Elon Musk says some political candidates running for office were secretly shadow banned on Twitter
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 10, 2022
On Friday, Elon Musk confirmed that under previous leadership, political candidates were blacklisted on Twitter. In 2018, Twitter executives testified that the platform did not “shadow ban” people.
On Wednesday, journalist Bari Weiss published the second batch of “Twitter Files,” which showed that “teams of Twitter employees” built blacklists that were used to limit the spread of content.
People have always suspected that some users are shadow banned but Twitter has never been transparent about it and never tells users when they’re being suppressed. The documents obtained by Weiss showed that Twitter used “visibility filtering” to “suppress what people see to different levels.”
Weiss mentioned some of those who were added to the blacklists, including conservative commentators Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Libs of TikTok. She did not say whether or not politicians were among those that were blacklisted.
Reporter Ian Miles Cheong asked both Musk and Weiss, “were any political candidates – either in the US or elsewhere – subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?” Musk responded, “Yes.”
Testifying before Congress in 2018, Twitter executives denied that users were suppressed based on political views.
“To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets,” said Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of product.
“We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints. We do rank tweets by default to make Twitter more immediately relevant (which can be flipped off),” said former CEO Jack Dorsey.
What Is CISA and Why Does It Matter?
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | December 10, 2022
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde from her job at Twitter where she was general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust. It became quickly obvious to him and others on his team that it was she who drove the censorship policy within the company, including that which blocked all information about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election and otherwise shut down critics of government Covid policy.
Her termination from Twitter did not leave her unemployed and homeless. A year earlier, she had already been tapped as an advisor to CISA, which is the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency headed by Jen Easterly, who was chosen to head the new agency (created in 2018) out of her tenure at the National Security Agency. As Freddy Gray puts it in the UK Spectator, “That seems fishy, to put it mildly.”
Easterly was called to give a deposition in the case brought by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana but the government rejected the idea. Fauci and others could be called but not the head of CISA. According to Epoch Times, the judge “ruled that three of the individuals—Murthy, Easterly, and Flaherty—will no longer be required to appear for a deposition after a federal appeals court blocked the move last month, stating that the judge had failed to consider whether alternative and less ‘intrusive’ means could be used to obtain the information being sought.”
Don’t want to be intrusive, right? That would be inhumane. Can’t make such a demand of the head of CISA.
And yet, it was CISA itself that gave the whole of the initial advisory in 2020 for all the stay-at-home orders that were imposed around the country. The agency is also the one primarily responsible for the division of the whole of the American workforce into sharp lines between essential and nonessential. It was a clear sign that something had gone very wrong, even to the point of feeling like martial law.
I’ve puzzled about where this all came from for almost three years. Thanks to research done by many Brownstone writers, we now know. It was CISA from the very beginning. Indeed the webpage laying it all out still survives, including a video. You can look at it all here.
The initial edict was issued March 19, 2020, three days following the catastrophic press conference that announced the need for universal social distancing and issued what is surely one of the most totalitarian edicts in the history of public policy: “indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”
CISA explained the exception. It includes this helpful graphic of those who were entitled or even required to work while everyone else stays home.
Note the inclusion of communications, which of course, means all media, and of course information technology, which means all Big Tech. As for “commercial facilities” that ended up meaning big-box chain stores while small businesses were brutally shut. Reinforcing the Trump administration’s fatwa against “bars, restaurants, and gyms,” they were closed immediately following the release of CISA’s order.
But of course, and consistent with all this machinery, CISA was careful to note that “This guidance was provided to clarify the potential scope of critical infrastructure to help inform decisions by state and local jurisdictions, but does not compel any prescriptive action.”
Further: “This guidance is not binding and is primarily a decision support construct to assist state and local officials. It should not be confused as official executive action by the United States Government.”
