Since 2016, US audiences have been flooded with claims that Russia has waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to influence them, and that Donald Trump and a bottomless cast of associates were somehow complicit.
No “scandal” in US history has yielded such a lengthy rap sheet of falsehoods, debunkings, and retractions. The Mueller investigation and parallel Congressional inquiries found no evidence for the all-consuming theories of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy. Allegations of Russian government email hacking and social media operations are equally dubious, most notably on the foundational allegation that Russian intelligence stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to Wikileaks.
Even if we were to ignore the evidentiary gaps and accept each assertion about “Russian interference” at face value, the totality could in no way justify even a shred of the multi-year Russia-mania. With no shame and without end, prominent political and media voices have imbued Russian bots, memes, and hackers — real or imagined — with the power to “sow chaos” in US society, swing election results, and even become worthy of comparison to the attacks of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Given the Iraq WMD-esque preponderance of hyperbole and outright lies in the incessant claims of Russian subterfuge, it is reasonable to conclude that the US intelligence officials and political-media actors who have spread them are waging exactly what they accuse Russia of: a politically motivated disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the general public.
The newly disclosed Twitter Files — a cache of internal communications from the social media giant — offer new evidence of one of the Russiagate disinformation campaign’s core functions: protecting the rule of domestic elites, particularly in the Democratic Party.
In two consecutive presidential elections, the Russian boogeyman has been invoked to stigmatize and silence reporting on the Democratic candidate. It began in 2016, when journalists who reported on the stolen DNC emails’ revelations about Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches or the DNC’s bias against Bernie Sanders were blamed for Trump’s victory and deemed to be unwitting Kremlin dupes promoting “disinformation” – in reality, factual material that embarrassed the pre-ordained winner.
Four years later, that same playbook was deployed for Clinton’s successor at the top of Democratic ticket, Joe Biden. In the weeks before the November 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook censored the New York Post’s reporting about the contents Hunter Biden’s laptop on the grounds that the computer material could be “Russian disinformation.” The Post’s stories detailed how Hunter Biden traded on his family name to secure lucrative business abroad, and raised questions about Joe Biden’s denials of any involvement.
The US media responded to the suppression of the laptop story with indifference or even approval. In one notable case, Glenn Greenwald resigned from the outlet that he co-founded, The Intercept, after its editors attempted to censor his coverage of the laptop controversy. Even stories that had long been public — such as the unqualified Hunter receiving an $80,000-per-month Burisma board seat just months after his father’s administration helped overthrow Ukraine’s government – were effectively off-limits.
There was never a shred of evidence that Russia was behind the laptop story, but that was of no consequence. Dutiful media editors, reporters, and pundits took their cues from a group of more than 50 former intelligence officials, who issued a statement declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
These intelligence veterans’ claim was in fact a classic Russiagate disinformation operation, as the Twitter files newly underscore.
More than two years since Big Tech made the historic decision to limit access to the New York Post’s story about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, users are getting a glimpse into how Twitter came to that decision. However, delusional legacy and social media outlets are doing everything they can to misrepresent and bury the consequential details of the process.
An October 2020 New York Post story titled “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad” offered sensationalistic photos and details of Hunter’s addiction issues coupled with damning emails indicating that Hunter utilized his connection with his father to curry favor and economic opportunity in foreign countries. At the time, intelligence officials told members of the press that the story was Russian propaganda aimed at influencing that year’s election. As a result, Big Tech platforms limited access to the story including in direct messages which is usually done only in extreme cases such as child pornography.
On Friday, December 2, 2022, Elon Musk promised to release files related to the matter. Soon afterward, journalist Matt Taibbi published a report based on thousands of internal Twitter documents. Taibbi demonstrated that Twitter’s decision to remove the Hunter Biden story was influenced in part by Biden’s campaign. Indeed, as Taibbi described, Twitter’s staff regularly fields phone calls from powerful people in government and acts upon their requests to moderate content. And it’s is not just Twitter. During a 2022 interview with Joe Rogan, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company’s decision to moderate content – including the 2020 Hunter story – is sometimes based on recommendations from the intelligence community. Similarly, The Intercept reported in 2022 that the Department of Homeland Security regularly informs Big Tech’s content moderation practices.
In any other country, the revelation that government and Big Tech collude to shape public discourse and democratic participation would make Americans irate, but the story has received little coverage. The coverage received by legacy media has been dismissive. CNN reduced the files as simply showing “how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story.” Variety echoed the same sentiments. Meanwhile, giving readers less than 24-hours to process what Taibbi reported, WAPO declared that Musk’s Twitter Files “haven’t changed minds.”
The lack of substantive coverage of the Twitter Files is rooted in the legacy media’s fears over the broader implications of the story. Since 2015, legacy media have been fostering a moral panic over fake news and blamed their competition – digital media – for its spread. They have practically begged Big Tech overlords to fix the country and restore faith in journalism by censoringproblematiccontent, which they often refer to as misinformation or disinformation. Taibbi’s reporting demonstrates that the news media’s framing of Big Tech content moderation as a solution to anti-democratic practices, actually functioned as an anti-democratic position that enables the elite political class to shape public dialogue and manufacture consent of the electorate.
