Tag Archives: Ben Nimmo

The Facebook Team that Tried to Swing Nicaragua’s Election is Full of U.S. Spies

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A tacit agreement between the government and Facebook appears to have been made: you can keep the profits, but we control the message. As such, a cynic might wonder what functional difference there is between Facebook and the national security state.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA — Less than a week before Nicaragua’s presidential election, social media giant Facebook deleted the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom supported the ruling left-wing Sandinista government, a top Washington target for regime change.

Facebook claims that these accounts were bots engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” Considering that around half of the country uses the platform for news and entertainment, the decision could barely have been more heavy-handed and intrusive. However, early reports show that if their goal was to swing the result, it has failed badly and the Sandinistas have achieved an overwhelming victory.

“This is appalling interference by Facebook in particular (which is the most popular social media outlet in Nicaragua). They allege that they’ve stopped a government-deployed troll farm but what they have actually done is to close accounts of ordinary Sandinista activists, particularly young people, often with many followers,” John Perry, a journalist living in the city of Masaya, told MintPress.

Worse still, after dozens of Sandinistas took to Twitter to record video messages proving they were real people being censored, their accounts were systematically deleted as well, in what Managua-based journalist Ben Norton described as a Silicon Valley “double-tap strike.”

“These are accounts that average Nicaraguans have come to count on for news and communicating with each other about current events and, in this case, about the election. So it is very troubling that it was obviously targeted against one political group: the Sandinistas,” said Daniel Kovalik, a human-rights lawyer and an observer of this weekend’s elections.

Both Perry and Kovalik were of the opinion that it was no coincidence that Facebook had taken action against precisely the group the U.S. government is trying to overthrow.

Facebook as security-state beard

Perhaps even more worrying from a freedom-of-speech viewpoint is who made the decision at Facebook. The 11-page report detailing the company’s supposed evidence of inauthentic behavior has just two contributors: Luis Fernando Alonso and Ben Nimmo, individuals with deep and long-lasting ties to Western military intelligence. According to his biography on LinkedIn, Alonso was, until last year, working for Booz Allen Hamilton, a shadowy corporation situated in the area around Washington, D.C. colloquially known as “Raytheon Acres.” The national security state farms out much of its most controversial work to the firm, which is technically a private company (and therefore not subject to the same oversight and scrutiny as public agencies). Edward Snowden, for instance, actually worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, not the NSA. Before that, Alonso directly worked for the government at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a Department of Defense-controlled institution that trains top military and intelligence leaders.

Nimmo’s background is equally spooky. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. The Institute for Statecraft established a secret network of journalists across Europe who were used to push anti-Russia and pro-establishment talking points, all in coordination.

In 2019, Nimmo played a key role in downplaying the bombshell news that the Conservative government was quietly negotiating to sell off key parts of Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) to foreign plutocrats. When the Labour Party publicized this information just days before the election, Nimmo jumped into action, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents in question “closely resemble … a known Russian operation.” His supposedly expert conjecture — together with help from allied journalists in the Integrity Initiative — allowed the story to become “Labour’s links to Russia” rather than “Tories privatizing the NHS in secret,” helping the Conservatives make huge electoral gains.

Nimmo also became a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank.

Facebook — now officially called “Meta” — is extremely secretive about who actually works at their intelligence department. Nowhere can one find a list of names of key figures. However, going back through months of reports and blog posts for names reveals a veritable revolving door between big tech and big government. In short, Facebook is strewn with spies.

For example, a document published in May, entitled “The State of Influence Operations, 2017-2020,” lists five author names in addition to Nimmo’s, at least four of whom have long histories as senior agents in the national security state.

