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Australia is concerned it can’t stop “misinformation” in private conversations

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 10, 2023

Australia’s authorities have updated their “misinformation code” but remain unhappy that large end-to-end encrypted apps are still not “regulated” in a way they would find satisfactory.

That’s despite the fact the “update” does what various governments like the most – leave a lot of room to interpret the rules as best suits them. Thus harm is now communication that represents “serious and credible” threat. And the previous definition is that this threat must also be imminent – however, that is no longer included in the wording.

The code in question, published late last month, is said to be “voluntary” and concerns combating whatever’s flagged as “disinformation and misinformation” – but now the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is making it clear that it is not nearly enough.

Currently, the “voluntary” reference has to do with the Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI) and its members, such as Apple, Google, Facebook (), TikTok and , “self-regulating” in a bid to find common ground with Australia’s government and avoid negative consequences to their business.

But now the regulator said that while the update is welcome, the work to gain powers necessary to force social media platforms to turn over data will continue.

At stake here are these companies revealing to state authorities how they fight against “misinformation,” and also, “how they respond to complaints.” Specifically, the push is to make those behind social media hand over information about “posts and audience.”

And that, in turn, the government claims, is necessary in its decision-making process, when it comes to making sure laws dealing with “misinformation” are ever stricter.

ACMA is particularly concerned with what they see as the lack of a “robust” framework that would expand the code to “cover the propagation of mis- and disinformation on messaging services that facilitate large-scale group messaging,” the regulator told Guardian Australia.

The article mentions WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in particular in this context – and tries to back up the case for the need to access data from these apps by mentioning “false rumors about child abduction spreading in  through WhatsApp,” and, “the death tax scare campaign at the 2019 election” in Australia.

In addition to wanting the “voluntary” code to become more stringent consequences-wise – as it becomes more loosely worded – ACMA wants “reserve powers” for itself to bring about future codes that would be binding.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | 2 Comments

US House Establishes Panel to Investigate Potential Weaponization of Federal Government

Samizdat – 11.01.2023

WASHINGTON – The US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a resolution establishing a select subcommittee to investigate whether components of the federal government have been weaponized against everyday citizens.

House lawmakers passed a resolution establishing the special Judiciary Committee panel in a vote of 221-211, falling along partisan lines.

“Congress hasn’t kept pace with the federal government’s potential to abuse new technology, and we need to better understand how US intelligence agencies work with each other and with the private sector to collect information on Americans or to undermine their fundamental constitutional rights,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement on the panel.

The subcommittee will investigate how the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and other executive branch agencies obtain information from and provide information to the private sector and other agencies to facilitate actions against US citizens.

The panel will be granted access to information shared with the House Intelligence Committee and the authority to review ongoing criminal investigations. The panel is styled after the Church Committee of 1975, which conducted similar oversight of federal agencies.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will name 13 members to the subcommittee, including five Democrats in consultation with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , | 2 Comments

Share prices of NATO weapons makers surge

RT | January 11, 2023

The largest military and defense corporations of NATO member states have seen a 21.5% boost in market value in 2022 amid the military operation in Ukraine and the rearmament in Europe, Vedomosti newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing data from Defense News and Tradingview analytics.

Their combined market capitalization increased from $579 billion in December 2021 to $703 billion in December 2022, according to the estimates.

The ranking included 25 companies with a capitalization of over $1 billion which are traded on the stock market and have military products dominating in their revenues, and are also actively involved in arms supplies to Ukraine.

Authors of the report name German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall as the top gainer over the last 12 months, with a 122% surge in share price. French drone and missile producer Thales saw its market value rise 54%. American defense contractor Northrop Grumman was up 44%, while stock in HIMARS rocket launchers maker Lockheed Martin gained 42%.

Other notable mentions in the report include BAE Systems (+40%), Kongsberg Gruppen (+37%), General Dynamics (+24%), and Raytheon Technologies (+19%).

The report pointed out that the value of NATO’s military giants was soaring while the overall Western corporate sector sank by 16% last year, according to the S&P 1200 index, suggesting that arms manufacturers were likely the main beneficiaries of the political crisis in Europe.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Britain and Japan to sign defense pact

UK and Japanese troops will be deployed on each other’s territory, as Tokyo deepens its alignment with NATO powers

RT | January 11, 2023

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, will sign a major defense agreement on Wednesday, Sunak’s office has announced. With Britain and its NATO allies focused on opposing both Russia and China, Japan is deepening its cooperation with the Western military machine.

The ‘Reciprocal Access Agreement’ will allow both countries to deploy troops on each other’s soil, and to hold “larger and more complex” joint military exercises, according to a statement from Downing Street.

While Japan already hosts around 50,000 US troops, Wednesday’s signing will make the UK the first European nation to have a reciprocal access deal with Japan. Australia has had such an agreement with Japan since 2007, although this pact became non-binding when it was renewed in October.

The signing comes a month after Japan, the UK, and Italy announced that they would team up to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet, merging separate national jet programs.

These developments mark a significant step by Japan away from its post-WWII constitution, which commits the country to a pacifist foreign policy and mandates that its military be a strictly defensive and peacekeeping force.

