Tag Archives: Fact Checkers

Vaccines That Don’t Stop Transmission Can Create Conditions For More Virulent Variants To Spread

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By Arjun Walia

Source: The Pulse

Penn State biologist David Kennedy PhD, published a paper in PLOS BIOLOGY in 2015 titled, “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens.” In it, he explains how the transmission of viruses and more severe strains by infected vaccinees could provide an opportunity for more virulent variants to spread.

The article described an experiment with a herpes virus that causes Marek disease in chickens. Vaccines against Marek disease are described as “leaky” because, although they protect chickens from getting sick, they don’t prevent them from becoming infected and transmitting the virus to unvaccinated chickens. That allows the most virulent strains that normally would die along with an infected chicken to survive and infect and kill unvaccinated chickens.

Vaccines that keep hosts alive, but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population…Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens

In other words, the vaccinated and unvaccinated can still spread the disease, and the vaccinated are protected from severe disease and symptoms. But what happens if vaccines don’t protect against severe disease and symptoms of these new variants? This means that conditions can be created that cause more severe disease in the vaccinated as well.

We’ve seen this with seasonal flu, where vaccines have to constantly be updated because of changes in the virus, and we’re currently witnessing it with COVID vaccines. COVID vaccines will most likely be tweaked as new variants continue to emerge, and shots may be encouraged once or twice a year. Who knows?

Many people have already received a third dose and in some countries, like Israel and Canada, a fourth dose is being offered to the elderly and immunocompromised patients. This is something people aren’t used to, so many jabs in such a short period of time, along with mandates as well.

We now know that COVID vaccines don’t stop the transmission of COVID, and that variants like Omicron and Delta are able to escape the protection that COVID vaccines provide. This is why the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises that even after they’re fully vaccinated, people should continue to mask up and socially distance in public places in part because they could still unknowingly become infected and transmit COVID to people who have and haven’t yet received their shots.

But do COVID vaccines help reduce the transmission? And does that mean they aren’t considered “leaky” vaccines? We will get to this discussion later.

An argument can be made that COVID vaccines protect people from severe symptoms and chances of hospitalization, but how much protection can they really provide for most people under the age of 70 who have a very high chance of survival? Furthermore, we musn’t forget that COVID added to an already existing problem of hospital capacity issues. Is COVID the issue or is an inadequate healthcare system?

And why hasn’t the science behind natural immunity been included in health policy? According to CDC statistics, for example, 95 percent of people who have died with or from COVID have an average of four other causes (comorbidities) listed on their death certificate. Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear how many people are ending up in hospitals with COVID, or because of COVID.

There are multiple real world examples showing that COVID vaccines fail to prevent transmission, including exponential outbreaks in the most highly vaccinated populations on the planet. This is why of the top five counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.9–84.3%), the CDC identifies four of them as “high” transmission counties. This fact comes from a paper published in the European Journal of Epidemiology titled, “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.”

Right now, COVID cases are surging in the five most vaccinated states.

According to a study published in October, infected vaccinated and unvaccinated people can also carry the same viral load. Viral load is a good proxy for infectiousness.

Another study was conducted with positive samples from asymptomatic testing at UC Davis for Healthy Yolo Together and at the Unidos en Salud walk-up testing site in the Mission District of San Francisco.

The researchers looked at 869 positive samples, 500 from Healthy Yolo Together and 369 from Unidos en Salud. All the Healthy Yolo Together samples were from people who were asymptomatic at the time of positive test result, and three-quarters were from unvaccinated individuals. The Unidos en Salud samples included both asymptomatic and symptomatic cases. Just over half (198) of the Unidos en Salud samples were unvaccinated.

A press release from UC Davis Explains,

When they analyzed the data, the researchers found wide variations in viral load within both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, but not between them. There was no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, or between asymptomatic and symptomatic groups.

The idea that vaccines that are not successful in stopping the transmission of a virus can facilitate the emergence of variants has been written about by academics throughout and before this pandemic. This is evident by Kennedy’s 2015 paper cited above.

Saad O. Omais, a PhD candidate in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the American University of Beirut wrote a response to an article published by Karam Abassi, Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal. In it he explains how COVID vaccines may not only allow the circulation of existing VOCs but can even facilitate the rise of new ones.

