Tag Archives: censorship

The Twitter Files, by Mike Whitney

Posted on December 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

Twitter epitomizes the destruction by government of legally recognized free speech via the machinations of corporate proxies. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

 

“The idea here is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future.” Elon Musk, Free Speech Absolutist

“By opening up Twitter’s own internal documents, they have the opportunity to detail how Twitter users have been secretly manipulated, managed, and muzzled — for years — around the world — on multiple topics of first-order significance.” Matt Bivens M.D.

Did Twitter executives censor a story that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election? Did they deliberately suppress information the public needed to make an informed decision about how to cast their ballot? Was candidate Trump damaged by Twitter’s meddling? Did it cost him the election?

It did cost him the election, at least the American people think so. Check out this excerpt from an article at the New York Post:

Nearly four of five Americans who’ve been following the Hunter Biden laptop scandal believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a new poll.

A similar percentage also said they’re convinced that information on the computer is real, with just 11% saying they thought it was “created by Russia,” according to the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics.

On the subject of the 2020 election, 79% overall said it was “very” or “somewhat” likely that “a truthful interpretation of the laptop” would have resulted in the reelection of former President Donald Trump instead of the election of President Biden.

The poll results, derived from an initial survey of 1,335 adults, have a “credibility interval” of plus or minus 4.8 percentage points, according to the TIPP.” (“79% say ‘truthful’ coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop would have changed 2020 election”, New York Post)

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Washington Goes to War Against Twitter and Free Speech, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on December 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

The government is frantically trying to put its fingers and toes in an informational dyke that springs a new leak every minute. It’s not going to work. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.com:

Below is my column this week on the campaign to coerce Elon Musk to restore the censorship system at Twitter. The campaign against Twitter now involves the full allied forces of the anti-free speech movement: the government, corporations, Democratic politicians, the media, and, of course, celebrities. However, it is an alliance that has proven overwhelming in the past but this unstoppable force has met an immovable object in Musk. It is total war in the beltway but Musk has yet to fully deploy his greatest weapon: free speech.

Here is the column:

Washington this week is in full wartime footing. No, it’s not over the Russian invasion of Ukraine or North Korean missiles or even Chinese expansionism. It is about Twitter and the threat of Elon Musk to restore free speech protections to social media.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has emerged as the bellicose general rallying others to the “censor or die” pressure campaign against Twitter.

The problem is that citizens are flocking to Twitter and signing up in record numbers. They want more, not less, free speech. The over two million new sign-ups per day represent a 66% increase over the same period last year, according to figures released by Musk.

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Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on November 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

America has been destroying morality to save it for a long time. From Caitlin Johnstone.com:

So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.

While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

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The Consortium Imposing the Growing Censorship Regime — and Our New Live, Prime-Time Rumble Program, by Glenn Greenwald

Posted on October 28, 2022 | 1 comment

Despite the occasional setback or two, the drive for censorship continues unabated. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

We are launching a new live, one-hour, prime-time news broadcast. Armed with cable-sized budgets, it will be part of a network that Russell Brand has already debuted.

 
Clockwise from top left: UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology speaks during the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum in Dubai, on March 28, 2022 (Photo by KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images); U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images); Google headquarters (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images); The Comcast/NBC Universal building in Los Angeles, CA (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images);

The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.

The Consortium of State and Corporate Power

There has been some reporting — by me and others — on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and “false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be “disinformation.” The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, Bellingcat, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They are designed to cast the appearance of apolitical scholarship, but their only real purpose is to provide a justifying framework to stigmatize, repress and censor any thoughts, views and ideas that dissent from neoliberal establishment orthodoxy. It exists, in other words, to make censorship and other forms of repression appear scientific rather than ideological.

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If You Liked Big Brother, Meet Google’s Big MUM, by Daniel Greenfield

Posted on October 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

Google is working hard to make sure you don’t get any unapproved truth. From Daniel Greenfield at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • Google first unleashed MUM to fight what it considered COVID “misinformation” by making sure that everyone saw “high quality and timely information from trusted health authorities like the World Health Organization”. By reducing the number of sources to only those that agree with its agenda, Google is able to deliver fast results while getting rid of different points of view.
  • Google long ago ceased being a way to find different answers and its search results are deliberately repetitive. Search is an illusion. The user thinks that he’s browsing the internet when he’s actually spinning his wheels in Google’s walled garden.
  • Or as Pandu Nayak, VP of search at Google, wrote in a recent post, “By using our latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our systems can now understand the notion of consensus, which is when multiple high-quality sources on the web all agree on the same fact.”
  • Google disagrees with many of its users about what “reliable sources” or “high-quality sources” entail.
  • In 2022, Google’s search is hopelessly broken because the company no longer has any interest in providing the search service that made it a monopoly, giving a ranked list of diverse results, but wants everyone to speak into their phones and receive a single answer. The consensus.
  • If you own an advanced Android phone, you may find that Google Assistant will interrupt conversations to offer its own “insights”. Google is also pursuing “prebunking” of what it considers “misinformation” with preemptive propaganda campaigns.

