Category Archives: internet freedom

ThinkProgress Censored By Facebook After Cheerleading Facebook Censorship

Posted on by
1

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In an article last month titled “Facebook announces that fake accounts are now coming not just from Russia”, fauxgressive establishment apologia firm ThinkProgress falsely reported that I have been writing for an outlet that is alleged to be part of an Iranian propaganda campaign. I repeatedly brought this false claim to the attention of Casey Michel, the article’s author, telling him that ten seconds of research or any attempt to contact me would have shown him that the articles published by the outlet in question were just reblogs of earlier publications from my platform, but Michel ignored the many notifications he received from myself and my Twitter followers and went on merrily interacting with other posters. As of this writing, the article remains uncorrected.

In the article, Michel documented Facebook’s heroic efforts to shut down alleged Iranian propaganda outlets, ominously warning his readers that “Russia is by no means the only foreign adversary exploiting social media’s inherent openness.” In other articles for ThinkProgress, Michel is repeatedly seen wagging his finger at Facebook and Twitter for not doing more to censor “Russian propaganda”, and in a July article titled “Facebook says both sides share fake news, defends Infowars’ presence on its platform — Mark Zuckerberg has an interesting way of prioritizing ‘high quality news’” another ThinkProgress author criticized Facebook for not censoring Alex Jones. Jones was censored by Facebook the following month.

So I think it’s understandable that those of us who have been warning of the dangers of internet censorship find it a bit funny to see ThinkProgress now complaining that it has been censored by Facebook.

ThinkProgress reports that its traffic from Facebook has been slashed by eighty percent due to a “fact check” by the Weekly Standard which, through a series of moronic mental contortions, found ThinkProgress guilty of reporting fake news about Brett Kavanaugh of all things. In a twist of irony which would be delicious if it weren’t so disgusting, the Weekly Standard is one of Facebook’s authorized “fact checkers”, and happens to be the brainchild of none other than bloodthirsty psychopath and rehabilitated #Resistance hero Bill Kristol.

ThinkProgress is part of a very large and diverse branch of progressive punditry whose ultimate job is to help centrist empire loyalists feel like leftist revolutionaries, and since 2016 one of the many appalling consequences of this bizarre environment has been the embracing of Iraq-raping neoconservatives like Kristol and Max Boot by Democratic Party loyalists. In a bid to stay relevant despite having been consistently wrong about literally everything in foreign policy for the last two decades, these murderous ghouls have repackaged themselves as a woke, cuddly alternative to the Trumpian faction of the Republican Party, and have been rewarded for their efforts with regular platforms on MSNBC and the Washington Post.

So with ThinkProgress getting censored by Facebook, you really couldn’t ask for a more clear-cut case of reaping what you sow. Nevertheless, it is wrong for anyone to be deprived of political speech, even if much of their political speech consists of attempts to silence the political speech of others. And if there is anything more gross than political speech being regulated by Silicon Valley plutocrats and a NATO psyop factory, it’s political speech being regulated by Silicon Valley plutocrats, a NATO psyop factory, and Bill Kristol. ThinkProgress should not have its audience restricted.

All the “let me help you cheer for the establishment while pretending to oppose it” pundits who celebrated Alex Jones’ coordinated de-platforming last month are falling all over themselves to spin this new development in a way that allows them to feel as though they aren’t being proven wrong day after day after day, but of course they are. Facilitating the censorship of anyone’s speech is facilitating the censorship of your own speech in the long run, and we’re not even having to wait long to see it this time around. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship; the massive new media corporations being implored to regulate which political speech gets an audience and which doesn’t have extensive ties to secretive government agenciesand a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

I do not expect ThinkProgress to remain on Facebook’s restricted list for long; the real targets of internet censorship are not partisan outlets which prop up establishment politics and help legitimize America’s two-headed one party system. But that isn’t the point. The point is that Silicon Valley plutocrats, the NATO propaganda firm Atlantic Council, and the Weekly Standard should not be determining who gets an audience in the new media environment and who doesn’t. Nothing that has anything to do with Bill Kristol should ever have any power over anyone. If our choices are between letting people think for themselves and letting the guy who’s always wrong about everything determine what shows up in people’s news feed, the choice is obviously the one which doesn’t involve placing faith in the man who helped deceive America into butchering a million Iraqis.

Facebook Censorship, Mad Ben Nimmo and the Atlantic Council

Posted on by
2

By Craig Murray

Source: CraigMurray.org

Facebook has deleted all of my posts from July 2017 to last week because I am, apparently, a Russian Bot. For a while I could not add any new posts either, but we recently found a way around that, at least for now. To those of you tempted to say “So what?”, I would point out that over two thirds of visitors to my website arrive via my posting of the articles to Facebook and Twitter. Social media outlets like this blog, which offer an alternative to MSM propaganda, are hugely at the mercy of these corporate gatekeepers.

Facebook’s plunge into censorship is completely open and admitted, as is the fact it is operated for Facebook by the Atlantic Council – the extreme neo-con group part funded by NATO and whose board includes serial war criminal Henry Kissinger, Former CIA Heads Michael Hayden and Michael Morrell, and George Bush’s chief of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, among a whole list of horrors.

The staff are worse than the Board. Their lead expert on Russian bot detection is an obsessed nutter named Ben Nimmo, whose fragile grip on reality has been completely broken by his elevation to be the internet’s Witchfinder-General. Nimmo, grandly titled “Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab”, is the go-to man for Establishment rubbishing of citizen journalists, and as with Joseph McCarthy or Matthew Clarke, one day society will sufficiently recover its balance for it to be generally acknowledged that this kind of witch-hunt nonsense was not just an aberration, but a manifestation of the evil it claimed to fight.

