Tag Archives: Twitter

New York Times stokes anti-Russia campaign to promote Facebook, Twitter censorship

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By Bill Van Auken

Source: WSWS.org

The New York Times has mounted a concerted campaign promoting a crackdown on political expression on social media on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of Russian government interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

In conjunction with a public statement by Facebook last Wednesday on political advertising allegedly originating in Russia, the Times published a sensationalist “investigative” report titled “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” an op-ed piece indicting Facebook for failing to exercise greater censorship of political content and an editorial Saturday touching on the same themes.

Facebook briefed members of both the Senate and House intelligence committees on its findings on September 6. It said it found $50,000 in spending on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads “that might have originated in Russia” over a two-year period beginning in June 2015. It added that this included Facebook accounts and pages “with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort,” including “accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian.”

The vast majority of the ads, Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos added, “didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” but rather appeared to focus on amplifying “divisive social and political messages.”

The testimony was seized upon by Democratic politicians attempting to promote the theme of Russia meddling in the US elections in support of Trump. Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the highly ambiguous Facebook findings “deeply disturbing and yet fully consistent with the unclassified assessment of the intelligence committee.”

The Times “investigation” was as weak in its substantiation of a Russian government operation to influence the 2016 presidential election as the Facebook report, but far more inflammatory.

It described an “unprecedented foreign intervention in American democracy” and a “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

It repeated the unproven allegations that Russia was responsible for the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails exposing the party leadership’s attempts to sabotage the presidential campaign of self-described “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, while accusing Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik of having “battered” Hillary Clinton with a “fire hose of stories, true, false and in between.”

The story focuses, however, on the alleged Russian use of Facebook and Twitter, darkly accusing the two companies of failing to prevent themselves from “being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.”

The “evidence” uncovered by the Times consisted of linking “suspect” Facebook accounts, since taken down by the company, that posted material linking to a website, DCLeaks.com, that published hacked emails from billionaire financier and Democratic Party donor George Soros, a former NATO commander, and Democratic as well as Republican functionaries. With no substantiation, the newspaper claims that “United States intelligence concluded” that the site was a creation of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

The article also accuses Russia of exploiting Twitter, using “hundreds of accounts” for “posting anti-Clinton messages and promoting leaked material.”

It further charges that the alleged Russian campaign employed “automated Twitter bots, which send out tweets according to built-in instruction.”

According to Twitter’s own estimate, there are some 48 million such bots on Twitter, and they accounted for fully 19 percent of all election-related tweets during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Times report acknowledges that it investigated Twitter accounts identified as “Kremlin trolls” to discover that there were real people behind them with no ties to the Russian government. It quoted one of them, Marilyn Justice, 66, from Nova Scotia, who told the newspaper she believed that “Hillary’s a warmonger” and that she was hostile to the anti-Russian bias in the Western media. Another so-called “troll” turned out to be a web producer in Zurich, who expressed sharp disagreement with Western narratives on the Ukraine and Syria.

The existence of such views, the Times concluded was “a victory for Russia’s information war—that admirers of the Kremlin spread what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.”

The Times followed up its “investigation” with an op-ed piece accusing Facebook of having “contributed to, and profited from, the erosion of democratic norms in the United States” by having allowed the posting of “anti-Hillary ads precisely aimed at Facebook users whose demographic profiles implied a vulnerability to political propaganda.”

It went on to comment: “Unfortunately, the range of potential responses to this problem is limited. The First Amendment grants broad protections to publishers like Facebook.”

The Times editorial published Saturday questions whether “any federal agency is focused on” the alleged “problems” uncovered in the newspaper’s report: “foreign intervention through social media to feed partisan anger and suspicion in a polarized nation.”

There is a farcical element to the Times exposé. The idea that the spending of $50,000, vaguely linked to Russia, on Facebook ads over a two-year period undermined US elections in which total spending is estimated at roughly $7 billion is ludicrous.

