But at least as far as words, “mother” and “father” are concerned, this inclusivity seems to, paradoxically, work by exclusion.

Gone are the days when Word offered spelling and grammar checks. Now, for people who like their writing software to nudge and prod them during the writing process by suggesting “more suitable” replacements, Word has something called “Inclusivity Checker.”

The repository of terms contained in the tool, that are recommended to be replaced, is only growing.

A modern update takes a dim view of the expression “maternity leave” on “gender-inclusivity” grounds, and suggests that it be replaced with “birth-related leave,” “parental leave,” or “childbirth leave.”

Fathers who go on paternity leave should instead be described as taking “child-bonding leave,” Microsoft thinks. All this is explained as a way to make sure that the writer is inclusive of “all genders.”

Is all this really necessary? Microsoft thinks it is. According to the Free Speech Union, one of the terms writers who, for some reason, use Word are advised to replace is Postman Pat: it should be “Postal Worker Pat,” according to those behind this effort.

In that case, the intent is to avoid the possibility of gender bias. The same goes for “biologically female” – a phrase best avoided, according to Microsoft.

The feature is at this time not hard-coded into Word: the software is “inclusive” of both opt-ins (this seems to be the default) and opt-outs. “Problematic” words are underlined in blue and then recommended alternatives pop up.

Right now, there is no auto-correct function, either. But, if critics compare this sort of thing as moving ever closer to Orwell’s dark dystopian world ruled by extreme censorship and government control – one never knows what’s around the corner.

And if you don’t like it, and thought you might switch to, oh, Google Docs? Bad news: this giant also has a similar feature, introduced in 2022.

Google frowns at terms such as “housewife” and “landlord” and would rather you write, “stay-at-home spouse” and, “property owner.”

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It is a dark place of “AI” (machine learning, ML) mass surveillance, which Ellison wants to make sure is served by his company by way of providing the fundamental infrastructure. It isn’t irrelevant to this story that Oracle’s portfolio also includes multi-decade contacts with the US government.

Oracle is not often mentioned when Big Tech is talked about, but it is one of the biggest in the industry. The reason for staying out of the limelight is that, unlike its peers with big stakes in the social media space, Oracle’s business is database software and cloud computing.

This is the reason Ellison sees the opportunity to place his company, already involved in building AI models, at the center of producing the tools to make this nightmarish scenario of real-time ML-powered surveillance a reality.

Ellison spoke during the Oracle financial analyst gathering to suggest that the company’s databases will become indispensable for the AI infrastructure, and that proof for that is in companies like X and Microsoft having already picked Oracle to provide this service.

“Maximizing AI’s public security capabilities” is what’s on Ellison’s mind, and he decided to sell this by giving police accountability as an example.

The system would prevent police abuse, he said – but the way “AI” combined with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure arrives there is perplexing, to say the least. It involves police body cameras that are always recording (including in bathrooms, and during meals), always transmitting back to Oracle – and with no option to stop this feed.

“Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times” – that’s another way of putting it, and Ellison did.

But who would build such an expensive and elaborate surveillance system just to use it in law enforcement? Not Ellison.

The cops will be on their best behavior, but so will (the rest) of the citizens, he promised. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting,” Ellison added.

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NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has teamed up with 15 large financial and state institutions, as well as tech companies, to research and develop a way of integrating Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) into financial services. But according to NIST, this is just the start and the initial focus of the program.

The agreement represents an effort to tie in yet more areas of people’s lives in their digital ID (“customer identification program requirements” is how NIST’s announcement describes the focus of this particular initiative). These schemes are often criticized by rights advocates for their potential to be used as mass surveillance tools.

In conversation with the State Department’s chief data and AI officer Matthew Graviss, he cited a number of initiatives – such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Washington’s Enterprise AI Strategy as the foundations for the ultimate goal – using AI to “advance our foreign policy.”

The second part of the push to equip the State Department with AI tools is to – “strengthen this institution.”

According to Blinken, his department is a leader within the government when it comes to testing and “harnessing” the technology. Some reports speak about this as combating whatever happens to be considered foreign disinformation.

And while on the subject of meddling, the Washington Times says AI tests are “part of an ambitious media monitoring and analysis project that spans the globe.”

As sinister as that may sound, packaging the message as the need to combat (only) “foreign disinformation” certainly makes the policy more palatable at home, where the department’s past activity features in congressional probes into government-orchestrated online censorship.