Adding to the news media’s inability to cover the story is their business model which depends on framing every story as an issue of left versus right, blue versus red, Democrat versus Republican. Indeed, whether it is cable news audiences or legacy newspaper subscribers, news outlets cater to audiences’ confirmation biases by villainizing a caricature of the “otherside.” This has reduced every story to a partisan issue, and fostered such high levels of hyper-partisanship vitriol that half of Americans cite “other Americans” as their number one fear, while 40% contend that a civil war will occur in their lifetime.
Although they still try, the legacy media has found it impossible to frame the Twitter Files as a hyper-partisan story because the political duopoly, not one party, utilizes Big Tech to manufacture the consent of the people. For example, Big Tech’s content moderation of was influenced by Biden’s Campaign in 2020 and leading Democrats after January 6th. Similarly, Donald Trump’s campaign spent $100 million to work with Facebook staff to amplify their campaign messages, and Trump met personally with Zuckerberg in secretmeetings throughout his presidency. Furthermore, legacy news media outlets cannot villainize the “other side” for censorship when loyalists for both parties are complicit. Indeed, the feckless liberals who begged Big Tech overlords to censor content about elections and Covid-19 are equally complicit as the neocons who championed censorship of the press and individuals, and organizations during the War on Terror and Trump supporters who lauded his attacks on the freepress and whistleblowers such as JulianAssange.
Anyone can, and will, argue that Hunter’s photos are not newsworthy, but that is for the citizens to decide when they encounter the story. That is how a free press in a democratic republic works. A democracy does not depend on Big Tech overlords acting at the behest of the political class to determine what content the public should see. The notion that censorship will erode hate, correct falsehoods, or solve national problems is a fallacy of utmost proportions. The contemporary censorious crowd seems to be in such a state of delusion that they have come to believe that World War II and the Holocaust could have been avoided if Twitter was around to censor Nazis. It is ludicrous and the establishment news media deserve part of the blame for perpetuating this lunacy.
A truly independent press would privilege narratives that expose Silicon Valley propaganda, which has led users of all political ideologies to a delusional state of Stockholm Syndrome, where Big Tech exploits their labor, erodes their privacy, and manufactures their consent for the duopoly, but users still laud and entrust the industry with their democracy. To be clear, Big Tech commercialized tools that were developed by the military industrial complex during the Cold War (which was not so cold in much of the world) to surveil and exploit users. They advertised their platforms as transformative tools that strengthen democracy and inclusion. As whistleblower after whistleblower remind us, this is all nonsense: Big Tech’s oligarchs are rapacious capitalists who time and time again put profits over people. No entity should be moderating information in a democracy, and as the Twitter Files reveal, the unaccountable profiteers in Big Tech are no exception.
A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts.
An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.
The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian.
The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them, boosting a high level of statistically measurable “angst” in the online discourse.
The research team analysed a massively unprecedented 5,203,746 tweets, sent with key hashtags, in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Feb. 24. The researchers looked at predominately English-language accounts. A calculated 1.8 million unique Twitter accounts in the dataset posted at least one English-language tweet.
The results were published in August in a research paper, titled “#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war,” by the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Science.
The size of the sample under study, of over 5-million tweets, dwarfs other recent studies of covert propaganda in social media surrounding the Ukraine war.
The little-reported Stanford University/Graphika research on Western disinformation, analysed by Declassified Australia in September, examined just under 300,000 tweets from 146 Twitter accounts.
The Meta/Facebook research on Russian disinformation reported widely by mainstream media, including by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) a fortnight later, looked at only 1,600 Facebook accounts.
Reports on the new research have appeared in only a few independent media sites, and on Russia’s RT. The ground-breaking study exposing a massive anti-Russia social media disinformation campaign has been effectively ignored by Western establishment media, showing how stories that don’t fit the desired pro-Western narrative are routinely buried.
Disinformation Blitz Krieg
The Adelaide University researchers unearthed a massive organised pro-Ukraine influence operation underway from the early stages of the conflict. Overall, the study found automated “bot” accounts to be the source of between 60 to 80 percent of all tweets in the dataset.
The published data shows that in the first week of the Ukraine-Russia war there was a huge mass of pro-Ukrainian hashtag bot activity. Approximately 3.5 million tweets using the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine were sent by bots in that first week.
In fact, it was like someone had flicked a switch at the start of the war as pro-Ukraine bot activity suddenly burst into life. In that first day of the war the #IStandWithUkraine hashtag was used in as many as 38,000 tweets each hour, rising to 50,000 tweets an hour by day three of the war.
By comparison, the data shows that in the first week there was an almost total absence of pro-Russian bot activity using the key hashtags. During that first week of the invasion, pro-Russian bots were sending off tweets using the #IStandWithPutin or #IStandWithRussia hashtags at a rate of only several hundred per hour.
Given the apparent long-range planning for the invasion of Ukraine, cyber experts expressed surprise that Russian cyber and internet responses were so laggard. A researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in Switzerland, said: “The [pro-Russian] cyber operations we have seen do not show long preparation, and instead look rather haphazard.”
