called Kuhcoon. He was just 25 when he launched Gab back in 2017, saying as a conservative he felt out of place in Silicon Valley and became increasingly concerned about online censorship and political bias.

“Every major communication outlet, every major social network, is run, owned, controlled and operated by progressive leaders, progressive workers in Silicon Valley,” he said.

The site came to national prominence in 2018 when the suspect in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh posted an anti-Muslim screed on Gab hours before shooting and killing 11 people.

While Gab was taken offline in the aftermath of the shooting, it came back online soon after and has since thrived.

Here is message to Gab users Andrew Tobin wrote this week:

Gab is a free speech software company. We build open source software with the primary purpose of conserving and exporting the uniquely American value of free speech to the world online. 

Our most popular product is Gab.com, our social media platform with millions of users from around the world. On Gab the rules are simple: if it’s legal speech, it’s allowed. Illegal content and activity is not allowed.

Gab also follows American privacy law in regards to protecting user data. We believe that privacy is a human right and that the dignity of a sovereign individual should be respected.

We don’t just say these things, we actively defend these values everyday. For example we regularly protect the privacy of international Gab users by turning down speech-related data requests.

On a regular basis foreign governments attempt to censor or no-platform individuals on Gab for “offensive” or “hateful” speech that is 100% protected by the first amendment and our user guidelines. We reject these requests and in doing so are exporting American freedoms to people all over the world on the internet.

We are also proud of our relationship with US law enforcement and the balance of due process, privacy, and free speech to keep criminal activity out of our community.

For over three years now the mainstream media and establishment players in the Silicon Valley cabal have smeared Gab because they do not share our values.

For holding the values described above, Gab has faced unique challenges on our journey. We have been no-platformed from dozens of service providers including both app stores, hosting providers, domain registrars, payment processors, and even banks. We’ve overcome these challenges by building our own infrastructure and by leveraging censorship-resistant technology like bitcoin.

The rise in the censorship of American citizens by American corporations and the subversion of democracy by those same US corporations is harrowing to me as a Christian American. Silicon Valley companies do not share my Christian values and indeed have a consistent history of silencing Christians online.

Free speech is at the forefront of the 2020 election. In just the past year we saw Democratic Presidential candidates and mainstream media personalities calling for Twitter to ban President Trump’s account.

Twitter then quickly announced that they will be removing the ability to like, reply, or repost President Trump’s tweets that are “abusive” according to their standards.

This isn’t “democracy” and it certainly isn’t “normal.”

Big Tech’s unchecked power to dictate who can speak, who can make money, and who can exist online is only part of the bigger picture.

Big Tech is curating and editorializing the legal political speech of American citizens and limiting the reach and engagement of the President of the United States.

Big Tech is socially engineering the American electorate.

Studies have shown that biased Google search results can swing and influence elections. Facebook has admitted to conducting psychological experiments on users. Facebook is building a literal mind reading device. Google was working with China to build a censored search engine. Pinterest censored pro-life and Christian content from their site.

Silicon Valley’s bravado has also inspired the Chinese government to project their values of censorship, communism, and control on millions of Americans online.

Many of the top mobile game and mobile apps are owned and controlled by the Chinese. Apps like Tiktok have already censored content that criticizes the Chinese government, but not just in China. They are doing it to Americans too.

These two versions of the internet are different sides of the same tyrannical coin. This corporate or foreign state-controlled internet isn’t the internet I want my daughter to grow up with. This isn’t the internet the people of the world deserve.

On Gab users are not the product, they are the customer. Gab monetizes by selling an optional service called GabPro. For the cost of a cup of coffee every month, GabPro users can get verified and unlock additional features.

We also offer a free speech browser that automatically blocks all Big Tech ads and trackers. The browser includes a universal comment section across the entire internet. Users can comment on any URL and also see what others are commenting.

What we all need to realize is that together we vastly outnumber Silicon Valley. They only control us only as long as you and I continue to let them do it. I refuse to allow it any longer.

Written and compiled by John Stapleton, editor of A Sense of Place Magazine. A collection of his journalism can be found here.

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Defective Modelling Throws Lockdowns into the Dustbin of Credibility, As Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 1 June, 2020.

 Defective Modelling Throws Lockdowns into the Dustbin of Credibility

By Professor Ramesh Thakur

On 26 May, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said if Australia’s mortality rate matched the UK’s, we’d have had 14,000 Covid-19 deaths. This is just tautological rubbish. It would be just as true and equally pointless to say if Australia’s mortality rate matched Vietnam’s, we’d have zero deaths.