This way, like Fauci, CISA can claim that it didn’t force the shutdown of anything. It only made recommendations and state-level agencies took it from there. And yet here is a FAQ to give you a sense of the military footing that the whole country entered up on in the course of only a few days.
How is this different than traditional disasters or emergencies impacting critical infrastructure?
COVID-19 is different than any emergency the Nation has faced, especially considering the modern, tightly interconnected economy and American way of life. In traditional emergencies, government coordinates with the private sector to get businesses back to business. In this case, as the government works with partners to slow the spread of COVID-19, the economic goal is maintaining resilience of the Nation’s foundation—its critical infrastructure.
In retrospect, the whole thing seems truly hard to believe, all for a respiratory virus with an infection fatality rate that compares with the flu except with a huge risk gradient by age. A military-style cooperation was unleashed on the entire country even as basic therapeutics were completely neglected and concern for collateral damage to health, culture, education, and enterprise were tossed out the window.
The initial lockdowns were followed by quarantine rules, travel restrictions, violations of religious freedom, forced masking and eventually forced medicalization of quickly approved shots that most of the population never needed and vast numbers now regret.
As CISA said, this crisis was “different than any emergency the Nation has faced.” Instead of keeping business going, the response this time was massive destruction of everything except “critical infrastructure.”
Indeed, the whole country fell into complete shambles and trauma for the better part of 2020, leading up to the November elections that gutted Republican control of Congress and flipped the White House. We are now finding out with piles of evidence that this was the ambition of many employees at Twitter, including the general counsel who ended up as a consultant to the very agency that issued the stay-home advisory.
CISA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, created only in 2018 with an act signed by President Trump. As is clear from the text of the law, the whole point was to protect the nation against cyber attacks and develop a response. Nowhere in the text could one discern a broad edict to divide the whole workforce, crush civil liberties, smash businesses, and trample on the Bill of Rights, much less shepherd into being a vast machinery of censorship that would effectively nationalize all major tech platforms on behalf of regime priorities.
On the weekend of March 14-15, 2020, Trump surrounded himself with a handful of advisors including Fauci, Birx, Pence, Kushner, along with a few outside consultants from pharma and tech, and agreed to “15 days to flatten the curve.” It seems highly unlikely he knew that he was approving a complete takeover of the country by the national security arm of the government, much less empowering this one agency with the task of crushing the whole economy except that which government called essential.
We are finding out ever more about what went on behind the scenes, especially thanks to the exceptional research of Debbie Lerman, who has fleshed out the underlying shift that occurred in these days. We went from being a normal nation with all the usual struggles to a country under quasi-martial law, ruled by administrative bureaucrats drawn from the national security arm of government. CISA was an agency that led the charge. Did Trump have any idea what he had approved? I would say it is highly doubtful.
I’ve been unable to find out anything about the agency’s budget or payroll but we do know that it is hiring: “CISA is always searching for diverse, talented, and highly motivated professionals to continue its mission of securing the nation’s critical infrastructure. CISA is more than a great place to work; our workforce tackles the risks and threats that matter most to the nation, our families, and communities. With more than 50 career fields available CISA offers multiple opportunities as well as multiple tracks for employment.”
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says he “strongly” suspects federal government directed Twitter to blacklist his account
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 9, 2022
Stanford University Medical School professor and epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has responded to the bombshell revelation that Twitter secretly blacklisted his account by suggesting that the federal government could have been pulling the strings of this censorship.
“I suspect very strongly that there was some government direction of this,” Bhattacharya said during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. ”
Bhattacharya continued by discussing the findings from a Biden administration-social media censorship collusion lawsuit that he’s involved in.
The documents that have been released and the sworn statements that have been made as part of this lawsuit have revealed that federal government officials have pressured Big Tech companies to censor many pieces of content that they deemed to be “misinformation.”
One of the documents that’s pertinent to Bhattacharya is an email from then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci where he called for a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the premises of The Great Barrington Declaration — an anti-lockdown statement published by Bhattacharya and other leading epidemiologists.