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Fauci, Biden Officials Ordered To Be Deposed In Social Media Collusion Case, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

Will weasel Fauci finally have to testify under oath and face hostile cross-examination? What a beautiful thing that would be. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A federal judge on Friday ordered Dr. Anthony Fauci, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and other officials from the Biden administration and the FBI, to testify under oath at depositions in a lawsuit over alleged collusion to censor information on social media during the pandemic.

District Court Judge Terry Doughty granted a request by the National Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) for depositions in the lawsuit, State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Biden, et al.

The NCLA joined the states’ lawsuit in August, representing renowned epidemiologists Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines.

Earlier interrogatories in this lawsuit identified 45 federal officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the CDC, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, and others who communicated with social media companies about “misinformation” and censorship.

…

The plaintiffs believe those named have specific individual details by virtue of their position. For example, CDC Chief of the Digital Media Branch Carol Crawford leads the agency’s digital media activities. Interrogatory responses revealed Crawford was holding regular “Be On the Lookout” meetings with staff from the social media companies. In these meetings, attendees reviewed specific social media posts containing “misinformation.” –PJ Media

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All of Us Are in Danger: When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on October 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

Without fail, governments will move to restrict speech as they move towards totalitarianism. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“If you can’t say ‘F@#k’ you can’t say, ‘F@#k’ the government.’”— Lenny Bruce, comedian

Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.

In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

Things are about to get even dicier for those who believe in fully exercising their right to political expression.

Indeed, the government’s seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, and several of his associates for their alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots puts the entire concept of anti-government political expression on trial.

Enacted during the Civil War to prosecute secessionists, seditious conspiracy makes it a crime for two or more individuals to conspire to “‘overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force’ the U.S. government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.”

It’s a hard charge to prove, and the government’s track record hasn’t been the greatest.

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Biden Admin Showered Millions On Government’s ‘Misinformation’ Czars After 2020 Election, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

How to end-run the First Amendment. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The Biden administration awarded millions of federal dollars to members of four private groups that worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State during the 2020 election to censor social media posts they deemed ‘misinformation’ – according to an in-depth analysis of documents obtained by Just the News.

The four groups in question – Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika – comprise the “Election Integrity Partnership,” which exists as a ‘concierge-like’ service for federal agencies such as Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to flag online content for censorship or monitoring by Big Tech using a “ticket” system.

Unsurprisingly, the head of Stanford’s Internet Observatory is a Clinton donor who previously served as Facebook’s Head of Security – while the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public is largely funded by the Knight Foundation, whose board exclusively contributes to Demorat or Neocon entities (a few examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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New Zealand Prime Minister Calls For A Global Censorship System, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on September 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

This lady needs censoring, big time. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest liberal leader to call for an international alliance to censor speech. Unsatisfied with the unprecedented corporate censorship of social media companies, leaders like Hillary Clinton have turned from private censorship to good old-fashioned state censorship. Speech regulation has become an article of faith on the left. Ardern used her speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly to call for censorship on a global scale.

Ardern lashed out at “disinformation” and called for a global coalition to control speech. After nodding toward free speech, she proceeded to lay out a plan for its demise through government regulation:

But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms. To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?

This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.

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Suppress, Silence, Skew and Censor, by Robert W. Malone, MD, MS

Posted on September 22, 2022 | 1 comment

What medical professionals who tried to tell the truth about Covid and the vaccines have been up against. From Robert W. Malone at rwmalonemd.substack.com:

Propaganda, skewed study results and psyops, what could go wrong?

Suppressing Scientific Discourse on Vaccines? Self-perceptions of researchers and practitioners

HealthCare Ethics Committee Forum: An Interprofessional Journal on Healthcare Institutions’ Ethical and Legal Issues

HEC Forum May, 2022

Abstract

The controversy over vaccines has recently intensified in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with calls from politicians, health professionals, journalists, and citizens to take harsh measures against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” while accusing them of spreading “fake news” and as such, of endangering public health. However, the issue of suppression of vaccine dissenters has rarely been studied from the point of view of those who raise concerns about vaccine safety.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the subjective perceptions of professionals (physicians, nurses, researchers) involved with vaccines through practice and/or research and who take a critical view on vaccines, about what they perceive as the suppression of dissent in the field of vaccines, their response to it, and its potential implications on science and medicine.

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