In order, they are:

  • Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy: Gleicher spent two and a half years at the White House as the National Security Council’s Director of Cyber Security Policy. Before that he also spent five years at the Department of Justice.
  • David Agranovich, Head of Security Communications: Agranovich worked for more than six years in a senior role at the Department of Defense, before, in 2017, moving on to become the Director for Intelligence for the National Security Council at the White House.
  • Olga Belogolova, Influence Operations Product Policy Manager: The most academic of the authors, Belogolova teaches cybersecurity and influence operations to students at Georgetown University, an institution notorious as America’s spy school. Before that, she worked at the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and on Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian policy at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She has also served on several working groups at government- and military-funded think tanks like The Center for New American Security, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, and The Atlantic Council.
  • Mike Torrey, Threat Intelligence Analyst: From 2010 until 2018, Torrey was a high-level CIA agent, specializing in cyberwarfare against China. Before that, he worked as a global network intelligence analyst for the NSA.

Of the six authors listed, only one, Margarita Franklin, comes from a non-governmental background.

Looking further into Facebook’s official blog, Mike Dvilyanski is described as the company’s Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations. From 2005 until 2018, Dvilyanski was an FBI agent in Washington and New York City, rising to the rank of Supervisory Special Agent, leading teams investigating cyberwafare.

Another official Facebook report from April was authored by the company’s Technical Threat Investigator, Michael Flossman, who spent nearly six years in the Australian Department of Defense.

In 2018, Facebook announced a partnership with The Atlantic Council, whereby it gave an undisclosed amount of control over users’ news feeds to the group, allowing it to help them decide what posts users saw and which ones were suppressed. Given that the council’s board features a plethora of military generals, former cabinet members, and no fewer than seven former CIA directors, this is tantamount to state censorship on a global level. A tacit agreement between the government and Facebook appears to have been made: you can keep the profits, but we control the message. As such, a cynic might wonder what functional difference there is between Facebook and the national security state.

Silicon Valley: tip of US imperial spear

It might be unfair, however, to single Facebook out. Other large platforms are similarly stocked with government plants. Reddit’s Director of Policy, for instance, was formerly a Deputy Director of The Atlantic Council’s Middle East Task Force. Meanwhile, a senior Twitter executive is also an active duty officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare and online propaganda brigade.

Silicon Valley has not only made their peace with this relationship; they actively court it. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book, “The New Digital Age,” laying out how they saw Silicon Valley becoming the tip of the American empire’s spear.

Washington has already used social media as a weapon aimed at its enemies. In July, Americans in Miami used Facebook to organize an attempted color revolution in Cuba, while Twitter ignored blatantly obvious bots boosting the anti-government message, even choosing to put it at the top of its “what’s happening” sidebar for 36 hours, meaning every user in the world was alerted to the news. Individuals inside Cuba complained to MintPress that the endless supply of fake news citizens receive from the U.S. via Facebook and WhatsApp is spreading disinformation and rotting Cubans’ brains.

Meanwhile, in 2009, the U.S. government persuaded Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance of its app because of widespread protests it was fomenting in Iran, knowing the platform was being used to coordinate anti-government forces. Last year, Facebook banned all positive references to Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in the wake of his assassination by the Trump administration. “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its leadership,” the company said in a statement. Despite the fact that over 80% of the country held positive views towards the general (even before his killing), this meant that even Iranians speaking Farsi with other Iranians online in Iran could not share an overwhelmingly held view. This is but one example of the extraordinary power the U.S. national security state now holds over the means of communication worldwide.

Ineffective interference

The United States has a long history of interfering in Nicaragua, from invasions to propping up the 40-year Somoza family dictatorship. When Sandinista rebels ran them out of town in 1979, Washington began a long campaign of terror against the Sandinistas, including funding, training and arming the infamous Contra death squads. After more than a decade of interference, U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro won the 1990 election. However, after Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas returned to power in 2006, the U.S. once again began trying to undermine their rule through sanctions and by supporting a 2018 coup attempt. Washington has also unleashed an army of NGOs into the country, each attempting to foment discontent with the ruling government.