“We’ve uncovered tremendous evidence that… there were federal agencies that were… directing social media companies about what to censor, even who to censor,” Bhattacharya told Ingraham. “If that is actually the case… that this blacklisting was directed by the government against American citizens, that’s a direct violation of my civil rights, it’s a direct violation of the First Amendment, and every American should be outraged.”
Bhattacharya continued: “A lot of the leadership of Silicon Valley, a lot of… the people who give advice to Silicon Valley and to the government about about these content moderation policies, they’ve gone… way too far.”
The Stanford professor also commented on the far-reaching implications of this censorship of discussions about basic scientific policy.
“Imagine how different [things would have been],” Bhattacharya said. “All the small businesses could have stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion.”
Additionally, Bhattacharya suggested that the censors deployed these tactics because “their arguments were not strong enough to survive the light of day” and called for a “national conversation that brings us back to the American commitment to free speech rights, the American commitment to… open discussion, and… honest dealings.”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the legal group that’s representing Bhattacharya in the Biden admin-Big Tech censorship collusion lawsuit, said:
“We already know the federal government had a hand in Twitter censorship, especially of those who articulated perspectives that conflicted with government messaging on covid. As Elon Musk exposes further information about Twitter’s inner workings, we anticipate learning more about the extent of government involvement in blacklisting those who express disfavored views.”
Not only does the recent disclosure about Bhattacharya’s account being blacklisted shine a light on the pervasiveness of Big Tech’s censorship but it also demonstrates that Twitter was still engaged in this censorship more than a year after the pandemic began with Bhattacharya only joining Twitter in August 2021.
Twitter’s blacklisting of Bhattacharya’s account is the latest of several examples of the tech giants censoring him after he challenged the government’s Covid narrative. Reddit mods deleted The Great Barrington Declaration, Facebook deleted The Great Barrington Declaration page, and YouTube deleted a public health roundtable featuring The Great Barrington Declaration authors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.
How the ‘Twitter Files’ have exposed a senior FBI official’s role in manipulating the outcome of the 2020 US election
By Felix Livshitz | RT | December 9, 2022
Internal Twitter documents and communications published by the journalist Matt Taibbi have provided devastating detail on a sweeping censorship operation conducted by the social network. They expose the central role played by a senior FBI agent in potentially influencing the outcome of the 2020 US election.
Immediate reaction to the Twitter Files was mixed, but overwhelmingly the mainstream American media has rushed to pour cold water on Taibbi’s bombshell disclosures, with, for example, The Washington Post branding them a “dud” and CNN claiming they “largely corroborated what was already known.”
Such responses are quite extraordinary given that the Twitter Files offers incontrovertible evidence of one of the largest, most influential global social networks taking extraordinary measures – usually reserved to prevent the dissemination of child pornography – to block information on its platform.
In particular, Twitter banned, both publicly and privately, the sharing of a New York Post article, based on the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, pointing to possible corruption on the part of his father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The report reinforced existing concerns about Hunter’s role with Burisma, for which he received up to $50,000 per month from the Ukrainian energy giant over a five-year period for attending a handful of corporate events.
The material exposed by Taibbi shows that a decision was made by individuals at the highest levels of Twitter – with direct connections to Biden’s Presidential campaign – due to apparent fears the laptop contents had been hacked and/or had been released as part of a Russian information operation. This was despite there being zero evidence or even a vague suggestion that either was the case, and significant internal concerns.
The Twitter Files show how, among the top brass involved in the suppression of this hugely significant story was the social network’s legal vice president Jim Baker, a former FBI general counsel. He was coincidentally also fundamental to the Bureau’s multiple attempts to fraudulently concoct a link between Trump’s campaign and Russia, one way or another.