After being apparently left flatfooted, the #IStandWithPutin hashtag mainly from automated bots, eventually fired up a week after the start of the war. That hashtag started appearing in higher numbers on March 2, day 7 of the war. It reached 10,000 tweets per hour just twice over the next two days, still way behind the pro-Ukraine tweeting activity.
The #IStandWithRussia hashtag use was even smaller, reaching only 4,000 tweets per hour. After just two days of operation, the pro-Russian hashtag activity had dropped away almost completely. The study’s researchers noted the automated bot accounts “likely used by Russian authorities,” were “removed likely by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”
The reaction against these pro-Russian accounts had been swift. On March 5, after the #IStandWithPutin hashtag had trended on Twitter, the company announced it had banned over 100 accounts using the hashtag for violating its “platform manipulation and spam policy” and participating in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour.”
Later that month, the Ukraine Security Service (SBU) reportedly raided five “bot farms”’ operating inside the country. The Russia-linked bot operators were reportedly operating through 100,000 fake social media accounts spreading disinformation that was “intended to inspire panic among Ukrainian masses.”
Ukrainian security forces unearthed a pro-Russian automated “bot army” operating out of an apartment in March 2022. The raid found 100 sets of GSM-gateways, left, and 10,000 sim cards, right, operating 100,000 fake bot accounts. (SBU)
Unfiltered Research
The landmark Adelaide University research differs from these earlier revelations in another most unique and spectacular way.
While the Stanford-Graphika and Meta research was produced by researchers who have long-term deep ties to the U.S. national security state, the Adelaide University researchers are remarkably independent. The academic team is from the university’s School of Mathematical Science.
Using mathematical calculations, they set out to predict and model people’s psychological traits based on their digital footprint.
Unlike the datasets selected and provided for the Stanford/Graphika and the Meta research, the data the Adelaide University team accessed did not come from accounts that had been detected for breaching guidelines and shut down by Meta or Twitter.
Joshua Watt is one of the lead researchers on the university team, and is a Master of Philosophy candidate in applied mathematics.
He told Declassified Australia that the dataset of 5 million tweets was accessed directly by the team from Twitter accounts on the internet using an academic license giving access to the Twitter API.
The “Application Programming Interface” is a data communication software tool that allows researchers to directly retrieve and analyse Twitter data.
The fake tweets and automated bot accounts had not been detected and removed by Twitter before being analysed by the researchers, although some were possibly removed in Twitter’s March sweep.
Watt told Declassified Australia that in fact many of the bot accounts behind the 5 million tweets studied are likely to be still up and running.
Declassified Australia contacted Twitter to ask what action they may have taken to remove the fake bot accounts identified in the University of Adelaide research. They had not responded by the time of going to press.
Critical Tool in Info War
This new research paper confirms mounting fears that social media has covertly become what the researchers call “a critical tool in information warfare playing a large role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
The Adelaide University researchers tried their best to be noncommittal in describing the activities of the fake Twitter accounts, although they had found the vast majority – over 90 percent – were anti-Russian messages. They stated: “Both sides in the Ukrainian conflict use the online information environment to influence geopolitical dynamics and sway public opinion.”
They found the two main participating sides in the propaganda war have their own particular goals and style. “Russian social media pushes narratives around their motivation, and Ukrainian social media aims to foster and maintain external support from Western countries, as well as promote their military efforts while undermining the perception of the Russian military.”
While the research findings concentrated on automated Twitter bots, there were also findings on the use of hashtags by non-bot tweeters. They found significant information flows from non-bot pro-Russian accounts, but no significant flows from non-bot pro-Ukraine accounts.
As well as being far more active, the pro-Ukraine side was found to be far more advanced in its use of automated bots. The pro-Ukrainian side used more “astroturf bots” than the pro-Russians. Astroturf bots are hyper-active political bots that continuously follow many other accounts to increase followers of that account.
Social Media Role in Boosting Fear
Crucially, the University of Adelaide researchers also investigated the psychological influence the fake automated bot accounts had on the online conversation during those early weeks of the war.
These conversations in a target audience may develop over time into support or opposition towards governments and policies – but they may also have more instant effects influencing the target audiences’ immediate decisions.
The study found that it was the tweets from the fake “bot” accounts that most drove an increase in conversations surrounding “angst” amongst people targeted by them. They found these automated bot accounts increased “the use of words in the angst category which contains words related to fear and worry, such as ‘shame,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘threat, ‘panic.’”
By combining the “angst” messaging with messages about “motion” and geographical locations, the researchers found “the bot accounts are influencing more discussion surrounding moving/fleeing/going or staying.” The researchers believe this effect may well have been to influence Ukrainians even away from the conflict zones to flee from their homes.
The research shows that fake automated social media “bot” accounts do manipulate public opinion by shaping the discourse, sometimes in very specific ways. The results provide a chilling indication of the very real malign effects that mass social media disinformation campaigns can have on an innocent civilian population.
