Has No One Noticed 1st Amendment Foe Katherine Maher Chairs the Board of 'Free Speech' Signal Foundation?

AP Photo/Armando Franca

I've been trying to get through these different reports and watching various videos of this chick - woof. It's hard. 

Honest to God, she gives me the skeevies. 

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She is also on the board of one of the largest secure free speech web apps in the world.

I do not understand the mindset of people who willingly sit in the audience for a performance like this, less mind worship at the altar of this mindset, hoping to emulate the intrinsic evil of it all.

This smooth-as-silk, smug as a bug control freak giving off sincere sociopath vibes somehow, some way, managed to acquire power and position sufficient enough to evangelize her internal demons.

Her delivery is nicely iced, parroting the need for atonement by the patriarchy for its limitless sins. Standard victimhood ideological boilerplate mouthed by every sit-in participant at Columbia, holding a placard in the street shrieking outside Trump Tower or whilst shrieking death threats at a city council meeting.

WHITE MALE WESTERNIZED CONSTRUCT

We know that tired song by heart.

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God Almighty, for all that education, she could at least be a little original. This shining example of modern womanhood is who the new Snow White was modeled on, whose dogma the actress portraying her espouses, and where the Bud Light executive got her schtick. Not WAASSUUP girls in the least...and don't call them girls.

...I have spent the past few days exploring Maher’s prolific history on social media, which she seems to have used as a private diary, narrating her every thought, emotion, meeting, and political opinion in real-time. This archive is a collection of her statements, but at a deeper level, it provides a window into the soul of a uniquely American archetype: the affluent, white, female liberal—many of whom now sit atop our elite institutions.

What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”

There's been a massive uproar surrounding this self-righteous creature's abhorrent but unashamed advocacy for censorship, and rightly so. 

If you like to think of Wiki as a place for relatively unadulterated information, she's definitely your villainess. But who does? Wiki's been such a mess for so long simply because the public can go in and change pages that it can only be used as a reference for the most basic of facts, like "What color is the sky? How many square miles in Long Island?" No one in their right mind accepts a Wiki reference for much else, so while she sounds menacing, I wouldn't personally be affected by whatever machinations the Evil Wiki Queen had managed behind the scenes. I already know to independently verify most of what I'd glean from that site. I'll bet you do as well.

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As for her tenure at NPR, well, PFFT. Other than the ultimate irritation of her living large and spreading propaganda paid for by my tax dollars, NPR was already a hopelessly Leftist progressive organ. She didn't make it that way - it already was. Maher was meant to be an ardent narrative caretaker. From her hamfisted performance in the recent public spat with Uri Berliner, she's a terrible public company executive. Her highhanded dismissal of both Berliner's eloquent cri du cœur and the man himself has exposed what a terrible person she is.

To me, however appalling Maher's actions and frightening her opinions are, the outrage centered on Wiki and NPR, which 1) really doesn't affect me in the least and 2) are left-leaning, to begin with, so I expect the Mahers of the world to operate with impunity in their natural habitat. Quelle surprise.

What does have me truly wigging out about Katherine Maher's authoritarian views on free speech is something brother Bingley pointed out. We've not seen it mentioned anywhere else, and it most assuredly affects us.

Katherine Maher chairs the board of directors of the Signal Foundation. 

...“How do you think about organizational risk, and what does a strategic legal function look like?” asked Ms. Maher, who graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from N.Y.U. She is the chair of the board of directors at Signal Foundation, the nonprofit behind the secure messaging app, and is a nonresident senior fellow for democracy and technology at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan research center.

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Yes - THAT "Signal." You know - the "free speech, secure messaging" app?


Does anyone else have a problem with an avowed anti-free-speech, censorship advocate, and admitted information manipulator being on (or chairing) the board of a widely used web application for secure communications? 

Raise your hand if you do. Mine's already waving in the air like a windsock in a hurricane.

THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD BE HOWLING ABOUT

Sure, it's free! Sure, it's safe! Sure, it's secure!

I remember when that was What's App's big selling feature—until it wasn't. Then what did we do?

We all switched to Signal because hay-yull, no - Lizard Man and his Meta snooping team weren't going to get a shot at our conversations.

The secure messaging app Signal has been around for years but, in 2021, it saw a huge spike in users after a heightened awareness of the need for privacy. Now, the app is used by over 40 million people.

Known for its end-to-end encryption and independent structure as a non-profit organization run by a foundation — not a big tech company — Signal has previously been the communication method of choice for activists, people in the hacker community, and others concerned about privacy.

In recent years, Signal has also been investing in more infrastructure and features to support its users. That's a good thing: Signal first saw an increase in users in the spring of 2020 as people participating in anti-racist protests around the murder of George Floyd realized how closely law enforcement was surveilling them and asking companies to hand over user data. It became more popular after that.

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And now we find Cyberella de Ville... 

...Americans, even CEOs, are entitled to their opinions and to their own life decisions, of course. But the personal and psychological elements that suffuse Maher’s public persona seem to lead to political conclusions that are, certainly, worthy of public criticism.

The most troubling of these conclusions is her support for radically narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. In 2020, she argued that the New York Times should not have published Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “Send in the Troops,” during the George Floyd riots. In 2021, she celebrated the banishment of then-president Donald Trump from social media, writing: “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists. Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

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...is running Signal's board? You've got to be kidding me.

When do her authoritarian impulses and itchy censorship fingers start agitating for Signal to change its principles? It's not like the left doesn't eventually eat its own. Now, it's not just trendy subversive BLM types or Hamasholes using the app for messaging - it might be - God forbid - climate deniers, Republican GOTV volunteers, or Moms 4 Liberty, which would be unacceptable. They are not approved by the collective. 

When does the app's security and non-collection of user data become not a feature but a bug that needs to be "fixed" in the eyes of a board that includes Katherine Maher? I haven't even looked into the other four members—they might be equally as frightening.

NPR and Wiki aren't the problems here. They're the breeding grounds. The holding pens. The training courses.

Katherine Maher, and anyone like her in any position of power, is the problem. 



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