Big Tech, Censorship And The Switch To 'International/Global' Law

Big Tech Censorship Using UN Law

Daniel Greenfield

Big Tech has built its own matrix. And we’re all in it.

As O’Neil documented the resulting “matrix” is a dangerous and bizarre list which classifies Sinn Fein and the Scottish National Party, alongside NARAL and “Anti-Vaxxers” as partisans on the first level of DMET. It’s unclear what a top anti-abortion group, the ruling leftist party of Scotland, the political face for the IRA, and opponents of vaccination have in common, but out of such confusingly disparate material, Big Tech has built its censorship matrix.

At the second level, alongside Neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18, the Bundy Family (a family, not an organization) and the Animal Liberation Front, which actually is a terrorist organization, is Jihad Watch.

The respected counterterrorism blog by historian and researcher Robert Spencer and his associates (I have been among them) has been an invaluable resource for chronicling Islamic terrorism and colonialism and represents the opposite of violent extremism.

As Robert Spencer wrote on Jihad Watch, “This is pure libel. We have never advocated or approved of any violence or any illegal activity of any kind.”

The DMET is just a more sophisticated pseudoscientific database of the kind that the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose materials have contributed to it, has deployed over the years.

One such database listed my blog, Sultan Knish, as a hate group, alongside a brand of gun oil, and a bar sign in Pennsylvania. These databases may have a Kafkaesque absurdity, but the consequences to lives, livelihoods, and careers are all too real with my blog showing up on the Color of Change list pressuring Big Tech monopolies to cut off funding and access to my site, as well as Jihad Watch, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and many other conservative groups.

Big Tech companies have begun building their own databases in coordination with governments. And these secret databases determine who has access to the public square of the internet, who can earn a living, and who ends up being deplatformed and unpersoned.

“If we are ‘extremist,’ so is the U.S. Constitution, for we are trying to defend the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law,” Robert Spencer wrote. But DMET, GFICT, and other interfaces between governments and tech monopolies aren’t using the Constitution. They’re censoring based on United Nations law.

When Facebook’s Oversight Board issued its verdict on censoring President Trump, it did not list a single item of United States law, including the First Amendment, but cited the Rabat Plan of Action, and articles of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

GFICT’s DMET matrix cites the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court to declare that preventing “dehumanization” is an “imperative under international law”. Like Facebook’s decision to censor the former president, there’s no mention of the Constitution, but international law is repeatedly cited. 

Most disturbingly, a GFICT attempt to define terrorism collates a variety of definitions including attacks “against social cohesion” which the UN itself has noted is used to censor speech and political opponents as well as efforts to suppress Mohammed cartoons.

Tier 4 of the Content Taxonomy for what gets censored by Big Tech includes only one example targeting a group: “fear of Muslims is rational” thereby essentially banning most counterrorism, advocacy against unlimited immigration as well the Trump political campaign.

While Americans slept, Big Tech adopted UN standards to eliminate the Constitution.

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