Ireland’s Media Commissioner Is Poised To Gain Substantial Authority Over Online Speech
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 11, 2023
Jeremy Godfrey has been named the executive chairperson of Ireland’s Media Commission, an organization tasked with overseeing social media regulation and censorship in Ireland.
This new role aligns with Ireland’s implementation of the EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA mandates that online platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users prioritize the moderation of content deemed “harmful.”
According to Politico, roughly about nine months into his role as the chairman of the Media Commission, Godfrey and his assembly of specialists, currently numbering 75, are still meticulously working out the intricacies of their novel directive. Their yet to be inaugurated authority, slated for activation early next year, will count among its arsenal the ability to stipulate severe fines for speech violations.
The Commission’s powers will intersect with those of Brussels, as the two seek to unify their efforts under the world’s pioneering social media legislation which is designed to curtail the propagation of online hate speech and misinformation.
“We are striving for a mutual objective,” Godfrey told Politico. Godfrey, however, candidly admitted that how the responsibilities will be shared between the European Commission and the Irish body remains an unresolved issue and will necessitate further deliberation.
Citizens in Ireland are currently facing a dark turn when it comes to free speech. The country is facing a controversial shift in its approach to freedom of expression and speech, with proposed laws targeting so-called “hate speech.”
Under the proposed legislation, actions or materials that could incite violence or hatred based on “protected characteristics” like disability, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or gender would be criminalized.
The bill’s scope is alarmingly extensive, penalizing not only the articulation or publication of such speech but also the mere possession of it. This could include anything from a meme on a cellphone to text messages, with non-compliance in surrendering device passwords to authorities potentially leading to a year’s imprisonment.
Migrant-loving Western leaders are at war with their own people
By Tony Cox | RT | December 10, 2023
The ongoing ruling-class meltdown over the recent Dublin riots tells us a lot about the breadth and depth of the gulf fixed between Western governments and their citizens. It’s as if those in charge are outraged by the temerity of their subjects to cry out over the pain and death inflicted upon them by their supposed leaders.
Angry Irish citizens took to the streets, chanting “Enough is enough,” after suffering the latest consequence of mass migration: The November 23 stabbing attack in which three children and two adults were injured in central Dublin. Having failed to be heard by the policymakers who are destroying their quality of life, they burned buses, torched police cars, and clashed violently with officers.
The suspect hasn’t been identified or officially arrested. Unlike the Irish people, he’s being protected by their government, and he’s reportedly too incapacitated to be questioned by police because of injuries suffered during the stabbing spree. He has been described as a 49-year-old Algerian who was given Irish citizenship.
A media controversy erupted days after the attack when independent journalist John McGuirk reported – incorrectly – that the suspect was an Algerian migrant who had been living in Ireland, at taxpayer expense, since 2003. McGuirk referred to a man who faced a deportation order after an arrest years ago, but he was allowed to stay in the country and was later given an Irish passport. Earlier this year, he was arrested for illegal knife possession and damaging a car. He was let go by the court because of a mental health issue, according to media reports.
McGuirk was assailed by establishment mouthpiece media figures not for getting the story wrong, which wasn’t initially known, but for deciding not to withhold sensitive information from his readers. Pressed in a television interview by host Ciara Doherty on whether he “inflamed” a “hostile situation” by reporting details about the suspect’s background, he replied, “Your essential position is that you, as a journalist, sitting in that chair, should decide what information the people watching this program have, and if you decide they can’t handle it, you don’t give it to them.”
Police subsequently revealed that McGuirk had identified the wrong Algerian migrant. Although he wasn’t named in the article, the details of his background made it possible for online sleuths to identify him. Police are now protecting the man who was misidentified, according to media reports, while continuing to withhold information about the actual suspect.
McGuirk took down his erroneous article from the internet and issued a statement saying that the source who gave him false identification was a senior police official. He also cross-checked the information with a senior official in the Irish justice system before posting his story. His media outlet, Gript Media, is now investigating whether the false tip was a deliberate act of sabotage.