Origins of Twitter Bot Accounts
The researchers report that the overwhelming level of Twitter disinformation that was anti-Russian was from bots “likely [organised] by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”
The researchers asserted no further findings about the origin of the 5 million tweets, but did find that some bots “are pushing campaigns specific to certain countries [unnamed], and hence sharing content aligned with those timezones.” The data does show that the peak time for a selection of pro-Ukrainian bot activity occurred between 6pm and 9pm across U.S. time zones.
Some indication of the origin and the targeting of the messages could be deduced from the specific languages used in the 5 million tweets. Over 3.5 million tweets, or 67 percent, were in the English language, with fewer that 2 percent in Russian and Ukrainian.
In May 2022, the National Security Agency (NSA) director and U.S. cyber command chief, General Paul Nakasone, revealed that the Cyber Command had been conducting offensive Information Operations in support of Ukraine.
“We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, [and] information operations,” Nakasone said.
Nakasone said the U.S. has been conducting operations aimed at dismantling Russian propaganda. He said the operations were lawful, conducted through policy determined by the U.S. Defense Department and with civilian oversight.
Nakasone said the U.S. seeks to tell the truth when conducting an information operation, unlike Russia.
U.S. Cyber Command had deployed to Ukraine a “hunt forward” cyber team in December to help shore up Ukraine’s cyber defences and networks against active threats in anticipation of the invasion.
A newly formed European Union cyber rapid response team consisting of 12 experts joined the Cyber Command team to look for active cyber threats inside Ukrainian networks and to strengthen the country’s cyber defences.
The U.S. has invested $40 million since 2017 in helping Ukraine buttress its information technology sector. According to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the investments have helped Ukrainians “keep their internet on and information flowing, even in the midst of a brutal Russian invasion.”
Wars &Lies in Our Pockets
With the rise of the internet, war and armed conflict will never be the same. Analysts have noted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ushered in a “new digital era of military, political and economic conflict” being manipulated by “laptop generals and bot armies.”
“In all dimensions of this conflict, digital technology plays a key role – as a tool for cyberattacks and digital protest, and as an accelerator for flows of information and disinformation,” wrote analysts at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Brussels. “Propaganda has been a part of war since the beginning of history, but never before could it be so widely spread beyond an actual conflict area and targeted to so many different audiences.”
Joshua Watt, one of the lead researchers on the University of Adelaide team that conducted the landmark study, summed it up: “In the past, wars have been primarily fought physically, with armies, air force and navy operations being the primary forms of combat. However, social media has created a new environment where public opinion can be manipulated at a very large scale.”
“CNN brought once-distant wars into our living rooms,” another analyst stated, “but TikTok and YouTube and Twitter have put them in our pockets.”
We are all carrying around with us a powerful source of information and news media – and also, most certainly, disinformation that’s coming relentlessly at us from influence operations run by “bad actors” whose aim is to deceive.
So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.
While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:
According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions. https://t.co/Zb3zmI1dQF
The report reveals pervasive efforts on the part of the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the FBI, to push massive online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to censor content in order to suppress “threats” as broad as fomenting distrust in the US government and US financial institutions.
“There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use,” The Intercept reports.
“Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020,” says The Intercept. “Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to ‘process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.’”
While these government agencies contend that they are not technically forcing these tech platforms to remove content, The Intercept argues that its investigation shows “CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions,” while critics argue that “suggestions” from immensely powerful institutions will never be taken as mere suggestions.
“When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” Michigan State University’s Adam Candeub tells The Intercept. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”
This is absolutely wild. The government is secretly transforming "national security" agencies into a new Narrative Police.
“If a foreign government sent these messages,” said the former ACLU president, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
The current CISA chief is seen justifying this aggressive government thought policing by creepily referring to the means people use to gather information and form thoughts about the world as “our cognitive infrastructure”:
Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.
Another CISA official is seen suggesting the agency launder its manipulations through third party nonprofits “to avoid the appearance of government propaganda”:
To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
But as a former ACLU president tells The Intercept, if this were happening in any government the US doesn’t like there’d be no qualms about calling it what it is:
“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. As The Intercept reminds us, this business of the US government assigning itself the responsibility of regulating America’s “cognitive infrastructure” originated with the “allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.” To this day that agenda continues to expand into things like plots to censor speech about the war in Ukraine.
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Hundreds of former agents of a notorious Israeli spying organization are now working in key positions at the world’s biggest tech/comms corporations, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Other examples of this trend coming out at the same time include Alan MacLeod’s new report with Mintpress News that hundreds of former agents from the notorious Israeli spying organization Unit 8200 are now working in positions of influence at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (just the latest in MacLeod’s ongoing documentation of the way intelligence insiders have been increasingly populating the ranks of Silicon Valley platforms), and the revelation that The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté were barred from participating in a Web Summit conference due to pressure from the Ukrainian government.
We’re told we need to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to preserve western values of freedom and democracy, and in order to facilitate that aim we’re getting less and less free speech. Less and less free thought. Less and less free press. Less and less democracy.
I keep thinking of the (fictional) story where during World War II Winston Churchill is advised to cut funding for the arts to boost military funding, and he responds, “Then what are we fighting for?” If we need to sacrifice everything we claim to value in order to fight for those values, what are we fighting for?