It’s clear that many staffers didn’t believe there were grounds to ban the New York Post story on the basis of Twitter’s policies on sharing hacked materials. One communications department official wrote that they were “struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” while their superior fretted, “can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
However, their legitimate worries were overruled. Twitter later reversed this ban but by that point the false specter of Russian meddling had been so successfully cemented – including via a joint letter signed by over 50 senior US spies – that the story was largely discredited in the eyes of many Americans and, thus, ignored. It is only now, with Biden safely in the White House, that other outlets have begun to verify the laptop’s contents as not only real, but damaging.
Baker was central to overruling subordinates about the basis for banning the story. In an email published by Taibbi, he announced it was “reasonable for us to assume that they may have been” hacked.
It is not explained why it was “reasonable” to make this assumption, especially as Baker himself acknowledged there were instead indications that “the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.” Which is, of course, a total contradiction in terms. So the ban went ahead, despite internal concern about the decision.
“Hacking was the excuse but, within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” an anonymous Twitter source told Taibbi. “But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
One of the reasons Baker’s intervention may have cut through initial misgivings, and no staffers then had the “guts to reverse it,” could’ve been his status as resident Russian “disinformation” expert at Twitter. He left the FBI in June 2018 on undisclosed grounds, although it was later confirmed he was the subject of a criminal Justice Department investigation due to alleged leaking to the media of scurrilous innuendo about Trump’s non-existent relationship with the Kremlin at the time.
Questions were also asked about whether, as General Counsel, Baker played any role in greenlighting or overseeing various failed FBI counterintelligence investigations into Trump’s election team. Known as Crossfire Hurricane, these related probes were built on extremely shaky foundations, and led to no evidence supporting suspicions of Trump-Russia ties being unearthed, but still remained open under internal pressure, in contravention of established investigative protocols.
A subsequent internal review found 17 separate “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s court submissions for warrants that it applied for to spy on campaign staffer Carter Page.
More recently, Baker testified at the trial of Michael Sussmann, a well-connected Washington DC lawyer tied to the Democratic party. He was charged by Attorney General John Durham with lying to the FBI when he presented to the Bureau falsified evidence of contact between Trump Tower and Moscow via Russia’s Alfa Bank, in the summer of 2016.
Sussmann claimed he was not representing a client in doing so, when in reality he was acting on behalf of the Democrats, and billed them for the service. Baker would’ve known anyway that this cover story was a lie, as he and Sussmann were longtime friends, but he recorded the delivery as the uninterested, selfless act of a concerned citizen. Quite why he wasn’t charged for procedural misconduct is not known.
It’s also not known why such dealings didn’t torpedo his professional credibility upon leaving the Bureau. Departing an organization like the FBI under such a dark cloud would normally mean the end of someone’s career. Instead, Baker was snapped up by Twitter to be the right hand man of Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of legal.
Throughout her time at the social network, she was derided as its censor-in-chief, and leaked documents reveal she regularly consulted with the Department of Homeland Security on how best to restrict inconvenient facts online. It’s understandable why Baker would be such an attractive hire for Gadde.
He was by that point clearly an expert in perpetuating false claims of “disinformation” and “Russian meddling” for political purposes, to tremendous effect. The Russiagate hoax almost took down President Trump, and meant his term in office was spent ramping up tensions with Moscow rather than improving relations as he’d repeatedly promised on the campaign trail.
It could have been calculated within Twitter HQ that Baker would be willing to play a similarly destructive role the next time round, and prevent Trump from getting re-elected in the first place. Helping suppress the damaging material facts contained in the New York Post may have done just that.
Twitter Update to Show Users if They Were ‘Shadowbanned’, Elon Musk Says
Samizdat – 09.12.2022
US billionaire entrepreneur and newly minted Twitter owner Elon Musk said on Friday that the company had been working on a software update to let users know if they have been “shadowbanned.”
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk said on Twitter.
In late October, Musk finalized the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Following the takeover, Musk changed the company’s day-to-day operations, including the termination of Twitter executives who were responsible for the platform’s privacy, cybersecurity and censorship, as well as about two-thirds of Twitter’s employees.
