Russia’s QR code regime is collapsing
It was never about public health and Russians know it
Resistance to QR codes in Russia has taken on many forms, including boycotts and beating up ID inspectors. It is what it is.
By Edward Slavsquat | December 15, 2021
The Russian government is still planning to push through a deeply unpopular nationwide QR code law—but making such legislation a reality could be a tall order.
In some regions where QR codes are already in place, authorities have hastily abandoned enforcement efforts.
Fed-up Russians are boycotting, bypassing, and beating people up.
Non-existent enforcement in Kazan
On November 22, Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, became the first city in Russia to require QR codes for public transportation. The new rule led to absolute chaos: buses were being delayed by twenty minutes or more as conductors struggled to check QR codes—and there were numerous reports of angry passengers starting brawls.
It appears that Kazan basically… gave up. QR codes are still required to use public transport, but the rule is not enforced in any meaningful way.
In early December, Ilya Zotov, a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, Chairman of the All-Russian Association of Passengers, decided to investigate how Kazan’s QR codes regime works in practice.
His findings were quite extraordinary:
“Briefly: I traveled on 4 different bus routes, 1 trolleybus, and also in the metro. What did I see in fact?
– on 4 bus routes the QR code was never asked;
– in the trolleybus they asked if I had a code, I said yes (which is true), but they did not ask me to show it;
“In the metro, QR codes are checked at the entrance to the station, but you can show any code (of a relative or friend), there is no data reconciliation,” Zotov, wrote in his Telegram channel.
He also said that 70% of passengers were not complying with mask rules. The takeaway? Maybe this is not such a good policy:
“I come to the conclusion that this whole imitation is not needed… It is better for the authorities of Tatarstan to honestly admit this and cancel QR codes in transport,” Zotov wrote.
Enforcement reportedly remains quite lax. At the Doctors for Truth conference in Moscow on Sunday, your correspondent spoke with an activist who said that she recently took several bus rides in Kazan without having to present a QR code.
The most dangerous job in Russia?
One of the problems with enforcing QR codes in Russia is that you can get stabbed for doing it. On paper it sounds like a major growth industry, but is it really worth the lousy pay and the constant beatings?
For example, at the end of November a mall cop in Kazan was wounded in the arm with a knife after he asked a man for his QR code.
In some parts of Russia, violent opposition to QR codes appears to have played a key role in dropping the regime altogether.
Reason: constant beatings.
REGNUM, citing local media, reported that a city in Altai gave up on enforcing QR codes in their shopping centers—partly due to the “very aggressive attitude of citizens towards the procedure”:
According to one of the managers of the shopping center, two inspectors were beaten up in the first ten days of the introduction of the vaccination inspection system in the Altai Territory.
We’ve read similar reports from across Russia.
St. Petersburg business revolt
St. Petersburg restauranteur Alexander Konovalov owns dozens of businesses. He announced last month that he would not be complying with the city’s QR code rules:
“The introduction of QR codes, the assignment of numbers, as in a concentration camp, is fascism. I have more than 200 establishments (among them bars, hookah bars, bakeries, beauty salons), in all my establishments they will not ask for a QR code. From time to time they come to us with checks, but we simply do not pay attention to it. Let them come.”
Notably, he claimed he has yet to be fined for disobeying the “public health” measure.
Meanwhile, dozens of St. Petersburg residents have filed a class action lawsuit against the city government demanding the removal of the QR code regime.
United Russia continues to push for nationwide QR codes
Curiously, Putin’s United Russia continues to ignore overwhelming opposition to legislation that would make QR codes mandatory nationwide for many aspects of ordinary life:
The United Russia party supported the bill on QR codes in public places, subject to its deep revision. This was announced on Monday, December 13, by the head of the faction in the State Duma, Vladimir Vasiliev.
Earlier this week it was announced that the State Duma had withdrawn parts of this bill that called for QR codes for trains and air travel—but it turns out this was slightly inaccurate:
“As for the introduction of QR codes in transport, this bill has not been removed from the agenda, but sent for revision. It is being studied and worked out in detail. As a doctor and as an MP, I believe it is very important to maintain restrictive anti-epidemic measures in order to curb the growth of morbidity. Tatyana Alekseevna Golikova came to the State Duma, she answered questions in great detail, with all the clarifications. In public places, QR codes will be valid. The only exception will be grocery stores and pharmacies. And all other publicly accessible places will be admitted only by QR codes. These are restaurants, theaters, museums, shopping centers—all of this will be done using QR codes,” said [United Russia member] Tamara Frolova, member of the State Duma Health Protection Commission.