Dissent is becoming less and less tolerated. Public discourse is being more and more aggressively disrupted by the powerful. We’re being shaped into the exact sort of homogeneous, power-serving, tyrannized, propagandized population that our leaders criticize other nations for having.
Any journalists or press freedom advocates out there care about a US gov’t ally, Ukraine, pressuring a media conference to cancel two journalists? https://t.co/sPwaQAIiTV
If the powerful are becoming more tyrannical in order to fight tyranny, what’s probably actually happening is that they are just tyrants making up excuses to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do.
As westerners in “liberal democracies” we are told that our society holds free speech, free thought and accountability for the powerful as sacrosanct.
Our leaders are showing us that this is a lie.
The problem with “western values” is that the west doesn’t value them.
In reality, those who best exemplify “western values” as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers.
Our ongoing descent into tyranny in the name of opposing tyrants calls forth a very simple question: if defeating autocracy requires becoming an autocracy, what’s the point of defeating autocracy?
The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was founded by the BBC in July 2019. While TNI claims to promote democracy and freedom, its purpose for being is global information control
Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft
TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Clearly, people were going elsewhere for the facts, and that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They have no control over alternative media, so they needed a comprehensive way to shut them all down
By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the COVID shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat
In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry. The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA), to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising”
What is the Trusted News Initiative (TNI)? As you may have discovered, Orwellian doublespeak is rampant these days, and many organizations are named in complete opposition to their intended purposes. Such is the case with the TNI as well.
As explained in the video above, created by Steve Kirsch’s Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF), TNI is an organization created for the purpose of global information control. It was founded by the BBC in July 2019,1,2,3 mere months before the COVID pandemic shattered all semblance of free speech rights.
Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft, just to name a few.4,5
TNI Formed as Trust in Mainstream Media Hit Rock Bottom
As astutely noted by Elizabeth Woodsworth in The Liberty Beacon,6 TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Canadians trust in mainstream media was only slightly better at 45%.
Also supporting the distrust in the media is an even more appalling recent Gallup Poll.7 Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Jimmy Dore goes into more details below.
This massive slip “can only mean that people are going elsewhere for their news,” Woodsworth said. And that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They realized people didn’t trust mainstream media anymore and were looking elsewhere for the facts.
This presented a serious problem, as they had no control over alternative media. How then would they shut down undesirable facts and theories that might jeopardize the smooth transition into the New World Order? Enter TNI and a new cadre of “fact checking” organizations to wrangle the unruly masses back into the brainwashing line.
Promoting ‘Freedom and Democracy’ Through Censorship
According to TNI, its first order of business was to “promote freedom and democracy” by preventing foreign interference in the 2020 election. However, TNI’s mission didn’t end there. Its Big Pharma backers had a vaccination agenda right from the start, and TNI has been instrumental in promoting that agenda and upholding their financial interests.
In 2019 — before we knew anything about the COVID shots to come — TNI warned that “anti-vaxxers are gaining traction” and that online platforms would need to intervene using algorithms to suppress the growing anti-vaccine movement.
In addition to suppressing undesirable vaccine content, TNI also floods online users with pro-vaccine messages to drown out what little opposition is left. As noted by VSRF, from the start, TNI sought to normalize the use of this experimental gene transfer technology, despite a mountain of unanswered questions about the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology.
Suppressing early treatment successes was also part of the vaccine agenda, as early treatment options posed a direct threat to the Emergency Use Authorization of these experimental shots.
To that same end, TNI also fueled hatred against the unvaccinated, and hired so-called “fact checkers” to publish false fact checks and hit pieces on those who questioned the sanity and safety of pandemic countermeasures, such as masks and lockdowns, or raised concerns about the experimental shots.
We’re Made to Pay for Our Own Destruction
Hundreds of outspoken doctors and scientists — including experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford — have been banned and deplatformed over the past two and a half years.
No matter how prestigious their careers, they’ve been labeled “dangerous” and targeted for neutralization. Many have lost their careers. They’ve been ousted from professional associations and stripped of their medical licenses.By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the very ‘fake news’ it claims to combat.
Thousands of vaccine-injured people have also been accused of spreading “misinformation” and have been targeted for elimination from social media, while mainstream media (MSM) have roundly ignored their plight and pleas for recognition and help.
As noted by VSRF, by suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It actually creates and promotes mis- and disinformation. It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat.
And “Who’s paying for this harmful suppression of science?” VSRF asks. The answer: YOU are. We all are, through our taxes. Government has spent billions of tax dollars to promote the experimental COVID jabs, which benefits no one but Big Pharma, various patent holders and investors.
Legacy Media Is on the Wrong Side of History
In a June 25, 2021, article, unidentified staff at TrialSite News commented on the shocking censorship that was already becoming apparent:8
“Since time immemorial, those with power have used it to control those without. In the modern world, big government and big tech represent the seats of power when it comes to who is allowed to say what. Of course, many think that ‘private companies’ can regulate speech in any way they see fit. But from either an ethical or legal point of view, this is false …
Legally, the Supreme Court has long held that when a private company creates something that functions as a public square (think of a company town), the First Amendment comes into play.
