Category Archives: Technology

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.”

Anti-Defamation League, Facebook, Google & Youtube Appoint Themselves As Official Internet Censor

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By Richard Enos

Source: Collective Evolution

If you are reading this, that means that articles that speak against the activities of the Anti-Defamation League are not being automatically scrubbed from the internet.

Yet.

In a foreboding sign that the free expression of opinion on the internet is too much of a threat to the powerful elite of our society, the Anti-Defamation League is leading the charge in turning their own subjective opinions on ‘hate speech’ into the absolute rule of Internet law. As this Cnet article reports,

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, among others, are joining with the ADL to form a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab, the companies and the civil rights group said Tuesday. They’ll exchange ideas and develop strategies to try to curb hate speech and abuse on the companies’ various platforms and across the internet.

“These companies have an added responsibility to do everything within their power to stop hate from flourishing on their watch,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “We look forward to tackling this pressing challenge together.”

Wow. A Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab. What heroes of selfless service to humanity.

Like Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy, who said in a statement that “some of the best minds in engineering will work alongside the ADL to help us rise to the occasion.” What occasion? The threat of the power that the proliferation of free speech on the internet is giving to individual human beings fighting for truth and justice.

Who Died And Made Them King?

It is disconcerting to me that we are moving into a time where a once free and neutral internet has suddenly come more and more under the control of powerful dictatorial forces. Yes, dictatorial. The ADL is marching into the internet cyberscape with the sense of entitlement to DICTATE what should and shouldn’t be said by the rest of us. Doesn’t this mimic that actions of a certain dictator from the past that the ADL would claim to have been zealously opposed to? (I won’t name names for fear of triggering some sophisticated ADL-Google-keyword-cyber-censoring mechanism).

The obvious fact is that the cabal of organizations that will be sitting down at the Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab will likely make little mention of the impact of cyber-bullying and online hate speech on human individuals. They will be more prone to focus on how to continue hiding crimes against humanity perpetrated by the global elite since time immemorial, crimes like massive fraud, slavery, pedophilia, torture, and murder. And why would these organizations be motivated to hide these crimes? Because they are now controlled by the very global elite who are perpetrating them in the first place.

The War On Hate

The whole narrative of a group that self-identifies as having the authority ‘to curb hate speech and abuse’ on the internet is deeply flawed and even hypocritical. And employing tactics in the same mold as the failed wars on drugs, cancer, and terrorism further gives them away. These are nothing more than tactics of obfuscation of what is really going on.

Human growth is not advanced by attempts to stifle, destroy, or eradicate darkness. As I discussed in my article ‘Let’s Discard The ‘Right’ To Be Insulted By Free Speech,’ we do not evolve by stopping people from expressing any hatred or other negative emotions that are deep inside them, we evolve by allowing people to express themselves freely and becoming immune to their ‘offensive’ remarks by learning not to take them personally.

Hate speech in itself cannot demean the object of hatred, it only reveals the unhealed emotions of its source. And the more we allow these unhealed emotions a chance to be let out, the more space we create for personal and collective healing.

In that regard, attempts to actually do something positive about human hatred through censorship is at best naive, and in most cases like this one, it turns out to be a vehicle of domination for those who would wish to maintain and expand control over information and the self-expression of individuals.

The Need To Move Off These Platforms

The ADL aside, internet corporations like Facebook that continue to delve more deeply into censorship are playing a bit of a risky game. Perhaps many of them feel that they are ‘too big to fail,’ in the sense that they believe they are too essential to the lives of most people to suddenly get abandoned en masse. Perhaps, for now, that is true. But I’m not sure that they should really be messing with an Awakening Community that is growing larger by the heartbeat.

Wealth of 400 richest Americans hits record $2.9 trillion

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These six men own as much wealth as half the world’s population

By Alec Anderson

Source: WSWS.org

On Wednesday, the US finance magazine Forbes released its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans, revealing an immense increase in wealth among the top social stratum in the United States.