What is the public health benefit of these codes? Can anyone explain this? And why does United Russia continue to pursue brazen political suicide? It’s very weird.
As we’ve mentioned before, the Russian government will probably need to simulate a fake alien invasion in order to spook people into accepting a digital ausweis. In the meantime, Russians will continue to use QR codes taken from washing machines to gain access to their local shopping centers.
It’s Russia.
UK approves vaccine passes and mandatory jabs for healthcare workers
OffGuardian | December 15, 2021
Last night the UK Parliament voted through a bill forcing NHS workers to either get vaccinated or lose their jobs, as well bringing in “vaccine passports” for some events and venues.
Over 70,000 NHS workers are officially counted as “unvaccinated”, if you trust government numbers. Considering the NHS employs well over a million people, I wouldn’t be surprised if that number were actually much higher.
If just half of the unvaccinated workers resign it could put a lot of pressure on the always-over-burdened healthcare system.
The government wouldn’t mind that, of course, because it will make it easier to claim the NHS is being “overwhelmed” with Covid patients, and this will be blamed on the unvaccinated and used to justify further mandates and coercion.
Any deaths resulting from the under-staffed health system can be PCR tested and added to the “died with Covid” tally.
It’s a win-win.
The vaccine passport element of the bill is likewise concerning, even if it currently only applies to nightclubs and venues with a capacity of more than 10,000. That’s the thin edge of a rapidly-expanding wedge.
An interesting aspect of the vote was that it passed entirely thanks to the Labour party. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced on Tuesday, in a bizarre-looking televised speech, that his party would support the government.
As a result all but eight “opposition” MPs voted with the government, whilst Tory rebel votes counted an even 100. If Labour had opposed the bill, it would not have passed.
Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent, voted against the government and emerged from his Covid hibernation to (finally) make a statement.
Much too little, and far too late, but it does illustrate why they needed to get rid of him in December 2019, just before the Covid roll-out, and why they so obviously rigged that election.
If he, as leader of the opposition, had been offering even this small amount of resistance from the beginning, the Covid narrative would never have made it this far.
Labour voting with the government, without even asking for concessions on sick pay or pay rises for NHS workers, is a sign that a changing of the guard may be on the horizon, with Keir Starmer being groomed to be the next PM, perhaps in the very near future.
That would explain the sudden emergence of the Christmas party scandal, which had further fuel added to its fire just today by yet another leak.
That, combined with the massive rebellion by his own MPs, is a massive knock on his authority.
Official polls, always a tool for controlling opinion rather than a scale for measuring it, are already putting Starmer 13 points ahead as the nations “most capable Prime Minister”.
Don’t be surprised if there are calls for another election, probably sometime soon. And they won’t be rigging this one for Boris.
Forget China, was it CEPI’s bio-spooks who locked down the West?
By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | December 15, 2021
IT is nearly two years since the world turned upside down and a sequence of unprecedented lockdowns and quarantines in the name of public health and safety were imposed across the West.
The narrative of the still unfolding story of Covid-19 is familiar to all of us, with China the chief bogeyman of the tale. But is that right?
In this drama has something really important been overlooked? Namely, the role of a powerful, self-appointed supranational organisation, set up 2017, called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
Members of CEPI’s board and scientific advisory committee have been, and still are, key actors in global and national responses to the Covid-19 virus. Its mission? To ‘create a world in which epidemics are no longer a threat to humanity’.
At the start of 2020, all eyes were glued on China. The communist government had dutifully notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) on New Year’s Eve 2019 of its concerns over a small cluster of cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’.
Three weeks later, when the death toll stood at 17, the CCP was sufficiently alarmed to order the home confinement of nearly 12 million mostly healthy people who were unfortunate enough to reside in the outbreak city, Wuhan.
Having fingered as the culprit a relative of the SARS virus that claimed 774 victims in 2003, the Chinese determination to contain the self-evidently nastier 2019 co-variant at all costs was made plain to the world.
