Category Archives: Psy-ops

FACEBOOK’S PURGE OF POLITICAL PAGES FUELS DELUSION OF INSURGENT THREATS TO DEMOCRACY

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By Kevin Gosztola

Source: ShadowProof

Facebook’s purge of more than 500 pages and 250 accounts ahead of midterm elections in the United States represents a massive trend to police social media activity in ways that put freedom of expression at risk.

This trend effectively discourages users from engaging in radical politics. It may be viewed as part of a counterinsurgency effort by a powerful social media company to assure a passive majority of Americans that they are properly guarding a widely used platform from alleged threats to democracy.

On October 11, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, and Oscar Rodriguez, the company’s product manager, published a press release about the purge.

“We’re removing 559 pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Gleicher and Rodriguez stated. “Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of groups and pages to drive traffic to their websites.”

According to Gleicher and Rodriguez, these techniques were used by groups and pages to make content “appear more popular” than it truly was on Facebook.

Both suggested some of the pages and accounts were “ad farms” that misled users into believing they were “forums for legitimate political debate.”

Unfortunately, Facebook offered minimal transparency on the action. Administrators with removed pages or accounts were apparently given no specifics other than a notice that they were shut down.

Several of the pages and accounts removed were right-wing and known for boosting President Donald Trump and his administration’s agenda. There were also dozens of progressive or left-wing pages, which were taken down.

Anti-Media, an anti-establishment independent media site with two million followers, had its page removed. Carey Wedler, editor at Anti-Media, did not lose her personal Facebook page with over 100,000 followers, but almost simultaneously, Twitter sent a notice that Wedler’s account was suspended.

The Free Thought Project, Reverb Press, Press For Truth, and Rachel Blevins, an RT America correspondent, had their pages taken down.

Pages that document abuse by police were removed—Police the Police, Filming Cops, Cop Block, and Cop Logic. Both Police the Police and Filming Cops each had over a million followers.

“There are legitimate reasons that accounts and pages coordinate with each other—it’s the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations,” Gleicher and Rodriguez stated. “But the difference is that these groups are upfront about who they are, and what they’re up to.”

Yet, none of the aforementioned pages, which have protested their removal, hid their missions from followers. They were very upfront about their political motives or agendas for social justice.

Gleicher and Rodriguez concluded, “As we get better at uncovering this kind of abuse, the people behind it—whether economically or politically motivated—will change their tactics to evade detection. It’s why we continue to invest heavily, including in better technology, to prevent this kind of misuse. Because people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”

The last sentences of Facebook’s press release make it clear that the company took this action to protect their brand. They were concerned about how these pages or accounts were impacting the experience of more passive, or even apathetic, users.

Administrators also recognize that politicians on Capitol Hill are watching. As Senator Dianne Feinstein told executives during a recent Senate hearing, “You’ve created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it or we will.”

On October 17, Twitter also acknowledged pressure from upcoming midterm elections to guard against alleged “influence operations.” It released a dataset it said was linked to operations during the 2016 election.

“We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation,” the social media company pledged.”

No executives at any Silicon Valley tech corporation want the government to introduce regulations. With parts of the public, especially those in the liberal establishment clamoring for action, Facebook and other companies are taking steps to supposedly fix the problem.

Cracking Down On “Influence Campaigns”

Facebook’s mass removal of pages and accounts was the company’s most extensive crackdown on “influence campaigns” since it started policing its platform. Most U.S. media outlets described the offending pages and accounts as purveyors of “political spam.”

The New York Times reported on Facebook’s purge with an article that was headlined, “Facebook Tackles Rising Threat: Americans Aping Russian Schemes to Deceive.”

Ironically, this was misinformation. At no point did the Times demonstrate that the removed pages or accounts were inspired or influenced by “Russian schemes,” which may or may not have been employed during the 2016 presidential election.

What the Times did do is conflate Russia-based activity with the operation of these accounts because those users may have wielded similar tactics to extend their reach. This is as disingenuous as suggesting someone who relies on Internet privacy tools is using terrorist tactics because terrorists want to hide their location, too.

The push to impose more control over the exchange of information on Facebook stems from a widespread belief that the Russia-based Internet Research Agency conducted a campaign through more than 400 accounts and pages that relied on ads and false information to “create discord and harm” Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The content was supposedly viewed by as many as 126 million Americans.

But in a paper on the 2016 presidential election by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, they show that this number is rather paltry. Americans saw at least 33 trillion posts in their news feeds between 2015 and 2017. Facebook even said a quarter of ads may have never been viewed by anyone.

The Senate intelligence committee reported minuscule ad numbers in key battleground states. In Wisconsin, $1,979 was spent. All but $54 were spent during the primary. Pennsylvania absorbed $823 and Michigan $300. “Unless Facebook discloses some vast new trove, the conclusion has to be that this was no full court press,” the report stated.

As the authors note, a few studies labeled sites as “Russian” or “Russian-influenced” simply because they have “politically distasteful” views that perhaps align with the agenda of Russia or run counter to U.S. foreign policy. This inappropriately counted non-mainstream or so-called fringe websites as part of an alleged Russian influence operation.

A far more extensive influence operation was likely perpetrated by networks highly capable of spreading right-wing messages in sophisticated manners.

“Our clearest and most significant observation is that the American political system has seen not a symmetrical polarization of the two sides of the political map, but rather the emergence of a discrete and relatively insular right-wing media ecosystem whose shape and communications practices differ sharply from the rest of the media ecosystem, ranging from the center-right to the left,” a Harvard study [PDF] on the 2016 election concluded.

The infiltrators sowing discord were aligned with Republicans and based in the United States. Like Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen contend, “By 2016, the Republican right had developed internet outreach and political advertising into a fine art and on a massive scale quite on its own.”

“Large numbers of conservative websites, including many that tolerated or actively encouraged white supremacy and contempt for immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, or the aspirations of women had been hard at work for years stoking up ‘tensions between groups already wary of one another.’ Breitbart and other organizations were in fact going global, opening offices abroad and establishing contacts with like-minded groups elsewhere.”