Whatever actions may have been taken by the government of Vladimir Putin to promote the international interests of Russia’s ruling oligarchy, Moscow’s alleged Internet activities pale in comparison to the unrelenting campaigns mounted by US government agencies, from the CIA to the Pentagon and the National Endowment for Democracy, to rig foreign elections, engineer regime change operations and militarily destroy entire countries. As the former US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland proudly acknowledged, Washington sunk some $5 billion into promoting pro-Western regime change in Ukraine.

Even more preposterous is the attempt to attribute the sharp social tensions and intense political antagonisms that are ripping apart the seams of American society to Russian propaganda. Both are the product of the crisis of American capitalism, characterized above all by the uninterrupted growth of social inequality.

There is, however, a sinister and deadly serious content to the campaign by the Times editorial board, which functions as a reliable conduit for CIA propaganda. It has joined its long-running campaign around allegations of Russian interference in the US election with the demand for a crackdown on political expression on social media.

The two are inextricably linked. Underlying the Times campaign around Moscow’s supposed assault on the “integrity of American democracy” lies the political agenda of powerful factions within the US ruling establishment, which are demanding the continuation and intensification of the drive toward regime change in, and military confrontation with, Russia.

The preparations for war abroad are inevitably accompanied by the growth of censorship and political repression at home. The Times ’ criticisms of Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding, these corporations, along with Google, are collaborating closely with the US government and its intelligence agencies in the attempt to suppress freedom of speech and thought and censor anti-capitalist and anti-war reporting and opinion.

Under the phony banner of combating “fake news,” Google announced a change in its search algorithms last April that was clearly directed at slashing the readership of anti-war and left-wing websites, with the World Socialist Web Site being hit the hardest, losing more than two-thirds of its traffic from Google search results.

Facebook has followed suit, rolling out a similar announcement in June that it was updating its own News Feed algorithm aimed at “deprioritizing” posts viewed as “problematic” promoting “low quality content” “sensationalism” and “misinformation.”

The attempts by these multi-billion-dollar corporations to arrogate to the themselves the power of gatekeepers of the Internet, censoring content that conflicts with the interests of the American ruling oligarchy and its military-intelligence apparatus has aroused broad popular hostility. The WSWS has spearheaded the opposition to these attacks, with 3,500 people from more than 80 different countries signing it petition demanding that Google cease its censorship of the Internet.

Facebook, Twitter, Western Media Attempt to Reassert Monopoly Over “Truth”

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By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

In a surreal and stunning example of 21st century propaganda and censorship, Google has cobbled together a coalition it is calling “First Draft” to tackle what it calls “misinformation online.” 

First Draft’s “founding partners” include News Corporation’s (parent company of Fox News) Storyful and NATO think tank Atlantic Council’s “Bellingcat” blog, headed by formally unemployed social worker Eliot Higgins who now fashions himself as a weapons expert and geopolitical analyst despite no formal training, practical real-world experience or track record of honest, unbiased reporting. In fact, between News Corporation and Bellingcat alone, Google’s First Draft appears to be itself a paragon of, and nexus for “misinformation online.” 

Google’s Glaring Conflicts of Interest 

Google too, having for years now worked closely with the US State Department, faces its own conflicts of interest in “social newsgathering and verification.” In fact, Google has admittedly been involved in engineering intentional deceptions aimed specifically to skew public perception, including doctoring its maps and Google Earth in real-time amid conflicts in favor of US-backed militant groups and through the development of applications designed to psychologically target the Syrian government into capitulating before US-backed militant groups.

The UK Independent in its article, “Google planned to help Syrian rebels bring down Assad regime, leaked Hillary Clinton emails claim,” would report that:

An interactive tool created by Google was designed to encourage Syrian rebels and help bring down the Assad regime, Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails have reportedly revealed.

By tracking and mapping defections within the Syrian leadership, it was reportedly designed to encourage more people to defect and ‘give confidence’ to the rebel opposition.