There is no Establishment cause Nimmo will not aid by labeling its opponents as Bots. This from the Herald newspaper two days ago, where Nimmo uncovers the secret web of Scottish Nationalist bots that dominate the internet, and had the temerity to question the stitch-up of Alex Salmond.

Nimmo’s proof? 2,000 people had used the hashtag #Dissolvetheunion on a total of 10,000 tweets in a week. That’s five tweets per person on average. In a week. Obviously a massive bot-plot, eh?

When Ben’s great expose for the Herald was met with widespread ridicule, he doubled down on it by producing his evidence – a list of the top ten bots he had uncovered in this research. Except that they are almost all, to my certain knowledge, not bots but people. But do not decry Ben’s fantastic forensic skills, for which NATO and the CIA fund the Atlantic Council. Ben’s number one suspect was definitely a bot. He had got the evil kingpin. He had seen through its identity despite its cunning disguise. That disguise included its name, IsthisAB0T, and its profile, where it called itself a bot for retweets on Independence. Thank goodness for Ben Nimmo, or nobody would ever have seen through that evil, presumably Kremlin-hatched, plan.

No wonder the Atlantic Council advertise Nimmo and his team as “Digital Sherlocks”

Nimmo’s track record is simply appalling. In this report for the Atlantic Council website, he falsely identified British pensioner @Ian56789 as a “Russian troll farm”, which led to Ian being named as such by the British government, and to perhaps the most surreal Sky News interview of all time. Perhaps still more remarkably, Nimmo searches for use of the phrase “cui bono?” in reference to the Skripal and fake Douma chemical weapons attacks. Nimmo characterises use of the phrase cui bono as evidence of pro-Assad and pro-Kremlin bots and trolls – he really does. Most people would think to consider cui bono indicates a smattering more commonsense than Nimmo himself displays.

It is at least obvious cui bono from Nimmo’s witchfinding – the capacious, NATO and CIA stuffed pockets of Ben Nimmo himself. That Facebook allows this utterly discredited neo-conservative charlatan the run of its censorship operations needs, given Facebook’s pivotal role in social media intercourse, to concern everybody. The freedom of the internet is under fundamental attack.

Censorship in America: The New Normal

Posted on by
Reply

By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.org

Dark forces in America threaten speech, media, and academic freedoms.

Social media, Google, and other tech giants are complicit in a campaign to suppress content conflicting with the official narrative.

What’s increasingly going on is the hallmark of totalitarian rule – controlling the message, eliminating what conflicts with it, notably on major geopolitical issues.

Losing the right of free expression endangers all others. When truth-telling and dissent are considered threats to national security, free and open societies no longer exist – the slippery slope where America and other Western societies are heading.

The following headlines should scare everyone:

NYT: “Facebook Says It Removed Pages Related to ‘Inauthentic Behavior’ ”

Washington Post: “Sprawling Iranian influence operation globalizes tech’s war on disinformation”

Wall Street Journal: “Facebook Pulls Accounts Peddling Misinformation From Iran, Russia”

CNN: “Facebook takes down 652 pages after finding disinformation campaigns run from Iran and Russia”

The UK owned and controlled BBC: “Facebook and Twitter remove accounts linked to Russia and Iran campaigns”

Other Western major media had similar headlined reports. On Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said hundreds of pages on its platform were removed for exhibiting signs of “ties to state-owned media” – including “activities the US government (said are) linked to Russian military intelligence” and Iran.

Facebook deleted accounts based on information supplied by the CIA, US State and Treasury Departments, acting as an agent for the imperial state.

The same goes for Twitter, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, and other tech giants – in cahoots with Washington against the most fundamental of fundamental freedoms.

Facebook removed 652 pages. Twitter suspended 284 accounts for engaging in what it called “coordinated manipulation” – code language for truth-telling dark forces in Washington want suppressed.

Google removed Google Plus and YouTube content – based on information supplied by the CIA-funded FireEye cybersecurity firm, Langley calling the company a “critical addition to our strategic investment portfolio for security technologies.”

According to Facebook, pages allegedly connected to Russia, Iran, and other US sanctioned countries are targeted for removal, claiming some seek to influence US midterm elections – providing no evidence proving any of the targeted pages were involved in illegal or improper activities.

FB allied with the Atlantic Council (AC) – a neocon infested enemy of world peace and stability think tank, promoting NATO’s killing machine, America’s military, industrial, security, major media complex, and Ziofascist Israel.

FB partnered with AC’s imperial geopolitical agenda to censor material falsely called “foreign interference” – AC’s Digital Forensic Research Lab involved in so-called “fact-checking,” code language for flagrant censorship.

The CIA-linked FireEye said so-called “inauthentic behavior” targeted for removal includes “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes, as well as support for specific US policies favorable to Iran, such as the US-Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA).”

In cahoots with dark forces in Washington, Microsoft’s so-called Digital Crimes Unit shut down 84 websites it claimed were associated with Russian hackers – no evidence cited proving it.

Its Microsoft AccountGuard initiative offers free cybersecurity protection to US political candidates and campaign offices at the federal, state and local levels.

No evidence suggests any threats to America’s political process exists – just invented ones to bash Russia.

The new normal in America and other Western societies considers anything conflicting with the official narrative on vital issues “inauthentic behavior.”

Are these nations heading toward eliminating the right of free expression altogether- falsely claiming it’s to protect national security?

It appears to be what’s going on in the West – the possible elimination of free and open societies already gravely threatened.

Facebook escalates censorship of left-wing, anti-war organizations

Posted on by
Reply

By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

One year ago this week, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to search monopoly Google demanding that it end its censorship of the internet.