“Whatever the Russians were up to, they could hardly hope to add much value to the vast Made in America bombardment already underway. Nobody sows chaos like Breitbart or the Drudge Report, as the New York Times documented in one Idaho town,” the paper added.

Recognizing the influence of right-wing messaging networks during the 2016 election is critical. In fact, a list of removed pages posted by Western Journal suggests the vast majority of pages and accounts removed were right-wing. A minority were cop watch pages or libertarian pages against government abuses. An even smaller minority were liberal or Democratic pages.

Therefore, journalists are wrong to suggest there is some kind of balance between the left-wing and right-wing when it comes to spreading “fake news” or misinformation on social media platforms.

Part Of The Counterrevolution

It is difficult to discern whether police accountability or alternative media pages, which protested their removal, were targeted for the dissenting perspectives on their pages. What is more likely is that these pages were flagged by a Facebook algorithm.

“Bad content” to Facebook includes “false news,” “hate speech,” “spam,” “graphic violence,” “clickbait,” and “links to low quality web experiences (ad farms).” Given the company’s description of an “ad farm,” a page that linked to a website cluttered with ads, which were embedded to ensure server bills were paid, could be construed as an “ad farm.”

As Emma Llansó, the director of the Free Expression Project for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Guardian, there are a  “lot of people who fervently believe their political views and are trying to drive traffic to their posts and ideas. They’re probably also running ads on their sites to make money off doing so. The line between spammer activity with a financial motive and spammy-looking political advocacy is incredibly hard to draw.”

Facebook’s press release demonstrated indifference to the administrators of political pages, who use “backup” or fake accounts in order defend themselves from political opponents who may campaign to have their real accounts suspended.

Reverb’s page was verified by Facebook. As the Guardian reported, Reverb editor-in-chief Edward Lynn was never contacted by anyone with the company about any violations of standards.

Similarly, Brian Kolfage, who administered the Right Wing News page, which was shut down with three other pages, emailed back and forth with a Facebook executive. There were plans for a meeting so he could better understand how to comply with policies. The company chose not to work with Kolfage.

On October 17, Facebook deleted a video featuring journalist George Monbiot on the brutal colonial legacy of Christopher Columbus. It was up more than a week and had 900,000 views before it was taken down.

Again, the social media company was completely opaque in its decision. It may have been flagged as a result of graphic images in the video, but Facebook did not bother to offer an explanation.

Facebook announced a partnership in May with an influential think tank known as the Atlantic Council to help the company detect “emerging threats” and “disinformation campaigns.”  The organization formed after the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949, and it is committed to maintaining America’s global dominance.

When Facebook removed 32 “suspicious pages” that were run by activists in August, it relied on the think tank’s Digital Forensic Research Lab to “point out similarities to fake Russian pages from 2016.” However, one of the pages removed was an event page for a counter-protest against a Unite the Right rally in Washington, D.C.

In Bernard Harcourt’s book, The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went To War Against Its Own Citizens, he outlines his theory of the current paradigm citizens live under in the United States. Counterinsurgency has been systematically domesticated, even though there is “no real insurgency or active minority.”

“The Counterrevolution” creates this illusion of an “active minority.” When it comes to social media, the “active minority” is fringe political pages that are sowing discord by spreading “fake news” or misinformation. It is remarkable that part of the crackdown involved police accountability pages because law enforcement, which perpetuates this paradigm, benefits greatly from passive Americans believing cop watch pages on Facebook are “political spam.”

Or, more sinisterly, the pages and accounts are seen as employing tactics similar to Russian influence operations, which increases the fear of doing nothing to shut them down and justifies dramatic action—even if wholly innocent pages or users are censored.

Facebook may not be silencing dissenting perspectives deliberately, but in “The Counterrevolution,” it does not have to bother with restoring pages and accounts wrongfully taken down. Those pages and accounts are collateral damage. They were not specifically targeted. The social media company can claim it never intended to crack down on political speech and defend an action that is designed to give consumers and political elites the illusion that they are guarding the internet from perceived threats.

That is not to say there are no threats to democracy in the United States. A few weeks before Election Day, there are countless reports of voter suppression. But these threats do not manifest themselves in one’s news feed on Facebook. Rather, they come from Republican officials who use state apparatuses to make it harder for citizens to challenge their destructive and discriminatory agendas.

Why Is Russiagate Rumbling Into the 2018 Midterms?

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By Alan Macleod

Source: FAIR

The November 6 midterms are fast approaching, yet much of the media is still looking back to the 2016 elections, and specifically the alleged Russian interference in them.

The New Yorker (10/1/18) published a 7,000-word article headlined “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump.” Considering other explanations for Trump’s victory and Clinton’s loss, such as her tactical campaign errors, gerrymandering, vote suppression, racism and the actions of James Comey for only a paragraph, it quotes one expert claiming, “It stretches credulity to think the Russians didn’t” win it for him.

Meanwhile, the New York Times (9/20/18) released an intensive 10,000-word history and analysis of the Trump/Russia story, explaining to its readers that it was Putin’s “seething” ambivalence towards the West and his “nostalgia for Russia’s lost superpower status” that were the driving forces behind Russia’s nefarious actions.

There is also a great deal of fear about supposed hacking of the upcoming midterms. USA Today (10/9/18) warned, “As Russia and perhaps other foreign governments seek to undermine democratic elections, Congress and states need to get serious about defenses.” The PBS NewsHour (10/11/18) quoted one official who noted, “Given our experiences of 2016 and what we saw the Russians attempt to do across the nation’s election equipment, the election infrastructure, we certainly have a degree of concern of what their capability is.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post(9/26/18) writes, “While Russia is clearly trying to influence the 2018 elections, this time the United States is prepared and taking action to counter it.”

There is little concrete evidence offered in these reports; see Gareth Porter in Consortium News (10/10/18) for a dash of cold water on the New York Times’ narrative. Yet even the lack of evidence is an ominous sign for some. The Daily Beast (10/8/18) published an article headlined, “No Evidence That Russia Is Messing with Campaign 2018—Yet.” Despite that lack of evidence, the article asserted that the US should brace itself: “Russia has an arsenal of disruption capabilities… to sow havoc on election day,” it said, and “everyone is expecting the 2016 shock and awe” again.