It would be easy to see why powerful figures in the Irish government would be pleased to have such a story misreported by an adversarial journalist. The discussion has turned to the spread of “misinformation” and the inciting of angry citizens rather than excessive immigration and poor public safety.
The situation is reminiscent of when WikiLeaks reported on emails showing that America’s Democratic National Committee had rigged the party’s 2016 presidential primaries in favor of its chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton. Rather than focusing on the scandal, legacy media outlets made the story about Clinton’s unproven claims that Russian hackers stole the emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.
The thing is, even if you knew that an adversary with ulterior motives had revealed that your spouse was cheating on you, wouldn’t you be more concerned about the infidelity than the source? The story in Ireland should be destructive immigration policies, not identifying the wrong Algerian migrant criminal.
Ironically, the distraction and misdirection in the Dublin story doesn’t really matter. The fact is that the dangerous migrant identified by McGuirk has been allowed to stay in Ireland by a government that doesn’t prioritize the safety of its own people. He didn’t perpetrate this particular assault, but he’s a criminal migrant, and if and when he commits another crime, it will be an unforced error inflicted on the Irish people by their government. The fact also remains that the real suspect is an Algerian migrant, meaning he came from a country more than 1,000 miles away that isn’t at war. If he was a legitimate refugee, Ireland wasn’t the nearest available safe haven – not by a long shot.
However, if Ireland’s leaders can help it, attention will be shifted away from the country’s migration crisis. Never mind the policies that endanger Irish citizens and diminish their quality of life. There won’t be a serious discussion, either, of why illegitimate asylum seekers and other migrants are allowed to stay in the country, even after they’ve committed crimes.
Rather than decrying the stabbing of children or confronting the policy questions raised by the rampage, Irish government officials and their media stenographers are focusing their ire on the citizens who violently demanded change, dismissing them as “emboldened racists.”
National police chief Drew Harris blamed the riots on a “complete lunatic hooligan factor driven by far-right ideology.” Justice Minister Helen McEntee pledged tougher police tactics to quell any such revolts by the “thugs and criminals” who were using the stabbing attack to “sow division.” Kenyan-born UK politician Lilian Seenoi-Barr blamed the unrest on a small far-right minority and called the rioters an “organized terrorist group of people who want to harm immigrants.”
Prime Minister Leo Varadkar insisted that people shouldn’t connect the stabbing spree to the mass migration that is transforming Ireland’s population. The PM said the rioters couldn’t possibly have been motivated by a desire to protect their way of life; rather, they were “filled with hate, they love violence, they love chaos, and they love causing pain to others.” He also called for enhancements to Ireland’s hate-speech legislation. “We will modernize our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general.”
To the extent the mob was whipped up, it was whipped up by reality – the reality created by the policies of the country’s tone-deaf leaders. The influx of migrants – many of them illegitimate asylum seekers from outside war zones – has swelled Ireland’s population to 5.15 million, up 31% in the past two decades. One in five residents of Ireland isn’t Irish-born. Many young people have given up on looking for homes because of the housing crisis and crushing inflation. Rates of murder and other crimes have risen sharply.
As for the notion that people are violently angry about their collapsing quality of life, recent polling shows that 75% of Irish people believe their country is taking in too many asylum seekers. An even larger majority, 76%, agreed that it was justifiable for people to be angry when migrants were moved into their communities. Presumably, most of those citizens aren’t inclined to torch trams or burn buses, but if even one in 100 of the people who oppose what’s being done to their country are angry enough to rise up, you have a mob nearly 40,000 strong.
Not all of the rioters were motivated by real grievances. Some, for instance, took the unrest as an opportunity to loot. In any case, a strong majority of the Irish people aren’t getting what they want from policymakers. Their message isn’t being heard when they burn things, just as it was ignored when they held peaceful protests. So, what comes next?