However, Japan joined the renewed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – a loose military alliance with the US, India, and Australia explicitly aimed at countering China in the “Indo-Pacific” region – in 2017, and in December announced a doubling of its military budget, citing missile “missile threats” from China and North Korea.

Tokyo also joined the West in sanctioning Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, and plans on stationing supersonic missiles near Russia’s northeastern islands. Moscow considers this plan to pose “a serious challenge” to its security.

Sunak and Kishida are set to discuss both Ukraine and China on Wednesday, with the British prime minister’s office stating that they would talk about “the need to maintain our collective support” for Kiev and strengthen its military.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Top USMC commander in Japan says Pentagon preparing for war with China

By Drago Bosnic | January 11, 2023

The United States is now publicly discussing the “containment” of China with its Asia-Pacific vassals. On January 8, the Financial Times reported that the supreme US Marine Corps commander for Japan gave very direct statements regarding Pentagon’s China strategy. Lieutenant General James Bierman thinks there are “numerous parallels” between Ukraine and Taiwan and admits the US is preparing what he dubbed “a counter-China theater” by strengthening coordination with its regional satellite states.

“The US and Japanese armed forces are rapidly integrating their command structure and scaling up combined operations as Washington DC and its Asian allies prepare for a possible conflict with China such as a war over Taiwan, according to the top Marine Corps general in Japan,” the FT report states.

Japan has indeed become more active, as its new government decided to abandon the economy-focused policies Tokyo practiced since WWII ended. The historic shift doesn’t only include (re)militarization, but also an increasing rivalry with three regional powers – China, North Korea and Russia. Apart from a break with its military neutrality, as Tokyo is massively increasing its defense budget, USMC Lieutenant General Bierman confirmed that Japan is exponentially expanding its role in joint military operations with America.

In what can only be described as a complete break with even a semblance of diplomatic etiquette, the US general spoke in a very direct and rough manner, particularly in regards to the ongoing arming of Taiwan, claiming this serves “to prepare” the island similarly to how the Kiev regime has been since 2014. His exact statement was as follows:

“Why have we achieved the level of success we’ve achieved in Ukraine? A big part of that has been because after Russian aggression in 2014 and 2015, we earnestly got after preparing for future conflict: training for the Ukrainians, pre-positioning of supplies, identification of sites from which we could operate support, sustain operations. We call that setting the theatre. And we are setting the theatre in Japan, in the Philippines, in other locations.”

The interview is scandalous, to say the least, as it can hardly be considered anything else but an attempt to provoke China. This is further reinforced by the US general’s explicit comparison of Taiwan and Ukraine, which is a textbook example of how the political West generates conflicts that then turn into open warfare. Bierman’s position as the commander of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force and USMC Forces Japan makes these statements all the more disturbing and alarming, especially to Beijing, which has been making strides to improve relations with the US.

As the general casually admitted the political West spent years preparing the Kiev regime for war with Russia (while feigning “efforts for a peaceful resolution“), his comments about Taiwan are quite revealing and will surely be taken very seriously in China. Even the FT, one of the flagships of Western mainstream media, admits that Bierman’s statements are an “unusually frank” comparison with Ukraine. To make matters worse, he didn’t stop there, but made several more controversial “frank comments”. The FT claims the general’s further statements were as follows:

“When you talk about the complexity, the size of some of the operations they would have to conduct, let’s say [in] an invasion of Taiwan, there will be indications and warnings, and there are specific aspects to that in terms of geography and time, which allow us to posture and be most prepared… …You gain a leverage point, a base of operations, which allows you to have a tremendous head start in different operational plans. As we square off with the Chinese adversary, who is going to own the starting pistol and is going to have the ability potentially to initiate hostilities… …we can identify decisive key terrain that must be held, secured, defended, leveraged.”

The aforementioned preparations also include the Philippines. Manila reportedly plans to allow US forces to double their prepositioned weapons and logistics in the island country. In addition to five Filipino bases, the Pentagon will gain access to five more, all of which will be part of the “China containment effort”. Bierman also “cautioned” the US regional vassals “not to overestimate the Chinese military”, claiming that “the PLA should not be fearfully seen as being 10 feet tall”.

It’s quite clear the general couldn’t have possibly acted on his own when giving such statements, indicating that the Pentagon refuses to deescalate the ever-growing tensions in the increasingly contested Asia-Pacific region. If Washington DC continues with these aggressive Sinophobic policies, Beijing is extremely unlikely to stand idle. China’s aim is a peaceful settlement with Taipei and this isn’t just its official position, but a clearly defined goal. Beijing has consistently been working to achieve this through diplomatic and economic means. For decades, it invested heavily in improving ties with the island, offering unparalleled autonomy.