The concern of the media over Russian actions has not resonated with the public more generally; a July Gallup poll reported that the number of Americans who considered Russia a top problem for the country was less than 1 percent. On the subject of the midterms and threats to their legitimacy, NPR (9/17/18) found that large majorities feel voter fraud or suppression to be a much greater danger to election integrity than foreign interference. Yet these concerns are not addressed nearly as thoroughly by the media. A search for “Russia” and “election” in the New York Timesdatabase generates 4,489 stories since the start of 2017, as compared to just 234 for “voter suppression” and “election,” 306 “gerrymandering” and “election” and 727 “racism” and “election.”

The question is not whether Russia, like other countries with extensive intelligence apparatuses, seeks to influence the elections of foreign nations. The question is why corporate media are concentrating on foreign interference, and not the other threats to democracy. In a previous article (FAIR.org, 7/27/18), I argued that the Democrats are using Russia to deflect anger and discontent away from their own failings. If Russia is to blame, there is no need for introspection, nor to address the deep race and class divides in the country that are addressed by surging political movements on the left, from Sanders to Black Lives Matter, and exploited by Trump and the alt-right. The focus on Russia as the sole reason for Trump’s victory allows establishment Democrats to continue as normal, without need for radical internal or policy change. As Clinton said, “America is already great.” To deflect pressure from the left, they can construct a narrative to explain why they lost to the most unpopular candidate ever.

For corporate media, the story of Russia covertly influencing the country promotes a climate where they can re-tighten their grip on the means of communication by accusing alternative media on both left and right of being Russian-sponsored “fake news.” As previously reported (FAIR.org, 8/22/18), under the guise of protecting readers, big media companies like Google, YouTube and Bing have changed their algorithms, resulting in devastating drops in traffic for reputable alternative media sites. Alternative media has been deleted, de-ranked, de-listed and de-monetized, effectively sidelining them. In response to ostensible Russian meddling, media giant Facebook announced last week (Washington Post, 10/11/18) it had shut down over 800 US accounts and pages for “inauthentic behavior,” a term even more nebulous than “fake news.” Included in the 800 were several police accountability watchdog groups and other alternative media, adding to its recent (temporary) deleting of TeleSUR English.

However, the best example of fake news and “inauthentic behavior” by media outlets in the modern age remains the manufacture of consent for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, with the crucial assistance of corporate outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and NBC (FAIR.org, 11/1/01; 3/18/03; 10/23/17). Forty-five percent of Americans get their news from Facebook, but it seems doubtful the tech giant will remove accounts belonging to those publications.

While it is clear that Moscow has an interest in who the US elects and doesn’t elect, the media’s focus on Russiagate through the midterm elections has as much to do with its political utility as with the evidence. With President Trump accusing China of midterm interference (CNN, 8/26/18), it appears that both major parties have sown doubt into the process and have a pre-made excuse if they fail on November 6. Both sides undermining trust in the democratic process does not augur well for the future of US politics.

The US military’s vision for state censorship

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By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

In March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference on the theme of “Sovereignty in the Information Age.” The conference brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces, including officials from the New York Police Department, and representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.

This meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

The Atlantic Council, a think tank with close ties to the highest levels of the state, has been a key partner in the social media companies’ censorship of left-wing views. Most notably, Facebook acted on a tip from the Atlantic Council when it shut down the official event page for an anti-fascist demonstration in Washington on the anniversary of last year’s neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville.

Confident that none of the thousands of journalists in Washington will question, or even report, what he writes, Watts lays out, from the standpoint of the repressive apparatus of the state and the financial oligarchy it defends, why censorship is necessary.

The central theme of the report is “sovereignty,” or the state’s ability to impose its will upon the population. This “sovereignty,” Watts writes, faces “greater challenges now than it ever has in the past,” due to the confluence between growing political opposition to the state and the internet’s ability to quickly spread political dissent.

Watts cites the precedent of the invention of the printing press, which helped overthrow the feudal world order. In the Atlantic Council’s estimation, however, this was an overwhelmingly negative development, ushering in “decades, and arguably centuries, of conflict and disruption” and undermining the “sovereignty” of absolutist states. The “invention of the internet is similarly creating conflict and disruption,” Watts writes.

“Trust in Western society,” he warns, “is experiencing a crisis. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked this erosion, showing a 30 percent drop in trust in government over the last year in the United States.”

Watts notes that this collapse in support for the government cannot be explained merely by the rise of social media. This process began in the early 2000s, “at the dawn of the social media age but before it had become mainstream.” Left out are the major reasons for the collapse of popular support for government institutions: the stolen election of 2000, the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction, unending war and the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

However, while it is “hard to argue that the current loss of trust results solely from the emergence of social media,” Watts writes, there “can be little doubt that it acted as a critical amplifier of broader trends.”

He continues: “Technology has democratized the ability for sub-state groups and individuals to broadcast a narrative with limited resources and virtually unlimited scope.” By contrast, “In the past, the general public had limited sources of information, which were managed by professional gatekeepers.”

In other words, the rise of uncensored social media allowed small groups with ideas that correspond to those of the broader population to challenge the political narrative of vested interests on an equal footing, without the “professional gatekeepers” of the mainstream print and broadcast media, which publicizes only a pro-government narrative.

When “radical and extremist views” and “incorrect ideas” are “broadcast over social media, they can even influence the views of people who would not otherwise be sympathetic to that perspective,” Watts warns. “When forwarded by a close friend or relation, false information carries additional legitimacy; once accepted by an individual, this false information can be difficult to correct.”

People must be isolated, in other words, from the “incorrect” ideas of their friends and family, because such ideas are “difficult to correct” by the state once disseminated.

But how is this to be done? The growth of oppositional sentiment cannot be combatted with “facts” or the “truth,” because “facts themselves are not sufficient to combat disinformation.” The “truth” is “too complex, less interesting, and less meaningful to individuals.”

