By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | February 9, 2023
Twitter has angered EU officials after it failed to submit complete reports on disinformation efforts as part of its commitment to the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.
“I am disappointed to see that Twitter’s report lags behind others and I expect a more serious commitment to their obligations,” wrote Vera Jourova, the Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency.
The European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, who has contacted Twitter owner Elon Musk at least twice about the Code of Practice, said “it comes as no surprise that the degree of quality vary greatly according to the resources companies have allocated to this project,” but did not mention Twitter directly.
Twitter signed the code before Musk took over late last year, and committed to sending biannual reports.
“In some areas, Twitter is unable to provide granular data due to resource constraints and data limitations,” the company said in its report. “In other areas, there are issues that are not applicable to Twitter’s service.”
The code is voluntary. However, non-compliance could put Twitter in a bad position with the EU ahead of the September 1 deadline for full compliance with the EU’s new censorship law, the Digital Services Act.
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | FEBRUARY 2, 2023
The European Union is organizing a conference entitled: “Beyond disinformation – EU responses to the threat of foreign information manipulation.”
Its main thrust is to seek ways of expunging any trace of a Russia-friendly outlook within the Union.
The EU has already censored Russia Today TV channels and the Sputnik agency. It is now extending its reach to EU citizens relaying content from these portals, whether they agree with it or not.
The event will be chaired by Josep Borrell, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, assisted by Stefano Sannino, Secretary General of the European External Action Service,.
MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, Chairman of the European Parliament’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference, will address the meeting along with representatives of the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency, the British Foreign Office and the US State Department, and of course of NATO.
The star of the show will be Nina Jankowicz (pictured), who, after serving as communications adviser to President Volodymr Zelensky, was appointed by President Joe Biden to chair the Disinformation Governance Board, the short-lived US censorship structure.
With the exception of Mr. Glucksman, all the speakers are senior, though unelected, officials.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 7, 2023
The United Nations is becoming heavily involved in several initiatives to regulate the digital space and online speech, and judging by the priorities the organization has for 2023, outlined on Monday in New York City, this trend is only picking up steam.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke about those priorities and suppressing the spread of online “hate” speech via what he called misinformation and disinformation made it to the list, among issues like rights-based approach, renewable energy, and a dire warning about the world being closer than ever to total catastrophe – all mentioned in his speech.
Guterres spoke about the subject of “mis- and disinformation” on the internet as a call for action to deal with these threats.
And Guterres had “everyone with influence” in mind – governments, regulators, policymakers, technology companies, the media, civil society. It’s notable that he “squeezed in” this warning about the need to “stop the hate” on the internet in the same paragraph he spoke about UN outreach programs that concern the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide.
He then moved on to the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech, which included the “call for action.”
“Stop the hate. Set up strong guardrails. Be accountable for language that causes harm,” the UN secretary-general said and explaining the plan on how to do that: by creating a code of conduct for information integrity on digital platforms.
This, Guterres noted, is part of his 2021 report titled, “Our Common Agenda.” In May 2022, a meeting was held at the UN by delegates who gathered to discuss what was dramatically dubbed as “the epidemic of misinformation and disinformation.”
The UN Department of Global Communications was tasked with drafting a code of conduct “to promote integrity in public information.”
In his speech on Monday, Guterres also accused social media platforms of using algorithms to “amplify toxic ideas and funnel extremist views into the mainstream,” and asserted that some platforms tolerate hate speech, which, according to him, is “the first step towards hate crime.”
And as stakeholders, those identified by Guterres, get together to produce the code of conduct for information integrity on digital platforms, “we will also further strengthen how focus on our mis- and disinformation are impacting progress on global issues, including the climate crisis,” he promised.
Critics wonder if this doubling-down on “the war on misinformation” by the UN will serve as an excuse for even more online censorship and if it might clash with members’ own speech protection laws.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 7, 2023
Canada‘s Senate has passed Bill C-11 (Online Streaming Act), which critics refer to as “the internet censorship bill,” along with several amendments.
The bill passed in the third reading with 43 votes in favor and 15 against, which means it is now inching ever closer to becoming law since in the next step it goes back to the House of Commons, which will consider the amendments.
The government proposed the bill as a way to amend the Broadcasting Act by modifying Canada’s broadcasting policy, and giving the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) new powers as a regulator.
Opponents of the bill, including Conservative politicians and advocacy groups, however, see it as a way to increase the government’s ability to censor online speech it dislikes.
The effort to bring this legislation to life in Canada has quite a story behind it: initially, the Online Streaming Act, then known as Bill C-10, passed in the House of Commons in June 2021 but failed in the Senate.
It made a comeback as Bill C-11 in February 2022, got cleared by the House in June, and finally last week made it through the Senate.