The total net worth of the 400 people included on the list hit a record $2.9 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion last year. The most heavily represented sector was finance, from which 88 people on the list, including bank executives, hedge fund managers and investors, drew their wealth.

The next highest proportion comes from technology giants such as Google and Facebook. The CEO of Twitter and payments firm Square, Jack Dorsey, registered the greatest percentage growth in wealth from the previous year, an increase of 186 percent to $6.3 billion. This was due in large part to a jump in Square’s stock price.

The threshold necessary for inclusion on the list rose to $2.2 billion in 2018, up $100 billion from last year’s threshold. Fully one-third of billionaires in the United States, a record 204 individuals, failed to make this year’s Forbes 400 list.

The average net worth of billionaires on the list rose to $7.2 billion, an increase of a half-billion over last year’s average of $6.7 billion.

As Forbes notes, the vast increase in wealth among the very richest Americans is largely thanks to a continuing surge in US stock indexes. They have reached new record highs in part due to unprecedented levels of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which are parasitic diversions of wealth away from productive investment in areas that produce decent-paying jobs and to the detriment of pursuits such as research and development. The billionaires on the Forbes 400 list have also benefited immensely from the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy signed into law in December 2017.

Topping the list is Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, whose $160 billion is $63 billion more than the second-wealthiest person on the list, Bill Gates, and a full $78.5 billion more than last year. Bezos has made his fortune through the super-exploitation of warehouse workers around the world, enabling Amazon to move its products faster and at cheaper prices than its retail competitors.

The staggering increase in Bezos’s wealth over the past year has been due to the more than 100 percent increase in Amazon’s stock price. The $2,950 Jeff Bezos has earned per second in 2018 is more than the $2,796 a fulfillment center worker in India makes in an entire year.

Ironically, the Forbes report was published the same day that the press was full of praise for Bezos’s supposed generosity and humanitarian concern for his workers, occasioned by the announcement that he was raising the minimum wage of his US-based employees to the poverty-level wage of $15 an hour.

If the $160 billion fortune Bezos holds were divided among Amazon’s global workforce of 500,000, each worker would receive $320,000.

Coming in second on the list with a net worth of $97 billion is Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who had topped the Forbes list since 1994. The top 10 wealthiest people on the list alone have a total net worth of $730 billion, up from $610 billion in 2018.

However, just the top 45 individuals out of the 400 on the list accounted for fully half of the total wealth, or $1.45 trillion. That amounts to an average fortune of more than $32 billion each, which is more than the estimated $30 billion required to end world hunger, according to a United Nations estimate.

The Forbes report illustrates that the barrier to resolving societal ills, such as poverty, hunger and disease, is the siphoning off and hoarding of a growing proportion of society’s resources by the wealthiest segment of society.

The $2.9 trillion in the hands of these 400 richest people in the United States is roughly three-quarters of the total federal budget. It represents nearly three times the 2018 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, which was slashed from over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion budget for the Department of Education in 2018.

Rather than addressing these issues, the Democratic Party’s midterm election campaign has instead been centered on a right-wing effort to channel opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump behind a #MeToo-style hysteria over alleged sexual abuse. This is accompanied by the ongoing campaign to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin and brand Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin.

The timing of the release of the Forbes list is significant, coming as it does on the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the $700 billion bank bailout that set the stage for the trillions that were essentially stolen from the working class to rescue the financial oligarchy and make it richer than ever. The result of the decade-long plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in the new Forbes 400 list.

Facebook’s New Propaganda Partners

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By Alan Mcleod

Source: FAIR

Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18).

In a previous FAIR article (8/22/18), I noted that the “fake news” issue was being used as a pretext to attack the left and progressive news sites. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm have reduced traffic significantly for progressive outlets like Common Dreams (5/3/18), while the pages of Venezuelan government–backed TeleSur English and the independent Venezuelanalysis were shut down without warning, and only reinstated after a public outcry.