The letter documented that a change in Google’s search algorithms that the company claimed was aimed at promoting “authoritative” news sources had led to a substantial decline in search traffic to left-wing, socialist and anti-war sites. Google, the letter from WSWS International Editorial Board Chairperson David North stated, was “engaged in political censorship of the Internet.”

One year later, it is clear that the allegations against Google were both correct and extremely prescient. The measures taken by Google initiated a sweeping system of corporate-state censorship adopted by all the US technology monopolies, including Facebook and Twitter. A campaign that began under the pretext of combatting “Russian meddling” and “fake news” is ever more openly targeting left-wing views.

The latest and most extreme attack on democratic rights came Tuesday, when Facebook announced that it has removed hundreds of user accounts and pages, many opposing the crimes of the American, Saudi, and Israeli governments in the Middle East, claiming they were the result of “influence campaigns” by Iran and Russia.

Some of the accounts purported to be “American liberals supportive of US Senator Bernie Sanders,” who expressed “support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel,” according to FireEye, the cybersecurity firm, heavily staffed by former intelligence operatives, with whom Facebook coordinated the deletions.

The press went even further in linking left-wing viewpoints with “foreign influence” operations. The Financial Times declared, “In the US, FireEye found accounts purporting to support Bernie Sanders, the US senator, and a fake organisation called Rise Against the Right. In the UK, the company discovered fabricated organisations called British Left and the British Progressive Front posting in support of Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party.”

Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, who is leading the campaign for censorship, made clear that the internet giants’ moves to censor the internet are far broader than the original pretext of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election. “There’s no way the problem of social media manipulation is limited to a single troll farm in St. Petersburg, and that fact is now beyond a doubt.” He added, “Iranians are now following the Kremlin’s playbook from 2016.”

Tellingly, FireEye said that it had only “moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors.” The company added that the possibility exists that “the activity could originate from elsewhere” or includes “authentic online behavior.”

Wherever the accounts originate, it is not up to Facebook to determine whether they are “authentic” or not. Tellingly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a conference call with reporters, added that some of the accounts removed came from “a set of people the U.S. government and others have linked to Russia.” Given that dominant sections of the US state have sought to brand anyone who opposes US foreign policy as an agent of the Kremlin, such a broad definition could extend to any public critic of the US political establishment.

On the same day that Facebook removed pages and accounts it said were “linked to Iran,” it terminated the longstanding Facebook account of a WSWS contributor writing under a pseudonym, declaring that it would only reinstate the account if he provided government identification proving his identity.

Were such a standard to apply across the board, social media posts by contemporary authors Richard Bachman (who writes as Stephen King), Anne Rampling (who writes as Anne Rice) and countless others would be “inauthentic” if they were to use the names by which are known to by millions of people. Some of the most famous figures in the revolutionary movement, including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, were known exclusively by their pen names. And of course, the American Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers were all drafted by writers using pseudonyms.

Facebook, acting in coordination with government entities, serves as judge, jury and executioner in deciding who is granted the freedom of expression guaranteed under the First Amendment and international civil rights laws. It claims the right, with no trial, no appeal, and providing no information, to declare statements to be “inauthentic” and remove accounts making them.

Last month, Facebook deleted the official page of the left-wing counter-protest to this month’s fascist “Unite the Right 2” demonstration in Washington, which was endorsed by prominent left-wing political activists, including Whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Its rationale was that one account connected to the event page displayed “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

This week, the Washington Post reported that Facebook operates an internal ranking system to determine “the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1.” Those labeled “untrustworthy” will evidently be liable or deletion.

What is being introduced, piece by piece, is the mechanism for US technology monopolies to silence anyone, at any time, for any reason, by claiming their statements and views are “inauthentic” and “divisive.”

Such a mechanism, tested and implemented in the privately-controlled social media ecosystems, will then, with the ending of net neutrality, be used by internet service providers to block access to sites on the public internet and through email, claiming the “responsibility” to police their privately-owned networks.

In other words, one year after the WSWS published its open letter, all the mechanism have been created for Google, Facebook, Twitter and leading internet service providers to ban and silence anyone, with no legal recourse, oversight or public knowledge.

But in the year since the publication of the open letter, another process has emerged. The working class all over the world has entered into struggle, beginning with a wave of teachers’ strikes in the US earlier this year, and continuing with strikes by heavy industry workers in Germany, airline pilots throughout Europe at Ryanair, and a growing opposition and anger among UPS workers, autoworkers, Amazon workers and other sections of the working class.

The moves to intensify censorship are aimed above all at blocking the intersection of this growing movement of the working class with a socialist program.

But this movement of the working class also creates the political basis for the struggle against censorship. As workers clash with their employers and their union collaborators, they must inscribe on their banners opposition to political censorship and must fight for the expropriation of the social media monopolies under public control as a key component of the fight for socialism.

In January of this year, the World Socialist Web Site issued an open letter calling for “socialist, anti-war, left-wing and progressive websites, organizations and activists” to join “an international coalition to fight Internet censorship.” This appeal is more relevant than ever. We urge everyone seeking to fight the grip of the technology monopolies and intelligence agencies over the internet to contact us and join the fight against censorship!

 

Orwell knew: we willingly buy the screens that are used against us

Posted on by
1

By Henry Cowles

Source: Aeon

Sales of George Orwell’s utopian novel 1984 (1949) have spiked twice recently, both times in response to political events. In early 2017, the idea of ‘alternative facts’ called to mind Winston Smith, the book’s protagonist and, as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, a professional alternator of facts. And in 2013, the US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden compared widespread government surveillance explicitly to what Orwell had imagined: ‘The types of collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us – are nothing compared to what we have available today.’