The article would continue:

The email detailing Google’s defection tracker purportedly came from Jared Cohen, a Clinton advisor until 2010 and now-President of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, the company’s New York-based policy think tank.

In a July 2012 email to members of Clinton’s team, which the WikiLeaks release alleges was later forwarded to the Secretary of State herself, Cohen reportedly said: “My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”

Cohen would conclude:

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.”

Can Google then be relied upon to sort out “misinformation online” if it itself is directly involved in manipulating public perception to achieve US foreign policy objectives? To impartial observers, the answer is clearly “no.”

First Draft would publish on its website a post titled, “Social networks unite with global newsrooms to take action against misinformation online,” adding further details behind the alleged rationale of the coalition. It would state:

Today, news breaks online. Today, the first images to emerge from a breaking news event have been captured by an eyewitness. Today, injustices that may never have been reported become global news stories because a bystander reached for their smartphone. Today, malicious hoaxes and fake news reports are published in increasingly convincing and sophisticated ways. 

We live in a time when trust and truth are issues that all newsrooms, and increasingly the social platforms themselves, are facing. In July, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner wrote about the ways technology is disrupting the truth, explaining “in the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a credible source or not.” Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organisations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source.

The members that constitute the First Draft coalition, however, have enjoyed an uncontested monopoly for decades in determining just what the “truth” actually is, as well as a monopoly over propagating things the global public now know for a fact were “untruths.” Again, we see another case of the proverbial fox guarding the hen house.

The Liars Who Lied About WMDs in Iraq Will Protect Us from Liars Online? 

Indeed, many of the organizations that constitute First Draft’s coalition played a pivotal role in perhaps the most destructive and costly lie of the 21st century (to date), that involving alleged “weapons of mass destruction” or “WMDs” in Iraq, serving as the pretext for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

According to some estimates, up to a million perished in the initial invasion and subsequent occupation. More conservative estimates are still in the hundreds of thousands.

Undoubtedly, the invasion, justified by lies propagated across the entirety of US and European media, helped trigger a predictable chain of catastrophes that have left the Middle East to this day in conflict and ruination. These same US and European media organizations, the same ones now signing their names to First Draft, also helped justify the continued presence of US troops in Iraq for years after the invasion, up to and including today.

And the same names signed on to First Draft are also the same names who helped sell the disastrous intervention in Libya and who are now attempting to sell yet another direct Western military intervention in Syria.

And it is perhaps the lack of success these same names are having in selling this most recent potential intervention in Syria that has precipitated First Draft’s creation in the first place.

There is a burgeoning alternative media composed of individual independent journalists, analysts and commentators both biased and impartial, both professional and amateur, competing directly with and overcoming the West’s longstanding monopoly over international public perception. There is also the emergence of professional and competitive national media organizations across the developing world who are taking increasingly large shares of both the West’s media monopoly and its monopoly over the public’s trust.

It is clear that First Draft has no intention of protecting the truth as none among its membership have done so until now individually, but rather in collectively protecting what the special interests behind these organizations want the global public to believe is the truth. First Draft is a desperate measure taken by Western special interests to reassert the West’s dominance over global public perception by leveraging the widely used social media platforms it controls, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as IT giant Google and its large range of services and applications.

In the end, all that First Draft is likely to accomplish is convincing the developing world of the necessity of creating domestic alternatives to Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as to continue expanding their own domestic media organizations to better represent their respective national interests upon the global stage and to dilute the dangerous and destructive media monopoly the West has enjoyed and abused for decades.

Until the members of First Draft can cite a lie told by their competitors that is as destructive and as costly as their own lies preceding and underpinning the invasion and occupation of Iraq or the more recent destruction of Libya, their efforts appear more as a means of further deflecting away from the truth, not defending it.

Facebook and Google Ready to Kill Alternative Media for the Government

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By Jake Anderson

Source: AntiMedia

This week three media goliaths — Facebook, Google, and Twitter, who collectively act as information gatekeepers for the Internet — announced they would begin implementing censorship practices against news sites they deem misleading.