Nor can the growth of political opposition, for the time being, simply be solved by “eliminating” (i.e., killing or jailing) political dissidents, because this only lends legitimacy to the ideas of the victims. “Eliminating those individuals and organizations will not be sufficient to combat the narrative and may in fact help amplify it.” He adds, “This is also the case for censorship as those behind the narrative can use the attempt to repress the message as proof of its truth, importance, or authenticity.”

Enter the social media companies. The best mechanism for suppressing oppositional viewpoints and promoting pro-government narratives is the private sector, in particular “technology giants, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter,” which can “determine what people see and do not see.”

Watts adds, “Fortunately, shifts in the policies of social media platforms such as Facebook have had significant impact on the type and quality of the content that is broadcast.”

The private sector, therefore, must do the dirty work of the government, because government propaganda is viewed with suspicion by the population. “Business and the private sector may not naturally understand the role they play in combating disinformation, but theirs is one of the most important…. In the West at least, they have been thrust into a central role due to the general public’s increased trust in them as institutions.”

But this is only the beginning. Online newspapers should “consider disabling commentary systems—the function of allowing the general public to leave comments beneath a particular media item,” while social media companies should “use a grading system akin to that used to rate the cleanliness of restaurants” to rate their users’ political statements.

Strong-arm tactics still have a role, of course. Citing the example of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, Watts declares that “governments need to create consequences” for spreading “disinformation” similar to those meted out for “state espionage” – which can carry the death penalty.

What Watts outlines in his document is a vision of a totalitarian social order, where the government, the media, and technology companies are united in suppressing oppositional viewpoints.

The most striking element of the document, however, is that it is not describing the future, but contemporary reality. Everything is in the present tense. The machinery of mass censorship has already been built.

The Atlantic Council report, based on high-level discussions within the military and state, is a confirmation of everything the World Socialist Web Site has said about the purpose of changes in the algorithms of internet and social media companies over the past year-and-a-half.

On August 25, 2017, the WSWS published an open letter to Google alleging that the company is “manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites.” It added, “Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting.”

Over the subsequent year, key details of the open letter have been indisputably confirmed. At congressional hearings and in other public statements, leading US technology companies have explained that they reduced the propagation of political views and statements targeted by US intelligence agencies, and did so in secret because they feared a public outcry. At the same time, they have explained the technical means by which they promoted pro-government, pro-war news outlets, such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

But the Atlantic Council document presents the most clear, direct and unvarnished explanation of the regime of state censorship.

The struggle against censorship is the spearhead of the defense of all democratic rights. The most urgent task is to unify the working class, which is engaged in a wave of social struggles all over the world, behind the struggle against censorship as a component of the fight for socialism.

 

DIGITAL FREE SPEECH ZONES ARE HERE

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

“Truth is treason in an empire of lies.” ~George Orwell

An empire of lies requires popular devotion to its founding illusions, lest it will collapse under the weight of its own hubris. It is therefore quite necessary to for those in power to control information and public access to ideas and narratives that run counter to their interests. This is a fact of life in a statist world, but now, in the age of the internet and social media, we are quickly learning just how far corporations will go to support this corrupt dynamic.

Amendment 1 – Freedom of Religion, Speech, and the Press

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

United States Bill of Rights

The social media giants along with big tech no longer have any qualms about deleting popular channels and personalities for their platforms, and the illusion of free speech is coming unhinged as we speak.

Just last week, Facebook (FB) announced the deletion of hundreds of pages it said were guilty of spamming and of profiting from web-traffic sent to ‘ad farms’ from coordinated FB strategies. Well-respected and reputable independent media organizations were banned along with many obviously spammy pages and politically inconsequential sites, indicating that there is much more to the story than de-spamming FB. And all of this news follows the recent ban of Alex Jones and the Infowars network, which marked a transition from shadow banning to open, public political censorship by these tech companies.

There really is no way to know precisely what, or who, is driving these page bans, as pages on both sides of the political spectrum have been targeted, but the most visible common thread running through it all is political dissent of one form or another. And the bans are clearly coordinated between the social media companies, as targeted pages and news organizations are banned from multiple platforms (FB and Twitter, for example) on the same day.

So, the main avenues of public discourse on the web today are removing dissident voices, which as journalist and activist John Vibes puts it, serves the same purpose of the free speech zones that G.W. Bush made popular during his controversial presidency.

Free speech zones are the ultimate insult to anyone who genuinely cares about the relationship between human beings and government. And we live in exceptionally controversial times, where the lines between government rule and corporate rule are blurrier than ever.

“Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you’ll always get some guy in your face who’s read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like “Facebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!” Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How “private” is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.” ~Caitlin Johnstone

So, now that we know that big tech is serving the interests of the political oligarchy, we are free to dissent in our own little corners of the internet (where very few can hear us), but we can also create new alternatives that will allow us to connect with people without the permission and all-seeing eye of big brother watching over us.

In the mean time, it’s good to know that independent media is having such a tremendous impact on the conversation that the powers that be want to shut it all down. Their illusion of legitimacy is cracking.

Boycott Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Here’s Why

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

NATO — the neoconservatives, the marketeers for firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE — has taken over the social-media giants and much of online international ‘news’-reporting, including that of virtually all independent news-sites and blogs.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google, in recent days, delivered what might be the death-blows.