Snowden was right. Re-reading 1984 in 2018, one is struck by the ‘TVs that watch us’, which Orwell called telescreens. The telescreen is one of the first objects we encounter: ‘The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.’ It is omnipresent, in every private room and public space, right up until the end of the book, when it is ‘still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter’ even after Smith has resigned himself to its rule.

What’s most striking about the telescreen’s ubiquity is how right and how wrong Orwell was about our technological present. Screens are not just a part of life today: they are our lives. We interact digitally so often and in such depth that it’s hard for many of us to imagine (or remember) what life used to be like. And now, all that interaction is recorded. Snowden was not the first to point out how far smartphones and social media are from what Orwell imagined. He couldn’t have known how eager we’d be to shrink down our telescreens and carry them with us everywhere we go, or how readily we’d sign over the data we produce to companies that fuel our need to connect. We are at once surrounded by telescreens and so far past them that Orwell couldn’t have seen our world coming.

Or could he? Orwell gives us a couple of clues about where telescreens came from, clues that point toward a surprising origin for the totalitarian state that 1984 describes. Taking them seriously means looking toward the corporate world rather than to our current governments as the likely source of freedom’s demise. If Orwell was right, consumer choice – indeed, the ideology of choice itself – might be how the erosion of choice really starts.

The first clue comes in the form of a technological absence. For the first time, Winston finds himself in a room without a telescreen:

‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.
‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow.’

Though we learn to take the old man’s statements with a grain of salt, it seems that – at some point, for some people – the owning of a telescreen was a matter of choice.

The second hint is dropped in a book within the book: a banned history of the rise of ‘the Party’ authored by one of its early architects who has since become ‘the Enemy of the People’. The book credits technology with the destruction of privacy, and here we catch a glimpse of the world in which we live: ‘With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.’

What does the murky history of the telescreen tell us about the way we live now? The hints about an old man’s reluctance and television’s power suggest that totalitarian overreach might not start at the top – at least, not in the sense we often imagine. Unfettered access to our inner lives begins as a choice, a decision to sign up for a product because we ‘feel the need of it’. When acting on our desires in the marketplace means signing over our data to corporate entities, the erosion of choice is revealed to be the consequence of choice – or at least, the consequence of celebrating choice.

Two historians have recently been pointing toward this conclusion – in quite different ways.

One, Sarah Igo at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, has argued that Americans’ demands for privacy seem to have gone hand-in-hand with their decisions to sacrifice it over the course of the 20th century. Citizens simultaneously shielded and broadcast their private lives through surveys and social media, gradually coming to accept that modern life means contributing to – and reaping the rewards of – the data on which we all increasingly depend. Though some of these activities were ‘chosen’ more readily than others, Igo shows how choice itself came to seem beside the point when it came to personal data.

Meanwhile, the historian Sophia Rosenfeld at the University of Pennsylvania has argued that freedom itself was reduced to choice, specifically choice between a limited set of options, and that its reduction has marked a revolution in politics and thought. As options are winnowed to those we can find online – a winnowing conducted under the banner of ‘choice’ – we start to feel the consequences of this shift in our own lives.

One can easily imagine choosing to buy a telescreen – indeed, many of us already have. And one can also imagine needing one, or finding them so convenient that they feel compulsory. The big step is when convenience becomes compulsory: when we can’t file our taxes, complete the census or contest a claim without a telescreen.

As a wise man once put it: ‘Who said “the customer is always right?” The seller – never anyone but the seller.’ When companies stoke our impulse to connect and harvest the resulting data, we’re not surprised. When the same companies are treated as public utilities, working side-by-side with governments to connect us – that’s when we should be surprised, or at least wary. Until now, the choice to use Gmail or Facebook has felt like just that: a choice. But the point when choice becomes compulsion can be a hard one to spot.

When you need to have a credit card to buy a coffee or use an app to file a complaint, we hardly notice. But when a smartphone is essential for migrant workers, or when filling out the census requires going online, we’ve turned a corner. With the US Census set to go online in 2020 and questions about how all that data will be collected, stored and analysed still up in the air, we might be closer to that corner than we thought.Aeon counter – do not remove

 

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

First Amendment Under Attack: What You Need to Know about Big Tech’s Assault on Alex Jones

Posted on by
Reply

By Sander Hicks

Candidate for US Congress

Special Report for the New York Megaphone.

Around August 6, 2018 independent journalist Alex Jones was kicked off Facebook, YouTube, Google, Spotify and Apple, in a coordinated, late-night purge, due to Jones’ criticisms and “threats” against Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Jones has also taken unpopular, iconclastic positions on Jeffrey Epstein, 9/11, Sandy Hook, and President Trump, so mainstream public opinion was swift to condemn him. Even the ACLU has been silent on this case, refusing to consider a defense of the First Amendment. No one seems willing to consider the controversial content of Jones’ complaint against Mueller.

It’s true that Jones is beyond politically incorrect. This article is not a defense of his anti-Muslim, anti-gay, or anti-transgender statements. Those things should be roundly condemned. And CNN’s Olivery Darcy hands in a pretty good summary of those here.

The problem however, is that Jones sometimes gets things right. These things are never acknowledged by the CNN reporters, or the decision-makers who pulled the plug on him. Alex Jones has a valid claim: that Special Counsel Mueller is a do-nothing who is criminally negligent. Jones’ accusations deserve First Amendment protection, because while they may be unpopular now, they could lead to an indictment someday against Mueller. This whole situation shows clear media bias in favor of the powerful, against outsiders who know too much and speak facts too loud.

Robert Mueller is a textbook example of a “Deep State” operative, with a track record of multiple cover-ups. And even if you hate Alex Jones’ politics, they need to be separated from this question: how can we save our country, when we silence and censor a maverick journalist who points out the hypocrisy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller?

