WEF Linked Organization Pushes for Online Censorship of “Harmful” Content
Jose Nino
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Teleperformance, a digital service that was founded in France, has recently put forward recommendations for platforms looking to censor several types of online creators.
Teleperformance is one of the World Economic Forum’s partners in the Global Coalition for Digital Safety. The GCDS was created to deal with “harmful content and conduct online”
These creators targeted would be ones who are flagged for allegedly causing harm. The recommendations call for platforms to change their censorship policies more frequently, in addition to tracking and seeking to demonetize the “demonized” creators.
Teleperformance also desires more collaboration at the “multi-stakeholder” level.
Teleperformance’s proposal operates in a threefold manner as Didi Rankovic of Reclaim the Net noted below:
First, this WEF collaborator addresses content policies, and how effectively they are enforced. Here, while reasonably happy about how platforms are combining machine learning and human ‘moderation’ to produce the onslaught of censorship we’ve seen over the past years, the idea is to focus on the “pre-crime:” be more pro-active, and in this case, it means identifying and reducing “harmful content” – before it is reported.
‘Platforms must be nimble and modify/augment their policies frequently given the velocity of changes we have seen in the field in such a short timespan,’ Teleperformance advises.
Rankovic also highlighted Teleperformance’s suggestions for who to censor online:
‘Next, there’s the issue the corporation sees as “signals and enablers beyond content.’
This is where we come to the need to demonetize the creators who are marked as producing “harmful content” to discourage them from participating on platforms. And, Teleperformance believes, they should be targeted whether they are making money directly or via ads.
‘When it comes to payment mechanisms, while the use of credit cards to purchase illegal content have been hampered based on efforts by financial institutions, bad actors have found other payment mechanisms to use, including cryptocurrency,’ continues the article.
Rankovic caps off the piece by highlighting where the next round of censorship must be directed to:
“And it’s clear where those behind it think the ‘censorship gun’ should be pointed next.
‘Initiatives that aim to tackle these harms at an industry-level will becoming increasingly important given that bad actors move across platforms to propagate harm,’ according to Teleperformance.”
There is clearly a public private partnership being formed to attack free speech online. Nationalists must be prepared to face off against an unconventional form of nefarious actors i.e. private corporations.
Now, more than ever, there needs to be strong free speech defenses erected to ensure that free discourse is preserved online. This is the last area where people can freely discuss ideas on a massive scale.
Should we lose this forum the rest of our freedoms will most certainly be on the chopping block.
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