According to Eric T. Payne, MD, PMH, Pediatric Neurocritical Care & Epilepsy, Alberta Children’s Hospital Assistant Professor of Pediatrics & Neurology, the University of Calgary,

With widespread dissemination of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, we are placing enormous evolutionary pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to continue mutating to evade our immune system, gain cell entry, replicate, and possibly cause illness. And, we are now using very “leaky” vaccines, making viral evasion from our antibodies that much easier. Only the fit will survive. Consider the reasonable analogy of antibiotic resistance – this is driven by the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics, not by people avoiding antibiotics.

RE: Mandatory mRNA vaccine mandate for Alberta physicians

In November, Dr. Günter Kampf, consultant hospital epidemiologist and Associate Professor for hygiene and environmental medicine at the University Medicine Greifswald, Germany published an article The Lancet explaining,

There is increasing evidence that vaccinated individuals continue to have a relevant role in transmission. In Massachusetts, USA, a total of 469 new COVID-19 cases were detected during various events in July, 2021, and 346 (74%) of these cases were in people who were fully or partly vaccinated, 274 (79%) of whom were symptomatic.

Cycle threshold values were similarly low between people who were fully vaccinated (median 22·8) and people who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown (median 21·5), indicating a high viral load even among people who were fully vaccinated.2

In the USA, a total of 10 262 COVID-19 cases were reported in vaccinated people by April 30, 2021, of whom 2725 (26·6%) were asymptomatic, 995 (9·7%) were hospitalised, and 160 (1·6%) died.3 In Germany, 55·4% of symptomatic COVID-19 cases in patients aged 60 years or older were in fully vaccinated individuals,4 and this proportion is increasing each week.

In Münster, Germany, new cases of COVID-19 occurred in at least 85 (22%) of 380 people who were fully vaccinated or who had recovered from COVID-19 and who attended a nightclub.5 People who are vaccinated have a lower risk of severe disease but are still a relevant part of the pandemic.

It is therefore wrong and dangerous to speak of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Historically, both the USA and Germany have engendered negative experiences by stigmatising parts of the population for their skin colour or religion. I call on high-level officials and scientists to stop the inappropriate stigmatisation of unvaccinated people, who include our patients, colleagues, and other fellow citizens, and to put extra effort into bringing society together.

COVID-19: stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified

Fact Checkers and The World Health Organization Weigh In

The discussion of the possibility of vaccines creating conditions for new variants to emerge more easily started several months ago, and was quickly shut down by third party Facebook fact-checkers and the World Health Organization. Yes, COVID vaccines don’t completely stop the transmission of the virus, but arguments can be made that they at least help in reducing the transmission. But, is that enough to stop what Kennedy is talking about in his paper? Does this still mean that these vaccines are “leaky”?

For example, in May 2021 Euronews reported the following,

The World Health Organization (WHO) has rejected claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing new variants of the virus. Reports have circulated online in France saying that vaccinated people are “more likely” to infect others with “super-strains” of the coronavirus. But the WHO and other immunologists have said that these claims are unfounded and have no scientific basis. “There is no evidence of this,” a WHO spokesperson Euronews. “Vaccination is part of the solution for suppressing transmission along with existing public health measures.”

An article published in Nature in February 2021 makes a case for COVID vaccines and their ability to reduce transmission, but also explains how this may not be the case. It does present some evidence showing that viral load is less in vaccinated individuals, but the studies cited are small compared to the ones mentioned earlier in the article.

And given the fact that we are now in 2022, there is much more data available showing cases in highly vaccinated populations and people as emphasized earlier. Breakthrough infections are happening all over the world among the vaccinated, this is no secret. Case counts are high in vaccinated people, but this is to be expected given the fact that in most regions, the majority of people are vaccinated.

But an article published by Harvard Health explains that people who are vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2 but get breakthrough infections may be less likely to spread the virus because they shed it for a shorter period than unvaccinated people who are infected, according a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. If this is true, it would reduce transmission rate but is this reduction significant? And again, it may contribute to reducing transmission, but it doesn’t stop it. Given the outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations, transmission reduction doesn’t seem to be significant.

A recent paper was published emphasizing the number of unvaccinated people that need to be excluded from a setting to prevent one COVID transmission is extremely high and negligible. The study didn’t even take into account the immunity that’s already been built up in a large amount of the population.