Robert Mueller presided as head of FBI for 12 years, where he stoically observed the carnage of 9/11 and the Anthrax attacks, neither of which Mueller managed to explain, or seriously investigate. In fact, he helped to cover up these two great crimes, and helped turn them into a justification for the Iraq War.

Time Magazine Person of the Year, the FBI’s own Coleen Rowley, named Mueller as an agent of the 9/11 “cover-up.” On May 21, 2002 she said that Mueller “and others at the highest levels of FBI management” were guilty of a “delicate and subtle shading/skewing of the facts” when it came to 9/11. When Senator Bob Graham wanted to subpoena the FBI about why an FBI informant lived in San Diego with two of the key 9/11 hijackers, the FBI agent fled the Senate office, rather than accept the subpoena. 9/11 widow and key member of the “Jersey Girls” Kristen Breitweiser said, “Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry’s investigative hands.”

Speaking of the Saudis, earlier in his career, Mueller hid the crimes of their Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). He stymied the US Senate investigation into this criminal, sleazy, narcotics and prostitution bank. Both Senator John Kerry and NY Attorney General Robert Morgenthau had their investigations into BCCI blocked, by Mueller, when he was head of the Criminal Division of the US DOJ. Morgenthau told the Wall Street Journal, regarding Mueller, “documents were withheld, and attempts were made to block other federal agencies from cooperating.” BCCI was controlled by the richest Saudis, and CIA/Deep State operatives, and operated to benefit Bush and Bin Laden Families, Wall Street Democrats, and the Iran/Contra cabal. Mueller helped protect them, while over 16 independent investigators and journalists were murdered.

This same Mueller is called a “demon” by Alex Jones. Perhaps the term “demon” sounds too Biblical for a cynical New York attitude. But this reporter recalls what attorney Bill Veale once said, in court, as he sued Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for 9/11. “Evil exists. And it’s attracted to power.”

According to recently released FBI documents, available online, Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein benefited greatly from Mueller’s FBI. Epstein ran a “sex slave island” on his own land in the Caribbean, and flew powerful celebrities and Democrats there on a private plane dubbed the “Lolita Express.” Just like BCCI, Epstein’s operation involved the rich and powerful, it included Bill Clinton, and numerous under-age girls for sale. Could it get any worse? Sure it can. This FBI document seems to indicate that Epstein was also some kind of FBI informant. Mueller’s FBI only gave him a slap on the wrist. And Epstein’s immunity from prosecution is what enraged Alex Jones.

A moral response would be to investigate Jones’ claims, not kill the messenger. Jones can seem histrionic at times, yes, but his sense of mission inflames him. Alex Jones, discussing Epstein, child-sex, and Mueller, called Mueller a “a demon I will take down, or I’ll die trying…we’re going to walk out in the square, politically, at high noon….” Jones said this as he mimed a gunfight with a pistol in his hand. Sure, the cowboy routine is a bit much, but remember, Jones did qualify the shoot-out vision as something that he was imagining could happen “politically.”

BIG MEDIA MYTH: Censorship is Necessary because There Is No Alternative.

For a look at the kind of censorship that Jones got in response, take a look at this article by

VOX’s Zack Beauchamp. It’s over the top. When Twitter was the only major online platform not to censor Alex Jones, Beauchamp attacked Twitter. His approach is similar to CNN’s Oliver Darcy who reports that he persistently pestered Twitter and showed them reasons to remove Alex Jones. Twitter declined to do so.

Beauchamp doesn’t even think to look at the content of Jones’ claims, about Epstein or Mueller. His arch tone is arrogant, nasty, biased, and smug. And he gets his facts wrong, to boot.

“Conspiracy theories, once they spread, create hermetically sealed communities that are impervious to correction,” he claims. It’s a false claim, and it’s not a justification for censorship. When you take on something as enormous as BCCI, or the 9/11 cover-up, you kind of have to be humble, and be open to correction. It takes years to get a sense of the big picture. Even the brash Alex Jones has amended his earlier claims about Sandy Hook.

Beauchamp is wrong, because even though some truthers are a passionate lot, the ones in it for the long haul do change. Look at how alternative historians of the 9/11 event have evolved. Using collaborative tools like conferences, internet and social media, the 9/11 truth movement has developed, and improved over 17 years. It has grown from marginal conspiracy theorists, into a serious intellectual force with organized opposition. Over 3,000 licensed architects and engineers reject the theory that two planes could have brought down three steel skyscrapers. And in 2018, the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry filed a petition for a Special Grand Jury, regarding the buildings’ collapses. The movement effectively helped to create the term “Deep State” which is now used in mainstream media to describe a level of federal government corruption which is alarming, almost beyond reform, and out of control. A recent ABC poll showed that half of the USA believes there is a “Deep State” and of that half, 58% call it a “serious problem.”

The same Senator Bob Graham who attempted to subpoena Mueller’s FBI was on 60 Minutes a couple years ago, advocating for the release of the 28 Pages (documents Bush censored from Congress’s 9/11 report). Once these were released by Congress, the world changed. Despite Obama’s veto, Congress passed legislation that acted on what we all saw in the 28 Pages (those of us who read them, despite Big Media falsely claiming there was nothing there.) The 28 Pages make it plain: the US Deep State, Prince Bandar, and Saudis clearly were backing the key 9/11 hijackers. This is the story of the century. The Zack Beauchamps of the world don’t dare to comment. They avert their eyes. But Alex Jones has done 17 years of investigating, interviews, and commentary. His work has millions of followers. Our “free” society is grossly guilty of hypocrisy and censorship. We can’t even find a way to talk to each other. Censorship only makes everyone angrier.

