Microsoft has forcibly installed a ‘news filter’ onto everybody’s device without their permission, aimed at censoring independent and alternative media.
The neocon-backed startup ‘NewsGuard’ is now one step closer to its vision of forcing warnings onto websites it deems “unreliable” after Microsoft decided to make it an integral part of its Edge mobile browser.
Edge users on Android and Apple devices can now just click one button to enable its “green-red rating signal” if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a so-called hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.
Among the green-rated websites: Voice of America, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as left-leaning upstarts such as Vice News and Refinery 29.
Ones that are given the red warning label of are RT and Sputnik and the right-wing Daily Mail, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, in addition to hundreds of other non-mainstream news websites such as Wikileaks.
This time around the virus targets your brain, not your computer or iPod.
None of this is the slightest bit alarming if you believe that NewsGuard is an absolutely fair arbiter of what constitutes real news or propaganda.
The green-listed media outlets above apparently do not ever engage in these practices, or at least not knowingly. So CNN never misleads with its headlines, the Guardian never dresses up its agendas as news, and Buzzfeed stories are always accurate?
The overall picture emerges of a fatal mix of establishment journalists, hawkish old-school Washington insiders, and so-called ethical businessmen, led by master of the disaster Google.
This is just a beginning: there is an overarching plan where all public computers, from the school to the university to the library, are automatically equipped with the same “safe browsing” system.
So, just like the use of NewsGuard in all public libraries in the faraway state of Hawaii, it is best to look at the Edge integration is more of a test, a pilot project, a dry run.
Latching NewsGuard onto a popular browser like Chrome, or a social network like Facebook, would stir tremors of public debate, as it has done in the past when similar initiatives have been tried. Instead, first they came for the Edge users.
News Punch / ABC Flash Point Cyber News 2019.