The authors explain,

While SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are beneficial, the high NNEs suggest that excluding unvaccinated people has negligible benefits for reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmissions in many jurisdictions across the globe. This is because unvaccinated people are likely not at significant risk – in absolute terms – of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others in most types of settings (as of mid-to-end November 2021). This is why so many unvaccinated people likely need to be excluded to prevent one transmission event.

Evaluating the number of unvaccinated people needed to exclude to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmissions

This topic really got the attention of Facebook fact checkers on March 6, 2021, when Geert Vanden Bossche, an independent consultant who previously worked in vaccine development, published an open letter to the World Health Organization on Twitter. In it, Vanden Bossche claimed that COVID-19 vaccines “should not be used amid an epidemic” and called for a halt to mass vaccination campaigns. Vanden Bossche claimed that global COVID-19 vaccination campaigns would accelerate the emergence of dangerous variants, which will escape vaccine-induced immunity and cause severe disease

Fact checker Health Feedback responded, stating that,

Vanden Bossche’s claim is based on two assumptions. The first is that COVID-19 vaccines “don’t prevent infection, they protect against disease”. The second is that vaccination doesn’t reduce transmission. These assumptions are unsupported.

COVID-19 vaccines are critical for controlling the pandemic; vaccines still offer partial protection against new variants of the virus

When claims made are marked as false by fact checkers like Health Feedback, and others, the claims are completely censored on social media platforms. Any outlets that share them are punished with reduced page distribution. Fact-checkers have a tremendous amount of power to limit the spread of information, be it factual, false, or even opinion based, and they’ve been criticized for being incorrect multiple times.

For example, the editor-in-chief of The British Medical Journal (BMJ), Fiona Godlee, alongside Kamran Abbasi, an executive editor of the BMJ who succeeded Godlee on January 1st 2022, published a piece in the journal criticizing Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook fact checkers, calling them incompetent. The piece was published on Nov 2, 2021.

In it, Godlee and Abbasi criticize Facebook for putting a “fake news” label on an article published in the BMJ by award winning investigative journalist Paul Thacker regarding fraud and the manipulation of data during Pfizer’s COVID vaccine clinical trials.

Here are three examples where it’s happened to us where fact checkers were forced to retract their ratings, but it’s happened many more times than this and the labels are often not removed unless you bend to the will of the fact checker.

The point is, how trustworthy are fact checkers?

Data To Support Whatever You Want To Believe

At the end of the day, although I believe it’s clear that COVID vaccines do not stop transmission or help reduce transmission in a significant manner, data and science can be used to oppose this belief. If you dive deep into the science, sometimes it’s hard to know what to believe. These days, data can be shared to confirm what you want to believe.

What doesn’t sit well, however, is that discussions that oppose what’s often presented by government health authorities is never really acknowledged within the mainstream. For example, like the idea that vaccines do not stop the transmission of the virus, and that breakthrough infections are rare. Why are we seeing so much censorship of evidence and opinion from experts in the field?

Yes, breakthrough COVID-19 cases happen in people who are fully vaccinated, and they are happening more frequently now that the Omicron variant is circulating widely and immunity from may vaccines may be waning.

Kennedy makes it clear that “imperfect vaccination” that does not stop transmission “can enhance the transmission of highly virulent pathogens.” Even if COVID vaccines do help slow down the transmission of COVID, which many would argue they clearly don’t, does this mean COVID vaccines would be considered “imperfect” by Kennedy’s definition? And does this mean that mass vaccinations are facilitating the development of more variants, for which more vaccines will be created that don’t stop transmission, thus creating the neverending development of COVID vaccines? Big pharma would certainly like that.

Which Is More Dangerous: Mainstream Media or The Spike Protein?

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By Madhava Setty, MD

Source: Collective Evolution

Last week CE published this piece that demonstrated the obvious spin The Washington Post used to mislead their readers about the status of the unvaccinated, claiming that their rates of infection, death and hospitalization are significantly higher than vaccinated individuals when in fact they never measured these rates. In this article I will once again focus on the Washington Post and their lack of journalistic integrity. This time their propaganda is more egregious because they are targeting the largest pool of unvaccinated individuals: children.