The Washington, DC–based NDI and IRI are staffed with senior Democratic and Republican politicians; the NDI is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while the late Sen. John McCain was the longtime IRI chair. Both groups were created in 1983 as arms of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Cold War enterprise backed by then–CIA director William Casey (Jacobin, 3/7/18). That these two US government creations, along with a NATO offshoot like the Atlantic Council, are used by Facebook to distinguish real from fake news is effectively state censorship.

Facebook’s collaboration with the NED organizations is particularly troubling, as both have aggressively pursued regime change against leftist governments overseas. The NDI undermined the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, and continues to do so to this day, while the IRI claimed a key role in the 2002 coup against leftist President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, announcing that it had

served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…. We stand ready to continue our partnership with the courageous Venezuelan people.

The Reuters report (9/19/18) mentioned that Facebook was anxious to better curate what Brazilians saw on their feeds in the run-up to their presidential elections, which pits far-right Jair Bolsonaro against leftist Fernando Haddad. The US government has a long history of undermining democracy in Brazil, from supporting a coup in 1964 against the progressive Goulart administration to continually spying on leftist President Dilma Rousseff (BBC, 7/4/15) in the run-up to the parliamentary coup against her in 2016 (CounterSpin, 6/2/17).

Soon after it partnered with the Atlantic Council, Facebook moved to delete accounts and pages connected with Iranian broadcasting channels (CNBC, 8/23/18), while The Intercept (12/30/17) reported that in 2017 the social media platform met with Israeli government officials to discuss which Palestinian voices it should censor. Ninety-five percent of Israeli government requests for deletion were granted. Thus the US government and its allies are effectively using the platform to silence dissenting opinion, both at home and on the world stage, controlling what Facebook‘s 2 billion users see and do not see.

Progressives should be deeply skeptical that these moves have anything to do with their stated objective of promoting democracy. Bloomberg Businessweek (9/29/17) reported that the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party went to Facebook headquarters for discussions with US companies about how it could use the platform for recruitment and micro-targeting in the 2017 elections. AfD tripled its previous vote share, becoming the third-largest party in Germany, the far right’s best showing since World War II.

Public trust in government is at 18 percent—an all-time low (Pew, 12/14/17). There is similar mistrust of Facebook, with only 20 percent of Americans agreeing social media sites do a good job separating fact from fiction. And yet, worldwide, Facebook is a crucial news source. Fifty-two percent of Brazilians, 61 percent of Mexicans, and 51 percent of Italians and Turks use the platform for news; 39 percent of the US gets their news from the site.

This means that, despite the fact that even its own public mistrusts it, the US government has effectively become the arbiter of what the world sees and hears, with the ability to marginalize or simply delete news from organizations or countries that do not share its opinions. This power could be used at sensitive times, like elections. This is not an idle threat. The US created an entire fake social network for Cubans that aimed to stir unrest and overthrow the Cuban government, according to the Guardian (4/3/14).

That a single corporation has such a monopoly over the flow of worldwide news is already problematic, but the increasing meshing of corporate and US government control over the means of communication is particularly worrying. All those who believe in free and open exchange of information should oppose Facebook becoming a tool of US foreign policy.

Amazon and Apple: Wall Street’s Trillion Dollar Babies

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By Dean Baker

Source: CounterPunch

Last month Amazon joined Apple, becoming the second company in the world to have a $1 trillion market capitalization. Amazon’s accomplishment didn’t cause quite as much celebration as Apple’s – it pays to be number one – nonetheless this was treated as a milestone that all of us should view as good news.

Actually, the celebratory coverage of both events demonstrated the incredibly ill-informed nature of much economic reporting in the United States. A big run-up in share prices is good news for the people who own lots of stock in the company; it is not especially good news for anyone else.