Way back in April 2020, it was already clear that the then-existing online socio-political censorship was going to expand into the world of science, medicine, and academia in the new COVID-19 era. On April 1 of that year, early in the pandemic, Foreign Policy took a look at these questions in a piece titled, ‘Coronavirus Has Started a Censorship Pandemic’9 …
[D]isallowing good-faith medical information because the public can’t be presumed to properly weigh claims is infantilizing said public, along with dismantling the free speech culture …
The efforts now underway to completely suppress positive data associated with early-onset treatment prospects such as ivermectin or the squelching of any discussion of vaccine safety issues is completely unacceptable in a civilized, democratic market-based society. Those perpetuating such offenses are in fact on the wrong side of history.”
And who are the ones perpetuating these offenses? The TNI, for sure. TNI partners have censored and tried to ruin the reputations and careers of fully qualified and licensed public health experts, doctors and scientists — all in the name of protecting you, the audience, from the life-saving information these experts are trying to share. In her closing remarks, Woodsworth says:10
“Regarding COVID-19, Dr. Piers Robinson, co-director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, has judged, ‘It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that this is probably one of the biggest propaganda operations that we have seen in history,’ concluding ‘what happens is down to how people resist and how much force and coercion the authorities use.’
Indeed, the very foundation of democracy is that public wisdom should be consulted and given its head in self-rule. The public has the constitutional right to full information to form and express its own conclusions and does not need a coordinated TNI to corral and contain it.
It is utterly outrageous that the voices the public needs from the top public health figures at its best universities are being denied to its hearing. A far superior job of investigative reporting is being done by the hard-working alternative media researchers without Big Pharma’s blood-stained advertising dollars.”
Organized Control
The reason the TNI has been so effective in shutting out opposing views is because all of the partners work together in a highly-organized manner. When one identifies a piece of “misinformation,” the order to quash it is shared across platforms. The same goes for the official narrative. Everyone supports and promotes it, no matter how illogical.
A debunking piece by one legacy media partner is used as “proof” by another, and Big Tech platforms, of course, have unprecedented ability to suppress unwanted content and push “official” or approved content to the front using algorithms alone.
As for who actually decides what the official narrative is supposed to be, your guess is as good as mine. What we do know is that wealthy and powerful interests control media worldwide.
Two major media controllers are BlackRock and the Vanguard Group, which combined own a vast majority of the world’s assets, including media companies. Another is Bill Gates, whose self-serving “donations” ensure media treat him like a medical expert (or climate expert, or nutritional expert, or agricultural expert) when, in reality, he’s just promoting ideas that will make him a ton of money.
TNI’s Not-so-Trustworthy Sources
And what about TNI’s “trusted sources”? Aside from other TNI partners and their fact checkers, trusted sources are the public health agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Every one of these agencies has a long “rap sheet” when it comes to corruption and errors in judgment, and their unreliability have been highlighted time and again over the course of the COVID pandemic. They’ve broken a long list of rules and regulations intended to ensure public safety, and rewritten others on the fly — again without following proper protocols.
Time and again, people have scratched their heads, saying, “How can they do that? That’s not lawful. They CAN’T do that!” Well, the reality is, they used to be merely corrupt, but now they’re completely lawless. And no one is stopping them.
Decisions made by the FDA, CDC, NIH and the WHO over the course of the pandemic have been downright shocking in their absolute absence of any moral compass. They’ve repeatedly deferred to Big Pharma and blatantly ignored even the most basic of safety protocols, putting even babies lives at risk.
In the past, we’d expect the Fourth Estate — journalists with integrity — to expose the kind of fraud and lawlessness these agencies are engaging in. But sadly, legacy media, just like nearly every federal regulatory agency, has been captured by the military industrial complex.
Legacy media is no longer the “free press.” It certainly is in no way shape or form your trusted source of news. Those days are long gone. They are completely captured; hardly a sentence is uttered that isn’t directed to them by the government and repeated parroting by all of legacy media in all their varied forms.
Google News Initiative
In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry.
The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA),11 to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising.”
This is wrong on so many levels. Advertising and news/editorial departments are not supposed to be mixed, period. They are intended to operate independently, not as complements or supporting helpmates. The very fact that newspapers are failing and ad revenue is dropping makes the entire press corps susceptible to doing whatever the advertisers want.
And, online, advertisers include the CDC and NIH, as evidenced by their many ads on social media. So, the TNTA program is really all about building revenue. It has nothing to do with providing trustworthy news.
Several other copycats also exist that have nearly the same name as TNI. There’s the Trusting News Initiative, the Trust Project, the News Integrity Initiative, the Journalism Trust Initiative, you get the idea.12 Some share partners with the TNI, further widening the media network of controlled news.
Add to that NewsGuard and scores of fact-checking organizations, all of whom work in tandem to promote the official narrative while suppressing opposing views. As I’ve stated before, NewsGuard received startup funds13 from the Publicis Groupe, one of the largest PR companies in the world, which serves the needs of several of the largest drug companies in the world.
Last but not least, there’s a tightly woven web of interlocking “fact-checking” agencies that work for advertisers in an effort to manipulate the news in favor of the advertisers or other entities with vested interests, such as governments and health organizations.