In September, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met in New York with the foreign ministers of Mexico and every other Central American country in an attempt to organize a united front against Nicaragua. Last week, the U.S. also announced new sanctions on the country. Kovalik told MintPress:

This is clearly punishment for the fact that they’re going to vote [the wrong way]. And meanwhile, of course the U.S. is putting millions into the country in terms of supporting opposition groups and different propaganda sources. So that continues. Again, what passes for alleged foreign interference in the U.S. …. is nothing compared to what the U.S. is doing here.

Western journalists and election observers whose opinions the U.S. government would rather not be shared have also been targeted. British journalist Steve Sweeney was detained in Mexico en route to Nicaragua. “It is no coincidence that it came just weeks after my ban from the U.S. I fully believe my detention is political and an attack on press freedom,” he wrote, after being released. Meanwhile, Canadian observer Dr. Timothy Bood was barred from sharing his experiences on Facebook, the platform blocking him immediately after he made a comment about U.S. interference in the election.

Perry suggested, however, that if Washington thinks that sanctions sanctions or other new measures will dislodge the government and break the people’s will, they are mistaken, and that the plan could backfire:

We had the approval in the U.S. Congress of the RENACER Act a few days ago, which is another threat of U.S. interference during and after the election process. I think opinion polls show that most people reject U.S. interference very strongly. I think in most cases it will strengthen people’s desire to vote and probably to vote for the Sandinista government. So it could have the opposite effect to the one that the U.S. wants to achieve.

Judging by the jubilant Sandinista parades in Managua and other cities today, coupled with the announcement that Ortega won an estimated three-quarters of the vote on a 65% turnout rate, Perry might have been proved right.

Facebook hires ex-NATO press officer and social media censor Ben Nimmo as intel strategist

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By Alan Macleod

Source: The Grayzone

Ben Nimmo, a former NATO press officer and current senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, has announced Facebook has hired him to “lead global threat intelligence strategy against influence operations” and “emerging threats.” Nimmo specifically named Russia, Iran and China as potential dangers to the platform.

His announcement was greeted with joy by several NATO officials but was not met with such enthusiasm by others. “More censorship on the way as the former NATO press officer turned Pentagon-funded ‘researcher’ who labeled real people as Russian bots and peddled disinformation to link Jeremy Corbyn to Russian active measures moves to big tech,” responded investigative journalist Max Blumenthal.

Nimmo’s questionable past certainly raises questions over whether such an official having a substantial say in what 2.8 billion Facebook users worldwide see in their feeds is such a positive step for the free and open exchange of information.

“Disinformation agents”

For example, in 2019, U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn revealed secret Conservative Party documents showing negotiations the Tory government had with the U.S. over the privatization of the National Health Service (NHS). With just days to go before the U.K. general election, the scandal could have toppled the government and brought into power the most radical antiwar, anti-establishment government in the country’s history. Corporate media went into overdrive to spin the news, and Nimmo was a key part of this, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents “closely resemble…a known Russian operation.” His supposedly expert conjecture allowed the story to become “Corbyn’s links to Russia” rather than “Tories privatizing the NHS in secret.” Nimmo’s work helped the Conservatives to an election victory and consigned Corbyn to the scrapheap.

This was much to the relief of Nimmo’s Atlantic Council, who had branded Corbyn the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horse” — someone pushing Moscow’s agenda abroad. A British Army general was of a similar opinion, claiming that if Corbyn were to win the election, the military would respond. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also said that the U.S. government was “doing its best” to prevent a radical leftist from winning power in the U.K.

Nimmo has been extremely liberal with whom he labels Russian disinformation agents. In 2018, his research identified one Twitter user, @Ian56789, as a “Kremlin troll.” In reality, the user, Ian Shilling, was a British pensioner, as Sky News was easily able to confirm, interviewing him on air and asking him the patently absurd question if he was actually a Russian bot or not. Despite clearly being a flesh and blood human, Shilling’s account was later deleted anyway.