Shadowbanning is a practice of concealed restriction, when a person remains on a social media platform, but his or her content is not visible or only partly accessible to other users.
Twitter’s ‘secret blacklists’ exposed
RT | December 8, 2022
Twitter has created a series of barriers and tools for moderators to prevent specific tweets and entire topics from trending, or limit the visibility of entire accounts, according to internal correspondence and interviews with multiple high-level sources within the company.
Despite repeated public assurances by top Twitter officials that the company does not “shadow ban” users, especially not “based on political viewpoints or ideology,” the practice actually existed under the euphemism of “visibility filtering,” according to journalist Bari Weiss, who published the second installment of the so-called ‘Twitter Files’ in a lengthy thread on Thursday night.
“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee said, while another admitted that “normal people do not know how much we do.”
Twitter moderators have the power to add the user to categories such as “Trends Blacklist,” “Search Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify,” to limit the scope of a particular tweet or entire account’s discoverability – all without users’ knowledge or any warning.
However, above the common moderators was another “secret group” that handled issues concerning “high follower,” “controversial” and other notable users. Known as “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” the team included high-level executives such as former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, the Global Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth and CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.
Investigation launches into possible State Department funding of third parties to censor online speech
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2022
America First Legal (AFL) has announced that it has filed a total of nine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that pertain to US State Department’s behavior in awarding grants and funding to outfits that are allegedly used as a way to “outsource” government censorship and disinformation.
The group suspects that the State Department used the Global Engagement Center (GEC) to fund “content moderation” groups, and had set aside $60 million for this purpose.
AFL says its FOIA requests aim to shed light on how in a number of cases the State Department pushed money to the likes of the Atlantic Council, Digital Public Square, Moonshot CVE, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which AFL says are “deeply involved” in moderation and censorship on internet platforms.
The obvious reason why this would be done would be for the government to find ways to circumvent First Amendment limitations it faces to itself, directly censor “unwanted” online content.
The latest requests are part of AFL’s ongoing investigations into how the US government engaged in its “misinformation and disinformation” campaign, dubbed here as Orwellian, including how it may have used its powers to influence major social media to act on its behalf.
This AFL effort includes a lawsuit filed recently to force the government to disclose any involvement by GEC in this suspected scheme in the period before the 2020 presidential elections.
See the lawsuits here and here.
AFL says that it recently learned, via State Department leaks, about a video game funded in this way to essentially indoctrinate youth against “populist news content,” while another government-financed game found its way to schools around the world, apparently as one way to influence elections in various countries.
Back in the US, AFL says it hopes that its efforts to obtain the records in question, should they succeed, will “help shed light on how these taxpayer funds and authorities are being weaponized against the American people and our civil liberties.”
AFL’s First Legal Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight Reed D. Rubinstein commented, among other things, that “politically partisan bureaucrats, almost always in concert with private companies, are running multiple propaganda campaigns and information actions to suppress First Amendment-protected speech and to control and shape what Americans hear and think.”
US military official targets mom over Facebook post that criticized school’s promotion of “polysexual” art
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2022
After a New Jersey mom took to Facebook to criticize posters in the entrance to a local school that promoted various sexual preferences, a high-ranking United States (US) military official from a local Joint Base accused her of causing “safety concerns” and flagged her post to state and local law enforcement.
The story was first covered by Chaos and Control which documented mom and Board of Education (BOE) member Angela Reading sharing her concerns about the posters in a public Facebook group on November 22. Some of the posters that Reading criticized promoted sexual preferences such as “pansexual” and “polysexual” (terms that refer to a sexual attraction towards people regardless of their gender).
In her post, Reading said she was “livid” after her seven-year-old daughter read the posters while attending an elementary “Math Night” and asked Reading what “polysexual” means.