Websites that publish “fake,” misleading, or even satirical news will now be subject to a sliding scale of infractions that will target ad revenue and social media algorithms. Without ad revenue from monetization platforms like Google Adsense, many of these sites would not be able to continue publishing, and without Facebook’s distribution platform, even sites with good organic reach could find their traffic severely crippled.

“Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” Google stated, following the lead of Mark Zuckerberg.

On a proprietary note, do these companies have the right to restrict users of their services who they deem to be in breach of contract? Yes. Is it understandable to want to exert some control over hacks who manipulate search engine and social media algorithms at the expense of a misinformed public? Yes. Does this exonerate the intellectual and cultural crime of using the specter of online ‘yellow journalism’ to deliver a crippling blow to the revenue streams of independent media…?

The move comes after Facebook and Google found themselves taking a lot of heat after the election. (Liberal) detractors went so far as to blame Facebook and Google for Trump’s win, claiming the constant online echo chamber of sensationalist news, unsubstantiated claims, and apocryphal headlines paved the way for Clinton’s electoral collapse.

The new restrictions will target a wide variety of websites: sites whose editorial content is deemed (by, Google, Facebook and Twitter’s board of directors, presumably?) false or misleading; sites that intend to invoke outrage with clickbait-y titles; and even sites that are purposely fake (such as the Onion’s sister site, Clickhole) for satirical purposes.

The websites on the new blacklist include Zero Hedge, The Free Thought Project, Collective Evolution, Disclose.TV, and dozens of others. The selections run the gamut from partisan propagandistic sites to alternative philosophy and healing resources. Unsurprisingly, alt-right darlings Infowars and Breitbart, both of which will soon wield vast power in the Trump administration, are targeted. In the case of Infowars, one might surmise the conservative Trumpland publication’s insistence that Hillary Clinton’s inner-circle practices satanic rituals had something to do with their inclusion on the list.

Some of the other sites on the list are surprising. Collective Evolution, as an example, may be considered by some to have New Age influences, but many of their articles practice sound journalistic ethics.

Why such a draconian response? Some analysts believe “fake news” had a role in flipping the results of the election away from what the mainstream media had predicted — away from their carefully groomed candidate. Their conscription of Google, Facebook, and Twitter (which may institute something called ‘mute’ filters) in order to exact revenge may cripple, if not destroy, an alternative media infrastructure that has grown into a formidable challenge to the traditional media establishment.

Because of how blatantly fascistic this move is, I struggle to respond to those who say, ‘Well, some of these sites are bad.’

Yes, some of them are, but that’s not the point. The point is that this is a Pandora’s Box scenario. Once we give the Corporate State the ability to curate online content via punitive measures, we’ve bestowed upon them the power to act as gatekeeper for a stunning amount of public knowledge. This is crony capitalism integrated into the very ethos of the fourth estate, using groupthink and the free market to drown out sites that don’t make the cut of acceptable. They will now be able to go through all news stories and delegate carte blanche which ones are “false” and must therefore be algorithmically and punitively castrated. They already used Russia as an excuse to not acknowledge Wikileaks impeccably researched leaks. What won’t they stoop to in order to conceal their future transgressions?

It will actually likely end up resembling aspects of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership). In that (hopefully dead) trade agreement, corporate tribunals would have been given the power to overrule national laws that hurt their profits. Similarly, with the “fake news” control mechanism, the political-media-industrial complex will be able to determine which stories are damaging to their geopolitical and domestic narratives and then use Google, Facebook, and Twitter to suffocate any news articles that challenge these narratives. Half-truths and controversial op-eds will be cited as reasons for bans. Hacked information from Wikileaks cables could be cited as specious and without corroboration, or, more likely, Russian espionage (well, if Clinton were still around, at least).

