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Before the COVID lockdowns, social media companies had started contracting with new third-parties organizations called fact-checkers to assist in “content creation.” Getting a pass meant the post or story was amplified but getting dinged for inaccuracy meant that the post would be throttled or deleted.

For a while we believed it but certain revelations changed that. We came to realize that the posts labeled false were typically contrary to regime narratives. And a close look at the supposed refutation revealed that many points were very much in dispute. The companies developed a talent for seeming to reveal something false that was actually still debatable and interesting to consider. In most cases, what was declared false was still under consideration.

As time went on, the attempts to censor became more brazen and obvious. Then the Twitter files and other FOIAs generated proof of what many suspected all along. These entities were funded either directly or indirectly by government or by other dark-money sources as quid pro quos for other relationships they had cultivated with interested parties.

In other words, they were not some independent, science-based entities at all but rather hit squads with a hard political agenda. What was actually happening here was a form of censorship laundering. Government wants to censor but cannot so it turns to the social-media company to do the dirty work. To make this hand-in-glove racket less obvious, the companies would outsource to a fact-checking organization, making the lines of control even more blurry.

Sometime within the last several months, the whole racket seems to have unraveled. I rarely see the fact-checks cited at all. Or maybe they are cited ironically: what is declared false came to be seen as a badge of honor, a confirmation of core truth. That might seem crazy but these are the times in which we live. Nothing is as it seems.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

UN Secretary-General Proposes ‘Global Digital Compact’ to Push Laws Against Online ‘Hate’

June 16, 2023

UN Secretary-General Proposes ‘Global Digital Compact’ to Push Laws Against Online ‘Hate’

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres deliver remarks to reporters outside the U.N. Security Council at U.N., headquarters in New York City, on April 20, 2023. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, proposed a “Global Digital Compact,” (GDC) to push sweeping international laws against “hate and lies” online.

“The proliferation of hate & lies in the digital space is causing grave global harm. This clear & present global threat demands clear and coordinated global action. We don’t have a moment to lose,” he wrote in a tweet announcing the compact.

The UN policy brief, which was released on June 12, called for handing control of the internet to international bodies, as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda.

Guterres also referred to another UN brief, “Information and Integrity on Digital Platforms” (IIDP), which he said will be used as a guide to coordinate global efforts against “hate.”

The IIDP warned about what it calls, the “darker side of the digital ecosystem,” which could enable “the rapid spread of lies and hate, causing real harm on a global scale.”

Guterres said that the internet is being misused to deny science and spread disinformation and hate to billions of people, in a veiled reference to vaccine skeptics and growing populist movements.

“The proliferation of hate and lies in the digital space is causing grave global harm. This clear and present global threat demands clear and coordinated global action. We don’t have a moment to lose,” he declared in his call for global censorship.

UN Calls for Nations to Suppress Online Disinformation

The GDC is focused on eliminating the “divide across regions, gender, income, language, and age groups” regarding internet access and decries the fact that “some 89 percent of people in Europe are online, but only 21 percent of women in low-income countries use the internet.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know

May 11, 2023

The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know

[Update: How do we know Matt and crew are over the target? Facebook won’t allow this post…]

Introduction by Matt Taibbi

On January 17, 1960, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power eve he could not overcome.

Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

How New Zealand Dealt with “Disinformation”

February 21, 2023

How New Zealand Dealt with “Disinformation”

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is spectacular, with Orcs, Elves and breathtaking scenery filmed on location in New Zealand. The special effects were good too – the eye of Sauron looked very realistic – perhaps it is.

We have come across a minimally redacted 28-page draft of a Kiwi Government document entitled “Communications approach to managing disinformation, online harms and scams” dated 10 Dec 2021 (Available here).

The document’s aim appears to be coordinating countering disinformation seeking to harm “by threatening public safety, fracturing community cohesion and reduced trust in democracy.” All well and good then; it’s a bit like saying, do not open fire on the Red Cross.

Except that the object is “disinformation” relating to the Kiwi government’s response to the Covid pandemic. The definition of disinformation in the document is on page 5:

We will not summarise the complex and superficial content of the document other than to note that this is precisely the attempt at normalising the message of the pandemic that we have reported. The government has put out a message, and its credibility must be defended at all costs, with tech media partners, academics, the community and, of course, the armies of Sauron.

One consideration is that the Covid narrative in Middle Earth (as elsewhere) is based on the misuse and misinterpretation of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the death of clinical medicine, as we have made clear.