Irish leaders have responded by demonizing their critics and criminalizing dissent. For example, Irish MMA legend Conor McGregor is reportedly among the many people being investigated for alleged “incitement to hatred.” McGregor posted on social media that the stabbing suspect was a “grave danger among us in Ireland that should never be here in the first place.” Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin denounced the fighter’s accurate comment as “absolutely disgraceful,” to which McGregor responded by calling the politician “worthless and spineless.”
McGregor doubled down on his criticism last week, saying Irish officials were trying to use him as a “scapegoat.” He added, “The truth of the many failed policies of this government, however, will never stop being the reason we have innocent children in hospital on life support after being stabbed by a deranged criminal.” The fighter even hinted on Monday about running for president.
Contrast the reaction in Dublin with how the Western ruling class treated the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. There were scenes of police kneeling with the protestors rather than calling them extremist hooligans. Rather than calling for everyone to hush up about the racial overtones of the triggering event – the death of a black criminal, George Floyd, after a white police officer kneeled on his neck – the story was made all about racism.
Even as cities burned and dozens of people were killed, many politicians agreed with the mob’s demands to “defund the police” and “reimagine policing.” The future US vice president, Kamala Harris, promoted a fundraising campaign to bail out rioters who had been arrested during the mayhem. Nike, Google, Apple, and other big names in Corporate America pledged massive donations to “racial justice” causes.
And while inflaming the Dublin rioters by linking the crime to migration has been deemed irresponsible, inflaming the BLM mob with falsehood may even have been a government strategy. A new documentary on Floyd’s death has claimed that the original autopsy found no indication that he had died from injury to his neck; however, he was infected with Covid-19 and had fatal levels of fentanyl in his blood. A day after the medical examiner met with FBI agents, the documentary said, the autopsy was altered to suggest that Floyd had been killed by police.
The cop who was found guilty of killing Floyd, Derek Chauvin, is still serving a long sentence in prison, where he was stabbed 22 times by another inmate last month. His attacker was a former FBI informant.
Western rulers seem to base their reaction to civil unrest and violent crimes on the ideology of the perpetrators. If it aligns with the political agenda, the message is amplified and treated sympathetically. If it exposes the folly of destructive policies, it must be crushed. The BLM riots provided an opportunity for race-baiters to further divide the people and promote “reforms” that favor criminals over law-abiding citizens and non-white people over whites. The Dublin riots screamed that the people had reached their breaking point with mass migration and leaders who refused to serve the interests of their citizens.
The same criteria were on display when an election fraud protest at the US Capitol escalated into a riot in January 2021. Rioters breached the Capitol to disrupt congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. Biden reacted by calling the riot the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” More than 1,100 people have been arrested for their alleged roles in the riot. Many have received long prison sentences. One man who wasn’t even in Washington on the day of the riot – but who sent messages cheering on the breach from his Baltimore hotel room – was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
A similar approach is taken to other high-profile crimes. When a white gunman wounded four people at a Missouri Walmart last month, the FBI came out just two days later to report that the shooter may have been motivated by racist ideology. Never mind that two of his victims were white, and two were black.
And yet, more than eight months on from an incident in which a transgender shooter killed three children and three adults at a Christian elementary school in Tennessee, police are still refusing to release the “manifesto” written by the murderer. In fact, seven officers have been suspended on suspicion that they may have leaked part of the document online. In leaked pages of the manifesto, shooter Audrey Hale spoke of killing “all you little crackers” with “white privileges.” Similarly, it took seven months for police to reveal that the man who killed five people and wounded eight at a Kentucky bank wanted to inspire tougher gun control laws by killing “upper-class white people.”
The suppression of truth, the lying, and the situational outrage cannot be sustained forever. Leaders who cram down policies that destroy their countries and harm their citizens, whom they supposedly represent, cannot endlessly evade a real reckoning of their betrayals. The critics can no longer be completely silenced, no matter how aggressive the censorship efforts.
How sustainable is being at war with your own people? How long can a government defy the interests of its citizens and vilify those who complain? Short of replacing the native-born population quickly enough to avert accountability, the leaders will have to answer to their subjects at some point.