This scrutiny is presented as something hindering the Department of State’s “anti-disinformation” work – while the tools now in development are quite openly described as a possible different means “to pursue the same goals.”

Blinken’s remarks reveal how the technology is used seemingly innocuously as a (translation and summarization) tool “in multilateral organizations;” but then he praised the ability of AI-powered tools to make mass surveillance (“monitoring”) cover a much larger number of media, making its scope and scale “vast,” as the report put it.

And also – combat “disinformation” – which Blinken quite dramatically refers to as “one of the poisons in the international system today.”

“We have one program that we’re using that is able to basically ingest a million articles every day from around the world — to be able to do that in a couple hundred countries in over a hundred languages — and then immediately translate, synthesize and give you a clear picture of what’s happening in the information space immediately,” the secretary is quoted as saying.

But given the scale of the operation, and the shortcomings of the current limitations of AI – those in the know might wish Blinken good luck with the accuracy and reliability of getting that “immediate, clear picture.”

However, when the “AI weapon” is pointed at online platforms as a means of identifying and censoring “disfavored” speech, it is objectively more likely to be efficient.

And the State Department is no stranger to such – strange given its mission – activities: after all, it is the home of the investigated-by-Congress and highly controversial Global Engagement Center.

Pavlovski sought to identify free speech as the core component in the historic achievement of the US civil rights movement. “It all comes down to one thing, freedom, freedom of speech. That’s where it comes from,” he said.

Pavlovski compared his platform’s struggle to remain open to freedom of expression to the efforts of those fighting for civil rights decades ago, and said this gave him and others at Rumble “a sense of purpose.”

At the same time, Pavlovski doesn’t think that governments of some leading Western countries are staying true to that crucial building block of their democracies.

The Rumble CEO “named and shamed” just a few – the US, the UK, Australia, and Ireland, where he said censorship laws that criminalize speech, all the way to putting people in jail, are either being drafted or enacted.

“That’s a scary place to be. That’s not a place I want to grow up in,” Pavlovski said. “But that’s what these laws are aiming to do. They’re giving the power to the government to determine what you can and cannot say. And that is a place that we have known throughout history, is a very bad place to go. And we need to do everything in the world to stop it.”

In the context of Western countries failing the very foundations of democracy, he also mentioned freedom of expression protections as part of not only the First Amendment in the US but also the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As for the way these governments get away with blatant violations of their own founding postulates – and laws – Pavlovski spoke about the Covid pandemic as an event that was used to “take away more rights from everybody, they use that as an excuse to infringe and take more power for them(selves).”

And in this context, Pavlovski asserted that his is the only platform that pushes back against such abuses – which he referred to as, “encroachment.”

Another issue that came up during the conversation was whether or not YouTube is carrying out censorship on behalf of yet another government – this time, that of Russia.

He noted that, unlike YouTube, Rumble is among those that got banned in Russia, something happened well after Russian outlets like RT got banned in the West – and after Rumble itself was previously “criticized” for refusing to censor RT (by Western countries).

Trying to make sense of this unholy mess, Pavlovski noted, “All of a sudden now Russia bans Rumble and YouTube is still operating there. So what is YouTube doing? Why isn’t the media writing about that? Why don’t they care about that?”

“They seem to care when we stand on the principle of free speech. But they don’t care when there’s actual cooperation happening. Not at all. They still only care about trying to knock us down,” said the Rumble CEO.

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Samantha Vinograd, until recently of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), also asserted that these days, because of what she considers to be election disinformation, “there is an unprecedented level of physical threats” while the US information ecosystem is “incredibly vulnerable.”

Dramatic and alarmist statements like this may be necessary to justify the rest of Vinograd’s message, which in effect attacks free speech, as it is legally protected in the US.

Appearing on CBS, Vinograd – who was until last December Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention – warned that the First Amendment might protect free speech, but that engaging in free speech is apparently not “cost-free.”

The Face the Nation hosts framed the problem as, essentially, federal laws (the Constitution) protecting speech, but the damage being done at the state level – and then what states, who organize elections, can do to fix that “problem.”

Spreading lies about candidates, as they put it, was given as an example of legal, protected speech becoming an issue by having the ability to create “a threat at the state level” – and asked Vinograd who she thought was supposed to correct the situation.

Vinograd – who has been bouncing between various administrations (including those of Bush and Obama, and private companies like Goldman Sachs and Stripe before landing at Biden’s DHS) – seemed to suggest that Big Tech (i.e., social media companies) should be assisting the government.