This web of fact-checkers is funded by hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars. I believe this was planned long before the pandemic, and their goal is to steer the news into a second horn for advertisers. Not surprisingly, the drug industry has one of the largest advertising budgets, which is part of why you can’t get the truth about drugs and health from the legacy media or any of these fact-checkers.
TNI and Hitler’s Principles
In his Substack article, “Propaganda, Corporatism and the Hidden Global Coup,” Dr. Robert Malone describes the TNI thus:14
“The TNI uses advocacy journalism and journals to promote their causes. The Trusted News Initiative is more than this though; if you go back to Hitler’s basic principles, the members of the TNI are using these core principles to control the public.”
Hitler’s basic principles are described in the book, “Propaganda and Persuasion,” and are listed as:15
Avoid abstract ideas — appeal to the emotions
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases
Give only one side of the argument
Continuously criticize your opponents
Pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification
I believe Dr. Malone is onto something. These principles have certainly become media norms over the past couple of years. Who knows — perhaps I was picked to be a “special enemy for special vilification” because the TNI and those who pull their puppet strings are all Nazis. I didn’t expect it to be that simplistic, but who knows?
We’re all getting an education in psychopathy these days, and there’s nothing normal about psychopathic logic. Their brains are wired differently and you won’t be able to understand their motivations no matter how hard you try. Is this perhaps why so many decisions handed down to us make no rational sense, either from a scientific, medical or humanitarian perspective?
If it’s true that many of those who are trying to take over the world in a global coup are in fact on the psychopathic spectrum, then our response needs to be suitably appropriate.
Appropriate responses when faced with a psychopath include keeping your emotions in check (as they seek to manipulate your emotions); standing your ground in an assertive manner; not buying into their stories (especially not victim stories); and paying attention only to their actions, not their words.16,17
To be more precise, most experts have one primary suggestion for dealing with a psychopath, and that is, “Don’t.”18 Since we’re talking about media here, that’s a fairly simple action item. Just turn them off, and find alternative news sources that aren’t tainted by blood money and an overt attempt for global slavery.
You owe it to yourself and your family to take control of your health and avoid these propaganda tools and restrict your information to truly trusted and vetted sources.
It seems we may have reached the moment when it is time to say goodbye. It has been fun, educational and sometimes cathartic – for me at least. I hope you got something from our time together too.
I am not going anywhere, of course. Not for now at least. I love to write. For as long as I feasibly can, I will continue to rail against injustice, call out corporate power and its abuses, and demand a fairer and more open society.
But I have to be realistic. I have to recognise that a growing number of you will not be joining me here on this page for much longer. And it feels rude after so much time together not to bid you a fond farewell before it is too late. I will miss you.
Many of you may have assumed it wouldn’t end this way. You probably imagined that I would get banned by Facebook or Twitter. You would be able to rally round, send in complaints worded in the strongest possible terms, and lobby for my reinstatement. Maybe even sign a petition.
But it isn’t going to end like that. There will be no bang. I have been too careful for that to be my fate. I have avoided rude and crude words. I have steered clear of insults (apologies if my responses have sometimes been a little caustic). I have not defamed anyone. I have avoided “fake news” – except to critique it. I have not peddled “conspiracy theories”, unless quoting the British Medical Journal on Covid now counts as misinformation (yes, I know for a few of you it does).
But none of that has helped. My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. “Going viral” is a distant memory.
No, I won’t be banned. I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.
Which is why I am saying my goodbyes now while I can still reach you, my most obstinate followers.
But this isn’t really about one small light being snuffed out. This isn’t just about our relationship coming to an end. Something bigger, and more disturbing, is taking place.
Journalists like me are part of an experiment – in a new, more democratised media landscape. We have developed new reader-funded models so that we can break free of the media corporations, which until now ensured billionaires and the state controlled the flow of information in one direction only: to speak down to us.
The corporate media need corporate advertising – or their owners’ deep pockets – to survive. They don’t need you, except as a captive audience. You’re both their prisoner and their product.
But the lifeblood of a reader-funded journalist, as the name suggests, are readers. The more of you we attract, the better chance there is that we can generate donations and income and make the model sustainable. Our Achilles’ heel is our dependence on social media to find you, to keep reaching you, to offer you an alternative from the corporate media.
If Facebook (sorry, the Meta universe) and Twitter stop independent writers from growing their readerships by manipulating the algorithms, by ghosting and shadow-banning them, and by all the other trickery we do not yet understand, then new voices cannot grow their funding base and break free of corporate control.
And equally, for those like me who are already established and have significant numbers of readers, these tech giants can whittle them away one by one. Ostensibly, I have many tens of thousands of followers, but for several years now I have been reaching fewer and fewer of you. I am starved of connection. The danger, already only too obvious, is that my readership, and funding model, will slowly start to shrivel and die.
Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and a handful of titans of the new media age are so big they can probably weather it out. But the rest of us will not be so lucky.
Readers will lose sight of us, as our light slowly fades, and then we will be gone completely. Vanished.