The same voices that call for tamping down the rhetoric and even suppressing the facts to avoid inflaming the mob in Dublin are only inciting more escalation by dismissing the rioters as extremist, racist thugs. People whose lives are being destroyed – at their own expense, as taxpayers, and by the traitorous leaders who have a moral duty to serve their interests – will eventually find a way to be heard.
Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
Father of American journalist jailed in Ukraine blames Biden
RT | December 9, 2023
The administration of US President Joe Biden was complicit in the arrest of an American journalist who has been jailed and tortured in Ukraine for criticizing the Kiev government, the father of Gonzalo Lira has claimed. He believes his son may have sealed his fate when he also spoke out against Washington.
Gonzalo Lira was apprehended by Ukrainian authorities for the third time in August while trying to escape to Hungary after being released on bail. The Chilean-American writer had repeatedly criticized the government of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, arguing that Kiev had provoked its conflict with Russia and had no chance of winning.
“This that is happening to my son, he’s a victim of this Biden government and his relation with that puppet Zelensky,” Gonzalo Lira Sr. said on Saturday in an interview with US journalist and political commentator Tucker Carlson. “Zelensky is a man that has made opponents, political opponents, disappear.”
The 80-year-old father said his son had bravely reported on about a dozen Zelensky opponents who had been “disappeared.” The younger Gonzalo Lira also predicted correctly that the Russian economy would be relatively unscathed by Western sanctions and that NATO members would suffer a boomerang effect from their efforts to arm Ukraine and punish Moscow.
However, it was only after the blogger sharply criticized Biden and US Vice President Kamala Harris that he was arrested for a second time in May, Gonzalo Lira Sr. told Carlson.
“Isn’t it odd that four days later, after condemning Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Gonzalo was arrested?” the father asked. “Why was he not detained earlier? When he was let go the previous year, he continued the same criticism against the war.” He added, “The USA government, with its silence in the face of this scandalous incident, suggests a degree of complicity, or at least tacit approval of Gonzalo’s arrest.”
Lira contrasted the Biden administration’s “conspicuous lack of response” to his son’s arrest to Washington’s aggressive efforts to secure the release of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested in Russia on espionage charges in March.
The younger Lira is relying on a court-appointed Ukrainian attorney who speaks no English for his legal defense. Just before being captured in August, he warned his audience that if he failed to get safely into Hungary and be granted political asylum, he would likely die in a Ukrainian labor camp.
Gonzalo Lira Sr. has called his son a political prisoner and has argued that his case illustrates the absurdity of US claims that the world must defend “freedom and democracy” in Ukraine. “If we are going to protect democracy in the world, let’s start by taking out that puppet called Zelensky,” he said.
US imposes media restrictions on Palestine FM as visa condition, Saudi FM confirms
MEMO | December 10, 2023
To Whom Should the Right of Speech Belong?
Brownstone Institute | December 7, 2023
On Sunday, December 17, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, will debate Dr. Kate Klonick, Associate Professor of Law at St. John’s University Law School, on whether Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 injunction restricting the Biden Administration’s communications with social media platforms hindered or helped “national internet policy.”
The topic refers to the federal district court’s 155-page ruling in Missouri v. Biden, which ordered the federal government to halt its efforts to induce Big Tech to censor its political opponents. Judge Doughty wrote that if the plaintiffs’ allegations are true, the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Dr. Bhattacharya is a Plaintiff in the lawsuit, which alleges that he and his colleagues “experienced extensive censorship on social media” for their criticism of the US Government’s Covid policies. In his affidavit, Dr. Bhattacharya testifies that there was a “relentless covert campaign of social-media censorship of our dissenting view from the government’s preferred message.”
Dr. Klonick previewed her support for the Government’s ability to work with private companies to control the flow of information in a July op-ed for the New York Times, “The Future of Online Speech Shouldn’t Belong to One Trump-Appointed Judge in Louisiana.”
Klonick’s article raises factual and analytical questions that Bhattacharya should raise in their debate.
Does the Future of Online Speech Belong to Anyone?
