consortiumnews | Since the Times is a member of the Google-funded First Draft Coalition
– along with other mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post and
the pro-NATO propaganda site Bellingcat – this idea of eliminating
information that counters what the group asserts is true may seem quite
appealing to the Times and the other insiders. After all, it might seem
cool to have some high-tech tool that silences your critics
automatically?
But you don’t need a huge amount of imagination to see how this
combination of mainstream groupthink and artificial intelligence could
create an Orwellian future in which only one side of a story gets told
and the other side simply disappears from view.
As much as the Times, the Post, Bellingcat and the others see
themselves as the fount of all wisdom, the reality is that they have all
made significant journalistic errors, sometimes contributing to
horrific international crises.
For instance, in 2002, the Times reported that Iraq’s purchase of
aluminum tubes revealed a secret nuclear weapons program (when the tubes
were really for artillery); the Post wrote as flat-fact that Saddam
Hussein was hiding stockpiles of WMD (which in reality didn’t exist);
Bellingcat misrepresented the range of a Syrian rocket that delivered
sarin on a neighborhood near Damascus in 2013 (creating the impression
that the Syrian government was at fault when the rocket apparently came
from rebel-controlled territory).
These false accounts – and many others from the mainstream media –
were countered in real time by experts who published contrary
information on the Internet. But if the First Draft Coalition and these
algorithms were in control, the information scrubbers might have purged
the dissident assessments as “fake news” or “misinformation.”