The Australian modelling, done by the Doherty Institute, proved to be as defective as the ICL and Swedish modelling. Although it was delivered to cabinet as case numbers began to rise in Australia and informed their decision to close borders and impose Stage 3 lockdown measures on 20 and 30 March respectively, the modelling was not released to the public until 7 April. Earlier, speaking in Canberra on 16 March, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said up to 150,000 Australians could die from the coronavirus under a worst case scenario of 15mn infected cases with 60% of the population being infected, and up to 50,000 dead out of 5mn infected with 20% of the population being infected. ‘The death rate is around 1 per cent. You can do the maths’. ‘This is a horrendous scenario’, Brendan Murphy said. ‘A daily demand for new intensive care beds of 35,000-plus’. The figures were based on a combination of Chinese and international data since the beginning of the pandemic’s spread in December. ‘It proves the theory of flattening the curve’, PM Scott Morison said.

They might want to redo their maths. The modelling shows that under an unmitigated worst case scenario, 89% of the Australian population could have been infected. In that scenario only 15% of those who needed intensive care would have been admitted.

All these assumptions, derived from the core assumption of the reproduction rate ‘R’ being 2.53% based on the initial Wuhan data, have proven to be speculative, unreliable and inflated. As it turned out Australia’s ‘R’ was below 1% already by the time that strict control measures were put in place in late March.

The highest tally of daily cases was 528 on 29 March; of ICU beds occupied was 96 on 6 April; and of Covid-19 patients in hospital was 448 on 6 April (Table 1). Stage 3 lockdown measures were imposed on 30 March. One week later the daily new cases had fallen below 100 and has stayed there, with the sole exception of 9 April when it was exactly 100. In interpreting the figure, it bears repeating that the virus has a 5-7 day incubation period.

Table 2 is a screenshot of the table from Appendix A of the modelling published by the Government on 7 April. It may be the only objective check we have on assessing the accuracy of the modelling.

Under the model’s best case Scenario 4, with tight quarantine, isolation and social distancing measures in force that reduce the rate of transmission by a third, 2.9mn people would be infected, 200,000 would require hospitalisation and nearly 5,000 people would need to be in intensive care (Figure 2) during peak demand.

With infections just over 7,000 and ICU peak occupancy at 96, the predicted numbers are off by 400-fold and 50-fold respectively.

If their best case scenario is this defective, there’s little reason to believe the other, including worst case, estimates of the modelling. Thus there’s no accurate measure of how many lives were saved by this level of intrusive state control.

Taking advantage of the recommended lockdowns, a surprising number of political leaders seem to have relished the opportunity to indulge their inner despots, and some police officers took advantage early on to indulge their inner bully.

Queensland’s Chief Health Officer banned RAAF flyovers for ANZAC Day by four pilots despite admitting they would have been no risk to themselves or anyone else but would set a dangerous precedent, while permitting up to 80 to congregate for an Aboriginal Elder’s funeral. Her logic on school closures is similarly idiosyncratic. She accepts the evidence that schools are not a high risk environment for the spread of the virus but closing them helps to convince people how grave the situation is:

‘So sometimes it’s more than just the science and the health, it’s about the messaging’.

Almost all journalists seem to have lost their cynicism towards claims by the authorities and instead become addicted to pandemic panic porn.

The measures taken have been extreme, more even than has been done during a war and more than was attempted during earlier, deadlier flu epidemics. The authorities have told us who and how many are permitted into our homes, where we can and cannot go, how many people we can meet, where we can shop and for what, which services we can access and which not, even which medical and dental services we can still access. Who is going to call the Governments and the medical experts to account for the overreach?

A critical and sceptical profession would have put the government’s and modellers’ claims under the blowtorch and subjected them to withering criticism for the magnitude of errors by which their predictions have been off. Instead they have mostly joined the adoring multitudes in showering praise on the magnificence of the emperor’s new robe. Or, to change the metaphor, it is as if the Wicked Wizard of Wuhan (WWW) has cast an evil spell over the whole world and turned it into an enchanted forest with humans confined to limited spaces and the other creatures roaming freely, no longer terrorised by homo sapiens.

Looking to the future

Australia’s 50^th biggest cause of annual deaths (110) is poisoning. At present, that is, Covid-19 does not make it to the top 50 causes of deaths. And for that we have inflicted such damage on people’s lives, livelihoods, education, freedoms, condemning them to house arrests en masse and robbing so many young of their future? If ever there was justification for a Royal Commission, this is it.

The point of the inquiry should not be to apportion blame for past mistakes. Rather, its primary term of reference should be to identify how we can prepare better for the next big one. In retrospect, we could have used the good fortune of the virus arriving in Australia in the latter part of summer, instead of in the middle of the flu season as in the northern hemisphere, to boost surge capacity at every bottleneck point to test, isolate, trace and treat cases.