Klonick’s headline is fundamentally at odds with the concept of free speech. Under the First Amendment, speech does not belong to any person or entity. Future speech receives heightened protections under Supreme Court precedent to curtail prior restraint.
Next Sunday, Dr. Bhattacharya should ask Klonick: who should “speech” belong to? This is not a pedantic or rhetorical point; those with control over information instinctively protect their own interests. A survey of American power structures demonstrates the corruption that power breeds.
Should the future of speech belong to CISA? The Department of Homeland Security subdivision monitored speech in the 2020 election through “switchboarding,” a process in which it flagged content for removal from social media platforms.
The US Security State censored posts related to natural immunity, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab-leak theory, and side effects of the vaccine, many of which were later proven true. In each instance, the suppression of information benefitted the country’s most powerful institutions.
Or should it belong to the Biden Administration? Every day, the White House slowly kills Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison. The President hasn’t accused the Wikileaks publisher of falsehoods; instead, Assange has spent over ten years in confinement for disrupting the preferred narrative of the American political class.
Should speech belong to unelected bureaucrats? Biden cronies like Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt have worked for years to control Americans’ access to information, including censoring “mal-information,” meaning “often-true information” that they consider “sensational.”
Should it instead belong to health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci? Fauci learned that he was complicit in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology on January 27, 2020, and orchestrated a cover-up campaign to shield himself from criticism and potential legal liability. He called for a “quick and devastating… take down (sic)” of the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Dr. Bhattacharya, because it questioned his judgment on lockdowns.
Our First Amendment demands that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. Alleged falsehood does not overturn this principle. As the Supreme Court recognized in United States v. Alvarez: “Some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation.”
Free speech is predicated on the notion that it belongs to no man or government entity. Klonick’s entire position is based on her opposition to that pillar of constitutional liberty.
The Flaws in Klonick’s Argument
Beyond the title, each prong of Dr. Klonick’s argument relies on falsehoods. First, she described the case as “part of a wider war conservatives believe they are fighting, in which tech executives and Democratic government officials are supposedly colluding to censor conservative voices.”
Like Professor Larry Tribe, the censors use terms like believe and supposedly to imply the censorship doesn’t exist. They call it a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” while ignoring the documented suppression of Alex Berenson, Jay Bhattacharya, the Great Barrington Declaration, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and others.
Klonick never mentions that Facebook banned users who promoted the lab-leak hypothesis at the behest of the CDC, that the Biden Administration launched a campaign to censor dissent surrounding vaccines in July 2021, or that the Twitter Files demonstrated the infiltration of the US Security State in Big Tech. Acknowledging those facts would unravel her premise.
Second, Klonick argued that the injunction was “overbroad” because it “seems to prevent anyone in the Biden administration from having any kind of communication with online platforms about matters related to speech.”
Here, she either didn’t read the order or deliberately misrepresented it. The injunction does not “prevent anyone” in government from communicating with online platforms “about matters related to speech,” as she claims; to the contrary, the injunction explicitly permits the Defendants to communicate with social media companies provided it does not infringe upon “free speech [protected] by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment.”
Third, she described the Biden Administration’s demands to social media giants to remove content as “classic examples of what political scientists call jawboning: the government’s use of public appeals or private channels to induce change or compliance from businesses.”
This ignores the inter-agency and systemic nature of what Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” Recent reports have revealed military contractors’ role in establishing systems for global censorship and the Intelligence Community’s direct involvement in the operations of our information centers.
The “content moderation” demands were not mere requests that could be freely accepted or denied. As Brownstone has detailed, they were mafia-like tactics where thuggish officials used the threat of retaliation to demand compliance.
Klonick exemplifies the censors’ repeated strategy: deny, deflect, and defend. The prongs of her augment are inherently contradictory. She defends the censorship tactics that she pretends don’t exist. Further, she either remains willfully blind to the corruption behind the usurpation of First Amendment freedoms or deliberately omits any mention of it.
No matter her intentions or misunderstandings, her aim is unconstitutional.