Cases may not have been active cases, hospitalisations may not be due to SARS-CoV-2, and deaths may be due to various causes related or unrelated to SARS-CoV-2. We will never know for sure. Why? Because the PCR cycle threshold for testing PCR “positive” in Middle Earth was 40 to 45, ensuring that most tested people would test positive even in the total absence of contamination (a very tall order).

…click on the above link to read the rest…

People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

September 29, 2021

People Don’t Understand How Unfree We Already Are

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved.

We’ve been so busy watching out for the next overtly totalitarian dictatorship that wants to put the jackboot on our necks we never noticed the covert totalitarians sliding the shackles around our minds.

Everyone thinks about the abusers who beat their spouses, but not the abusers who dominate their spouses’ minds with psychological manipulation.

Everyone thinks about psychopathic killers prowling the streets, but not the psychopathic killers who rule our world via mass-scale manipulation.

Conspiracy analysts warn that the government is trying to give everyone a social credit score to force us all to comply with the agendas of the powerful, in nations where mass-scale narrative management through the media and online algorithms already manipulates everyone into complying with the agendas of the powerful.

People assume that they aren’t already behaving exactly how the powerful want them to behave within a civilization whose political, monetary and economic systems are already completely under the control of the powerful.

People think they are free just because they can go and buy whatever they want in an economy rigged for the powerful using money rigged for the powerful, because they can say whatever they want on internet platforms whose algorithms are manipulated by the powerful, because they can vote for a politician who only got on the ballot by being owned by the powerful.

People think they are free because the system let them elect a “populist” like Donald Trump, even after that “populist” spent four years doing nothing but advancing the interests of the powerful.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Twitter Rolls Out New Wikipedia-Like Program To Narrative Manage Tweets

January 26, 2021

Twitter Rolls Out New Wikipedia-Like Program To Narrative Manage Tweets

Twitter has announced that it will be employing “a new community-driven approach to help address misleading information” called Birdwatch which news media are comparing to the model of content moderation used by Wikipedia.

“Twitter unveiled a feature Monday meant to bolster its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation by tapping users in a fashion similar to Wikipedia to flag potentially misleading tweets,” reports NBC. “The new system allows users to discuss and provide context to tweets they believe are misleading or false. The project, titled Birdwatch, is a standalone section of Twitter that will at first only be available to a small set of users, largely on a first-come, first-served basis.”

“We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors,” Twitter’s official statement says. “We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.”

Such claims provide little reassurance for anyone who’s familiar with the establishment narrative control operations which take place on Wikipedia in exactly that way. The Grayzone‘s Ben Norton did a great two-part report last year on the way concerted, aggressive efforts by a small group of shady-looking Wikipedia editors has succeeded in dominating the site’s articles which relate to western imperialist agendas and the reporters who support and oppose those agendas, including getting outlets like WikiLeaks and The Grayzone banned from use as sources despite their having no history of false reports.

“The internet encyclopedia has become a deeply undemocratic platform, dominated by Western state-backed actors and corporate public relations flacks, easily manipulated by powerful forces,” wrote Norton. “And it is run by figures who often represent these same elite interests, or align with their regime-change politics.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Never Forget How The MSM Smeared Assange: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

January 3, 2021

Never Forget How The MSM Smeared Assange: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The frenetic mass media propaganda campaign against Julian Assange was easily the creepiest and most Orwellian thing I’ve ever witnessed. And now it is silent. It did its job and then disappeared, before the public could really notice what was happening. It’s absolutely stunning.

You wouldn’t know it now, but between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest social media was full of blue-checkmarked narrative managers falling all over each other to be the first to come up with the day’s hottest smear painting a heroic journalist as a villain. Day after day after day. Smearing Assange was one of the easiest ways for an aspiring journalist to show current and prospective employers that you’re on the side of the empire. He was a soft target you could kick to signal that you’ll say whatever the Pentagon wants so you can climb the media ladder.

The smear campaign pervaded every political faction in every part of the US-centralized power alliance. Where they couldn’t get away with openly smearing him they circulated rightist psyops about Trump and Assange secretly working together and the extradition actually helping Assange, which was effectively the same as smearing him. The overwhelming majority of mainstream opinions about Assange are the result not of his work or the life he’s lived, but of a concerted propaganda campaign the majority of which took place between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest in April 2019. People just aren’t aware they’ve been propagandized.