In principle, the value of a stock is supposed to represent the expected future earnings of the company. I said “supposed” because stock prices fluctuate wildly in response to all sorts of things that are not obviously connected to future earnings, but in the textbook definition, it is the discounted value of future earnings that determine stock prices. To be clear, this is not the socialist textbook, this is the capitalist textbook that is taught in business schools.

What does it mean that Amazon and Apple have market valuations of more $1 trillion? Presumably, it means that investors are now more optimistic about the companies’ future profit potential. It’s difficult to see why the rest of us should celebrate this outcome.

Apple obviously makes products that consumers value, and in that sense, it is contributing to the economy and generating wealth. But, suppose instead of one huge company we had 10 little (or littler) Apples that sold iPhones, computers, and the other items that comprise Apple’s product line? Would we be any poorer as a society in that case, even if the market cap of our leading tech company was just $100 billion?

Or, even with Apple as our dominant tech company, suppose the surge over the $1 trillion barrier was due to a victory in an antitrust case, which would allow Apple to charge higher prices going forward. That’s great for Apple’s stockholders, but what exactly would the rest of us be celebrating? Paying more money for our iPhones?

In the same vein, in the past, Apple has been caught conspiring with other Silicon Valley companies, agreeing not to compete for workers. Apple, along with its co-conspirators, ended up paying a substantial settlement as a result.

Suppose Apple found a legal way to fix wages or bought a judge to make it legal. The prospect of a lower wage bill would also be good for Apple’s stock price, but not especially good news for those of us who are more likely to make our living from working than owning Apple stock. Again, there is not much in this story for most of us to celebrate.

The celebration for Amazon is even more peculiar. Amazon is clearly an innovative company that has sped the development of Internet retailing. It also has specialized in tax avoidance, eliciting investment incentives from state and local governments, and abusive labor practices.

Perhaps the crossing of the $1 trillion threshold was associated with investors’ confidence that Amazon’s CEO had developed a new and more effective tax avoidance scheme. Again, great news for Amazon stockholders, but pretty bad news for the folks who will have to make up the revenue shortfall.

What is notably different about Amazon is that, unlike Apple, the company does not have huge profits. While Apple earned $48.4 billion in after-tax profits in 2017, Amazon’s profit was just over $3 billion. That gives the company an incredible price-to-earnings ratio of more than 300-to-1.

There are two stories we can tell here. One is that investors expect Amazon’s profits to increase enormously. This would be a case where it takes advantage of its market power to increase its profit margins hugely. Ordinarily, this would be the basis for antitrust action, but given the corruption of the political system, it is certainly possible the company could get away with it. Again, is a future of higher prices something the rest of us should really be celebrating?

The other possibility is that Amazon’s stock price is driven by fantasy, like the Internet stocks of the late 1990s or Bitcoin today. Presumably, at some point reality will reassert itself, but should the rest of us celebrate ill-informed investors being taken for ride?

It is striking that so many would see economic or social progress as being in some way captured by stock valuations. In 1953 Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine. This eventually led to the near eradication of a disease that had killed or crippled tens of millions of people.

Salk didn’t try to patent his invention. A private charity funded the research. But, what if there had been a Salk Inc. that had the patent on a vaccine that could save tens of millions of lives? Surely the market cap would be an order of magnitude larger than either Apple’s or Amazon’s. Was it a loss to society that the vaccine was made available for pennies rather than tens of thousands of dollars a shot?

If we want to talk about value to society, the anti-smoking crusaders of the last four decades have saved tens of thousands of lives and improved the health of millions more by reducing smoking in the United States and around the world. The people who led this fight, most of whom were women, won’t be featured on the covers of business magazines, but they did much more to enhance society’s wealth than Jeff Bezos.

Anyhow, congratulations to Apple and Amazon’s stockholders on their stock gains. They have been fortunate. The rest of us, not so much.

ThinkProgress Censored By Facebook After Cheerleading Facebook Censorship

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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

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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

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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.