One way or another, we will come out of this pandemic. But we can also be absolutely certain that it will not be the last pandemic to hit us. There will be others and next time we may not be fortunate in the timing (off flu season) or the geographical epicentre (North Atlantic). Also, the choice of Commissioners should reflect modern Australian demographics and the already evident reality that the best lessons to be learnt for successful responses are from Asia–Pacific countries. It’s both perplexing and irritating that, reflecting the composition of political and bureaucratic elites, Australia continues to look to Western countries to establish benchmarks.

Subject to change as the virus evolves, some things I would like to see begin with putting hard lockdown into the dustbin of history. And state border closures too, for that matter. Related to this, the government should provide the best available information and guidelines for individual and social health practices, but transfer the burden of risk back to individuals for assessing the dangers to themselves and the appropriate preventive measures to take and practices to adopt. A smarter approach is a more targeted approach, especially for an epidemic that is so strikingly age and gender stratified and in many jurisdictions has hit care facilities particularly badly.

We need surveillance mechanisms to identify and quarantine outbreak clusters backed by reliable contact-tracing methods. A team of scientists from Edinburgh and London has suggested a segmenting-and-shielding strategy that segments the elderly and frail while shielding their carers with adequate personal protective equipment. It is adapted from the ‘cocooning’ of infants by immunisation of close family members that is a pillar of infection prevention and control strategies.

The one thing in common that all the successful Asia-Pacific examples – Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore – have is they learnt from the earlier avian flu and SARS examples. They made preparations in advance and their institutions and procedures were activated with exemplary swiftness and efficiency. We certainly require prepositioned and pre-approved equipment and procedures for screening passenger traffic at air and sea ports on short notice, stocks of protective, preventive and therapeutic equipment and supplies, a surge capacity to break through the bottlenecks when we need to scale up, and the right balance between national manufacturing capacity and diversified global supply lines.

How can we best begin organising for the next health epidemic by way of institutions? The National Cabinet has been a good innovation. But we also need the equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Like the latter, I’d be in favour of a Trans-Tasman centre (TTCDC).

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This story was originally published in one of Australia’s leading social policy journals Pearls & Irritations and is reproduced here with their kind permission.

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Savage Blows to Australia’s Regional Media, As Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 1 June, 2020.

 

Savage Blows to Australia’s Regional Media

David Mariuz/AAP

Kristy Hess, Deakin University

With swift and savage force, the COVID-19 pandemic has inadvertently attacked Australia’s local news media ecology, which was already battling a weakened immune system.

As a researcher working on Australia’s largest academic study into the future of local newspapers, the phones have been running hot in recent weeks. We’ve had calls from everyday people, journalists made redundant, cadets surviving on JobKeeper, and independent news proprietors, all navigating their way through the crisis.

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Read more: Local newspapers are an ‘essential service’. They deserve a government rescue package, too

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News Corp has announced plans to close or suspend printing operations of more than 100 suburban and small community titles. Its more successful publications, such as the Geelong Advertiser, Gold Coast Bulletin, Hobart Mercury and the iconic Northern Territory News, will remain with print and digital editions.

Other independently-owned newspapers across rural and regional Australia are still breathing: they are gasping for air, but they are breathing. They’ve either temporarily suspended operations, cut back the number of print editions or shifted to a digital-only model to “see how it goes”.

Since the COVID-19 crisis emerged, there have been two key funding schemes introduced (or re-introduced) to support news providers – the government’s $50 million Public Interest News Gathering Program and a $5 million Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund.

The federal government has also announced plans to force Google and Facebook to share advertising revenue with producers of quality journalism in Australia. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is now seeking views on its new draft mandatory code that will address bargaining power imbalances between Australia’s news media businesses, and Google and Facebook.

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Read more: Trust in quality news outlets strong during coronavirus pandemic

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This has been met with some initial concern from the Country Press Association of Australia amid fears the modelling may only benefit big companies and not the little players that serve small towns and cities.

The Victorian government has waded in to provide more than $4 million in additional advertising support for local and regional print publications. Our preliminary research indicates Victoria leads the way with this type of support for local news. Other states, such as South Australia and New South Wales, lag behind or have announced changes to legislation that provides government authorities freedom to advertise on their own sites or via social media.

The problem is, social media sites like Facebook don’t put the interests of local communities first, whereas local news outlets do (or at least they should). Facebook has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the types of local content posted on its platform. In the local news ecology, it tends to feed from traditional local news providers or the goodwill of citizens who moderate and upload content of local importance and reap the advertising rewards. One off, $10,000 grants from social media juggernauts to local news entrepreneurs won’t fix this systemic problem.

In some local areas, business owners are offering donations or advertising support to preserve the journal of record during COVID-19. JobKeeper is keeping many cadet journalists on the payroll, and there are some keen reporters doing their bit to report on the news, even if they are not getting paid.