In the past, Nimmo has also insisted that Valentina Lisitsa was an influential Russian bot. In reality, she is an internationally known concert pianist, as one Google search would have shown. This sort of behavior does not augur well for those critical of Western foreign policy, who have faced constant harassment, suspension, or outright bans from social media.

https://twitter.com/ValLisitsa/status/978559232508416000

Pro-war putsch

The Atlantic Council began as an offshoot of NATO itself and maintains extremely close connections to the military alliance. It continues to receive major funding from Western governments and weapons contractors, and its board of directors is filled to the brim with former American foreign policy officials such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Henry Kissinger. Also appearing on the board are no fewer than seven former CIA directors and a number of top military generals, such as Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, Wesley Clark, and David Petraeus.

In recent years, the council’s employees have penetrated deep into big tech and social media organizations. In 2018, it announced it had partnered with Facebook to aid in the curation of Facebook news feeds of users worldwide, giving it considerable power over what sort of views to highlight and which to demote. One year previously, Jessica Ashooh left the position of the council’s Deputy Director of Middle Eastern Strategy to take the position of Director of Policy at Reddit, the eighth-most visited website in the United States. However, as with many intelligence agencies, it is unclear whether one truly “leaves” the Atlantic Council.

It is not just Russia that is in NATO’s crosshairs. Last week, the Atlantic Council published an anonymous, 26,000-word report stating that their goal for China was regime change and advising President Biden to draw a number of “red lines” around it, beyond which the U.S. would respond militarily. Meanwhile, the head of STRATCOM, Admiral Charles A. Richard, wrote that the U.S. must prepare for a potential nuclear war with Beijing.

Greater control

The military escalation has been mirrored by an intensifying online propaganda war, where the U.S. has attempted to isolate China economically and stop advancing Chinese technologies such as Huawei’s 5G network, mobile phone, and semiconductor manufacturer Xiaomi, and video sharing app TikTok. Nimmo has played his part in ramping up suspicions of nefarious Chinese activity online, claiming the existence of a wide-ranging pro-Beijing bot network encouraging Americans to believe that China has handled the COVID-19 pandemic far better than the United States. That Americans might have come to that conclusion on their own appears not to have been considered.

There is an enormous government effort to convince its population of the existence of (foreign) government efforts to manipulate their opinions online. In a massive case of projection, Western governmental organizations point the finger at their enemies, all the while securing greater access and control over the means of communication themselves, to the point where it is now difficult to distinguish where the deep state ends and the fourth estate begins. Nimmo’s move from NATO to NATO-aligned think tank to Facebook is just another example of this phenomenon. Perhaps the reason Nimmo is not looking for any Western influence operations online is that he is part of one.

How CNN Led Facebook To Censor Pages Of Russia-Backed Video Company And Manufactured News Story

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Disclosure: Kevin Gosztola co-hosts the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast with Rania Khalek, who is a contributor for Maffick Media’s Soapbox. “Unauthorized Disclosure” is entirely listener-funded. Shadowproof is member-supported and funded by reader donations.

By Kevin Gosztola

Source: Shadowproof

CNN went in search for a story about a Russian-funded digital media project that produces viral videos aimed at undermining American democracy. When CNN journalists could not find what they were looking for, they effectively manufactured the news by giving Facebook a pretext for removing the project’s pages used to share videos. Now, the cable news network had their story.

Four CNN journalists worked on the report, “Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials.” It appeared online late in the day on February 15 and broke the news that Maffick Media had their Facebook pages for three video channels suspended.

Maffick also produces In The Now, which Facebook took down as well.

Facebook never required pages to include information about their parent companies nor has the social media company ever labeled state-sponsored media, which CNN acknowledged. Yet, since the project involves funding from Russian state media, CNN believed Facebook may want to require the pages to disclose such details.

CNN contacted Facebook on February 13, and Facebook informed CNN they were “contemplating doing something about labeling state-funded media,” according to Donie O’Sullivan, a CNN reporter who worked on the story. The media organization held their story until Facebook took action.