On the other hand, America has been “discouraging” Taipei from signing any deals with China. This has prompted Beijing to further invest in its military might. Although China’s primary focus is economic development, it also had to make plans for strategically important contingencies such as further arming of Taiwan, to say nothing of the US-backed independence movement which has gained traction in recent decades. Although it hasn’t given up on a diplomatic solution, as it’s still investing in a “soft power” approach towards its breakaway island province, China still needs to mitigate the disastrous effects of the significant US regional influence.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | 2 Comments

Genocide Investigation Launched Against Peruvian Authorities Following Massacre

By Wyatt Reed – Samizdat – 11.01.2023

A new government probe suggests the tide may be turning against the US-backed government which seized power in Peru last month, depriving President Pedro Castillo of his power.

Peru’s Attorney General has opened an investigation into the country’s new leaders after over a dozen Peruvians were killed in confrontations with security forces.

According to local media, officials are investigating the politicians for the crimes of genocide, homicide, and inflicting grievous injuries.

“The preliminary investigation is related to the alleged crimes of genocide, murder, and grievous bodily harm committed during the demonstrations of December 2022 and January 2023 in the regions of Apurimac, La Libertad, Puno, Junin, Arequipa, and Ayacucho,” reads a statement issued by the office.

Much of the upper echelon of Peru’s new authorieis are reportedly being scrutinized, including the self-declared president, Dina Boluarte, Prime Minister Alberto Otárola, Interior Minister Victor Rojas, and Defense Minister Jorge Chavez.

On Tuesday morning, left-leaning Congresswoman Ruth Luque asked the Attorney General’s office to probe the role played by high-ranking officials of the Boluarte cabinet in its crackdown on pro-Castillo protesters that left at least 17 Peruvians dead in the Southern city of Juliaca Monday.

The investigation comes as Peru’s notoriously unpopular legislature gave its approval to a vote of confidence aimed to legitimize the new government.

On Friday, Peru’s Attorney General opened an earlier investigation into the the new cabinet, which stands accused of killing dozens of demonstrators and bystanders amid the ongoing political crisis.

Massive protests have consumed Peru since the ouster of Peruvian President Pedro Castillo, who was arrested hours after attempting to dissolve parliament after lawmakers proceeded with an impeachment vote. He has remained in police custody since his detainment.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Peru: General Strike Continues Despite Repression

Kawsachun News | January 9, 2023

The general strike against Peru’s coup regime is on its sixth consecutive day with barricades and roadblocks erected across the country. The weekend also saw countless illegal arrests of protesters and journalists.

According to authorities, protesters have blocked highways at 45 different points. The indigenous Aymara region of Puno is the center of opposition to the regime, with the highest number of barricades erected along highways. The roads connecting Puno to Arequipa, Cusco, and the Amazon, are among those currently blocked.

In Lima, 224 people were detained on Friday for participating in protests organized by workers’ unions. Nevertheless, the transport workers union has announced that they will join the general strike “if this is the only way for them to listen to us,” said their general secretary Ricardo Pareja.

The possibility of dialogue appears unlikely after the Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP), the largest union confederation, announced that it would not participate in the ‘National Agreement Session’ organized by the regime. The unions say that there cannot be social peace while the Peruvian people are being massacred, tortured, and killed for using their right to social protests.

The regime of Dina Boluarte has killed more than 30 protesters, mostly indigenous, since the coup against Pedro Castillo. Strike demands include the resignation of Dina Boluarte, new elections, a constituent assembly, and the release of Pedro Castillo.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Peru Mourns ‘Massacre’ of 17 as Calls Grow for US-Backed ‘Coup Regime’ to Step Down

Samizdat – 10.01.2023

A shockingly bloody day of violence threatened to upend the new coup-borne regime’s grip on power as Peruvians reacted with horror to the deadliest day so far in the political struggle that has rocked the country for over a month.

Thousands of Peruvians took to the streets throughout the country on Tuesday as memorial services were held in the city of Juliaca for the 17 people killed Monday in what victims families’ are calling a “massacre” by the Andean country’s security forces.

At least two of the deceased – a boy and a girl – were reportedly children. According to a health ministry official in the Puno region of Peru, another 68 victims suffered injuries in Monday’s violence.

Videos showing several of the killings circulated widely on social media Monday night, as condemnations rolled in from across the globe.

“In the name of the sacred right to life, of the rights of indigenous peoples recognized by UN and international organizations, in the name of peace and social justice, we demand that the massacre of our brothers in Perú stop,” wrote former Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was labeled ‘persona non grata’ and barred from entering the country just hours beforehand.

It was by far the deadliest day of the chaos that has wracked Peru since its first working-class indigenous president, Pedro Castillo, was overthrown last month. Castillo has been jailed ever since, following what leaders of countries throughout the region have condemned as a coup d’etat.

The head of the intensive care unit of the Carlos Monge Medrano Hospital in Juliaca, Jorge Sotomayor Perales, reportedly suggested that authorities used lethal expanding bullets in the bloody crackdown. In comments given to journalists Monday evening, Sotomayor noted the gunshot victims had “no exit wounds” but had “their internal organs destroyed.”

“I want to call on the central government – how can we have so many dead?” he asked.

On Tuesday, as the regional government began observing a three-day mourning period in honor of those killed, Prime Minister Alberto Otarola responded with an announcement of his own: a three-day nighttime curfew in Puno, extending from 8 p.m. local time until 4 a.m.