Zack Beauchamp wants Alex Jones’ media platforms to be strangled and asphyxiated:  “Jones was spreading dangerous lies, and….journalists simply couldn’t debunk them. The only way to stop these ideas was to deprive them of oxygen, to prevent people from being exposed to them in the first place.”

No, Zack. The media should not get to decide what people can “be exposed to.” The spirit of First Amendment says that they should be allowed to a diversity of information, and that the powers that be should not restrain freedom of the press. And no, don’t tell me that Facebook is not subject to the First Amendment. Recent case law says that even privately owned corporations can create spaces that can be termed a “public forum” that are thus subject to First Amendment protection.

At the end of the day, Authoritarian denunciations from government or media beg the question: What are you afraid of? Why can’t these topics be discussed? And who are you working for?

Beauchamp in his Vox article often quotes Harvard professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, regarding their article about the 9/11 truth movement. But a deeper look at that article shows that there’s a sinister violation of Constitutional Rights there. Those authors urge that, “government operatives, whether anonymous or otherwise, should infiltrate and disrupt” the 9/11 truth movement. They wrote, “Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”

As author Kevin Ryan wrote on his blog, “In retrospect, it is comforting to know that so much effort at disruption was needed to prevent 9/11 questions from taking over the national discussion. It means that many people were informed to some degree and that citizen groups working for the truth were seen as a threat to a corrupt system.”

 

IN SUM

The election of President Trump showed a desperate decision to break with status quo corruption and career politicians like Hillary Clinton. The people just don’t trust the system.  With the murder of Seth Rich, the uninvestigated pedophilic crimes exposed by the DNC emails, the major revelations about the 9/11 cover-up going unprosecuted, it’s no surprise the that corporate media has such low approval ratings in public opinion polls.

But the bottom line is that, with Alex Jones, cooler heads will prevail. The truth about Epstein and 9/11 will eventually win out. That’s what the soul of the First Amendment says. If you allow for a diversity of opinion, eventually the truth will prevail.

A group of over 70 attorneys has taken action recently, based on the 17 years of independent research into 9/11. The Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry in April filed a petition for a Special Grand Jury into the collapse of the World Trade Towers, in US Federal Court. Of course, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman ignored the petition, and ignored his legal duty to convene a Grand Jury, despite the 57 categories of evidence. So, on the 10th of September this year, the Lawyers will escalate and file a Mandamus suit.

Alex Jones’ work on 9/11 Truth, is probably the most important of all his work on controversial topics. In some ways, the national 9/11 Truth movement has received a great gift here. Nothing unites a movement like the feeling of being attacked, especially on the verge of the 17th Anniversary of 9/11, in an eventful year for work against the Deep State. The censorship of Alex Jones shows that our work is relevant, and that the struggle is escalating. We have hard facts. If they can’t debate us, they will try to silence us. It won’t work. The First Amendment is on our side.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sander Hicks is an independent progressive candidate for US Congress, in NYC’s 12th Congressional District. He has been a guest on Alex Jones’ show, and has debated CNN’s Oliver Darcy on the Comedy Central video podcast. He is author of two books about the War on Terror. Please learn more about his campaign, and consider a donation, at www.hicksforcongress.com

Martial Law By Other Means: Corporate Strangulation of Dissent

Posted on by
2

By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

“The ‘hate speech’ trick, in practice, rewards Black people’s occupiers and abusers (the police) and renders voices of protest illegitimate and mute.”

The people that rule the United States are in the third year of a frenzy to blame Russia and its “trolls,” “dupes,” and witting or unwitting “colluders” – including a sitting president – for racial conflicts, eroding respect for public institutions and a general social breakdown in the nation. “We are at war!” they scream, incessantly, in a thousand well-placed voices. The relentless barrage of war-talk crowds out all other subjects in the corporate media — the Omnipresent Voice of Oligarchy — including the actual wars waged all across the globe by the U.S. and its shrinking gaggle of allies.

By now, 65 percent of Americans — if asked — tell pollsters they think Russia “interfered” in the 2016 elections. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll  released late last month, 41 percent believe that whatever the Russians did had some effect on the election, and 30 percent think Hillary Clinton would be president if the Russians had not interfered.

“The relentless barrage of war-talk crowds out all other subjects in the corporate media — including the actual wars.”

People don’t volunteer these opinions; the question is presented by the pollsters and respondents select an answer among the multiple choices offered. However, a Gallup poll , taken during the same period, that allowed respondents to offer their own list of problems besetting the nation showed that less than one percent thought “the ongoing situation with Russia was the top issue.” Immigration was the top problem on people’s minds (22 percent), followed by dissatisfaction with the U.S. government (19 percent), and racism (7 percent). Concerns over “unifying the country,” “lack of respect for each other,” “the economy in general,” “health care,” and the catch-all, “ethics/morality/religious/family decline” rank in the even lower single digits – but almost nobody considers Russia to be a top problem.

Apparently, Americans don’t yet believe that anything like a “Pearl Harbor” has occurred, despite the Herculean efforts of the corporate media, the Democratic Party, old school Republicans, and the National Security State (Spookland). Undeterred, these fevered fomenters of hysteria insist that Russia’s “war” against the United States — aided by a “fifth column” composed of left-wing and right-wing web sites — must be answered by putting the nation on martial footing, through further curbs on freedom of speech and association at home, and relentless pursuit of full spectrum military dominance over all potential adversaries and competitors abroad.

“Less than one percent thought ‘the ongoing situation with Russia was the top issue.’”

The oligarch-declared state of war requires that there be one set of “truths” and a common worldview to unite the nation at this time of peril — whether the people perceive such a peril, or not. If there is insufficient public resolve to respond to the “threat” from Moscow and their partners in Beijing, then that is blamed on Kremlin-disseminated disinformation designed to confuse Americans or cause them to lose faith in U.S. institutions, and to fight among themselves – to “hate” each other — thus requiring more censorship.