There’s also stories of new start-ups emerging – like Matt Dunn in Victoria’s South Gippsland region. He was made redundant by the local newspaper, which is planning to close its doors permanently. He immediately set to work developing his own digital news platform, “The Paper”.

Dunn is confident elderly residents who have little experience with technology will come on board because they will be hungry for good quality local meaningful news. It’s about the content, not the platform.

However, digital-only publications are problematic in areas of rural and regional Australia that struggle with broadband connectivity. It’s even more worrisome for those areas with ageing populations, where reading the local paper is a daily or weekly ritual to maintain a sense of connection to their community.

I’ve spoken with several elderly residents in recent weeks who are distressed about the decline of Australian Community Media’s local content and the reduction of the print edition. Without the newspaper and technological capabilities, they feel “lost”. And importantly, they can’t read the death notices, so have no idea who has died.

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Read more: Without local papers, regional voices would struggle to be heard

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Perhaps that is the key for policymakers, researchers and industry in a post COVID-19 world. Big news conglomerates around the world have been accused of building a plethora of zombie newspapers that are local in name only – full of syndicated content, without really being attuned to the needs and wants of a community or helping people to develop shared social connection and purpose to place.

My hunch is zombie papers will be the first to fall.

Audiences aren’t stupid. It’s the newspapers and community individuals determined to provide news that are the heart of their communities and should survive into the future. Policymakers, researchers and industry need to be acutely aware of the types of news outlets and individuals that best provide – or are willing to provide – real, credible and meaningful local news and information for their communities in areas of Australia big and small.

They are the ones that should be at the front of the queue for any type of media vaccine.

Kristy Hess, Associate Professor (Communication), Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Additional Commentary:

Crikey: Dark day for journalism as Murdoch’s global empire sells democracy down the river

From Peter Fray and Eric Beecher: Today’s News Corp cuts represent an enormous threat to Australian democracy ⁠— and a grim reminder of the power of a single family.

Australian news journalism has never seen a day as black as today — and not just because News Corp has closed 12 of its 17 regional daily newspapers, leaving Australia with just 20 remaining.

Today also demonstrates the grotesque power of
one company — and one family — to decimate a large slice of a country’s
news in a single media release. 

A company worth $16.3 billion, run from New York, has wielded a knife through large swathes of Australian democracy.

Christopher Warren: Despite News Corp’s intentions to use digital news and state-based tabloids to balance regional closures, the initiative won’t survive the disruption of news media.

Today’s News Corp conflagration of the venerable regional mastheads from northern NSW and Queensland marks the tipping point where printed newspapers will now endure as a nostalgic luxury good for those few communities that can afford them.

Among the 100-plus titles slated for shutting are almost half of all Australia’s regional newspapers — 12 dailies out of its 17, leaving no daily papers along the more than 2000km-long regional strip between Newcastle and Townsville. Only the Gold Coast Bulletin and Courier-Mail in the heavily-populated south-east corner of Queensland will be in between.

Many suburban newspapers suspending print early in the COVID-19 crisis. Now most of them are, unsurprisingly, confirmed as shutting.

MEAA

MEAA, the union for Australia’s journalists, says the closure of mastheads and the job losses announced by News Corp Australia this morning represent a huge loss for communities in regional and suburban Australia.

MEAA chief executive Paul Murphy said: “We are still waiting for clarity from the company on how many editorial staff will be affected by these changes across the News Corp network. We are determined to see proper consultation and fair treatment for any affected staff.

“The closure of so many mastheads represents an immense blow to local communities and, coming off the back of hundreds of previous regional closures during this period, it underlines the seriousness of the crisis facing regional and local journalism,” Murphy said.

MEAA will be requiring News Corp to engage in full consultation over these major changes to the workplace.

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In the Theatre of the Absurd which is now Australian politics, in mid-April the Commonwealth announced a $50 million package allegedly to support public interest journalism across TV, newspapers and radio in regional and remote Australia.

The announcement came a day after Australian Community Media said it would suspend publishing at its non-daily publications until at least June due to the pandemic’s impact of the pandemic on advertising revenue.

Australian Community Media is made up of more than 170 leading rural and regional newspapers and community-based websites. It’s bolstered by the representation of over 100 independent titles. Combined they serve millions of people in every state and territory across Australia.

ACM journalists were told via teleconference that mastheads such as the Avon Valley Advocate, Bunbury Mail, Collie Mail and Esperance Express would be among the papers to be mothballed.

Fast forward six weeks and one really has to ask: What happened to the $50 million??? Did it end up in the pockets of their great friend and enabler, Rupert Murdoch???

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