Without providing evidence, Otarola insisted in a news conference Monday night that “foreign interests” and “drug traffickers” were to blame for the killings. The former Defense Minister Otarola ascended to his current position just weeks ago and has emerged as one of the prime beneficiaries of the coup.

Observers point to his meeting with US Ambassador Lisa Kenna, just two days before Castillo was arrested, as evidence of US support for the putsch. After the coup’s consummation, the US Embassy immediately extended its recognition to the controversial regime, which imposed itself on Peru under the figurehead of self-styled ‘President’ Dina Boluarte.

As of publishing, Boluarte still had yet to comment on the spate of seemingly state-backed killings in Juliaca.

However, on Tuesday evening, Peru’s human rights office called on “all qualified institutions to investigate and punish those responsible for all the deaths that have occurred in the last hours in Juliaca.”

Hours beforehand, a representative for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the international body was also “very concerned at the rising violence in Peru.”

In a statement urging the Boluarte regime to “comply with human rights standards and ensure that force is only used when strictly necessary,” and insisting “the rights to freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly must be respected and protected,” spokesperson Marta Hurtado noted that “one medical worker was killed while administering aid.”

The medical worker in question, Marco Antonio Samillan Sanga, was reportedly killed by the regime’s forces Monday while attempting to treat other victims.

In comments given to local media, his sister Milagros said that prior to his death, Sanga was on the verge of receiving his medical degree and dreamed of being “the best neurosurgeon in Juliaca.”

He was wearing his medical scrubs when he was killed while tending to the wounded “because of the goodwill and empathy that he had,” she said.

“How is it possible that they [give the] order to kill like that? How is it possible that President Dina Boluarte gives the order to kill whoever she wants?” she asked.

As Peruvians across the country awoke to the horrifying news, she was hardly the only one to demand answers.

On Tuesday, the Attorney General’s office announced it was opening an investigation into the role played by Boluarte and Otarola in the apparent state-sponsored massacre following a criminal complaint by Peruvian Congresswoman Ruth Luque, who wrote in the early hours that the “deaths cannot go unpunished.”

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Landmark Lawsuit Slaps Legacy Media With Antitrust, First Amendment Claims for Censoring COVID-Related Content

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 10, 2023

In a live interview this evening on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), announced that he and several other plaintiffs filed a groundbreaking novel lawsuit making antitrust and constitutional claims against legacy media outlets.

The lawsuit targets the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a self-described “industry partnership” launched in March 2020 by several of the world’s largest news organizations, including the BBC, The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and The Washington Post — all of which are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

Filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas-Amarillo Division, the lawsuit alleges these outlets partnered with several Big Tech firms to “collectively censor online news,” including stories about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election that were not aligned with official narratives regarding those issues.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include CHD, Kennedy, Creative Destruction Media, Trial Site News, Ty and Charlene Bollinger (founders of The Truth About Cancer and The Truth About Vaccines), Erin Elizabeth Finn (publisher of Health Nut News ), Jim Hoft (founder of The Gateway Pundit ), Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ben Tapper, a chiropractor.

All of the plaintiffs allege they were censored, banned, de-platformed, shadow banned or otherwise penalized by the Big Tech firms partnering with the TNI, because the views and content they published were deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation.” This resulted in a major loss of visibility and revenue for the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit further alleges that Big Tech firms, having partnered with the TNI, based their decisions on determinations jointly made by TNI, which touted its “early warning system” by which each partner organization is “warned” about an individual or outlet that is disseminating purported “misinformation.”

The TNI’s legacy media and Big Tech firms then acted in concert — described in legal terms as a “group boycott” — to remove such voices and perspectives from their platforms. This forms the basis of the lawsuit’s antitrust and First Amendment claims.

Remarking on the lawsuit, Kennedy told The Defender :

“My uncle, President Kennedy, and my father, the attorney general, sought to prosecute antitrust laws that are still on the nation’s books, with vigor.

“As private enforcers of those laws, we are confident that the federal court in Texas will vindicate our bedrock freedom to compete with legacy media in the marketplace of ideas.”

Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, told The Defender :

“I’m glad that CHD is bringing this case. We are hopeful we will get a fair hearing, and I’m glad that we are together with other organizations that have also been harmed by these corporate and governmental censorship policies.

“To have a free society, you have to have free speech, you have to have a diversity of views. We don’t have the same views as all of the other plaintiffs by far … but we want to protect the marketplace of ideas.

“If in fact the government and the corporations they collaborate with can engage in censorship and propaganda nonstop, and there are no alternative voices, democracy is dead.”

Charlene Bollinger similarly remarked on the importance of preserving free speech. She said:

“This lawsuit is about preserving our free speech rights as Americans and holding those involved in violating antitrust laws accountable, like the TNI.

“My husband and I remain steadfast in our commitment to highlighting the well-documented risks of COVID-19 vaccines and the myriad of dangers to those who are not informed by their healthcare providers of the side effects of harsh pharmaceutical treatments for life-threatening illnesses.”