I have lost count of the followers who – because, god knows, an algorithm slipped up? – tell me they have received a social media post many months after they last saw one from me. In the cacophony of media noise, they had not noticed that I had unexpectedly gone quiet until that reminder arrived or else they assumed I had given up writing.
Which is why, if you want to keep seeing posts from me and writers like me, if this is not soon to be a final goodbye, if you think it important to read non-corporate analysis and commentary, then you need to act. You should be bookmarking your favourite writers and visiting their sites regularly – not just when you are prompted to by Mark Zuckerberg.
You need to be an active consumer of news – not a passive one, as you were raised to be when the choice was between three TV channels and a dozen print newspapers.
You need to search out and maintain those connections before they are gone entirely and the window has closed. Because those voices you prize now will wither and decay like autumn leaves if they have no audience. If you leave it too long, even when you finally remember to go search for them, you may find they are no longer there to be discovered. You will have missed the chance to say goodbye.
So let us say it now, while we still can: Farewell.
UPDATE:
Writing is a solitary activity, and it can be easy to imagine that what was obvious inside your head will be clear to others when that idea takes its place in the outside world. But a proportion of early readers of this post have mistaken it for an actual goodbye, rather than as a cautionary tale of what has been happening and what is still to come. So let me reassure you: I am going to continue writing and you can continue reading me, so long as either Twitter and Facebook direct you to me or you make the effort to find me.
Here’s hoping that my goodbye will prove unnecessary.
Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.
In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.
I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world.
Having unelected tech oligarchs ban duly elected members of Congress – or even the sitting President – from using their massive platforms is dystopian. Remember how many world leaders warned that FB & Twitter's banning of Trump was a threat to democracy.https://t.co/zIT7l04hMWhttps://t.co/2BPFrgeZXv
We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.
“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”
Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.
The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.
Silicon Valley Should Not Restrict Public Discourse About Covid Measures Which Affect Everyone
"Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse."https://t.co/WlDypacgmM
It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.
When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.
I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.
This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.
For years, Americans have largely ignored corporate social media surveillance. But all of that is about to change, thanks to President Biden. No one has taken the White House’s plan to turn Big Tech into a quasi-Five Eyes censorship program seriously despite repeated warnings from journalists and news websites. Journalist Caitlin Johnstone warned, the White House is pushing for Facebook and Microsoft to censor any social media stories the Feds don’t like.
“After Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted on Thursday that the administration has given Facebook a list of accounts to ban for spreading misinformation about the Covid vaccine, she has now doubled down saying that people who circulate such materials online should be banned from not just one but all social media platforms.”
The Feds want Big Tech to ban stories and people they do not approve of from social media.
“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there,” Psaki told the press on Friday.
“Until now, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) database has focused on videos and images from terrorist groups on a United Nations list and so has largely consisted of content from Islamist extremist organizations such as Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
Big Tech’s GIFCT is essentially a Five Eyes censorship program, masquerading as a Big Tech social media forum to stop terrorism and extremism.
“Over the next few months, the group will add attacker manifestos — often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence — and other publications and links flagged by U.N. initiative Tech Against Terrorism. It will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes, adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.”
Twitter and YouTube are also helping Five Eyes spy on the world’s social media.
“The firms, which include Twitter and YouTube, share “hashes,” unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it.”
Other companies that have access to the GIFCT database are Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, Verizon Media, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Mailchimp and Airbnb.
Three years ago the mass media warned us about Five Eyes demanding that tech companies give them backdoors to users’ encrypted data, and now they finally got their wish.
The dangers of Big Tech giving URLs, PDFs and personal information to a global intelligence agency will allow governments to secretly track and ID people and organizations they deem a threat.
Radio New Zealandsaid if one government has access to this information, then other government’s will request it as part of doing business with another country.
New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner also warned that there is nothing stopping governments’ from abusing their access to people’s social media posts. And that is the real danger of letting Big Tech, Five Eyes and the U.N. decide who is a terrorist or extremist.
“Even then you don’t solve the technical challenge of allowing access for legitimate purposes while maintaining a secure network, and people in the tech industry tell me this is impossible” Privacy Commissioner John Edwards said.
The GIFCT claims to “bring together the technology industry, government, civil society, and academia to foster collaboration and information-sharing to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online.” But what it does not tell you is how they decide to brand someone a terrorist or extremist.
GIFCT admits that Big Tech has been secretly compiling a database of “hashes” or unique digital fingerprints of suspected terrorist/extremist social media posts since 2016.
Big Tech also uses their in-house “Content Incident Protocol” (CIP) to justify sharing hashes of an extremist’s video, and other related content with Big Tech companies, Five Eyes and the U.N.
If the GIFCT’s secret social media database and CIP sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Earlier this week, PayPal announced that they are working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities.
PayPal is basically setting up its own version of GIFCT to justify monitoring people’s transactions under the terrorist/extremist umbrella. As the article mentioned, PayPal and the ADL will “uncover and disrupt the financial flows of anti-government and white supremacist organizations” on their own!
“The information collected through the initiatives will be shared with other firms in the financial industry, law enforcement and policymakers, PayPal said.”
It is only a matter of time before GIFCT censorship will be used to monitor and stop protests that corporations and the White House disapprove of.
After the Crash 