NATO’s main PR agency, think-tank, and lobbying organization, is ‘non-profit’ — a legal tax-dodge that’s financed by donations from those weapons-making firms and their supporting firms and their ‘non-profits’, so that the taxes that it doesn’t pay will need to be paid instead by the general public. Billionaires know how to avoid taxes, and they hire politicians who write the laws with all the ‘right’ loopholes for them — and only for the very richest — to use. This PR agency is called “The Atlantic Council,” and it was set up in 1961, the exact same year that U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower left office warning that “the military-industrial complex” might take control of the U.S. Well, it did so, with The Atlantic Council’s help; and, now, it is finally lowering the boom against democracy itself — at least among the U.S. and its allied nations (the governments whose weapons-manufacturing firms are in, and sell to, NATO governments). The aim is to drive up the percentage of government-expenditures there that go to pay those firms, and so to reduce the percentages that go to pay everything else. The aim, in short, is the permanent-warfare-economy. After all, firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE sell only to allied governments. They have virtually no consumers except those governments. So: their (and their ‘charities’) basic message is ‘austerity’ — except on ‘defense’ or realistically called “aggression.” This is national ‘defense’ such as against Iraq in 2003, and against Libya in 2011 — it is instead sheer aggression. George Orwell predicted “Newspeak” — well, here it is. It’s today’s norm, so normal that the public think it’s just natural, and conservatives and even many liberals think it’s the way that ‘a free market’ ought to be.

Here was Facebook’s announcement, on October 11th:

——

newsroom.fb.com

11 October 2018

Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook

Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action. Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.

——

Those 559 and 251 weren’t identified; none of them were. Facebook wants them to need to scream in order for them to be able to be noticed at all by the public. The announcement didn’t even say by what criteria they were measuring ‘Inauthentic Activity’ versus ‘legitimate political debate’. Their announcement did say “we look at these actors’ behavior – such as whether they’re using fake accounts or repeatedly posting spam – rather than their content when deciding which of these accounts, Pages or Groups to remove,” but unless they make public what the actual algorithms are by means of which they remove sites, no one should trust them, at all, because they can remove whatever NATO or The Atlantic Council (neither of which their announcement even mentioned) want them to remove.

The background for this act by the war-economy’s billionaires had already been reported at Mint Press on May 18th, “Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to ‘Protect Democracy’”, where Elliott Gabriel opened:

Facebook is hoping that a new alliance with the Atlantic Council — a leading geopolitical strategy think-tank seen as a de facto PR agency for the U.S. government and NATO military alliance – will not only solve its “fake news” and “disinformation” controversy, but will also help the social media monolith play “a positive role” in ensuring democracy on a global level.

The new partnership will effectively ensure that Atlantic Council will serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a company press statement. With its leadership comprised of retired military officers, former policymakers, and top figures from the U.S. National Security State and Western business elites, the Atlantic Council’s role policing the social network should be viewed as a virtual takeover of Facebook by the imperialist state and the council’s extensive list of ultra-wealthy and corporate donors.

Then, on October 12th, Mint Press’s Whitney Webb bannered “Facebook Purges US-Based Independent Media For Political Disinformation”, and reported that,

Notably, Facebook’s statement on the mass purge of pages was co-authored by Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher, who is a former White House National Security Council director of cybersecurity policy.

Twitter also banned many of the pages targeted for deletion by Facebook on Thursday, suggesting a coordinated censorship effort between the two most popular social media platforms.

Many of the pages banned had millions of likes, such as the Free Thought Project (3.1 million likes), Antimedia (2.1 million), Cop Block (1.7 million), and Police the Police (1.9 million). Several of the pages that were deleted on Thursday had been targeted by Facebook in recent months, both through new censorship algorithms and Facebook’s controversial team of “fact checkers.”

For instance, the Free Thought Project had been flagged earlier this year as “fake news” by Facebook “fact checking” partner organizations, including  the Associated Press (AP) and Snopes. In one case, a story published by the Free Thought Project was flagged as “false” by the AP. That story, which detailed the documented case of Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) being forcibly removed from a DHS migrant detention center that had once been a Walmart, was marked false because the AP asserted that the article made the claim that Walmart was housing immigrants for DHS. However, the article does not make the claim, instead accurately noting that the facility used to be a Walmart.

Censorship algorithms had also greatly affected traffic to the recently deleted pages for much of the past year. In the case of Antimedia, its traffic dropped from around 150,000 page views per day in early June to around 12,000 by the end of that month. As a reference, in June of last year, Antimedia’s traffic stood at nearly 300,000 views per day.

Also on October 12th, heavy dot com bannered “‘Facebook Purge’: List of Some Deleted Accounts on Left & Right” and listed a few dozen sites that the article’s writer had seen online screaming about having been removed.

Meanwhile, in UK’s very mainstream Daily Mail (the second-largest-circulation of all UK’s newspapers), columnist Michael Burleigh headlined on October 13th “Putin’s taking over Libya by stealth in order to point a new weapon at the West — millions of desperate migrants” and he opened:

So bloody and extensive is President Putin’s record of aggression, not least in Syria and Ukraine, that an incursion into the empty deserts of North Africa might hardly seem worth noting.

Yet the discovery that Russia is moving troops and missiles into war-torn Libya has rightly caused alarms to sound throughout the capitals of Europe.

It is a step of huge significance, and one with potentially disastrous results for Western nations.

The discovery that Vladimir Putin, above, and his government is moving troops and missiles into war-torn Libya has rightly caused alarm. Russia – this time in the form of Rosneft, the huge oil company controlled by Putin’s sinister crony Igor Sechin – is interested in a slice of Libya’s vast oil reserves, the largest in Africa

Libya has both oil and Mediterranean ports, and Russia is hungry for both.

But was it Russia that in 2011 had invaded and destroyed Libya, or was it U.S., UK, and France, who invaded and destroyed Libya — a country that like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and others which The West has destroyed, had never threatened nor invaded any of them?

Burleigh continued:

– cause enough for concern, perhaps. Yet the real fear for European governments is this: Libya, with its porous southern borders, has become the main jumping-off point for the hundreds of thousands of African migrants now seeking to cross the Mediterranean to the shores of the EU and, in particular, Italy.

So, his own country, UK, had helped with the bombing of Libya that had caused all those ‘migrants’ (actually refugees) into Europe, but now he’s trying to blame Putin for it, as if Russia and not UK, U.S., and France were the cause of it. Doesn’t that “mislead people”?

But is the Daily Mail being strangled by Facebook, Twitter, and Google; or is it instead being done to the small-fry political sites, which aren’t owned and controlled by the aristocracies of the U.S., UK, France, and their allied aristocracies — all the aristocracies that are in NATO and promoted by The Atlantic Council?