It is the ruling class that is in panic, and using Russia as an all-purpose foil. The U.S. is in terminal decline, and has already been economically surpassed by China, based on “purchasing power parity,” the standard of measurement preferred even by the U.S dominated International Monetary Fund. According to an analysis by business columnist Noah Smith in Bloomberg , “not only is China already the world’s largest economy, the gap between it and the U.S. can be expected to grow even wider.” Dean Baker , co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies, says “China’s economy is already 25 percent larger than the U.S. economy and is on a path to be almost twice as large in a decade.”

The era of U.S. economic dominance has already ended, and the Potemkin façade of American economic supremacy is only maintained by the U.S. dollar’s artificial status as the main international reserve currency – from which pedestal it will ultimately be toppled, and the imperial era will be over. But this is an historical verdict that the U.S. rulers cannot accept. Having lost the economic capacity to lord over the planet, they must now rely on their military — a terror machine more expensive than most of the rest of the world’s militaries, combined — in a “generational,” twilight battle to preserve the empire. The Lords of Capital cannot imagine a world in which they are not on top. They have chosen permanent, “infinite” war.

“Not only is China already the world’s largest economy, the gap between it and the U.S. can be expected to grow even wider.”

On the home front, the ruling class policy is eternal austerity, dictated by the requirements of capitalism at this stage in its decline. It is a horrifically destructive process of corporate consolidation (the big get bigger, devouring each other and everyone else) and the shrinking of the public sphere, through public sector starvation and privation. The job market is restructured, with more and more workers becoming “casual” or “contracted” — the “gig” economy — and millions of others (especially Blacks) made permanently redundant and disposable.

A regime of permanent war and austerity — the fate that both corporate parties plan for us — requires the manufacture and perpetual maintenance of war hysteria, and the methodical suppression of popular demands for economic rescue of the affected classes. It demands Russiagate and the snuffing out of radical dissent. This is not about Hillary Clinton, although she was the presidential choice of the great bulk of the ruling class because she could be trusted to pursue permanent war and austerity. It’s about preserving and serving the oligarchy under capitalism in terminal decline.

“A regime of permanent war and austerity requires the manufacture and perpetual maintenance of war hysteria, and the methodical suppression of popular demands for economic rescue of the affected classes.”

A similar process is underway in Europe, where the welfare state is besieged by the ruling bankers and corporate chiefs. Some leftish pundits describe the corporate parties’ lashing out at “the left and the right” as an offensive of “the center” — but that’s nonsense. In both the U.S. and Europe, the corporate governments are to the right of the public; they don’t represent some political “center” — they represent only their corporate selves. The corporate leaders of the Democratic Party are positioned way to the right of Democratic voters, and also rightward of the general American pubic on most key economic issues. They are carrying out their corporate duties to preserve and maintain austerity and war.

This compels them to make a spectacle of Russiagate, and to ensure that the show never ends, but takes on new forms of hysteria. And it requires that internet-based dissent be brought to heal, as Hillary would say — even at the cost of billions to one of the top oligarchs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has been mercilessly bludgeoned by his fellow corporatists. Facebook’s political tampering with its algorithms to marginalize left-wing sites like BAR cannot help but suggest that the company also puts its fingers on the scales of the algorithms whose results Facebook sells to advertisers. But Zuckerberg no doubt understands that the purge of “left and right” sites is in the best interest of his class, and has accepted to forgo some profits.

“The corporate leaders of the Democratic Party are positioned way to the right of Democratic voters, and also rightward of the general American pubic on most key economic issues.”

Facebook, Apple, Google, YouTube and Spotify all came down  on right-winger Alex Jones and his Infowars, this week, in what appeared to be a coordinated purge. Although the corporate media have long accused Jones of spreading “disinformation,” he was not purged for telling non-truths. Apple announced that “it does not tolerate hate speech.” Facebook said “false news” was not the issue, but that Jones had violated its policies by “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.”

When it comes to “hate,” the high tech oligarchs rely heavily on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Morris Dees – Richard Cohen  legal outfit in Montgomery, Alabama. The Center has a special animus towards Black nationalists, to whom it dedicates a whole page  on its web site. “Most forms of black nationalism are strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic,” the SPLC declares, as if its white, Jewish leadership are expert in the Black American polity. In addition to naming Min. Louis Farrakhan and every Nation of Islam mosque, the site lists a slew of “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” including book stores, the Black Riders Liberation Party and all its affiliates, various Black Israelites, both halves of the split New Black Panther Party, and the Revolutionary Black Panther Party, as well as the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors. We can assume that these groups’ internet sites and Facebook presence are marked for special attention and future purging.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center has a special animus towards Black nationalists.”

But, many more Blacks will be caught up in the “hate speech” net that the high tech monopolists have deployed. Anyone that has gone to protests against killer cops has shouted words that could be deemed hate speech — because we do hate killer cops, and we do hate their armed occupation of our communities, and we have every right to say so among ourselves or to shout it to the world. Black people — and especially Black activists — must be most zealous in defense of free speech, knowing that our speech will be the first to be curtailed and outlawed.

We can expect no defense of Black speech rights from the Black misleadership class, which has always opted to cut off Black lips in order to silence a few white racists’ mouths. In the early Seventies, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Atlanta NAACP tried to get the Federal Communications Commission to ban campaign ads by J.B. Stoner, the arch-racist candidate for one of Georgia’s seats in the U.S. Senate. I argued loudly against attempting to create a “hate speech” standard for the public airwaves, warning that among the first victims of such a standard would be Min. Farrakhan, whose weekly radio program was aired on over 100 Black-oriented radio programs.