The Pretext for Tyranny
Pro-censorship advocates like Klonick and The New York Times imply that the internet presents unique challenges that require the government to “stifle disinformation.” But “disinformation” has long been the pretext for tyrants to banish unwanted speech.
In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld the Wilson Administration’s convictions of journalists, immigrants, and presidential candidate Eugene Debs for their opposition to the Great War. Charles Schenck, a pamphleteer, argued that the military draft violated the US Constitution. Debs told his followers, “You need to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. affirmed their jail sentences, offering the now-famous slander that the First Amendment did not protect “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
Holmes’ metaphor was a precursor to disinformation. It dismissed the dissidents as liars and accused them of endangering those around them. In the Covid era, we saw the slanderous nature of Holmes’ glib principle return to the public square as men like Dr. Bhattacharya were accused of killing grandmothers, hating teachers, and spreading Russian propaganda.
A century after the censorship of the Great War, Dr. Klonick asserts that the future of speech should belong to someone, just not Trump-appointed judges. But history, through figures such as Holmes, warns us of the tyranny inherent in that principle.
As one Irish Senator recently demonstrated, censors justify their totalitarianism in the name of the “common good.” They march under innocuous banners like public health, anti-racism, and civility.
But the results always serve the censors’ interests, stifling dissent to augment power.
Judge Doughty’s injunction may have flaws, but on the question of whether it advances or hinders free speech in the United States, the answer is undeniable. Missouri v. Biden is a litmus test for Americans. Either the Government has a right to curate citizens’ newsfeeds by using the power of the federal government to nationalize our information centers, or we embrace the First Amendment and unshackle ourselves from the militarized system of informational warfare that has dominated our airwaves for over three years. Dr. Klonick must answer, who would she appoint to control the future of our speech, to determine whether there really is fire in the theater?
Documents Show DHS Agency “Real-Time Narrative Tracking” of Social Media Posts in 2020
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 7, 2023
Judicial Watch has come forward with newly acquired evidence of an intriguing alliance during the US 2020 election. The investigative body was able to obtain, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit, a series of records demonstrating a comprehensive synergy between the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and a controversial entity, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).
These files reveal a concerted effort to execute “real-time narrative tracking” on principal social media networks during the critical days leading up to the 2020 election. Interestingly, these records illustrate instances of social media post “takedowns” and an intentional avoidance of creating public records that would be subject to the FOIA process.
These records also allow us a peek into the operations of EIP. Originally known as the Election Misinformation Partnership, it invested in monitoring online election discourse round the clock, especially prioritizing “disinformation that is going viral.”
A lawsuit launched under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gave Judicial Watch access to the records. The lawsuit was deemed necessary in response to a lack of transparency from the DHS, which did not respond to a formal request submitted by Judicial Watch on October 5, 2022.
This data was part of an extensive request by Judicial Watch that included all communication records between CISA and EIP, minute details of a meeting between DHS officials and EIP members on July 9, 2020, and all records of communication between CISA and Stanford University’s Internet Observatory or the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, specifically regarding the Election Integrity Partnership, the 2020 US election, online misinformation and disinformation, or various social media platforms.
The Election Integrity Partnership, established right before the Presidential elections in July 2020, was composed of four major entities: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and social media analytics firm Graphika.
This partnership provided a valuable service to federal bodies, such as Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), enabling them to file tickets for flagging or censoring specific social media posts and online stories. It also extended similar privileges to three liberal organizations – the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause, and the NAACP – along with the Homeland-funded Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center.
In 2023, a report by the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed the drastic evolution of CISA. Established in 2018 to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats, it had emerged by 2020 as the central conduit for domestic surveillance and censorship of social media by the federal government. CISA’s focus shifted to reporting supposed disinformation on social media. By the following year, they had officially formed a team specializing in misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. As criticism intensified in 2022 and 2023, CISA sought to obscure its activities, ostensibly serving a purely “informational” role despite judicious allegations of unconstitutional conduct.