There is another parallel, and it’s nothing less than 9/11 itself. After the terrorist attacks that tragically took the lives of over three thousand Americans, the government used the nation’s fear and collective trauma to ram through the Patriot Act, which created a matrix of laws that has been stripping us of our civil liberties for over 15 years. It appears the political establishment wants to use Clinton’s loss in a similar way: to bottle public anger over the election into the deliverable censorship of grassroots media. I’ve been claiming for months that the government’s next war would be on hackers and publishers of hacked material. It appears I may have been wrong (oops, I guess Google and Facebook ought to break our site over their knee). The next war could be on independent media, who the establishment rightfully believes is one of their biggest enemies at the moment. Who else can expose to everyday Americans that the government and their corporate goon-slaves are full of the worst kind of shit?

Let’s be clear: there are certainly sites on the list that publish bad journalism, sloppy journalism, or straight up lies. And sometimes it’s easy to find them. After all, Professor Melissa Zimdars (who contributed to the list) made the following astute point:

“Odd domain names generally equal odd and rarely truthful news.”

But whether or not some sites practice questionable editorial standards is completely beside the point. By attacking the finances of alternative media sites who publish controversial but well-researched journalism, the government is blacklisting an entire movement. The precedent Google and Facebook will establish with this move will have incalculable ramifications on the future of alternative media and the Corporate State’s ability to censor any story they deem dangerous. This is nothing short of a two-step with fascism.

If they don’t want “misleading” news, they better kill the networks.

Let’s unpack this for a moment and pretend that truthful journalism is really what Google and Facebook are after. If that were the case, they would need to cut off the revenue streams of CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, and all of the other mainstream news channels — you know, the same ones that collectively manipulated us into accepting the Iraq War and the subsequent regime change policies that have killed millions in the Middle East. And, see, that’s precisely the reason the mainstream media would never be held to these kinds of standards: they are a division of the State Department; they help manufacture consensus. You see, their “fake” news is important; the government’s fake news is real news.

Beyond just propagating blatantly misleading and fraudulent news (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the link I just used, which catalogs instances of mainstream media perpetuating false news, is on the new official list of “fake” news), the networks have long been guilty of commission by omission — curating the news cycles so that stories on critical issues like Standing Rock, TPP and others get a fraction of the air time of, say, an airplane crash or Trump’s latest gaffe.

This is Trojan horse for the government

In the Deep State (which you won’t hear even a mention of on network news), the government operates as a series of revolving doors between private defense contractors, media conglomerates, the surveillance apparatus, and giant financial institutions. After the revelations of Snowden (source is another from the list of fake news – be wary!), it became clear that the government was spying on and data mining American citizens with impunity in ways far worse than even 1984 had imagined.

Caught with their pants down, the government stopped, right? No. In fact, they doubled down, except they did something smart: they farmed it out to corporations and created a new synergistic surveillance state. Without Silicon Valley, many of the NSA’s transgressions could have never come to pass. Similarly, the government will now outsource its censorship game to corporations. Ironically, it will be Google and Facebook, two companies that represent the 21st century Information Age, who will be holding the cuffs.

This is another example corporations pitch hitting for the government, and it sets a horrifying precedent.

What can you do?

1. Don’t listen to them. Trust independent media (while being extremely discerning) over corporate media.

2. Help in the effort to create alternative and underground internet and social media infrastructure. A huge part of this is holding independent media accountable to accurate reporting, confirming sources, and obtaining original documents. Alt. media doesn’t have the same financial resources available to them, but with the ubiquity of the Internet, there’s no excuse for sloppy reporting.

3. Support alternative media with donations and content sharing.

4. Boycott mainstream media.

5. Tell Google and Facebook you disagree with censorship.

6. Encrypt (always encrypt). This isn’t necessary for some journalists — but if you are breaking a big story you should be using anonymous web tools like Tor, a VPN, as well as using encryption to transmit and unlock messages. Take a look at the Twitter account of information activist Cory Doctorow. He lists a long string of numbers and letters. That is his public key, otherwise known as asymmetric cryptography, which allows him to communicate information privately and anonymously. In the future, it will be unthinkable for journalists to not protect themselves, their data, and their sources in this way.