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AI Researcher Quits; Says He’s “Pretty Terrified”

By Selwyn Duke

It’s easy to call warnings about artificial intelligence (AI) “sensationalism.” (So many things today are, after all.) In fact, when I told a “terrified” ex-AI researcher on X yesterday that I was writing a story about the alarm he sounded and had questions for him, another respondent — an author, it turns out — wrote of me, “Typical journo… If it bleeds, it leads.” Perhaps there’s no worse insult than “typical journo,” a status below used-car salesman and personal-injury lawyer and just above politician. (Maybe.) But I think my psyche will survive. Will we, however, survive the coming AI revolution?

The Fakery That is the War on Fake News

By Selwyn Duke

Is it true that one man’s misinformation is another man’s salvation?

Or is it actually true that what man censors is sometimes God’s sublimity?

Author and university lecturer Nolan Higdon may not be pondering anything so ethereal. What he is sure of is that, as he wrote Sunday at Salon, the “war on fake news has backfired.” As to his meaning, his subtitle tells the tale and the Truth. To wit:

“Content moderation was never about eradicating fake news.”

Biden Warns of Tech “Oligarchs” — Now That Tech ISN’T Censoring for Dems Anymore

By Selwyn Duke

As I had on many other occasions, in 2020 I warned of a “dystopia-delivering tech oligarchy.” I cited Dr. Robert Epstein, a liberal who’s the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and his studies on Big Tech influence. His findings were alarming, too. Big Tech, he warned, could shift 15 million votes toward a given presidential candidate at election time. That’s more than sufficient to swing a White House race, do note, especially given how close our elections now are.

Oddly enough, though, neither Joe Biden nor any other Democratic office holder complained about this tech “oligarchy” back then. Yet lo and behold, Biden has changed his tune. In fact, in his farewell speech Wednesday evening, he warned that a “tech” oligarchy was seizing control of America.

What explains this epiphany?

Well, an inveterate cynic might suppose he’s just upset that much of Big Tech has stopped censoring for Democrats.

X Marks the Plot: “Defenders of Democracy” Trying to Destroy the One True Social-media Democracy

(Image credit: Beatchoose/Wikimedia Commons)

By Selwyn Duke

We hear continual warnings from the Establishment and the Left (and the overlap there is profound) about “attacks on democracy.” Donald Trump, of course, is supposed to be a “threat to democracy.” Yet it all appears like projection. Why?

Because the self-proclaimed “defenders of democracy” are now aiming to destroy the only major extant social-media democracy: X (formerly Twitter).

Two recent stories epitomize this. The first involves an actual UK government plot to destroy X. The second revolves around a study blaming Elon Musk, X’s owner, for causing college professors’ departure from the platform. An article at The Independent on the matter actually calls it the “Twitter brain drain.” It’s yet another attack based on the supposition that it is freedom of speech that’s the social-media perversion. It’s inversion — of reality.

Cell Phones Have Been Called “Digital Heroin.” So, Should We Ban Them in School?

By Selwyn Duke

“There was a time, not that many years ago, really, when we would actually get into an argument because we didn’t want to answer the phone,” quite funny and mostly clean comedian James Gregory once said during an act. “It’d be like, ‘You get it; I got it last time!’”

Boy, the world sure has changed. Back then, Gregory continued, the phone was an interruption, taking time away from what you really wanted to do. Now it is what people want to do.

In fact, “screen addiction” is a real phenomenon, so much so that researchers have called electronic devices “digital heroin.” As a result, a movement to ban cell phones in schools is gaining momentum. There’s also been pushback, however. Many are reluctant to live life without that continual digital fix.

Study: Conservatives’ Lies Cause Their Higher Social-media Suspension Rates — So Keep Censoring

By Selwyn Duke

Conservatives, let not your heart be troubled. You are being censored more on social media than liberals are, a new study has discovered. But the researchers can help you solve the problem because, they say, they have identified it.

You.

The study has “found,” you see, that conservatives endure social-media suspension more only because they share more “misinformation.” The remedy?

Just echo mainstream media in your determinations and, “Voila!” — you can express opinions with complete freedom.

Oh, the researchers did “prove” their thesis, using “fact-checkers” such as Snopes.com. (Never mind that site co-founder David Mikkelson was suspended in 2021 for plagiarizing at least 54 articles. And never mind that Snopes has in the past had to confess that some of its fact-checks were false.)

The LEGAL Election Rigging That’s Stealing Our “Democracy”

By Selwyn Duke

There’s much talk today about “threats to our democracy.” Yet do you know that foreign entities such as China, Russia, and Iran are feeding mis- and dis-information to the American electorate in order to influence our political outcomes? When the USSR did this (without having social media as vehicles), it was called it “subversion” or, as the Soviets put it, “active measures.”

Add to this how a study found that mainstream media bias increases the Democratic presidential candidate’s vote share by eight to 10 points every election. Also add how another study found that Big Tech bias can shift up to 15 million votes toward a favored presidential candidate. It all raises a question.