The Washington Post urges the vaccination of adolescents

On May 10, 2021 the Washington Post published this article titled “FDA authorizes Pfizer Coronavirus vaccine for adolescents 12 to 15 years old”. The article begins with a quote from Kawsar R. Talaat, an assistant professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who says,  “A vaccine gives them an extra layer of protection and allows them to go back to being kids.” 

This is a fascinating statement. Obviously kids were never not kids during the pandemic. Dr. Talaat is essentially saying that in order to be allowed to enjoy their youth kids must be vaccinated. However the restrictions that have been imposed upon their activity were never based on sound data. Asymptomatic spread could never be quantified or even confirmed. Mask mandates have been empirically demonstrated to have no effect on transmissibility or incidence of infection. The only things preventing kids from going back to being kids are the mandates that remain unsupported by any evidentiary arguments–not their vaccination status.

This statement was then further supported in the article:

”Robert W. Frenck Jr., the researcher who led [an] adolescent trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who said the study was designed to test whether it triggered immune responses, not whether it prevented disease. But because of the number of children who became ill in the placebo arm of the trial, it also became evident the vaccine offered robust protection. He finishes by stating ‘That really points out how much covid there is in the adolescent community.’”

Dr. Frenck admits that the study he conducted was not designed to tell whether the vaccine prevented disease but whether children in the study developed antibodies. The point he is trying to make is that there is a lot of disease in the adolescent community. How much? In his study 16 out of approximately 1150 unvaccinated kids got Covid, all of whom recovered. That is an absolute risk of 1.4%. Compare that to the risk of getting the flu in a flu season: 8%. 

The article goes on to claim that the mortality of COVID is greater than the flu in children. The Post correctly states that of the 581,000 deaths from Covid only 300 adolescents have perished from the disease, an admittedly extremely small percentage but tragic nonetheless. However they state that this number is greater than the number of adolescents that die from the flu which justifies universal vaccinations. The article cites this paper from the CDC that they claim confirms this statistic. In it the CDC states that 188 children died from the flu in the 2017-18 season, indeed less than 300. However the paper then states that “CDC estimates the actual number was closer to 600”. We have caught the Post in what can be fairly called a lie that is being used to make their case that the threat of the disease justifies prevention through vaccination.

Vaccination Risks and what we know about the “Spike Protein”

Every medical intervention has a risk/benefit relationship that must be examined closely. The Washington Post never once addresses the potential risk of the vaccine in children. Despite mainstream media’s dogged refusal to pursue any research into potential harm of the Covid vaccines, some very troubling information has recently surfaced if one is willing to look beyond headlines and CDC reports. Unlike the Washington Post, I will also examine the risk aspect of the vaccine with a look at the role of the infamous “spike” protein.

As is well known, the Spike protein on the SARS-COV2 virus is what allows it to enter a human cell and infect it. It is also the target protein of the mRNA “vaccines” that use a novel approach to teach our immune systems to recognize it by stimulating our own cells to produce this protein ourselves, hopefully triggering our immune system to produce antibodies against it.

The vaccine manufacturers and the FDA who grant them authorization to deploy their product have made an enormous assumption: the virus is dangerous, but the spike protein is not. It is becoming clear that this assumption does not hold true. In this short article published on April 30, 2021 (11 days before the WP published their article) Salk News summarizes one of several scientific publications that demonstrate the danger of the spike protein:

“The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research, also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease, demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system on a cellular level. The findings help explain COVID-19’s wide variety of seemingly unconnected complications, and could open the door for new research into more effective therapies.

‘A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.’”

The takeaway from these statements is that Covid-19 is a vascular disease more than just a respiratory illness. This was suspected very early on in the pandemic when many people were injured by bleeding, clots, strokes and organ failure. The authors were able to establish its mechanism by an elegant experiment. They designed a “pseudovirus”, one that had the SARS-COV2 spike protein on its surface but without any viral RNA in it. The pseudovirus damaged the lungs and pulmonary vasculature in animal models. They then isolated the molecular pathway by which spike proteins alter the metabolism of vascular endothelial cells causing injury. Conclusion: the spike protein itself causes harm in animal models.

Though we cannot definitively assert, from this study alone, that the spike protein is directly responsible for injury in humans, we must avail ourselves of the reality that this may take a very long time to prove definitively. If it is shown that an intervention is dangerous to animals there is no justification in assuming that it will be safe in a human being. That is why we use animal models in medical research to begin with.