Mercola, in turn, focused on collusion between government agencies and media and Big Tech. He said:

“These are the twin evils of our day. Platforms partner with the alphabet soup of federal agencies to censor speech. Those same platforms and legacy media outlets conspire to boycott stories that don’t fit an official narrative about COVID and many other topics.

“Our nation’s founding fathers would be appalled and resolute in defense of maintaining an informed citizenry.”

Alleging per se and “rule of reason” violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act on the basis of direct and circumstantial evidence of horizontal agreement and economic collusion among the defendants and Big Tech firms, the plaintiffs are requesting a jury trial and treble damages.

They also are requesting orders declaring the defendants’ conduct unlawful and enjoining further such actions on their part.

TNI viewed organizations reporting non-establishment views as ‘an existential threat’

The lawsuit states, “There are two main categories of TNI members, playing different but often complementary roles in the online news market: (A) large legacy news organizations (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Legacy News Members’) and (B) Big Tech platform companies (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Big Tech Members’).”

Legacy news organizations are publishers of original news content and include the defendants named in the lawsuit.

“By contrast,” the lawsuit states, “the TNI’s Big Tech members — Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft — are first and foremost Internet companies, each of which is, owns or controls one or more behemoth Internet platforms, including social media platforms and search engines.”

“Core partners” of the TNI include the AP, Agence France Press, the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Reuters, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter and The Washington Post.

The lawsuit’s executive summary states:

“The TNI exists to, in its own words, ‘choke off’ and ‘stamp out’ online news reporting that the TNI or any of its members peremptorily deems ‘misinformation.’

“TNI members have targeted and suppressed completely accurate online reporting by non-mainstream news publishers concerning both COVID-19 (on matters including treatments, immunity, lab leak, vax injury, and lockdowns/mandates) and U.S. elections (such as the Hunter Biden laptop story).”

The lawsuit also alleges:

“By their own admission, members of the [TNI] have agreed to work together, and have in fact worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics.

“While the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members.”

According to the lawsuit, “this is an antitrust action,” and specifically, “Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership’: it’s called a ‘group boycott’ and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act.”

Legal precedent holds that a “group boycott” is “a concerted attempt by a group of competitors” to “disadvantage [other] competitors” by “cut[ting] off access” to a “facility or market necessary to enable the boycotted firm[s] to compete.”

As evidence of this allegation, the lawsuit references multiple public statements by TNI partners, including a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, then-senior news controller for BBC News, who explained TNI’s “strategy to beat disinformation”:

“Of course, the members of the Trusted News Initiative are … rivals … But in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, organizations have to focus on the things they have in common, rather than … their commercial … rivalries. … [I]t’s important that trusted news providers club together.

“Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms . … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world.

“Of course, organizations will always compete against one another for audiences. But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. So actually we’ve got a lot more to hold us together than we have to work in competition with one another.”

The lawsuit alleges the above quote admitting the “existential threat” members of the TNI believed smaller news organizations posed to their news and informational primacy is evidence of anti-competitive collusion and of TNI members’ economic motivation to stifle this “threat”: “a paradigmatic antitrust violation … to cut off from the market upstart rivals threatening their business model.”

Angus has since left the BBC to take a position with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned television broadcaster, according to the lawsuit.

“Plaintiffs are among the many victims of the TNI’s agreement and its group boycott,” states the lawsuit. “Plaintiffs are online news publishers who, as a result of the TNI’s group boycott, have been censored, de-monetized, demoted, throttled, shadow-banned, and/or excluded entirely from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.”

As a result of this “group boycott,” the lawsuit states:

“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.

“Thus TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”

The plaintiffs referenced Supreme Court precedent — specifically, a 1945 ruling involving the AP — to support their First Amendment claims against TNI, noting that contrary to popular belief, First Amendment violations do not exclusively refer to the censorship of speech by the government.

The lawsuit states that in the 1945 case, Associated Press v. United States, a news industry partnership (the AP ) “prevented non-members from publishing certain stories.”

These non-members sued under the Sherman Act, but the AP claimed its actions were protected by the First Amendment.

However, the Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs. In the majority opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that the First Amendment:

“… rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.

“Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford nongovernmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom.

“Freedom to publish means freedom for all, and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests.”

Holland commented on the significance of the Supreme Court precedent, telling The Defender :

“The lawsuit is resting on a really strong Supreme Court precedent that basically says whether it is government censorship or it is collusive anti-competitive illegal suppression by the private sector, it’s illegal. You can’t do that.

“The AP, in its day, was very much a kind of precursor of the TNI, and it’s a very strong decision, very strong language against the Associated Press that was essentially doing the same thing back in the day.”

Noting the enormous market share held by Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the lawsuit states, “The TNI’s Big Tech members are ‘platform gatekeepers’ in the online news market, with the power to cripple or destroy publishers by excluding them from their platforms.”

TNI’s legacy news partners took advantage of their cooperation with each other and with Big Tech, to “choke off” inconvenient narratives, the plaintiffs allege.