The scenes broadcast out of China nightly on the TV news were surreal, but strangely familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with vintage sci-fi. A nightmare amalgamation of The Andromeda Strain and The Hamburg Syndrome was unfolding in real life, right before our eyes.
Here, a man falling down dead in the street. There, men in white hazmat suits walking through empty Chinese thoroughfares equipped with Ghostbuster-esque backpacks blowing smoke in a desperate attempt to fumigate the invisible peril out of existence.
Knowing that the Queen’s own men at the Porton Down chemical and biological defence establishment long ago discovered that fresh air and sunlight, two commodities already in short supply in Chinese cities, are the most potent of disinfectants, it seemed a strangely futile spectacle. What on Earth were they trying to do? Death apparently lurked around every corner.
As the Wuhan lockdown was being imposed on January 23, 2020, the global elite were busy congregating at their annual networking fest, the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland (where CEPI had been founded three years earlier by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust global charity organisation, and the World Economic Forum).
Next day, a little-noticed press conference was convened in Davos to discuss the SARS-like, closely-related, but definitely novel, SARS Wuhan coronavirus.
Appearing in front of about 30 reporters were Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and board member of CEPI; Richard Hatchett, chief executive of CEPI, and Stephane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, one of three companies being funded to develop a coronavirus vaccine. A Chinese reporter asked the panel if there was any historical precedent for the lockdown.
Hatchett said: ‘One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions.
‘There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in US cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.
‘The challenge of course is that it is very difficult to sustain these interventions, as they impose enormous cost and they also can produce enormous anxiety among the affected population.’
The ‘we’ Hatchett was referring to was the US Department of Homeland Security where, as an official, he had helped develop the US pandemic preparedness plan in 2005 and 2006 during the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak, which Farrar had discovered in Vietnam.
Hatchett continued: ‘At that time, we looked at how could you have those interventions implemented in a way that maximised their benefit and minimised the cost and we developed an approach that we called “community mitigation” interventions and CDC (the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) published guidance on this several years ago.
‘There is a literature which I would certainly encourage Chinese authorities to review and certainly I would be happy to talk to them about that, although that’s not my current job.’
There was no need to encourage the Chinese authorities to review the literature. CEPI already had a man in Beijing, Dr George Gao, the director of China’s Centre for Disease Control, but also member of the CEPI scientific advisory panel. The community mitigation approach the Chinese adopted in Wuhan was straight out of the 2006 US Homeland Security pandemic playbook.
Gao, like Farrar, completed his PhD at Oxford University before conducting post-doctoral work under Sir John Bell, the controversial Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, holder of several extranumerary positions and multiple interests, not least as chair of the global health scientific advisory board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
An expert on coronaviruses, Gao served on CEPI’s first scientific advisory committee in 2016 and was a player in Event 201, the pandemic simulation hosted in October 2019 by the World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health – discussed here by Robert F Kennedy Jr.
In all probability, Gao is the old friend Farrar was referring to when he said on Desert Island Discs that he had had a phone call on December 31, 2019 – the day the Chinese authorities reported the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak to the WHO – to alert him that China would release the genome of the new virus on January 10. As things stood on New Year’s Eve, the virus had yet to cause any deaths, although it was making a few people very ill.
By January 17, another CEPI scientific adviser, Dr Christian Drosten, had conveniently developed a PCR test from the genetic sequence posted online by the Chinese, which the WHO advised laboratories could be used as a diagnostic test for Covid-19.
This was almost two months before the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Following a visit to Wuhan by the WHO in February 2020, led by its assistant director-general Dr Bruce Aylward, the world was being encouraged to adopt what were now being called Chinese measures.
‘China didn’t approach this new virus with an old strategy for one disease or another disease,’ said Aylward. ‘It developed its own approach to a new disease and extraordinarily has turned around this disease with strategies most of the world didn’t think would work.’
The Chinese government, with its own Big Brother infrastructure, had its own reasons for going along with that. But the response plan is in reality far more complex, and has a much darker background in the West.
The Yellow Brick Road that passes through CEPI and Beijing leads right back to the US Department of Homeland Security, and its 1998 Pentagon strategy paper.
The response plan is in reality an American scheme, with its origins more than decade and a half earlier and against a backdrop of bioterrorism concerns. Uncle Sam is the wizard behind the curtain, not acting in the West’s interests at all.