“Fact Checkers” are Taking Notice

As expected, such statements are getting a lot of attention in the media. PolitiFact quickly responded with two articles (one here) “debunking” the theory that spike proteins are dangerous to humans. They quote Dr. Walter Orenstein (associate director of Emory University’s Emory Vaccine Center) and Dr. Paul Offit (director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) who both summarize that they are not aware of any evidence around the danger of spike proteins. Neither, however commented on the study presented in this essay.

PolitiFact also noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called the spike protein “harmless”. Once again, PolitiFact accepted their blanket statement without asking the CDC for their opinion of the evidence cited here. PolitiFact declined to query the CDC for a different explanation of why hospitalized Covid-19 patients commonly expressed systemic disease often with vascular and clotting disorders.

The Danger of an mRNA vaccine that generates spike proteins

If the spike protein is pathogenic, i.e. capable of causing disease, how do we know that when we create antibodies to it we will be completely protected from it? We don’t. How do we know that every person inoculated will mount an antibody response to them? We don’t. This should be sounding alarms in every institution charged with public health. Why? With traditional vaccines there is very little risk, if any, of contracting disease from the vaccine. For example, if a person inoculated with a Hepatitis B vaccine does not mount an immunological response they do not end up getting Hepatitis B.

The situation we may be in is much more concerning. These mRNA vaccines, if they work as intended, are in fact introducing the disease-inducing component of the virus into our bodies. As with most biological processes there will be a wide distribution of responses to the vaccine from people who have little or no side-effects to others who suffer devastating injury. Is that what we are seeing now? Yes it is. 

The vaccines migrate throughout the body after injection

More recently, more disturbing information is coming to light. Bioavailability studies of the vaccine were not made public prior to Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). A Pfizer bioavailability study, obtained through the FOIA from a Japanese regulatory agency by a group of international scientists, demonstrates where the vaccine may go once it has been injected into the muscle tissue of our shoulder. Table 2.6.5.5B in this study indicates that the very same Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) used in the Pfizer vaccine begin to redistribute throughout the bodies of mice. Within 15 minutes after inoculation LNPs show up in the brain, liver, gastrointestinal tract, heart, lungs and especially in the ovaries and spleen. We can infer that where the LNPs go so do the mRNA that codes for spike protein. That was the purpose behind doing this study. We can also safely say that Pfizer and the other Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers never intended for their product to migrate so far from the site of inoculation.

This story is still evolving, however these studies and recently released bioavailability reports help to explain the clinical picture of Covid-19 with its broad effects on the body that are not limited to the respiratory system. Furthermore it may substantiate the numerous reports of injury following vaccinations like strokes, blood clots, bleeding, “brain fog”, Bell’s Palsy, etc.

The spike protein is toxic. The vaccine induces our cells to make spike proteins. The vaccine spreads throughout the body after injection. Until another unifying explanation is found we must assume that these vaccines are potentially far more dangerous than anticipated.

A call to halt vaccinations in the UK

In this advisory letter to Dr. June Raine, chief executive of Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (the UK’s FDA), Dr. Tess Lawrie, the director of an evidence based medicine consulting firm, urges the director to halt the vaccination program in that country after an extensive review of the UK’s adverse reaction data was conducted.

The Takeaway

We know, through the CDC’s own data, that Covid-19 vaccines provide almost no benefit to children and adolescents. The danger of vaccination is yet to be fully understood or quantified. In my opinion, the medical community, the FDA and CDC have no reasonable argument to encourage parents to vaccinate their children at this point. The Washington Post has once again demonstrated sloppy research standards, unbalanced reporting and lack of integrity. In this case adolescents, who are among the least vulnerable to the virus, may be harmed from The Post’s inability or unwillingness to uphold basic journalistic principles.

Technology giants hold censorship meeting with US intelligence agencies

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By Will Morrow

Source: WSWS.org

The New York Times and Washington Post this week published reports of a private meeting last month between eight major technology and social media corporations and the US intelligence agencies, to discuss their censorship operations in the lead-up to the November 2018 mid-term elections.

The meeting was convened at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters on May 23, and was attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Snap, Twitter and Oath, which owns Yahoo and the telecommunications network Verizon, along with agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

The Post described the meeting, organized at the request of Facebook, as a “new overture by the technology industry to develop closer ties to law enforcement.” Both articles were based on anonymous statements by individuals who attended. One attendee told the Post that the conversation was a “back-and-forth, with both sides talking about how they were thinking about the problem and how we were looking for opportunities to work together.”