Here is yet more from Elliott Gabriel’s excellent news-report at Mint Press on May 18th, providing background to the present purges and censorships:

The announcement, made last Thursday in a Facebook Newsroom post, explained that the social network’s security, policy and product teams will coordinate their work with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to analyze “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

DFRLab employees include pro-war media activist Eliot Higgins (of Bellingcat fame) and Ben Nimmo — a senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council, who earned infamy for his groundless accusations that actual Twitter users are Russian trolls.

Read more on Facebook

Continuing, Facebook global politics and government outreach director Katie Harbath explained:

“This will help increase the number of ‘eyes and ears’ we have working to spot potential abuse on our service — enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.”

“We know that tackling these problems effectively also requires the right policies and regulatory structures, so that governments and companies can help prevent abuse while also ensuring that people have a voice during elections. The Atlantic Council’s network of leaders is uniquely situated to help all of us think through the challenges we will face in the near- and long-term.”

“The think-tank’s Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions will also be tapped by the social network during elections and “other highly sensitive moments” to allow Facebook the ability to zero in on key locales and monitor alleged misinformation and foreign interference.”

Who is the Atlantic Council?

Hillary Clinton at the 2013 Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards (Photo: Atlantic Council)

The Atlantic Council was recently in the news for receiving a donation of $900,000 from the U.S. State Department for a “Peace Process Support Network” program to “promote non-violent conflict resolution” in support of Venezuela’s scattered opposition, with which the council enjoys very close ties. The council also advocates the arming of extremist militants in Syria (a “National Stabilization Force”) and a hard-line policy toward Russia.

Established in 1961 by former U.S. Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter, the Atlantic Council of the United States was originally conceived as a means to drum up support for the Cold War-era NATO alliance, which had formed in 1949 as the basis of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture during the post-WWII competition with the Soviet Union. Dozens of similar Atlantic Councils were eventually established throughout the NATO and Partnership for Peace states.

The council is a part of the Atlantic Treaty Association, a NATO offshoot that claims to unite “political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats in an effort to further the values set forth in the North Atlantic Treaty, namely: democracy, freedom, liberty, peace, security, and the rule of law.”

In general, groups such as the Atlantic Council are meant to secure the legitimacy of U.S. policies and neoliberal economics in the eyes of world audiences and academia, whether they live in the “advanced democracies” (the imperialist center) or “developing democracies” (the post-colonial and economically exploited nations).

Mint Press — a real news-operation, instead of the fake-news operations that are being boosted by Facebook, Twitter, and Google — apparently hasn’t yet been removed by Facebook, but the permanent-war-economy is only just starting to lower the boom. And, who knows what’s next, in American ‘democracy’, now?

The way to boycott Facebook, Twitter, and Google, is to NOT respond to their ads, but instead to blacklist their advertisers and all media that rely upon those giant social-media sites. There are competitors, and those need to be aggressively favored by anyone who doesn’t want to be mentally strangulated by these three giant corporations.

These media-giants want to strangle the public; so, the public needs to strangle them first.

Is the Purge of Independent Media a Coordinated Attack by the Military Industrial Complex?

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By Derrick Broze

Source: Activist Post

Victims of Facebook’s most recent purge should not forget the connections between the social media giant and the Western Military-Industrial Complex.

On Thursday, Facebook announced they were unpublishing, or purging, over 500 pages and 200 accounts who are accused of spreading political spam. Several of these pages and writers were also removed from Twitter on the same day.

“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook stated in a blog post. Facebook states that the people behind this alleged spam “create networks of Pages using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names” and “post the same clickbait posts in dozens of Facebook Groups.”

Essentially, Facebook is accusing these pages of writing articles related to politics and then using the social media platform to…. post the articles in as many places as possible to reach as many people as possible. Hardly dangerous or scary stuff. However, these actions are in violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. Facebook also accused the pages and accounts of using their fake accounts to generate fake likes and shares which may artificially inflate their reach and mislead people about their popularity. According to Facebook, “This activity goes against what people expect on Facebook, and it violates our policies against spam.”

Facebook also stated that “sensational political content” from across the political spectrum is being used to “build an audience and drive traffic to their websites, earning money for every visitor to the site.” Again, this does not qualify as dangerous or threatening activity. This is a standard practice for most media outlets who are trying to earn revenue to pay writers, editors, social media managers, etc. It is true that some of the pages on this list (see below for a current list) have indeed used clickbait headlines or even posts that are likely untrue. However, the list also includes legitimate independent news outlets such as The Anti-Media, The Free Thought Project, Cop Block, and Police the Police, which focused on countering mainstream and establishment narratives related to politics and police.

Facebook’s statement that the pages and accounts were “often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate” begs the question – which pages and accounts are “legitimate political debate”? and by which metric does Facebook decide what counts as legitimate? These questions are yet to be answered. Perhaps with time Facebook will come clean about their process, but in the meantime it’s important to reflect on Facebook’s recent partnership with the Atlantic Council and attempts to stifle the flow of information in the name of fighting “fake news.”

The fight against Fake News started immediately following the election of Donald Trump. In November 2016, Merrimack College associate professor Melissa Zimdars posted a public Google document titled, “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’ Sources” which went viral after being reported on by most corporate mainstream outlets. This list lumped in some of the same outlets which fell victim to Facebook’s most recent purge with actual fake news websites which are well known among the indy and alt media industry. Within a matter of weeks, a new list appeared online from an organization calling itself PropOrNot, an allegedly independent group of researchers trying to find the truth about the dissemination of Russian propaganda and fake news. This list also contained names of prominent independent media outlets like The Anti-Media, The Corbett Report, MintPress News, and many others.

It was this combination of the Zimdars list and the PropOrNot list which had the immediate effect of placing a target on the vast majority of independent journalists and outlets who were now being accused of directly or indirectly conspiring with the Russians. Websites and social media pages for these outlets began suffering a drastic reduction in reach and interaction with their audiences and many websites lost access to Google advertising money due to these false associations.