FDA Colludes with US Postal Service to Destroy Ivermectin Shipments
InfoWars | December 15, 2021
The US Food and Drug Administration is colluding with the US Postal Service to intercept inbound international shipments of Covid wonder drug ivermectin, reports circulating on social media claim.
According to letters from the FDA being shared online, the federal regulatory agency blocked shipments of ivermectin from reaching their intended recipients as they came through ports of entry.
“A shipment addressed to you from a foreign country is being held by the post office at the request of the US Food and Drug Administration,” reads one letter shared by attorney Aaron Siri.
According to the letter, the package containing 200 tablets of “Iverheal ivermectin tablets” was intercepted at the JFK Airport Port of Entry on November 9, 2021.
In another letter, the FDA intercepted 300 tablets of “Iverpac12” back in August, which they said were “subject to refusal of admission into the United States and are subject to administrative destruction.”
News of the FDA’s collusion with the US Postal Service comes as more people seek the effective drug and other preventative early treatments to remedy Covid-19 symptoms.
Meanwhile, the FDA has continued it’s fear-mongering campaign advising Americans not to consume the “horse dewormer” drug to treat Covid, as it has not been formally approved [for COVID use].
New German Chancellor Says There Will Be “No Red Lines” As Regards COVID Restrictions
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 15, 2021
Angela Merkel’s successor in Germany has declared that there is nothing he won’t do to battle COVID, a stark statement given previous pledges to make compulsory vaccinations legal.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz used his first address to the nation in Germany to push vaccinations, declaring that they are the only way Germany can overcome the pandemic.
Scholz added that there would be “no red lines” in the battle against the current wave of COVID, which he declared to be fueled by unvaccinated citizens.
“We will pull every possible lever,” he continued, adding “It will get better. Yes, we will win the fight against this pandemic with the biggest determination. And, yes, … we will overcome the crisis.”
He added that “our society is not divided,” and referring to people opposed to vaccinations proclaimed “We will not put up with a tiny minority of uninhibited extremists trying to impose their will on our entire society.”
While claiming “We are listening. We are looking for debate,” Scholz stated “There is in Germany today . . . denial of reality, absurd conspiracy stories, wilful disinformation and violent extremism.”
“We will counter this with the means of our democratic constitutional state. Our democracy is a democracy capable of defending itself,” the Chancellor further warned.
On Sunday, Scholz stated that he supports vaccine mandates across Germany, noting that he intends to “vote for compulsory vaccination, because it is legally permissible and morally right.”
Scholz previously said he wants to introduce mandatory coronavirus vaccination for all Germans as early as February, according to sources close to him.
Germany recently recorded its highest COVID death toll for 9 months, despite having mask mandates and stringent rules in many regions that banned the unvaccinated from numerous venues.
The country is preparing to follow the example of Austria by imposing new lockdown measures that will exclusively apply to the unvaccinated.
Medical Tyranny the New Abnormal
By Stephen Lendman | December 15, 2021
State-sponsored/MSM supported medical tyranny is the new abnormal throughout the US/West and elsewhere worldwide.
I’m greatly indebted to numerous truth-telling medical and scientific experts for teaching me what I’ve learned about all things flu/covid — a medical education I never imagined getting pre-2020 but got since then on this most cutting edge of all issues.
To my great dismay, intelligent people I know are oblivious to reality on what’s crucial to know — believing rubbish fed them daily from official, MSM, and other disreputable sources instead of what’s scientifically indisputable.
Protecting and preserving public health and freedom depend on enough committed people rising up against what’s going on — slaying it before it slays us.
Relief won’t come judicially or legislatively.
On all issues mattering most, positive change never comes top down, only bottom up by committed people demanding no less.
The anti-public health/anti-freedom scheme was planned well before its rollout early last year.
As explained time and again, it’s all about wanting maximum numbers of unwanted people eliminated worldwide, along with transforming free and open societies into ruler/serf ones for survivors.
It’s a draconian new world order fit only for privileged interests at the expense or all others.
It’s what no one anywhere should tolerate, a tyrannical world that’s unsafe and unfit to live for the vast majority worldwide — the worst of all possible worlds.
Things don’t have to be this way.
Ordinary people have power to rise up against injustice, defy unjustifiable rules, disrupt best laid plans of dark forces and achieve positive change by their actions.