“Why are elementary schools promoting/allowing elementary KIDS to research topics of sexuality and create posters?” Reading wrote in the Facebook post. “This is not in the state elementary standards (law) nor in the BOE-approved curriculum. It’s perverse and should be illegal to expose my kids to sexual content. Look up the terms, and you will see they are sexual in nature.”
Reading added: “How can my young children be accepting of people ‘who are sexually attracted to multiple genders’? They don’t know what sex is! Are adults talking about their sexual life with my kids and looking for affirmation? Are there elementary students engaged in polyamorous or multi-gender sexual activity who need my kids to know about it and cheer them on? I am very confused and very angry.”
Then the military official got involved.
Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Shilling responded to Reading’s post by accusing her of causing “safety concerns for many families.
He added that the Joint Base (McGuire, Fort Dix, and Lakehurst) has had its Security Forces “working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation to ensure the continued safety of the entire community.”
Schilling subsequently changed the name on his Facebook account to “Chris Topher” and deleted his LinkedIn account.
In a statement to Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Joint Base confirmed that it had “notified local law enforcement about the social media exchange, which is common information-sharing practice among law enforcement entities.”
However, Carlson pointed out that “a military base is not a ‘law enforcement’ agency.”
He added: “The purpose of the military is to defend us from foreign enemies, not to police our Facebook posts.”
In an interview with Carlson, Reading said that shortly after Schilling had targeted her, the local police chief contacted the admin of the Facebook group and told her that the post “should come down.” Reading agreed to have the post taken down and then contacted the police chief directly to remind him of the First Amendment.
“We shouldn’t be utilizing government resources and our positions to pressure individuals to take down Facebook posts,” Reading said.
Reading’s story is the latest of many examples of federal and local government departments potentially violating the First Amendment by flagging posts for censorship.
CDC and Census Bureau had direct access to Twitter portal where they could flag speech for censorship
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 7, 2022
Emails between an employee at the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Twitter have revealed that at least one CDC staff member and the US Census Bureau had access to Twitter’s dedicated “Partner Support Portal” which allows approved government partners to flag content to Twitter for censorship.
The emails were released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal and show Twitter enrolling a CDC employee into this portal through their personal account in May 2021 (pages 182-194).
On May 10, 2021, the CDC’s Carol Crawford sent Twitter employee Todd O’Boyle a list of example posts highlighting “two issues that we [the CDC] are seeing a great deal of misinfo about.” O’Boyle responded by saying that enrolling in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal is the best way for Crawford to get posts like this reviewed in the future.
Crawford asked O’Boyle if she could enroll in the portal with her personal Twitter account and on May 27, 2021, O’Boyle confirmed that Crawford had been enrolled in the portal.
In other emails, Crawford asked O’Boyle whether the federal government could flag “COVID misinformation on the portal using the existing census.gov accounts that have access” and questioned how to flag “misinformation” via the portal.
June 2021 emails (pages 359-360) also show another CDC employee attempting to enroll in a Facebook portal but getting error messages. While these emails don’t describe the portal, it appears to be Facebook’s content takedown portal which is similar to the Twitter portal and allows government agencies to flag content for censorship.
Additionally, a February 4, 2021 email (pages 354-355) shows Facebook’s US Head of Public Policy, Payton Iheme, asking Crawford whether she’s aware of the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) misinformation work.
“I saw that DHS/CISA is planning /possibly working on COVID-19 misinfo concerns?” Iheme wrote to Crawford. “Are you aware of that aspect?”
This email was sent more than a year before the DHS announced its controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” in April 2022.
Another revelation from this email is that Iheme acknowledges the focus on misinformation “growing among members of Congress.”
These emails provide more evidence of the Big Tech-Biden administration censorship collusion that’s currently facing a legal challenge over potential First Amendment violations.