The problem is that the majority of the mainstream media unquestionably reported on and repeated the claims made by these two lists without any attempt at investigative work. For example, PropOrNot claims they are “completely independent” and “nonpartisan” because they are not funded by anyone and have no formal institutional affiliations or political connections. They say the must remain anonymous for now because they are a “are civilian Davids taking on a state-backed adversary Goliath.” However, a report by Russian news outlet Sputnik (yes, I am aware many readers will automatically scream, “Fake news!”, but I encourage you to read on.) challenges the alleged unbiased nature of PropOrNot.

Sputnik reports that George Eliason, a Ukraine-based investigative journalist, authored an exposé of PropOrNot in which he argued the organization was a “deep-state hitjob on alternative news outlets.”

“So when you’re looking at PropOrNot, it’s just basic investigative techniques. Who are they — that’s the first thing you need to know,” Eliason told Sputnik. “So you look them up on the web and you find nothing. I went to their website and did a basic scan, and the funny thing about PropOrNot is that to get into their website, you need to be logged into the dashboard of The Interpreter magazine.”

So who runs The Interpreter?

Eliason states that “The Interpreter is also overseen by the the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who run Voice of America and half a dozen other US propaganda projects across the globe.”

In addition, “The Interpreter is a product of the Atlantic Council committee, who is basically setting our foreign policy right now in Eastern Europe and Russia,” Eliason stated. “They’re an NGO, they work outside the government, and they work with the Ukrainian diaspora. They actually have a signed contract with the diaspora — you can view them signing it.”

The important takeaway from this report is that only 4 months later, in May 2018, Facebook announced a new partnership with the Atlantic Council –the same think tank tied to PropOrNot – which officially claims to provide a forum for international political, business, and intellectual leaders. Facebook said the partnership is aimed at preventing  the social media tool from “being abused during elections.” The press release promoted Facebook’s efforts to fight fake news by using artificial intelligence, as well as working with outside experts and governments.

The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 to bolster support for international relations. Although not officially connected to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Atlantic Council has spent decades promoting causes and issues which are beneficial to NATO member states. In addition, The Atlantic Council is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, an umbrella organization which “acts as a network facilitator in the Euro-Atlantic and beyond.” The ATA works similarly to the Atlantic Council, bringing together political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats to promote values that are favorable to the NATO member states. Officially, ATA is independent of NATO, but the line between the two is razor thin.

Essentially, the Atlantic Council is a think tank which can offer companies or nation states access to military officials, politicians, journalists, diplomats, etc. to help them develop a plan to implement their strategy or vision. These strategies often involve getting NATO governments or industry insiders to make decisions they might not have made without a visit from the Atlantic Council team. This allows individuals or nations to push forth their ideas under the cover of hiring what appears to be a public relations agency but is actually selling access to high-profile individuals with power to affect public policy. Indeed, everyone from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to the family of international agent of disorder Zbigniew Brzezinski have spoken at or attended council events.

The list of financial supporters reads like a who’s-who of think tanks and Non-Governmental Organizations. The Atlantic Council receives funding from the Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment, Cato Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rand Corporation, to name a few. In addition, various members of the Military-Industrial Complex are benefactors of the Atlantic Council, including Huntington Ingalls, the United States’ sole maker of aircraft carriers; Airbus, the plane manufacturer; Lockheed Martin, the shipbuilder and aviation company; and Raytheon, which makes missile systems. All of the companies have contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and offer financial support to the Atlantic Council. The Council also receives support from Chevron and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Finally, the Atlantic Council receives direct financial support from the U.S. Departments of the Air Force, Army, Navy and Energy and from the U.S. Mission to NATO.

Is it possible Facebook is acting under the direction of their partners at the Atlantic Council to suppress anti-war, anti-establishment voices three weeks before the U.S. midterm elections? It is absolutely possible and likely.

We should also remember this is not the first time Facebook has deleted accounts which operate outside the mainstream corporate media. In August, Facebook deleted accounts containing “fringe or holistic medicine,” including Just Natural Medicine (1 million followers), Natural Cures Not Medicine (2.3 million followers), and People’s Awakening (3.6 million followers). The same month Facebook and Twitter deleted pages they claimed were connected to Iran and Russia.

This entire ongoing attack of independent media and free thought stemmed from the establishment media’s nonstop coverage of what has become known as Fake News. Anyone and everyone who has countered the establishment narrative of endless war, a growing surveillance and police state, and an allegedly growing divide in American politics, has been labeled a Russian bot, accomplice, or useful idiot. One way or another, the message is clear: stand against the establishment and you will be labeled an enemy of the State.

By spreading the Fake News meme, the elitists behind the American power centers are able to attack  growing independent media icons by painting them as propagators of false Russian propaganda. The media is also using this Fake News meme and Russian prop to accuse Trump of being an illegitimate president, further playing into the “Trump is an outsider” narrative. All of this is being done with the goal of keeping the domestic front as divided as possible while selling the brainwashed masses into another war. Coincidentally, all of this nonsense is taking place while the corporate media spreads lies about Syria and Russia.

It’s more important than ever to remain level headed and use critical thinking. It’s never been more important to follow the pages that were purged directly from their websites. See the full list below and decide which outlets you want to continue to support in the information war.

List of websites taken down on Thursday October 11, 2018:

The Free Thought Project – 3.1 million fans
The Anti-Media – 2.1 million fans
Police the Police – 1.9 million fans
Cop Block – 1.7 million fans
Filming Cops – 1.4 million fans
Rachel Blevins – 69,000 fans
V is For Voluntary – 160,000 fans
End the War on Drugs – 460,000 fans
Mass Report – 500,000 fans
Get Involved, You Live Here – 360,000 fans
Press for Truth – 350,000 fans
Political Junkie News Media – 300,000 fans
Murica Today – 180,000 fans
Choice & Truth – 2.9 million fans
You won’t see this on TV – 172,000 fans
Modern Slavery Hilarious Vines – 129,000 fans
Fuck the Government – 168,000 fans
Punk Rock Libertarians – 190,000 fans
Reverb Press – 700,000 fans
Nation In Distress – 3.2 million fans
Right Wing News –
Reasonable People United –
Psychologic Anarchist –
Policing the Police
Cop Logic
Legalizing Cannabis
Free Your Mind Conference – 75000
Hemp
End the Drug War
Anonymous News

Social Media Censorship Intensifies

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

Both the Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media lost their social media accounts in a coordinated attack today by Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook alone removed 559 pages and 251 accounts.