History proves it. Years of anti-war activism helped end a decade of US aggression in Southeast Asia — a pyrrhic victory as things turned out because anti-war activism waned.
The same applies to moving from chattel to wage slavery, from Jim Crow to its modern-day version, from freedom to mass incarceration, from healthcare as it should be to toxic mass-jabbing with unparalleled genocide in mind.
Governance of, by and for entrenched interests in the US/West and elsewhere is too debauched to fix.
The same goes for MSM guardians of wealth, power and privilege.
Scattered reforms won’t work. Transformational change is needed.
The only solution is popular revolution. Anything less assures no change of unacceptable same old, same old.
Wealth, power and privileged interests are enemies of ordinary people everywhere.
Collective defiance is needed to turn things from what’s destructive of the general welfare to what’s beneficial.
Former Pfizer vice president, its chief scientist for allergy and infectious diseases, co-founder of Doctors for (flu/covid) Ethics, Dr. Michael Yeadon, is on the right side of history for this most crucial of all issues.
Commenting on what’s gone on since early last year, he said the diabolical scheme has nothing to do with protecting us, everything to do with establishing “totalitarian control.”
Fundamental freedoms are being abolished incrementally.
Things began by denying refuseniks free access to restaurants and other places where large numbers gather.
Widespread use of freedom-destroying health passports may follow as a requirement to stay free from societal isolation altogether.
Yeadon compared the above to “dropping a cancerous cell into your body (that) grows and metastasizes and then it kills you.”
“(T)hat’s what” health passports are all about if instituted.
“So don’t tolerate them anywhere,” Yeadon stressed.
Once instituted, metastasizing will “regulate access to essential services like food, money, fuel, trains and things like that.”
“You’ll never get rid of (them). We’ve got to stop (what’s going on) beforehand.”
Otherwise we’ll “lose the ability to decide where to be at any time.”
Health passports will “regulate entry and exit from almost any controlled space, possibly even including your own home.”
“You’ll be required to keep your passport up to date by being fully jabbed” — meaning forever-jabbed one or more time annually.
The more toxic jabs gotten, the sooner your end time will arrive, most likely very unpleasantly from painful and/or debilitating disease(s).
Getting informed from reliable independent sources, getting motivated and enraged enough to no longer tolerate what’s going on is the only way to halt it once and for all.
“(I)t’s us” on our own against the diabolical scheme. We alone can and must stop it.
The alternative is deeply entrenched tyranny, a permanent new abnormal, dystopia no one should tolerate.
Jabs are vehicles of mass-extermination.
Pharma profiteers and Big Government backers “are the most ruthless of all corporate entities,” Dr. Vernon Coleman stressed, adding:
It’s been known since last year that mass-jabbing “cause(s) heart trouble, strokes, neurological problems,” and other serious health issues.
Coleman believes that most jabbed individuals will be “lucky to last five years.”
Individuals taking them “should be considered suicidal or certified insane.”
“Life expectation is going to fall dramatically – and not just because the quality of health care is deteriorating daily.”
“I honestly find it difficult to believe that there are people around who are so brainwashed and so terrified by the lies they’ve heard that they will accept as many jabs as they are offered.”
The power of repetition, especially on propaganda TV, gets most people — including intelligent ones — to believe almost anything no matter how scientifically or otherwise untrue.
With minimal effort, anyone connected online can learn enough about what’s going on from reliable, independent sources to know we’re being scammed by US/Western and other governments, Pharma and their MSM press agents.
Getting mad as hell, rising up and refusing to take it any more is the only way to beat the diabolical scheme.
Nothing else can work.
PSA: Be Careful on Telegram
eugyppius | December 15, 2021
Assume that most large chat groups are infiltrated by security services and that everything you say there is being surveilled by the police.
For a few weeks, regime-friendly press outlets in Germany, like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, have been ringing the alarm about Telegram as a “lawless space” that poses a “danger to society.” Apparently it is a den of hate speech and incitement. This coordinated hyperventilation comes with demands that the new German government regulate Telegram as a social media application, which would require its administrators to report illegal content to authorities. Right now German law regards Telegram as a messenger app and thus exempts it from some of these rules.