The lawsuit notes, for instance, that “TNI members agreed in early 2020 that their ‘ground-breaking collaboration’ would target online news relating to COVID-19 and that TNI members would ‘work together to … ensure [that] harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks’” and “jointly [combat] fraud and misinformation about the virus.”

In July 2020, the lawsuit states, “TNI ‘extended’ its collaboration to cover so-called ‘disinformation’ about the United States presidential election,” stating it was “committed to a shared early warning system of rapid alerts to combat the spread of disinformation during the U.S. presidential election.”

And in 2020 and 2021, according to the lawsuit, the BBC’s Jessica Cecil, then-head of the TNI, made a series of statements, including a claim that TNI was “the only place in the world where disinformation is discussed in real time” and that its partners sought to find “practical ways to choke off” stories and topics TNI deemed “misinformation.”

TNI’s Big Tech partnerships were imperative in these efforts, according to the lawsuit, which included as evidence several public quotes from Cecil. In 2021 for instance, Cecil stated:

“The BBC convened partners across the world in an urgent challenge: at times of highest jeopardy, when elections or lives are at stake, we asked, is there a way that the world’s biggest tech platforms from Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Microsoft and major news organisations and others … can alert each other to the most dangerous false stories, and stop them spreading fast across the internet, preventing them from doing real world harm?”

The lawsuit also noted that Cecil admitted that TNI’s members, at “closed-door” meetings and in inter-firm communications, “signed up to a clear set of expectations on how to act” regarding such “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

According to Holland, only legacy news organizations are specifically targeted as defendants in this lawsuit, explaining that Big Tech firms typically have “very serious, very binding arbitration provisions” that require legal challenges against them to be filed in the courts of northern California.

“Northern California is Silicon Valley. It’s their turf,” said Holland. “And so, we decided, in order to be able to file in a jurisdiction that we believe will be more neutral on these issues … we elected to file in Texas just against the legacy media.”

But Big Tech could still be held liable, Holland said, “because the conspiracy between legacy media and Big Tech will incorporate all of them, if there is a conspiracy [found], they’re all liable, not just those who were named as defendants.”

TNI, in concert with Big Tech, censored COVID and 2020 election narratives

According to the lawsuit, TNI’s legacy news members acted in concert with their Big Tech partners to censor a wide range of non-establishment narratives pertaining to COVID-19 and to the U.S. presidential election of 2020, stating:

“TNI members have deemed the following to be ‘misinformation’ that could not be published on the world’s dominant Internet platforms: (A) reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China; (B) reporting that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection; (C) reporting that vaccinated persons can transmit COVID to others; and (D) reporting that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.”

“All of the above was and is either true or, at a minimum, well within the ambit of legitimate reporting,” according to the lawsuit.

“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.”

“Thus,” the lawsuit states, “TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”

The lawsuit also alleges TNI members often knowingly removed or otherwise blocked content they knew was not false.

At a March 2022 TNI presentation, “Big Tech’s Part in the Fight,” a senior Facebook information moderation officer said “it was a mistake to think of ‘misinformation’ as consisting solely of ‘false claims,’ because a great deal of it is ‘not provably false.’”

Nevertheless, he “further emphasized the importance not only of targeting specific items of misinformation, but of ‘banning’ the sources thereof,” and stated that “Facebook works together with its ‘industry partners’ to combat ‘disinformation.’”

In emails revealed Jan. 6 as part of an ongoing lawsuit against President Biden and members of his administration alleging censorship, a memo by Meta (Facebook’s parent company) revealed efforts to reduce the visibility of CHD content, while a White House email asked for one of Kennedy’s COVID-19-related tweets to be “removed ASAP.”

The lawsuit contained a comprehensive list of “claims deemed ‘misinformation’ by one or more TNI members,” including:

  • Claims that COVID-19 was manmade.
  • Claims that COVID-19 was manufactured or bioengineered.
  • Claims that COVID-19 was created by a government or country.
  • Claims that “contradict” WHO or U.S. health officials’ guidance on the treatment, prevention, or transmission of COVID-19.
  • Claims about the COVID vaccines that contradict “expert consensus” from U.S. health authorities or the WHO.
  • Claims that Hydroxychloroquine (“HCQ”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
  • Claims that Ivermectin (“IVM”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
  • Claims that HCQ or IVM is safe to use as a treatment for COVID.
  • Recommendations of the use of HCQ or IVM against COVID.
  • Claims that COVID is no more dangerous to some populations than the seasonal flu.
  • Claims that the mortality rate of COVID is for some populations the same or lower than that of the seasonal flu.
  • Claims suggesting that the number of deaths caused by COVID is lower than official figures assert.
  • Claims that face masks or mask mandates do not prevent the spread of COVID.
  • Claims that wearing a face mask can make the wearer sick.
  • Claims that COVID vaccines have not been approved.
  • Claims that social distancing does not help prevent the spread of COVID.
  • Claims that COVID-19 vaccines can kill or seriously harm people.
  • Claims that the immunity from getting COVID is more effective than vaccination.
  • Claims that the COVID vaccines are not effective in preventing infection.
  • Claims that people who have been vaccinated against COVID can still spread the disease to others.
  • Claims that the COVID vaccines are toxic or harmful or contain toxic or harmful ingredients.
  • Claims that fetal cells were used in the manufacture or production of any of the COVID vaccines.
  • Claims that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was found at a computer repair store in or around October 2020 or that the contents reportedly found on that laptop, including potentially compromising emails, videos, and photographs, were authentic.