“These records show the lengths to which a ‘Homeland Security’ Deep State agency went in its effort to censor and suppress Americans during and after the 2020 election,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That it took a federal lawsuit to extract these disturbing records should raise additional worries about what else this Biden administration is up to.”
Tech investors organize to silence pro-Palestinian voices
The Cradle | December 9, 2023
A group of pro-Israeli tech investors and executives in California’s Silicon Valley are seeking to influence media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and “combat the slightest deviations from the pro-Israel script,” a new investigation by journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulsen shows.
The investors and executives have joined with pro-Israeli activists and Israeli government officials to terminate pro-Palestinian employees at multi-national corporations from their jobs, smear Palestinian journalists, cancel speaking events at US universities by Palestinian writers and politicians, remove social media posts critical of Israel, “ridicule” pro-Palestinian social media influencers and lawmakers, and send military equipment to Israeli forces.
The Following Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israeli military bases and settlements surrounding Gaza, the group formed a WhatsApp group to coordinate their activities.
The WhatsApp group, officially named the “J-Ventures Global Kibbutz Group,” is a project of J-Ventures, a US-Israeli investment fund.
The journalists obtained access to thousands of the group’s WhatsApp messages dating back to mid-October showing the group’s efforts to help Israel in its public relations war, in particular as Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza quickly reached shocking levels, resulting in harsh international condemnation.
They described how members of the group coordinated on WhatsApp to have Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, fired. Carey posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” which means, “Freedom for Palestine” on her LinkedIn page, and was terminated 24 hours later.
The group includes prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeff Epstein – a former CFO of Oracle – and Andy David, a diplomat-cum-venture capitalist who also serves as the Israeli foreign ministry’s head of innovation, entrepreneurship, and tech.
Adam Fisher, the head of the Israel office of Bessemer Venture Partners, gave a presentation to the group on how US “high-tech leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs,” such as himself, could help the Israeli army win the “information war” on social media.
The Israel-based venture capitalist spoke of how to “sow doubt” among young people in the US sympathetic to the Palestinian cause so they would not speak out or attend protests against Israel’s killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. “So it’s really about creating some kind of confusion,” Fisher said,” to make it clear to them that it’s really a lot more complicated.”
The group also petitioned Netflix to remove the award-winning Jordanian film “Farha,” claiming that its accurate portrayal of the actions of Israeli soldiers during the 1948 massacre and forced displacement of Palestinians constituted “blood libel,” while another said the film was based “antisemitism and lies.”
J-Ventures documents and affiliated WhatsApp discussions also show support for a variety of automated attempts to remove pro-Palestinian content on social media, including via DigitalDome.io, an initiative that promotes itself as an online version of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, promising that “offensive and malicious content is intercepted here.”
Digital Dome’s “recent achievements” included the censorship of Hamas’s channels on the Telegram communications platform using Android phones and the removal of pro-Palestinian content from Instagram and Twitter/X.
Members of the WhatsApp group successfully lobbied to have speaking events of Palestinian-US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Palestinian writer for the Nation Magazine, Mohamed al-Kurd, canceled.
The group circulated a push poll suggesting Representative Tlaib should resign from Congress.
Finally, the group has also attempted to provide tactical gear to Israel’s equivalent of the US Navy SEALs, known as Shayetet-13, and donated to a foundation dedicated to supporting the Israeli army’s undercover “Duvdevan” unit, which is known for assassinating Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Martyrdom of Dr. Refaat Al-Areer, the PIC social media founder and manager
Palestinian Information Center | December 8, 2023
The Palestinian Information Center (PIC) mourns with grief and pride Dr. Refaat Al-Areer (Abu Omar) one of the pillars of the PIC English language site and the founder and manager of its social media department.
Abu Omar was killed along with his brother, sister and her four children in an Israeli shelling that targeted her house in Gaza City in yet another proof of the barbarity of the Israeli genocidal campaign on the Gaza Strip that has been ongoing for more than two months.
Dr. Refaat was an English language professor in the Islamic University that was destroyed in the barbaric Israeli aggression and whose rector was also killed by Israeli shelling along with his family.