The smear campaign went silent so quickly because it is now impossible to paint yourself as a brave up-punching journalist while smearing someone who is being openly prosecuted for journalism. So they’ve slinked off into the shadows, hoping we’ll forget what they did. Let’s not.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oligarchic Imperialism Is The New Dominant World Religion

November 27, 2020

Oligarchic Imperialism Is The New Dominant World Religion

I was just watching a gaggle of blue-checkmarked narrative managers attack progressive commentators Katie Halper and Briahna Joy Gray on Twitter for platforming antiwar journalist Rania Khalek on the grounds that Khalek is an “Assadist”, which is imperialist for “someone who opposes western imperialism in Syria”.

At no point do any of these narrative managers bother to address the actual things these women were discussing together or why anything Khalek was saying in their video conference was wrong. They do not feel the need to do such a thing, because they have this label, “Assadist”, which they can pin on one of the speakers and thereby reject one hundred percent of her work and one hundred percent of the people who give her a platform from which to speak. They feel no need to address the arguments, because they have a label which they all agree means they can completely un-person someone who opposes western regime change agendas in a specific region.

There are many such labels that are used to exclude people from positions of influence and power for simply disagreeing with the official doctrine of status quo oligarchic imperialism in any way. “Assadist” is one of them; it allows someone to be completely marginalized from platforms of significant influence without anyone ever needing to admit that they’re simply depriving anyone of a platform who criticized the way the US power alliance used proxy armies and propaganda campaigns in a campaign to topple Damascus. “Kremlin asset” is another, as are “conspiracy theorist”, “tankie”, or “[insert imperialism-targeted leader] apologist”.

In reality, these labels are interchangeable with the word “heretic”. They mean “Someone who disagrees with the mainstream consensus religion of oligarchic imperialism”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Imperialists Run The Same Tired Old Script Day After Fucking Day

August 14, 2020

Imperialists Run The Same Tired Old Script Day After Fucking Day

Imperialist pundit and Obama administration cold warrior Michael McFaul recently tweeted the following:

“Belarusians, inside and outside of the country, have reached out to me this week to ask why the West is so indifferent to their courageous fight for democracy. I can’t explain. Can you?”

I am not highlighting this tweet because it is remarkable (except for the extremely dubious claim that anyone ever reaches out to Michael McFaul). I am highlighting it because it is completely unremarkable.

Two months ago Moon of Alabama published an article titled “Belarus – A U.S. Sponsored Color Revolution Is Underway” documenting all the telltale signs that the Moscow-aligned nation would soon be overrun with protests in opposition to its Soviet-style government. Here’s an excerpt from that June 16th article:

On August 9 Belarus will hold presidential elections. Lukashenko will do his best to win again.

Color revolutions are usually launched over controversial elections. The results are publicly put into doubt even before the election begins. When the results finally arrive western media will claim that they diverge from the expectation it created and therefore must have been faked. People will be pushed into the streets to protest. To increase the chaos some sharp shooters may be put to work to fire at the police and at protesters like it was done in Ukraine. The revolt ends when it is flogged down or when the U.S. favorite candidate is put into place.

Last year the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy financed at least 34 projects and organizations in Belarus. The U.S. does not do that out of charity but to put its finger on the scale.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Critical Thinking Has Never Been More Important

February 25, 2020

Critical Thinking Has Never Been More Important

There are several reasons I spend so much time discussing and analyzing the current state of affairs. The primary motivation, aside from a drive to share personal opinions and spread awareness, is to encourage people to think critically. I don’t want readers to agree with everything I say, I want people to become inspired to think for themselves.

The ruling class doesn’t want you to think, they want you to simply accept the nonsensical stories they tell you. By contrast, I don’t want readers to blindly accept any of my conclusions, rather, I want my work be a case study on how to deploy independent logic and insight to a variety of topics and situations.

While I haven’t discussed the 2020 presidential campaign much here, I comment on it quite a bit over at Twitter, and people often ask why I discuss the circus at all. The reason isn’t because I expect a politician to come save us and make everything right again, but because the establishment response to populist-type candidates is so instructive.

Although Trump hasn’t done much of anything to address our nation’s core fundamental problems; such as a two-tier justice system, central bank power, financial feudalism, aggressive militarism/empire, rogue intelligence agencies, civil liberties abuses and tech giant censorship, his unexpected victory over chosen one Hillary Clinton nevertheless exposed many individuals and institutions for the frauds they are. Bernie Sanders’ run is doing the same thing. You don’t have to like the specific policies of Trump or Sanders to appreciate how any candidate with even a hint of grassroots populism puts the “elites” into panic mode.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Primary Mechanism Of Your Oppression Is Not Hidden At All

February 2, 2020

The Primary Mechanism Of Your Oppression Is Not Hidden At All

I write a lot about government secrecy and the importance of whistleblowers, leakers and leak publishers, and for good reason: governments which can hide their wicked deeds from public accountability will do so whenever possible. It’s impossible for the public to use democracy for ensuring their government behaves in the way they desire if they aren’t allowed to be informed about what that behavior even is.