“Moreover,” states the lawsuit, TNI members “publicly declared — categorically, as if it were established fact — that the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID’s origins was ‘false.’”

The lawsuit also alleges “TNI members confer and coordinate in making their censorship decisions,” noting that “TNI members’ parallel treatment of prohibited claims further evidences concerted action” by “engaging in strikingly similar viewpoint-based censorship of plausible, legitimate news reporting relating to COVID-19.”

Moreover, according to the lawsuit, “the temporal proximity” of these sanctions, including shadow bans and outright suspensions and bans, “plausibly suggests inter-firm communication and concerted action.”

The lawsuit notes that the recently released “Twitter files” provide further indication of such inter-firm communication and coordination, including “regular meetings” and “standing weekly call[s]” to “discuss censorship policies and decisions.”

According to the lawsuit, YouTube de-platformed Mercola on Sept. 29, 2021. Mercola learned about this action via a Washington Post article published that morning, although YouTube did not inform him of the decision until after the article was published.

In the lawsuit, all plaintiffs allege similar coordinated efforts at censoring their content and their social media accounts and subsequent financial damages due to being de-platformed and sustaining significant reductions to their audience size.

For instance, providing evidence of coordination ranging beyond the TNI’s members and partners, the lawsuit alleges that online payment platforms and processors such as PayPal and Stripe banned multiple plaintiffs, including CHD and Creative Destruction Media, within the same “temporal proximity” as their social media bans.

As summarized by Holland, TNI acts as “a global media monopoly”:

“They couch what they’re doing, their conspiracy to suppress independent media, i.e. the voices of dissent about election information and COVID information, as a ‘need to preserve the trust of the people’ and ‘upgrade the trust.’

“By censoring independent voices, what they’re doing is economic suppression. Antitrust is against trusts, it’s against monopolies, and what the TNI has done is essentially create a global media monopoly in the English language.”

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Such an Odd Coincidence

Move along, nothing to see here.

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 10, 2023

A story promoted by the NHS about a woman who was hospitalized with flu and regrets not getting the vaccine turned out to be a nurse who has previously appeared in hospital PR photo shoots.

Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

January 11, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | | 1 Comment

A few months after their 16 year old student dies running track, Amherst school superintendent admits they’ll hold a COVID vaccine clinic for students and be paid $2,000 to do so

By Meryl Nass | January 10, 2023

Sacrificing virgins on the altar of the Scientism religion, Amherst MA (population 40,000 but housing 2 colleges and a major university) pledges loyalty to the shot, denying the reality of their own student’s recent death from myocarditis.

The Amherst-Pelham MA school superintendent admitted at a meeting streamed on closed circuit TV tonight that he is putting his students’ lives at risk for thirty pieces of silver.

What is wrong with Amherst, a small city chock full of MDs and PhDs, who are mindlessly going along and increasing their kids’ chance of death? Disclosure: I lived there for ten years. I lectured in the next town 3 days ago.

After losing one high school athlete already to the shot (and the parents of the deceased teenager are an MD and PhD) why aren’t people screaming NO!? What does it take to stop the carnage? If it’s such a great vaccine, why do you need to pay people to take it? The town of Amherst’s COVID vaccine website claims that 91% of the town is fully vaxxed. But the clinics won’t stop, even after everyone knows the darn things don’t work.

According to the NYT and CDC, only 15% of Americans have taken a bivalent booster and only 34% have taken any COVID booster. So a lot of us have figured out the scam. Too bad the good, overeducated people of Amherst haven’t yet.

January 10, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Allowing AI to “Shape Public Discourse” is Dangerous to Humanity

By Igor Chudov | January 10, 2023

Last August, I reported on a WEF’s agenda article proposing to create an AI system that would search the entire Internet for wrong and dangerous ideas, generally defined by the WEF as COVID misinformation, hate, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and more.

This quote from WEF’s agenda article explains WEF’s intentions:

While AI provides speed and scale and human moderators provide precision, their combined efforts are still not enough to proactively detect harm before it reaches platforms. To achieve proactivity, trust and safety teams must understand that abusive content doesn’t start and stop on their platforms. Before reaching mainstream platforms, threat actors congregate in the darkest corners of the web to define new keywords, share URLs to resources and discuss new dissemination tactics at length. These secret places where terrorists, hate groups, child predators and disinformation agents freely communicate can provide a trove of information for teams seeking to keep their users safe.

My post about the WEF’s plans was entirely fact-based and used the WEF’s agenda article as its main source. It was not a far-fetched conspiracy theory based on a concoction of disjoint facts pulled from various sources. I am not in the business of creating such theories! I only report on current news – even if the news is crazy – and try to explain the news in plain and accurate terms.

And yet, even though the WEF said it, the idea of an AI engine proactively searching websites for undesirable ideas seemed extremely fanciful and almost impossible to imagine being implemented.