The martyr was distinguished for advocating the Palestine cause at various western and international media platforms. He wrote a book about Gaza titled “Gaza Writes Back” in the English language and had numerous notable interviews with western media outlets.
While mourning our academic and media expert colleague Abu Omar, we strongly condemn Israel’s escalating targeting of reporters and journalists in a bid to cover up its army’s crimes that have violated and continue to violate all human rights laws and doctrines.
We further call on international human rights institutions worldwide to adopt whatever is necessary to protect journalists and enable them to do their job without hindrances or harassment. We also call on world organizations concerned with protecting journalists to condemn the premeditated Israeli targeting of journalists and deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians. We also call for bringing all those responsible for such crimes to justice.
75 Palestinian journalists have so far been killed and 80 others were injured while two are still missing due to the Israeli aggression on Gaza Strip that started on October 7.
Israel revokes UN humanitarian coordinator’s visa for ‘not condemning Hamas’
The Cradle | December 6, 2023
Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen announced on 5 December the state’s decision to revoke the resident visa of UN humanitarian coordinator Lynn Hastings.
“We will no longer be silent in the face of the bias of the UN!” the foreign minister said via social media. “I decided to revoke the residence visa to Israel of the UN humanitarian coordinator Lynn Hastings.”
“Someone who did not condemn Hamas for the brutal massacre of 1,200 Israelis, for the kidnapping of babies and the elderly and for the horrific acts of abuse and rape, and for using the residents of Gaza as human shields, but instead condemns Israel, a democratic country that protects its citizens, cannot serve in the UN and cannot enter Israel!” Cohen’s social media statement continued.
The Israeli foreign minister’s remarks came on the heels of comments made by Hastings, in which she voiced concern for the Palestinian people after Israel resumed indiscriminate attacks on residential neighborhoods, hospitals, and UN shelters.
“Nowhere is safe in Gaza, and there is nowhere left to go,” Hasting’s statement read. “The conditions required to deliver aid to the people of Gaza do not exist. If possible, an even more hellish scenario is about to unfold, one in which humanitarian operations may not be able to respond.”
Israel’s UN envoy, Gilad Erdan, had also voiced his condemnation of the organization’s view regarding the war between Israel and Palestinian resistance.
“There is no justification or point in talking to those who show compassion for the most terrible atrocities committed against the citizens of Israel and the Jewish people. There are simply no words,” Erdan said on social media.
Cohen had also voiced his displeasure in October to a UN-fronted ceasefire despite Hamas being open to such a resolution.
“We reject outright the [UNGA]’s despicable call for a ceasefire,” Israel Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said. “Israel intends to eliminate Hamas just as the world dealt with the Nazis and ISIS.”
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UN declares war on ‘dangerous’ conspiracy theories
‘World is not secretly run by elites’
Free West Media | August 5, 2022
UNESCO says it is seriously concerned about the increase in “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories”. And they plan to put an end to it through a network of informants.
“Conspiracy theories can be dangerous,” the UN agency warned. “Often they ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with dire consequences. This has to stop.”
Unesco’s director-general warned that “conspiracy theories” could cause damage to people as well as to their health. “They reinforce misconceptions about the pandemic, reinforcing stereotypes that can fuel violence and violent, extremist ideologies,” said Audrey Azoulay.
The UN agency has launched a campaign to help people identify, debunk and report “conspiracy theories” to prevent them from spreading further.
This campaign is being carried out in collaboration with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress. The UN has created a toolkit to “debunk” such theories and smear anyone who dares to claim that governments are not fair and transparent.
The UN also warned that George Soros, the Rothschilds and Israel should not be linked to “alleged conspiracies”.
World events “are not secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful players with malicious intent,” the UN agency maintained.
And if anyone therefore comes across someone who believes that the world elite is plotting to consolidate power or direct events, then that person needs to take action. According to the UN agency, when meeting a “conspiracy theorist”, under no circumstances should one enter into a discussion. … continue
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