You probably couldn’t pay a lawsuit a bigger compliment than a bunch of activists and their umbrella organization involved in censorship complaining that it has had “a chilling effect” on their work.
But that’s what a recent panel, hosted by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), heard regarding Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri). The lawsuit is “infamous” in those circles for putting some brakes on the government pressuring tech companies to do its censorship bidding.
And, those gathered went into how they recruit what one report calls volunteer censors whose task is to monitor social media and flag content as “misinformation.” (When working to set the tone and steer the narrative on platforms, they call themselves, “trusted messengers.”)
The National Conference on Citizenship, however, is a congressionally chartered organization, and yet it is part of a network that is looking for “misinformation” in private messages.
Back during the highly contested 2020 US elections, online censorship was essentially government business, with its public “face” being the Election Integrity Partnership, that originated with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Having in the meantime received various levels of pushback from not only citizens but also lawmakers and even tech firms, “the censorship industry” is looking for ways to reinvent itself.
One of these ways is turning civil society groups and individual citizens into tools of censorship. They are recruited and trained for this purpose, writes the Foundation for Freedom Online, and reveals that NCoC’s Algorithmic Transparency Institute (ATI) has a name for it: “Civic Listening.”
Translated into non-Orwellian English, it means turning individuals into spies and censors of both public, and private speech, including on apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, that are supposed to protect users thanks to encryption.
Recently, the Annual Conference on Citizenship – NCoC’s flagship gathering – featured a panel titled, “Understanding the Conversation Around the 2024 Elections.”
From the panel we learned that as far as “Civic Listening” goes, Latino communities seem to be most at risk from the activities of “volunteer censors as well as ‘trusted messengers.'”
The significance of this regarding the US elections, given the demographic realities in a number of states is obvious, and a notable group doing this work is the National Association of Elected Latino Officials (NALEO).