Facebook has unpublished our page

After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back. pic.twitter.com/H3AmHTT8Qo

— Free Thought Project (@TFTPROJECT) October 11, 2018

Dan Dicks is another victim.

“The Press For Truth FaceBook Page with 350k followers has just been memory holed form the internet! 350k followers gone in the blink of an eye as we are right before our eyes witnessing the results of what happens when these big tech companies appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of political thought and opinion,” a headline story at Press For Truth reports today.

The midterm election is being used as an excuse to purge social media accounts and thus reduce traffic to websites on the target list.

First it was alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who had their accounts pulled for behavior that is an every day occurrence by others on social media.

Then Alex Jones was taken down. This was a landmark event that served notice on other websites diverging from the establishment narrative and spreading dangerous “alternative facts.”

Now the effort has moved on the the next level of targets, those with moderate to high social media traffic and successful websites with growing viewership. Not millions like Jones, but a couple hundred thousand all the way down to tens of thousands.

Numbers are way down for sites banished from the corporate social media kingdom. Traffic is drying up and thus support.

This is precisely what the establishment and its political class have in mind. It has nothing to do with “inauthentic” content as they claim. It is a concerted effort to wipe out for good entire segments of the alternative media.

If Democrats take control of Congress next month, watch out. They will make it impossible for another Donald Trump to get elected with the help of social media.

They leveraged the patently absurd and widely discredited Russian influence scam. The accusation Trump somehow colluded with the Russians has been used to tarnish his supporters, conservatives in general, and other groups not part of the establishment engineered political arrangement.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others are building an algorithmic filter. It will not permit entire segments of the population to weigh in on political issues during federal elections.

That model, most recently tested in Brazil, will be used. If successful in November, it will be further implemented after the election.

The European model (not based on constitutional liberties) will be adopted. This is a collectivist arrangement where certain groups are protected by the government while individual Germans and Swedes are singled out and prosecuted for criticizing the arrangement on social media.

Finally, I believe somewhere down the line many of us will barred access to the internet if were appear on a government list similar to the malfunctioning no-fly list. This will be easy to implement. Pass a law forbidding ISPs from selling service to Americans espousing political ideas considered racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, etc., by the government.

In the current political climate, it’s easy to fall into one of these categories. Others will be memory holed simply due to their political philosophy, most notably conservatives and libertarians, but also nonviolent radical leftists and progressives opposed to the military-industrial-surveillance complex and neoliberal globalism.

 

Pages purged by Facebook were on blacklist promoted by Washington Post

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By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

Media outlets removed by Facebook on Thursday, in a massive purge of 800 accounts and pages, had previously been targeted in a blacklist of oppositional sites promoted by the Washington Post in November 2016.

The organizations censored by Facebook included The Anti-Media, with 2.1 million followers, The Free Thought Project, with 3.1 million followers, and Counter Current News, with 500,000 followers. All three of these groups had been on the blacklist.

In November 2016, the Washington Post published a puff-piece on a shadowy, and up to then largely unknown, organization called PropOrNot, which had compiled a list of organizations it claimed were part of a “sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign.”

The Post said the report “identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.”

The publication of the blacklist drew widespread media condemnation, including from journalists Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, forcing the Post to publish a partial retraction. The newspaper declared that it “does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”

While the individuals behind PropOrNot have not identified themselves, the Washington Post said the group was a “collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”

PropOrNot, which remains active on Twitter, publicly gloated about Facebook’s removal of the pages. “Russian propaganda is VERY VERY MAD about their various front outlets & fellow travellers getting suspended by @Facebook &/or @Twitter.” The tweet tagged The Anti Media and The Free Thought Project, and included a Russian flag emoji next to an emoji depicting feces.

PropOrNot did not attempt to reconcile its own narrative that the targeted organizations were front groups for the Kremlin with Facebook’s official claim that they operated independently of any government, but instead sought to “stir up political debate” for financial motives. This is because both accusations are hollow pretexts for political censorship.

In a separate post, Propornot added: “Well, look at that… @Facebook removed some of the most important gray/black Russian propaganda outlets from their platform! Bravo @Facebook – better late than never, so a BIG thank you for this.”

It added, ominously: “All of these [organizations] are cross platform & have websites, but one thing at a time.”

These comments by PropOrNot make clear where the US government’s censorship measures are going. While these organizations still “have websites,” the authorities are handling “one thing at a time.”

The clear implication is that censorship will not end with Google’s search platform or the removal of accounts by Facebook and Twitter. The ultimate aim is the total banning of oppositional news web sites.

The publication of the PropOrNot blacklist and its promotion by the Washington Post helped trigger a wave of censorship measures against oppositional news sites by the major technology companies, working at the instigation of the US intelligence agencies and leading politicians.

Last Year, the World Socialist Web Site reported that many of the sites, including Global Research, Counterpunch, Consortium News, WikiLeaks, and Truth-out saw their search traffic plunge after search giant Google implemented a change to its search ranking algorithm.

In the subsequent period, search traffic to these sites has fallen even further. Search traffic to Counterpunch has fallen by 39 percent, and Consortium News has fallen by 51 percent.

These developments confirm the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site in its open letter to Google alleging that it was censoring left-wing, anti-war and socialist websites.

“Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting,” the letter declared. “The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.”

On Tuesday, Google admitted that it and other technology companies had “gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation.” The document admitted that an aim of carrying out censorship was to “increase revenues” under conditions of growing government and commercial pressure.

The document acknowledged that such actions constitute a break with the “American tradition that prioritizes free speech for democracy.”