Elon Musk has been cheered by many on Twitter as a champion of free speech, having reinstated banned accounts from well known media personalities, as well as speaking out against the “woke mind virus” embraced by the western world’s morally (and financially) bankrupt governments. Taking such public stances that appear to go against the grain has garnered a great deal of support for Musk. Less is said about whether ‘X’ really is becoming a freer bastion of open discourse and non-algorithmically governed and suppressed search results. Whether or not shadow bans are still in vogue, albeit with an updated coding twist?
Since acquisitionswe have built brand safety and content moderation tools that have never existed before at this company and we've introduced a new policy to your specific point about hate speech called freedom of speech not reach so if you're going to post something that's illegal or against the law you're gone zero tolerance but more importantly if you're going to post something that is lawful but it's awful you get labeled you get labeled you get de-amplified which means it cannot be shared and it is certainly demonetized.
Back to your direct point about Brands brand safety, so they are protected from the risk of being next to that content and it's also why it's really important to note that once a post is labeled and it can't be shared and the user sees that 30 percent of the time they take it down themselves - staggeringly they take it down.
That sounds a lot like controlling the narrative, doesn’t it? Who fact checks the fact checkers? Granted, there is the feature of community notes whereby users can ‘add context’ to ‘misleading’ tweets. Based on Musk’s outspoken stance flavour of the month, do the safety and content moderation tools allow for anti-gender ideology / anti-wokeism posts to have both freedom of speech and reach, but perhaps not other anti-globalist narrative posts? Who moderates the moderators?
Specifically, the whole narrative behind ‘countering hate speech online’ is driving corporate and institutional adherence to SDG goal 16:10 -
Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.
The UN site has undergone many revisions lately, and actually reading about the details of each SDG has been made more difficult. Instead, there are only icons such as the blue graphic I linked to above, then multiple links to offshoot reports.
Here is an Agenda 2030 PDF report I saved in 2023 which is easier to search:
Let us remind ourselves that any and all pushes for digital ID are always snuck in under the auspices of protecting us and for our safety. Whether the chosen trojan horse of the 24/7 news cycled minute comes in the form of cyber attacks, scammers, child safety, or hate speech. Existing legal protections are in place to deal with any genuinely arising criminality for all of these issues - I linked to UK legal protections as an example.
Any additional legislation foisted upon us is most assuredly not for our safety, yet shall enable governments and corporatocracies to wield greater control over us and our ability to freely access and share information.
Elon Musk stopped just short of explicitly endorsing two New York state online child safety bills even though, for the proposals to work, platforms would have to implement age verification and digital ID for people to access online platforms.
The X owner’s reaction to a post about Meta and Google reportedly spending more than a million as they lobby against the bills read, “In sharp contrast, X supports child safety bills.”
It remains unclear whether Musk expressed his support for these particular bills – New York Senate Bill S7694 and Bill S3281 – or the legislative efforts in general to make the internet a safer place for minors. Another possibility is that he was not missing a chance to criticize the competition.
Either way, there are two problems with such efforts that keep cropping up in various jurisdictions: very often, the proposed laws are far broader, but use the issue of protecting children as the main talking point to shut up any opposition.
And, as in this case, they call for some form of age verification to be introduced, which is only doable by identifying everyone who visits sites or uses platforms, undermining online anonymity, and curbing free speech.
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But the elephant in the room is – how are platforms supposed to know a user’s actual age?
This is where age verification comes in: the bills speak about using “commercially reasonable methods” to make sure a user is not a minor, and age verification through digital ID is also demanded to achieve “verifiable parental consent.”
From the perspective of the United Nations [mis]leadership driving agenda 2030, catchment of the children is a repeated theme - as I detailed recently when covering Education 2030 here and here - UN literature often refers to children as ‘change agents’ and ‘shaping young learners’. Having children digitally verify themselves online will normalise this action across all platforms, then as a pre-requisite to access the internet itself - through to adulthood. The digital ID campaign is a core tenet of Agenda 2030; specifically cited under SDG 16:9 -
By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.
In case you are not convinced that this goal relates to digital ID, this particular SDG is cross-referenced by partnering organisations which are on board to usher in technocracy, such as ID2020:
X, formerly Twitter, is now mandating the use of a government ID-based account verification system for users that earn revenue on the platform – either for advertising or for paid subscriptions.
To implement this system, X has partnered with Au10tix, an Israeli company known for its identity verification solutions. Users who opt to receive payouts on the platform will have to undergo a verification process with the company.
This initiative aims to curb impersonation, fraud, and improve user support, yet it also raises profound questions about privacy and free speech, as X markets itself as a free speech platform, and free speech and anonymity often go hand-in-hand. This is especially true in countries where their speech can get citizens jailed or worse.