“Black people — and especially Black activists — must be most zealous in defense of free speech, knowing that our speech will be the first to be curtailed and outlawed.”

The FCC ruled in J.B. Stoner’s favor in 1972, but it was a good day for Black political speech, too. In the same way, the high tech monopolists’ assault on right-winger Alex Jones under a “hate speech” standard is bad news for Black political speech, and for radical speech. “Hate speech” is a trap. A few months ago, all but eleven members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to make any assault on police a “hate crime,” thereby giving police the status of a protected class. The “hate speech” trick, in practice, rewards Black people’s occupiers and abusers (the police) and renders voices of protest illegitimate and mute.

We will need every energizing expletive in our vocabularies to mobilize our folks against the racist repression that must accompany the rulers’ plans for permanent austerity and war. We need to hate them very deeply for what they are trying to do to humanity, and to express that hatred at the top of our lungs and in every forum possible.

 

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Alex Jones and the Rise of Corporate Censorship

Posted on by
1

By Brendan O’Neill

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

So we’re now trusting the capitalist class, massive, unaccountable corporations, to decide on our behalf what we may listen to and talk about? This is the take-home message, the terrible take-home message, of the expulsion of Alex Jones’ Infowars network from Apple, Facebook and Spotify and of the wild whoops of delight that this summary banning generated among so-called liberals: that people are now okay with allowing global capitalism to govern the public sphere and to decree what is sayable and what is unsayable. Corporate censorship, liberals’ new favourite thing – how bizarre.

We live in strange times. On one hand it is fashionable to hate capitalism these days. No middle-class home is complete without a Naomi Klein tome; making memes of Marx is every twentysomething Corbynistas’ favourite pastime. But on the other hand we seem content to trust Silicon Valley, the new frontier in corporate power, to make moral judgements about what kind of content people should be able to see online. Radicals and liberals declared themselves ‘very glad’ that these business elites enforced censorship against Jones and Infowars. We should be ‘celebrating the move’, said Vox, because ‘it represents a crucial step forward in the fight against fake news’. Liberals for capitalist censorship! The world just got that bit odder, and less free.

Over the past 24 hours, Jones and much of his Infowars channel has been ‘summarily banned’ – in the excitable words of Vox – from Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube. Initially, Facebook and YouTube had taken only selective measures against Jones. In response to a Twitterstorm about his presence on these platforms, they took down some of his videos. But then Apple decided to ban Jones entirely – removing all episodes of his podcast from its platform – and the other online giants followed suit. Or as the thrilled liberal commentary put it: ‘The dominoes started to fall.’ Despite having millions of subscribers, despite there being a public interest in what he has to say, Jones has been cast out of the world of social media, which is essentially the public square of the 21st century, on the basis that what he says is wicked.

This is censorship. There will of course be apologists for the corporate control of speech, on both the left and right, who will say, ‘It’s only censorship when the government does it!’. They are so wrong. When enormous companies that have arguably become the facilitators of public debate expel someone and his ideas because they find them morally repugnant, that is censorship. Powerful people have deprived an individual and his network of a key space in which they might propagate their beliefs. Aka censorship.

It doesn’t matter what you think of Jones. It doesn’t matter if you think he is mad, eccentric, and given to embracing crackpot theories about school shootings being faked. You should still be worried about what has happened to him because it confirms we have moved into a new era of outsourced censorship. It shows that what was once done by the state is now done by corporations. The illiberal, intolerant cleansing from public life of ideas judged to be offensive or dangerous has shifted from being the state’s thing to being the business elite’s thing. Witness how many campaigners for censorship now seek to marshal capitalist power to the end of erasing voices they don’t like – from the Dump Farage campaign that wants corporations to withdraw their advertising from LBC until it dumps Nigel Farage as a presenter to the calling on Silicon Valley to deprive the oxygen of publicity to offensive broadcasters.

In essence, so-called liberals and sections of the political class now want corporations to do their dirty work for them. They want the capitalist elites to do what it has become somewhat unfashionable for the state to do: ban controversial political speech. What an extraordinary folly this is. To empower global capitalism to act as judge, jury and executioner on what may be said on social-media platforms, in the new public square, is to sign the death warrant of freedom of speech. What if these bosses decide next that Marxist speech is unacceptable? Or that Zionist speech is dangerous? In green-lighting the censorship of Jones, we grant corporate suits the moral authority to censor pretty much anything else, too.

People on both the liberal left and the libertarian right argue that what has been done to Jones is acceptable because this is simply a case of businesses deciding freely who they should associate with or provide platforms to. This is disingenuous. This was not a clean, independent business decision – it was a rash act of silencing carried out under pressure from a moralised mob that insisted Jones’ words are too wicked for public life. This isn’t the free market in action – it’s the bending of capitalist power to the end of enforcing moral controls on speech. There is one very interesting thing that will spring from this incident: we will witness the severe limitations of right-wing libertarianism. Libertarians’ obsession with the state, their belief that things are only bad if the state does them, means they are incapable of arguing against capitalist authoritarianism, and in fact even support it on the basis that this is the free market being the free market (even though it isn’t). Libertarianism is devastatingly ill-prepared for the new authoritarianism, for tackling the rise of outsourced censorship and informal intolerance.

For good or ill, the social-media sphere is the new public sphere. The expulsion of people from these platforms is to 2018 what a state ban on the publication or sale of certain books was to 1618. How can we convince the owners of social media to permit the freest speech possible and to trust their users to negotiate the world of ideas for themselves? This is the question we should be asking ourselves, rather than concocting more ways to encourage these corporate overlords to censor and blacklist.