Maffick produces three video channels—Backthen, which explores the history of Western imperialism, Waste-Ed, which covers environmental issues, including climate change, and Soapbox, which covers politics and current events.

As O’Sullivan said during an interview on CNN, “The content was pretty critical of the U.S government, of U.S mainstream media, but nothing that would be totally out of the ordinary necessarily.” Videos made a “lot of legitimate arguments,” and they “weren’t necessarily really hiding their Russian ties.”

“If you were to start Googling these pages, you could quickly work it back to see,” O’Sullivan added.

Journalist Rania Khalek, who produces videos for Soapbox, was interviewed by CNN, along with Maffick Media chief operating officer J. Ray Sparks. The interview took place in Berlin on February 11. However, CNN did not initially contact them.

“CNN was contacting peripheral employees, some of the people in the U.S., one of the camera people that I worked with. They contacted her,” Khalek shared. “And they actually lied to [this person] and told her they had already spoken to me, when they had not.”

According to Khalek, CNN seemed to be interested in whether any Maffick employees were difficult to work with, whether employees or contractors were paid decently, and whether they were leery of the stories they were asked to cover.

J. Ray Sparks contacted CNN to inform them that they were aware the news network was attempting to dig up dirt. Maffick made CEO Anissa Naouai, Khalek, and Sparks available to CNN in the interest of transparency, even though it was clear journalists were looking for material for a hit piece on the project.

Shadowproof was provided with a copy of the unedited interview that CNN conducted with Khalek and Sparks.

More Like An Interrogation By Intelligence Agents Than An Interview

The interview was conducted by CNN correspondent Drew Griffin. In February 2018, Griffin went to the home of a woman in Florida, a private citizen who supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and insisted she was duped by Russia when she ran the “Team Trump Broward County” Facebook page.

The page’s events were reportedly promoted by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll farm operated out of St. Petersburg.

“I don’t go with Russians, c’mon, give me a break,” the woman insisted, while Griffin tried to take away her independence as a campaign supporter and shame her for something out of her control.

The questions asked by Griffin collectively amounted to an interrogation. He went out of his way not to engage with answers to his questions that conflicted with the story CNN was chasing.

Also, Griffin was fishing for very private details involving the business model of Maffick that would help CNN attack the project. Sparks provided answers, despite the fact that the questions were invasive, and the vast majority of U.S. news media outlets would probably refrain from sharing such information with the public.

CNN misquoted Sparks twice. In the print report, they said Sparks claimed it was “standard business practice” not to disclose who owned a Facebook page. That made it seem like Sparks was specifically referring to Maffick and that he was exhibiting a flippant attitude to the question of who funds Maffick. However, Sparks said “standard industry practice” and was making a general point about CNN holding Maffick to a standard most media organizations throughout the world do not follow.

Griffin asked why Maffick tells employees and contractors they are funded by the Russia government but not their audience. “There’s no mention of Russia or Ruptly on the Facebook pages. Why is that?”

“Because that’s standard industry practice,” Sparks replied. “We get this question a lot, and it’s a funny question to me because why does Great Big Story not put CNN on their Facebook page? Why does CNN not put Time Warner on their Facebook page? The audience is not interested in these things.”

Sparks added, “I worked for Comedy Central for many years. No one ever knew that Comedy Central was owned by MTV, and that MTV was owned by Viacom. These were things that you had to discover as a more esoteric audience within the industry. The general audience never is interested in these things, and the standard practice is to just simply not mention them because the audience is not interested.”

Whether Sparks is right or not is insignificant. CNN used a different word so it better suited their story.

[Note: CNN later issued a correction during the weekend after Shadowproof published this report:

“The original version of this article incorrectly quoted Sparks as saying it is ‘standard business practice’ for a media outlet not to disclose its ownership on its Facebook page. He actually referred to ‘standard industry practice’ and ‘standard practice.’”]