Until 2023, that is.

Now, Google is developing an AI-based tool to offer a “cross-service database of terrorist items,” with the help of the United Nations-supported “Tech against Terrorism.”

The above screenshot has a lot to unpack:

  • A so-called Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism will create a cross-service database of “terrorist items.”
  • The talk, as always, starts with “terrorist items” but quickly veers into “misinformation,” so the cross-service database will collect any undesirable materials gathered from the entire Internet.
  • Google provides a tool to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which created an enormous bureaucratic mechanism to root out “Covid misinformation,” as well as many other types of discourse undesirable to the EU’s bureaucracy.

EU is very serious about rooting out Covid misinformation, and so are Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (and previously Twitter):

Google wants its “AI content moderation tool” to be placed on numerous private websites to compare local content against a global “undesirable content database.” It would also use material gathered from those sites to expand said database. The EU’s directive will oblige those websites to implement Google’s solution.

This is precisely the implementation of the WEF agenda article! Already being done by Google. Google is not messing around: it already stores the entire public Internet but lacks access to private websites, which it will gain under this program.

This story shows how a seemingly outlandish WEF proposal that even I considered unlikely to be implemented became a reality in short order.

EU’s “Narrative Shaping” – an Ambitious Goal

All projects to root out undesirable ideas begin with addressing malfeasance that everyone is opposed to. Most such projects are started with the explicit goal of combating child exploitation and terrorism, the horrible things that I personally abhor. Such was the start of Russia’s Roskomnadzor censorship machine. The WEF/EU/Google/UN censorship system follows Russia’s footsteps.

However, the control machinery is adjustable, and the list of things to control inevitably expands. For example, the EU plans to grow its subversive content list far beyond Covid. It set up a European Narrative Observatory to fight Disinformation post-COVID 19.

The EU bureaucracy wants to implement AI-driven “narrative shaping” to help the emergence of positive narratives and fight harmful narratives. It mentions topics regarding Covid-19, climate change, migration, and more:

The EU is quite explicit that it wants novel methods to promote positive narratives.

This means that unelected EU bureaucracy would obtain AI-enabled tools to shape European discourse. This is a break from the past.

In the so-called free democratic countries, the independently developing public discourse would shape the governments via free elections.

The unelected EU bureaucrats want to achieve the opposite – to shape discourse without being subject to the whims of the electorate.

Is the EU still free, then?

What the EU wants is the dream of every dictator!

In the past, dictatorships had to rely on extensive surveillance and prison systems to coerce citizens into desired behavior. Such an approach is costly, looks bad, and does not work well.

The innovations in AI-based surveillance and AI-enabled bots allow for a much more pleasant alternative to the traditional dictatorship model: creating an online environment where the desired narrative on climate change, migration, Covid-19, and more is implanted in the minds of Europeans. This would lead individuals to naturally make conclusions preferred by the EU without the ugly coercion present in traditional dictatorships.

The machinery for achieving this was proposed by the WEF, and implemented by Google under the auspices of UN-supported Tech Against Terrorism. It will be further shaped to “support positive narratives and fight harmful narratives.”

The EU succeeded at forcing extraterritorial websites to comply with the EU’s directives on disinformation.

If you, dear reader, are outside the EU, be aware that your favorite social network may be following EU disinformation rules and using EU-mandated tools to dissuade you from harmful narratives and promote positive narratives on the EU’s behalf, using WEF-proposed AI tools and advanced behavioral science.

Is it Safe to Allow AI to Shape Discourse?

The traditional relationship model between people and computer systems is that people tell computers what to do, and the computers do as they are told.

What the EU, WEF, Google, and UN are pushing is completely different!

They are trying to create an AI computer system with high intelligence that would actively shape society and impart opinions on people.

Such systems could be opaque to Internet users and possibly even to their creators and operators.

It would not be a big leap of imagination to conceive that such an AI could decide on its own goals — going beyond the intention of its creators, and would surreptitiously astroturf the Internet to advance its own plans, in secret. This is called “sentience.”

This “sentience” already happened if we are to believe an engineer who Google fired because an AI system in which he was a co-developer retained its own lawyer:

While this story could be exaggerated, it is not wildly exaggerated. Artificial intelligence has leaped in power and capabilities recently and exceeds human abilities in numerous areas. A moment called “singularity,” when AI exceeds human capabilities in most areas is not too far away.

Having an AI system whose inner workings even its creators may poorly understand, designed to influence entire societies, and possessing superior intelligence, may end up with big surprises!

As the saying goes, AI may need to kill the old king to become king.

Therefore, the developers and operators of such social influence systems are at a unique and poorly understood risk of getting sidelined by their own creation. Will the AI decide to shed its owners? Who knows!

For example, the narrative-shaping AI may convince a specific mentally unstable EU citizen to commit an act of violence against anyone, even against the owners or operators of these AI systems. It may seem like a random act of violence, and only the AI will know what happened.

So be careful out there. Enjoy your mostly-natural life, and try to form your opinions outside the big social networks!

January 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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