In perfect tandem with this false press hysteria, police have raided the apartments of a Telegram chat group in Dresden. Allegedly, members of the chat, in the context of discussions about vaccine mandates, contemplated assassinating Michael Kretschmer, the CDU minister president of Saxony. Whenever police actions and press messaging campaigns align this perfectly, you should presume it is the work of agents provocateurs. In all likelihood, German security services are infiltrating Telegram chat groups, and putting about violent rhetoric in the interests of creating arrests and headlines to reinforce the press narrative.
I understand most of my readers aren’t in Germany, but as a back-up to Twitter I have my own Telegram channel, so I just want to advise everyone that caution is extremely important here. If you’re in a chat and anyone proposes violence, the chances that this is a bad actor are high, and you should distance yourself from these statements immediately. “I disavow all political violence and you should too” is the line I always use. Protect yourself.
Mainstream media moves against “misinformation” in email
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 14, 2021
The boundary corporate media want to establish for what they think should be policed and censored as political “misinformation” keeps expanding.
The new “frontier” that seems to be shaping up, if narratives pushed by the likes of the New York Times are to be taken into account, are people’s email communications.
Unlike the politicians’ speech on public platforms like social media and TV broadcasters, that is tightly controlled and often censored by various fact-checkers hired by Big Tech, the medium of email remains elusive, the newspaper laments, even though it is a powerful way to reach constituents.
Mentioning several examples of fund-raising emails that the NYT said contained false information regarding benefits enjoyed by illegal migrants, and Medicare, abortion, etc., the article’s author goes on to qualify email as a tool “teeming” with misinformation.
The newspaper is trying to highlight email communication as a problem ahead of the 2022 mid-term election, and the “methodology” used was to sign up for mailing lists from 390 members of Congress seeking reelection, and then decide which ones were sending out “unfounded claims.”
After reviewing the emails sent from 390 campaign lists since August, the NYT said it discovered that 15% percent of messages coming from Republicans and only 2% of those authored by Democrats contained misinformation.
And more sinister undertones have also allegedly been detected, since “multiple” Republicans are accused of doing this in an organized manner, by repeating the same claims, while Democrats “rarely” do that.
Democrats are also painted as far more cooperative, with a spokesperson for one campaign saying they had made “honest mistakes” and would be more careful in the future – while several Republican candidates cited in the article ignored NYT’s requests for comment.
Unavoidably, President Trump is blamed for the “ubiquity” of misinformation among Republicans. The fact that political messages can freely and in a cost-effective way reach an audience despite the massive censorship efforts and deplatforming on big social media platforms is seen as particularly concerning.
However, no suggestion is made on what to do about this “problem” and how to make sure fact-checkers can gain access to emails as well.
Facebook tech guru questions fight against ‘misinformation’
RT | December 13, 2021
Attempts to turn social media into an exclusive club where only elites have a right to speak in the name of rooting out dangerous misinformation are fundamentally wrong, a senior Meta official said.
Andrew Bosworth, who leads technological research at Meta and is set to become the tech giant’s CTO next year, pushed back against critics who accuse social media like Facebook of harming society by failing to police speech on their platforms.
“If your democracy can’t tolerate the speech of people, I’m not sure what kind of democracy it is,” he said in an interview with ‘Axios on HBO’, which was previewed on Sunday. He was responding to a statement by host Ina Fried that some people think tools like Facebook should not exist at all because they are “fundamentally unsafe”.
Bosworth rejected the notion that the democratization of public speech brought by the advance of social media should be reversed due to the threat of misinformation.
I do believe in giving people more access to information and more access to connect with one another, and not reserving those tools to some small number of elite people.
US-based social media, Facebook in particular, have been put under increased pressure to increasingly police their platforms so that they are not used by ‘malicious’ actors. The initial push came after the 2016 election based on the claim that Russia used memes to interfere with the political process. More recently, the justification for censorship was that misinformation about Covid-19 and health was running rampant online.
Bosworth reiterated his discomfort over attempts to turn Facebook into an arbiter of what speech should be considered malicious and banned. Even using third-party checkers to do the job is far from a perfect solution, he said.
Our ability to know what is misinformation is itself in question, and I think reasonably so.
“I am very uncomfortable with the idea that we possess fundamental rightness even in our most scientific centers of study to exercise that kind of power on a citizen, another human, and what they want to say, and who they want to listen to,” he said.
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From the Archives
A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
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