The meeting is yet another testament to the increasing integration of the technology giants with the US military/intelligence apparatus. These companies, which provide a growing share of the technical infrastructure for the repressive apparatus of the state, increasingly see the censorship of left-wing, anti-war, and progressive viewpoints as an integral part of their business strategy.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to secure control over a $10 billion project to host the Pentagon’s Cloud infrastructure, a position that will literally mean hosting the communications between military units engaged in battle. Employees at the three companies have also written letters in recent months denouncing their provision of artificial intelligence technology to improve drone targeting (Google), facial recognition of civilians by police agencies (Amazon), and assisting in the operations of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Microsoft).

The Times and the Post are the main media voices for the campaign by the Democratic Party and intelligence agencies for Internet censorship, under the guise of opposing the spread of “misinformation” by the Russian government. This McCarthyite campaign is based on the totally unsubstantiated allegation that Russian “fake news” led to popular disillusionment with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 vote, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump. The newspapers’ synchronized reports therefore present last month’s meeting as aimed at preventing Russian interference in the mid-term elections.

But the real target of the censorship campaign is popular access to left-wing news sources not controlled by the corporate media, and the proliferation of oppositional social media content, such as videos of police killings, mass roundups of immigrants, military interventions, protests and exposures of corporate malfeasance and government criminality.

Since the beginning of the year, Facebook has rolled out a series of changes to its News Feed, including demoting political content in favor of so-called “personal moments,” and prioritizing content from so-called “trustworthy sources”—in reality pro-establishment propaganda outlets—including the Times and the Wall Street Journal. The social media giant has also changed its algorithms to reduce the spread of “viral videos,” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared are “not good for people’s well-being and society.”

Last Thursday, Facebook published an announcement by its Head of News Integrity Tessa Lyons, announcing a further expansion of these measures, including the introduction of “fact-checking” for videos and photos. The post also stated that Facebook is introducing “machine learning to help identify and demote foreign Pages that are likely to spread financially-motivated hoaxes to people in other countries.” These will work alongside Facebook’s army of “fact checkers”—i.e., censors—many of them former security and intelligence agents, who belong to the 20,000 people employed in its “security” and “moderation” department.

The “demotion” of what Facebook calls “false news” was codified in “community guidelines” published by the company in April. The guidelines state that because the suppression of “false news” is a “sensitive issue,” the company does not openly remove news stories, which would be easily detected by publishers and their followers, but does the same thing secretly: “significantly reduc[ing] its distribution by showing it lower on the News Feed.” (See: “Facebook codifies its censorship regime”)

Lyons repeated this line of argument in an interview with PBS’ Miles O’Brien on May 16. Admitting that “censoring and fully removing information unless it violates our community standards is not the expectation from our community,” Lyons explained that instead “we work to reduce the damage it can do” by restricting its proliferation. The Washington Post reported yesterday that while speaking at the International Fact Checkers Network conference last week, Lyons “told attendees that … [Facebook] will soon use machine learning to predict pages that are more likely to share misinformation.”

With the official ending of net neutrality this month, the financial oligarchy that controls both the search and social media monopolies and internet service providers has further tightened its grip over the freedom of expression on the internet, with ISPs given the prerogative to block and throttle internet content at will.

The expansion of internet censorship takes place amidst mounting pressure on whistleblower Julian Assange, the Wikileaks journalist who has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, where he was forced to take refuge to avoid being extradited to the US and charged for publishing evidence of US government crimes. The persecution of Assange for the “crime” of publishing the truth is aimed at intimidating whistleblowers and honest journalists all around the world.

Google , which attended last month’s meeting with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, has altered its search engine algorithms to censor left-wing and anti-war websites, including the World Socialist Web Site, whose Google search traffic fell by three quarters in response to changes by the search engine in April 2017. There are indications that Google has recently intensified its censorship of the World Socialist Web Site, with search impressions falling by as much as one third over the past month.

In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google demanding that it end its censorship of the internet, declaring, “Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. 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.”

We urge all readers of the World Socialist Web Site seeking to defend the freedom of expression online to contact us and join the struggle against internet censorship.