These things get lots of attention in conspiracy circles and dissident political factions. Quite a few eyes are fixed on the veil of government opacity and the persecution of those brave souls who try to shed light on what’s going on behind it. Not enough eyes, but quite a few.

What gets less attention, much to our detriment, is the fact that the primary mechanism of our oppression and exploitation is happening right out in front of our faces.

The nonstop campaign by bought politicians, owned news outlets, and manipulated social media platforms to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world contribute vastly more to the sickness of our society than government secrecy does. We know this from experience: any time a whistleblower exposes secret information about the malfeasance of powerful governments like NSA surveillance or Collateral Murder, we see not public accountability, nor demands for sweeping systemic changes to prevent such malfeasance from reoccurring, but a bunch of narrative management from the political/media class.

This narrative management is used to shift attention away from the information that was revealed and onto the fact that the person who revealed it broke the law or misbehaved in some way. It’s used to convince people that the revelations aren’t actually a big deal, or that it was already basically public knowledge anyway.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nobody Sets Out To Become A War Propagandist. It Just Sort Of Happens.

January 31, 2020

Nobody Sets Out To Become A War Propagandist. It Just Sort Of Happens.

Senior Huffington Post UK editor Chris York has published what is by my count his twelfth smear piece against a small group of academics and independent journalists who’ve expressed skepticism of establishment Syria narratives.

York’s obsessive deluge of hit pieces revolve around British academics Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson, as well as independent journalist Vanessa Beeley. Every word in this sentence hyperlinks to a different article smearing them.

York’s twelfth such hit piece is much like the preceding eleven: it omits fundamentally crucial facts, it hides the shady nature of its sourcing, it makes outright false claims, and will only be believed by individuals who either don’t research this subject very deeply or whose paychecks depend on their not thinking about it too hard. But, more importantly, it’s his twelfth such hit piece.

A dozen smear articles. A dozen. Not against politicians. Not against powerful government leaders or massive celebrities. York’s smears focus on two professors with some 22,000 Twitter followers between them both, and Beeley, whom York himself refers to as an “obscure blogger” while authoring smear piece after smear piece after smear piece about her.

Now Beeley, Hayward and Robinson all do great work asking the important questions that no one else is asking about the many, many glaring plot holes in the narratives we’re being fed about what’s happening in Syria by the western political/media class. I am a fan. But only a relatively tiny number of people have ever heard of them. I don’t want to minimize the importance of what they do, but they are generally unheard of outside of small esoteric internet circles which focus on deep dives into questionable government narratives about Syria.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Narrative Management = Reality Management

June 17, 2019

Narrative Management = Reality Management

The Grayzone‘s Max Blumenthal has published the first part of an investigative series on how so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are being used to manipulate the narrative about what’s going on in Syria by posing as impartial investigative bodies and circulating pro-imperialist disinformation to the western political/media class as objective fact. Part one is titled “Behind the Syrian Network for Human Rights: How an opposition front group became Western media’s go-to monitor“, and it documents a mountain of evidence that one of these “NGOs” is in fact very much state-funded and highly biased in favor of anti-Assad forces, yet still gets cited as an independent source by western mass media outlets in a way that just so happens to help make the case for western interventionism in Syria.

“Citing the Syrian Network for Human Rights as an independent and credible source is the journalistic equivalent of sourcing statistics on head trauma to a research front created by the National Football League, or turning to tobacco industry lobbyists for information on the connection between smoking and lung cancer. And yet this has been standard practice among correspondents covering the Syrian conflict,” Blumenthal writes. “Indeed, Western press has engaged for years in an insidious sleight of hand, basing reams of shock journalism around claims by a single, highly suspect source that is deeply embedded within the Syrian opposition – and hoped that no one would notice.”

Major media outlets rely on the Syrian Network for Human Rights as a go-to source.

They won’t tell you that @snhr is based in Qatar & run by Syrian opposition leaders who clamor for US intervention.@MaxBlumenthal rips the lid off a propaganda front: https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/14/syrian-network-for-human-rights-opposition-snhr/ …352 12:16 AM – Jun 14, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy Behind the Syrian Network For Human Rights: How an opposition front group became Western media’s…Top media outlets turn to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) for figures on deaths and detentions, never noting the group’s seamless connection to Syria’s opposition, the support it receives…thegrayzone.com

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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