Reacting to the latest vote on the bill, Conservative Senator Denis Batters took to Twitter to slam both the legislative institution – calling it (Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau‘s “fake ‘independent’ Senate,” while referring to the bill itself as “awful.”
Supporters believe that once it becomes law, the bill will be beneficial for legacy media competing with digital outlets, and improve the “discoverability of Canadian content” on major international platforms.
Opponents, however, think that the CRTC will gain broad new powers without proper oversight by either the government or parliament.
Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms founder and president John Carpay says that the goal of the bill, on the face of it, is not the issue, since it is supposed to give the CRTC authority over companies like Netflix, Disney, and similar giants.
However, that authority will not end there, Carpay said, trotting out the same statement that has been made for months.
“Rather, the OSA (Online Streaming Act) will empower the CRTC to assume jurisdiction via regulation over any ‘program’ (audio or audiovisual online content) that is ‘monetizable’ because it ‘directly or indirectly’ generates revenues” Carpay added.
And that, according to him, includes private citizens.
“In the long run, the CRTC could end up regulating much of the content posted on major social media, even where the content is generated or uploaded by religious, political, and charitable nonprofits,” Carpay commented.
RT | February 7, 2023
Ukraine has removed millions of copies of Russian-language books from its public libraries, Yevgeniya Kravchuk, a senior member of the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, said on Monday.
She stated that the Culture Ministry had provided recommendations on what titles should be taken off the shelves.
This comes amid an initiative declared by the Ukrainian government to “overcome the consequences of Russification,” which in practice means purging schools of certain literature, renaming streets, and dismantling monuments to Russian historical figures.
According to Kravchuk, the deputy chair of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, 19 million copies of books had been removed as of November, including 11 million in Russian.
“Some Ukrainian-language books from the Soviet times are being removed as well,” Kravchuk said. The MP noted that there was not enough literature available in the Ukrainian language.
“The ratio of books in the Russian and Ukrainian languages in our libraries is very disheartening. We are talking about the need to update the stocks more quickly and procure books in the Ukrainian language.”
Ukraine has a sizable Russian-speaking minority, and many Ukrainian speakers are fluent in Russian as well.
In June, the Ukrainian Education Ministry proposed removing more than 40 books by Russian and Soviet authors from the curriculum. The list included the works of such renowned classical writers as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Alexander Pushkin, as well as Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Sholokhov, both of whom won the Nobel Prize for literature. Ukrainian Culture Minister Aleksander Tkachenko urged the world in December to “boycott” Russian culture, arguing that Moscow has been using it for propaganda.
Since 2014, Kiev has adopted several laws aimed at restricting the use of the Russian language in the public sphere. Moscow, meanwhile, has described these moves as discriminatory. Last year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov condemned “Kiev’s policy of aggressive de-Russification and forced assimilation.”
Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine nearly a year ago, citing the need to protect the people of Donbass, a predominately Russian-speaking region, and Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk 2014-2015 peace accords.
Yet again, The Science follows politics.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | February 6, 2023
The Cochrane mask review I wrote about last week has hit Team Mask very hard, in fact much harder than I thought it would. They’ve been frantically coping for days now – combing through the fine print, seizing upon every moment of expressed uncertainty or caution in the paper to claim that population-wide masking might still be justified, somehow, because reasons.
The dim and eternally concerned Twitter epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo (who would be a disgrace to her field, if the field of public health weren’t already a disgrace) posted a hilarious nineteen-tweet thread that gathers all the typical excuses and cries to the heavens for more studies, because the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Intriguingly, as others have noted, Nuzzo used to think totally differently about the utility of masking. In 2006, our epidemiological luminary co-authored a paper on Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, which flatly admits that “the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets” and that no data support using N95 or FFP2 respirators outside of healthcare settings. Like all pandemic authorities, Nuzzo had sensible ideas right up until the moment her ideas became important.
Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, has added to the pain and embarrassment of Team Mask by granting this interview to Maryanne Demasi, in which he reiterates bluntly that “there’s no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,” no evidence that respirators do anything even in healthcare settings, blames misguided mask mandates on bad governmental advisers, and criticises the masking “craziness” that took root in 2020, in which “strident campaigners” – “activists, not scientists” – like “academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks.” He also makes an observation that is often aired at the plague chronicle, namely that the failure of masks to do very much indicates that virus transmission itself is poorly understood, and far more complicated than we tend to assume. You should read the whole thing for yourself.
Here, I want to highlight one crucial point. Jefferson explains that he and his co-authors were ready to publish a review on the evidence for masking and other physical interventions in April 2020, but that Cochrane held up its appearance by “inexplicably” demanding a further peer reviewer. This effectively delayed publication by months, in precisely the period that novel mask mandates were emerging all across the world. When the review was finally cleared for publication in November – long after its chance to influence mask policies had passed – the authors were directed to insert all manner of language softening their conclusions, and Cochrane included an accompanying editorial on why “Policy makers must act on incomplete evidence in responding to COVID-19.”
Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but suppressing the truth requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.
In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin unravel.
UPDATE: See also this interview with Tom Jefferson published today in the Daily Sceptic
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | February 6, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) has released the latest zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which will give the unelected global health agency new sweeping surveillance powers if passed.
The treaty requires the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) to strengthen the WHO’s “One Health surveillance systems.”
One Health is a WHO system that aims to “optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems” and “uses the close, interdependent links among these fields to create new surveillance and disease control methods.”
The WHO’s One Health fact sheet points to Covid-19 as one of the main reasons for expanding its One Health approach and states that it “put a spotlight on the need for a global framework for improved surveillance.”
The draft treaty also orders WHO member states to strengthen surveillance functions for “outbreak investigation and control through interoperable early warning and alert systems.”
Additionally, it requires member states to recognize the WHO as the “directing and coordinating authority on international health work, in pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery of health systems, and in convening and generating scientific evidence, and, more generally, fostering multilateral cooperation in global health governance.”
We obtained a copy of the zero draft of the WHO’s pandemic treaty for you here.
Although the draft treaty doesn’t mention surveillance tools that were used during Covid, such as contact tracing, testing, and vaccine passports, the WHO has previously confirmed that it’s a big supporter of vaccine passports. In the early stages of the pandemic, the WHO also lauded China’s Covid response, which utilized intense digital surveillance, before changing its position and criticizing China’s zero-Covid policy.
This draft treaty has been in the works since December 2021. A final report on the treaty is expected to be presented to the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), in May 2024.
If passed, this treaty will be adopted under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution — an article that allows the WHO to impose legally binding conventions on the WHO’s 194 member states if two-thirds of the member states’ representatives vote in favor of the conventions.
Unlike the lawmaking process in most democratic nations, where elected officials implement national law, this WHO process allows a small number of global representatives, often unelected diplomats, to impose international laws on all of the WHO’s member states.
While some politicians have pushed back against this international pandemic treaty, it has the support of many powerful nations including the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Council (EC) (which represents 27 European Union (EU) member states).
This treaty is just one of the global surveillance proposals with ties to the WHO that is being pushed by influential global figures. At Business (B20) 2022, a summit of business leaders from Group of 20 (G20) countries, numerous countries agreed on a digital health passport that uses WHO standards. This digital health certificate will track whether people have been vaccinated or tested.
RT | February 7, 2023
The EU’s crusade against Russian media does not seek to curb free speech but in fact pursues the opposite goal, the bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said on Tuesday. His remarks triggered criticism from Moscow, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying that Russia has viewed the media crackdown as a sign of a dictatorship.
Speaking at a conference dedicated to the EU’s response to foreign disinformation, Borrell said that the sanctions on Russian media “effectively banned them from operating” within the bloc.
“In doing that, we are not attacking the freedom of expression, we are just protecting the freedom of expression,” he argued.
Borrell also noted that the EU is trying to support those media organizations that Russia has classified as ‘foreign agents’, a designation meaning that an entity is either funded from abroad or is under “foreign influence.”
“What I’m saying is not just rhetoric. I cannot go into detail, but believe me, we try to support them in practical terms,” he said, adding that he would not say how in order not to do them “a bad favor.”
In an attempt to defend the EU’s media policies, Borrell claimed that Russia is using “manipulation and interference as a crucial instrument” in the Ukraine conflict. In light of this, the diplomat said that the EU would launch a platform called the Information Sharing and Analysis Center to combat falsehoods.
“We need to understand how these disinformation campaigns are organized … to identify the actors of the manipulation,” he stressed.
Commenting on Borrell’s remarks, Zakharova stated that in the past Moscow regarded the media crackdown as “a manifestation of liberal dictatorship.” But the way the diplomat described these policies in his latest speech made them “sparkle with fresh colors with a shade of delusion,” she added.
In recent years, the EU has unleashed a campaign against Russian media which only intensified when Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. In March, the EU suspended the broadcasting activities of Sputnik and RT, with the number of blacklisted channels only growing in the following months as the bloc introduced new sanctions against Russia.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 7, 2023
Twitter owner Elon Musk accused the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) of being the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
Musk’s comments came after the latest release of the Twitter Files which focused on GEC’s attempts to get Twitter to censor accounts and content.
“The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,’” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote. “State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned [such as] the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.’ ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.”
According to its website, the GEC’s role is to direct and coordinate the US government’s efforts to combat foreign state and non-state misinformation and propaganda.
Then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth pushed back against GEC’s analysis based on data from Homeland Security that showed “nearly 250,000” Chinese accounts that were spreading propaganda about COVID-19.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 