The federal government said Vinograd, “should not be the omnipresent fact checker for the American people.”

And even though, according to her, the government is debunking information about elections that is deemed to be inaccurate, social media companies “should be thinking about what kinds of election disinformation violate their terms of service.”

It’s difficult not to take this as a not-so-veiled added pressure on social platforms to not only continue with censoring content but perhaps expand it in terms of what qualifies as election disinformation.

Either way, Vinograd is in favor of enlisting “every American” to help out as well (although it is not clear in what specific way), invoking even the concept of patriotic duty.

And Vinograd did not miss the opportunity to assert that election misinformation threats are now of such magnitude as to present a national security issue.

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Censorship enthusiasts, who habitually use the terms “dis/misinformation” to go after lawful online speech that happens to not suit their political or ideological agenda, now feel that debunking has failed them.

(That can be yet another euphemism for censorship – when “debunking” political speech means removing information those directly or indirectly in control of platforms don’t like.)

Enter “prebuking” – and regardless of how risky, especially when applied in a democracy, this is, those who support the method are not swayed even by the possibility it may not work.

Prebunking is a distinctly dystopian notion that the audiences and social media users can be “programmed” (proponents use the term, “inoculated”) to reject information as untrustworthy.

To achieve that, speech must be discredited and suppressed as “misinformation” (via warnings from censors) before, not after it is seen by people.

“A radical playbook” is what some legacy media reports call this, at the same time implicitly justifying it as a necessity in a year that has been systematically hyped up as particularly dangerous because of elections taking place around the globe.

The Washington Post disturbingly sums up prebunking as exposing people to “weakened doses of misinformation paired with explanations (…) aimed at helping the public develop ‘mental antibodies’.”

This type of manipulation is supposed to steer the “unwashed masses” toward making the right (aka, desired by the “prebunkers”) conclusions, as they decide who to vote for.

Even as this is seen by opponents as a threat to democracy, it is being adopted widely – “from Arizona to Taiwan (with the EU in between)” – under the pretext of actually protecting democracy.

Where there are governments and censorship these days, there’s inevitably Big Tech, and Google and Meta are mentioned as particularly involved in carrying out prebunking campaigns, notably in the EU.

Apparently Google will not be developing Americans’ “mental antibodies” ahead of the US vote in November – that might prove too controversial, at least at this point in time.

The risk-reward ratio here is also unappealing.

“There aren’t really any actual field experiments showing that it (prebunking) can change people’s behavior in an enduring way,” said Cornell University psychology professor Gordon Pennycook.

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Nohynek, who is also the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare’s chief physician, testified that as the controversial schemes were being announced, her stance was that Covid vaccines were not effective in stopping the transmission of the virus, and therefore “vaccine passports,” designed to prove somebody’s vaccination status and create a checkpoint society, were superfluous.

Breaking news. Learn what was testified today at Helsinki district court by Hanna Nohynek Senior physician of Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare (THL) and chair of Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization at WHO. @positvfi @DrAseemMalhotra @MikaVauhkala pic.twitter.com/oF0WfVr4o2

— Ike Novikoff (@IkeNovikoff) April 11, 2024

Worse still, they provided people with “a false sense of security,” is how the doctor put it, referring to her advice dating back to the end of 2021. As for the awareness that the vaccines did not stop Covid transmission, reports quoting Nohynek’s testimony say the Institute knew this in the summer of that year, and possibly earlier.

But despite Nohynek’s stance and her role at WHO – where she chairs the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE), and is also a member of the Vaccines Together and the International Vaccine Institute boards – the government ignored her.

At about the same time, the UN health agency was going ahead with plans to set up its Global Digital Health Certification Network, enabling the proliferation of digital vaccine passports, while the EU came out with its Digital COVID Certificate Regulation.

The facts concerning the advice given to the Finnish government came out during court proceedings launched by Mika Vauhkala, who sued for being barred from entering an establishment in 2021, even though he was healthy, but did not have the “vaccine passport.”

Vauhkala sued the government, alleging that the measures were unconstitutional since the country’s highest legal act prohibits discrimination against citizens – including based on health conditions.

The WHO, other organizations, and national governments like to talk about preparing for the “next pandemic”; however, revelations like this can hardly increase the level of trust people will have if another pandemic happens, particularly considering how ill-thought-out some of the most restrictive and damaging Covid measures have been.

After all, Nohynek could hardly be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist” – and yet, her recommendations were dismissed.

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