Baselessly Accused Of Boosting ‘Kremlin Narratives’

Although Khalek and Sparks detailed their editorial independence at Maffick extensively, Griffin remained incredulous at the reality that officials working at the Kremlin are not dictating what specific stories should be covered. CNN quoted Ben Nimmo, a “senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab,” to undermine their assertions.

“They routinely boost Kremlin narratives, especially those which portray the West negatively,” Nimmo stated.

He added Maffick’s pages are “broadly anti-U.S. and anti-corporate. That’s strikingly similar to RT’s output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.”

The Atlantic Council is a militaristic think tank that receives funding from the U.S. government. In particular, Nimmo holds himself out as some bot hunter, who is an expert at exposing “Kremlin influence networks.” Yet, as journalist Max Blumenthal highlighted in 2018, Nimmo misidentified “several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin ‘influence accounts.’ Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.”

Khalek told Griffin why her journalism challenges U.S. foreign policy and the power of U.S. corporations.

“I’m an American, right? My priority and my responsibility is to challenge destructive policies [of] the government that I pay tax dollars to. And that’s what I focus on in my videos,” Khalek declared. “I challenge war. I challenge corporate ownership of our government and of our political system. And this is one of the few places that I have where I can actually do that with complete editorial control.”

“Now, if CNN would like to give me a job to spend my time challenging the war industry and corporations, I’d be happy to do that. But that’s just not the case.”

“I have complete editorial control over my work on Soapbox,” Khalek said, prior this comment. “I get to tell the truth about war and corporations, which you don’t get to hear much about in corporate outlets, like CNN, where people oftentimes even get fired for being antiwar. You know, I’d ask, you where was Marc Lamont Hill’s editorial freedom when CNN fired him for telling the truth about Israeli occupation of Palestine?”

Griffin plowed forward as if he was oblivious to what happened to the former CNN contributor, and at no point did Griffin offer any examples, where specific Russian policies were mindlessly championed by Khalek or other Maffick contractors to boost the Kremlin.

Succumbing To Russophobia

It was the German Marshall Fund, which brought records on the ownership of Maffick to the attention of CNN. They also were the source CNN used to back up the notion that Facebook should require Maffick to disclose its ownership.

Bret Schafer, a social media analyst at the German Marshall Fund, said “that he believes most people who see content from the pages on Facebook have no idea it could be tied to Russia.”

“It should be clearly labeled,” he told CNN, “and when they don’t label them, they need to be called out on that.”

The German Marshall Fund receives funds from the U.S. government, and as it states on its website, the fund was founded in 1972 as “a non-partisan, nonprofit organization through a gift from Germany as a permanent memorial to Marshall Plan assistance.”

“GMF maintains a strong presence on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to its headquarters in Washington, D.C., GMF has offices in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Belgrade, Ankara, Bucharest, and Warsaw. GMF also has smaller representations in Bratislava, Turin, and Stockholm.”

The Marshall Plan was a foreign policy strategy adopted in 1947 to expand American dominance in the world. It aimed to expand access to European markets for U.S. businesses and fend off the rise of communism in countries like Italy and France.

One of the German Marshall Fund’s projects is the Alliance For Securing Democracy. It was far more strident in its assessment of Maffick than CNN.

The project’s advisory council includes Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Department chief, Bill Kristol, who was a board member of the Project for the New American Century, which pushed for the invasion of Iraq, Rick Ledgett, former NSA deputy director, Mike McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Mike Morell, former acting CIA director, John Podesta, former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Mike Rogers, former congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, James Stavridis, a former admiral who led European Command, and Jake Sullivan, former national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. (Journalist Glenn Greenwald further detailed the “marriage of convenience” between establishment Democrats and neoconservatives.)

It is the Alliance For Securing Democracy that developed Hamilton 68, a “tracker” it claimed could unearth Russian influence operations. But the individuals involved with Hamilton 68 have refused to share their methodology. They follow accounts “run by people around the world who amplify pro-Russian themes either knowingly or unknowingly,” which means any dissent deemed to be “anti-American” can draw their attention to hashtags worth tracking.