While this new X change is only for those users looking to claim a cut of the advertising revenue that X makes from their posts and is not yet enforced for all users, it is a large step towards the normalizing of online digital ID verification.
Digital ID required in order to monetise online content today - tomorrow it could be required in order to access all goods and services, both online and in the real world.
Elon Musk recently doubled down on his predictions that humans would need a “universal high income” in the wake of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven job displacement. — this time claiming that without our jobs, our purpose in life may eventually be to “give AI meaning.”
The bleak prognostication from the world’s richest person came during the VivaTech 2024 event in Paris as part of a winding speech wherein Musk made fervent claims that AI would provide all of our goods and services in the future.
“My biggest fear is AI,” the mogul said.
He also claimed that AI will be better than humans at everything, thus relegating our species to doing our best to support the machines:
“The question will really be one of meaning — if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning? I do think there’s perhaps still a role for humans in this, in that we may give AI meaning.”
Putting aside the much hyped AI takeover of the labour force, and even the bizarre quote from Musk touting AI as a god-like deity to be given meaning by humans - the endorsement of a universal basic income (UBI) for all, should ring alarm bells for anyone who would readily choose liberty over fear, and freedom over slavery.
Any UBI scheme will inherently suggest, at first, then strongly encourage, and eventually force good citizen behaviours in order to quality for the UBI stipend. UBI will invariably be distributed in the form of centralised digital bank currency (CBDC) tokens. The tokens will be programmable per good or bad behaviours and habits - as deemed fit for purpose by the government. A social credit score and a carbon credit score will determine a person’s spending threshold, along with what they can buy, where they can buy, and whether they have exceeded their permitted travel allowance quota.
Giving out ‘free money’ to everyone in the form of UBI equates to an expansion of the money supply, which will lead to more demand for goods and services, and thus higher inflation. UBI is a terrible idea all around - paying people not to work, making them beholden to the state apparatus, driving up demand for goods and services via money supply expansion, and presumably decreasing the supply of manufactured goods because less people will be working and actually producing things = even higher inflation.
Of course, UBI is a great idea if the goal is to create a pliable, malleable populace, that is obedient and compliant because their survival depends on it. UBI is also a surefire way to create mass chaos and civil unrest as society unravels without a productive workforce, leading to anarchy, violence, and mass death. If depopulation is the ultimate goal of all the 17 sustainable development goals touted by Agenda 2030, then UBI is just another tool in the toolbox.
I asked Brave browser’s AI how UBI fits in with Agenda 2030:
Interesting results there. I would have cited the SDGs of ‘no poverty’ and ‘reduced inequalities’. We can see how the warm and fuzzy language of the 17 SDGs can be warped to achieve wholesale public approval of a universal basic income, can’t we?
Let us cast our minds back to 2017 when ride-hailing companies were relatively new.
On 19th June, 2017, Paul Asel, writing for NGP Capital Insights, wrote about transportation as a service:
A transformation is underway as the plate tectonics of technology and consumer interests converge. The traditional “Transportation as an Asset” model — in which a person buys, owns, and drives her own car — is shifting to “Transportation as a Service” (TaaS). As the chart below illustrates, PriceWaterhouseCoopers projects nearly 20% of industry revenues and 36% of profit will shift from auto sales to services by 2030.
Auto Industry — Share of Revenues & Profits in 2015 & 2030
Transportation as a Service: The Auto Industry Re-imagined
While Transportation as an Asset is a monolithic model, TaaS may take a variety of forms offering more consumer choices and business opportunities. Transportation services have attracted many new entrants as the industry replaces low-margin asset revenue with high-margin service revenue. Ride-hailing companies have garnered the most attention, with funding totaling over $23B between 2015–2016, according to CB Insights. If you include the recent $5.5B and $100M raises by Didi and Ola, that number approaches $29B. Other TaaS companies offering on-demand delivery services, car sharing, bike sharing, and public transport services have also raised over $8B globally. The chart below shows a selection of TaaS companies funded recently. (Note: Nokia Growth Partners has invested in Moovit, Drivy, Zoomcar, Meican, and Deliveroo.)
Combining the forceful introduction of EVs with the banning of combustion engines, and legislation to fit kill switches in all vehicles is foreboding. We are facing a trifecta of technocratic control, surveillance, and freedom curtailment; a further realisation of the permission-based economy.
Add to this the growing number of so called ‘vaxxidents’ as painstakingly covered by Mark Crispin Miller, and there is every impetus and justification in the minds of the faceless government totalitarians to just outright ban driving - for our own safety, naturally. We could find ourselves at the mercy of autonomous driverless vehicles, which could also be algorithmically governed by social credit score systems and digital ID integration.
Musk is on board with TaaS as per his ‘Robotaxi’ fleet dream, albeit yet to materialise into reality.
In the clip below from January 2020, Musk describes his vision for Tesla vehicles operating under the transport as a service model.