James Carden, a contributor for The Nation, wrote, “Projects like Hamilton 68 are the opposite of what one would expect in an open society like the United States: In essence, it seeks to police and narrow the scope of acceptable political discourse. The implicit message is that Americans should ignore unpleasant news so long as it comes from foreign outlets, regardless of the veracity of the story.”

“That the well-regarded German Marshall Fund has succumbed to the Russophobia now so in vogue across the political spectrum is cause for both sadness and concern,” Carden added.

“Completely In Line With What We’re Hearing From The Kremlin”

Twice Griffin pressed Khalek on her views. He maintained they are “completely in line with what we’re hearing from the Kremlin, especially on Venezuela.”

“Okay, do you have a specific criticism about what I said about Venezuela?” Khalek replied. “The U.S. right now under Trump—the president that CNN is very much against—is currently attempting to launch a right-wing coup in Venezuela and what I see from the mainstream press in the U.S., across the board, is support for that.”

“What I’m interested in is accurate reporting in Venezuela about what’s happening and what the U.S. is doing there,” Khalek continued. “And you know, that might align with this entity or that entity, but that’s not what I care about. What I care about is telling the truth. And I would like to know why CNN isn’t telling the truth about what’s happening in Venezuela.”

Khalek further outlined why this notion of “views aligning with the Kremlin” is dangerous.

Say I’m antiwar. Say that Trump right now is threatening a military intervention against Venezuela. If I oppose that, which the Russian government I think does—and so do other governments in the world. They also oppose it. But if I oppose U.S. war, does that automatically mean I’m going to be accused of being aligned with the Kremlin? And with this Russia hysteria that we’re experiencing now, I feel like this is a very, very dangerous McCarthyist tactic to start saying that leftist views, antiwar views are just the Kremlin government’s talking points.

Immediately following this statement from Khalek, Griffin said, “Business model folks and others who think there’s so much negative publicity surrounding a Russian label, especially in the world of journalistic freedom, that your company is probably purposely distancing itself from any kind of public or branding related to Russia.”

“Is that true? In terms of trying to grow this company and grow these channels, it would be wise that you did not have any kind of connection with Russia available to the public?”

Either Griffin has a lot of gall or is plainly ignorant. Khalek, Naouai, and Sparks granted unprecedented access to their work. Because it did not conform to widespread notions of state-funded media bandied about in Russia investigation coverage, Griffin and others at CNN discounted what was shared.

Griffin stuck to hyping the danger of Russian-funded media so CNN can keep profiting off the panic. So, it is stories like this one that drive media and journalists with ties to Russia underground and pushes them to engage in secrecy for their survival.

***

The key issue, which CNN deliberately avoids, is one that has been prevalent since 2014, when Abby Martin was an anchor for RT America and spoke out against Russian military aggression in Crimea. She went on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN and told Morgan that RT was no different than any other corporate media station in America.

“We’re talking about six corporations that control 90 percent of what Americans see, hear, and read, lead up to the Iraq War parroting exactly what the establishment said. I mean, you could reflect the exact same criticism on all the corporate media channels,” Martin contended.

As she put it, “RT toes a perspective of the Russian foreign policy just as the entire corporate media apparatus toes the perspective of the U.S. establishment.”

“Why do I have to work for RT to tell the truth about corporations and the U.S. government?” Martin asked. “I mean, seriously, you guys are beholden to advertisers that you cannot criticize.” That is why Martin was working for RT, not CNN.

Until journalists at U.S. media outlets, like CNN, quit projecting images on the cave wall for citizens in order to help the U.S. government maintain its global dominance and insulate government officials from scrutiny, particularly on matters of war, there will always be Americans who seek out jobs with foreign media outlets. They will seek out companies like Maffick to produce dissident journalism, which establishment media organizations refuse to support.

UPDATE: The report was updated on February 18 to reflect details from an interview with Donie O’Sullivan on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” and to include the correction CNN printed after Shadowproof published this report.

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.

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.