“In recent months, millions of Americans have witnessed the peeling of the ‘misinformation’ onion,” Gene Hamilton, America First Legal Vice-President and General Counsel, said. “Beneath each layer of shocking details about a partnership between the federal government and Big Tech is yet another layer of connections, conspiracy, and collaboration between power centers that seek to suppress information from the American people. We are proud to play a leading role in fighting for the rights of all Americans and revealing this vital information to the American people.”
We obtained a copy of the emails for you here.
The emails also shine a light on the government departments that have access to these direct Big Tech censorship portals. Previous reports and document releases have shown that the California Secretary of State’s Office of Elections Cybersecurity (OEC) has access to the Twitter portal while the DHS and the New Zealand government have access to the Facebook portal.
Washington rejects ICC probe into Israel’s murder of Al Jazeera reporter
The Cradle | December 7, 2022
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price on 6 December said the White House opposes Al Jazeera taking the murder of Palestinian-American reporter Shireen Abu Aqla to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“We oppose it,” Price told reporters when pressed about the ICC probe. He went on to add Washington maintains its “longstanding objections to the ICC’s investigation into the Palestinian situation and the position the ICC should focus on its core mission, and that core mission of serving as a court of last resort and punishing and deterring atrocity crimes.”
Abu Aqla was shot dead by Israeli troops on 11 May as she was covering a raid in the Jenin refugee camp. At the time of her death, she was wearing full body armor with clearly visible press markings.
Washington has long opposed Palestinian-led efforts to take up Israeli human rights abuses with international bodies, including the UN and the ICC.
The ICC has reportedly reviewed the evidence presented by the Qatari news network, and will make a decision on whether or not it will launch an investigation. The uncertainty comes naturally, as Israel has attempted to shut down any form of an objective inquiry into the incident since it took place.
Independent investigations by the UN, human rights groups, and western media outlets have all concluded Abu Aqla was deliberately shot by an Israeli soldier in an area where no Palestinian gunmen were present.
Last month, the White House disavowed an FBI investigation into the killing in order to appease Israel.
Israel, which rights groups accuse of imposing a system of apartheid on Palestinians, receives $3.8 billion in US security assistance annually.
Price’s reaction to the ICC probe echoes that of Israeli officials, who on Tuesday called for the expulsion of Al Jazeera journalists from the occupied territories.
“Al Jazeera is an anti-Semitic and false propaganda network working against Israel in the world,” Jewish supremacist official Itamar Ben Gvir said in a tweet, before calling for the journalists’ expulsion.
Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman also called for withdrawing the license of Al Jazeera reporters, saying: “I expect the [Israeli] government press office to revoke the journalists’ credentials of Al Jazeera reporters who are in Israel.”
Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, for his part, has said he will not allow any interrogation of army soldiers in connection with Abu Aqla’s death.
In a statement on Tuesday, Al Jazeera said its lawsuit with the ICC includes “new witness evidence and video footage that clearly show that Abu Aqla and her colleagues were directly fired at by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).”
“The evidence presented to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) confirms, without any doubt, that there was no firing in the area where Shireen was, other than the IOF shooting directly at her,” the statement added.
“My family still doesn’t know who fired that deadly bullet and who was in the chain of command that killed my aunt,” Abu Aqla’s niece, Lina Abu Aqla, said at a press conference in The Hague.
“The evidence is overwhelmingly clear, we expect the ICC to take action,” she said, adding that they had asked for a meeting with prosecutor Karim Khan.
Israel is not an ICC member and disputes the court’s jurisdiction. The US is also not a member.
YouTube censors RT Balkans
RT | December 6, 2022
YouTube, the Google-owned video platform has blocked the channel of Belgrade-based RT Balkans. No explanation was given for Monday’s move, which came about three weeks after the launch of the Serbian-language outlet in a region saturated by Western media coverage.
RT Balkans reported the ban on Monday evening, pointing out that the most recent video posted on the channel was their interview with the Russian ambassador to Serbia, Aleksandr Botsan-Kharchenko.
“Why are owners of the Western media space so afraid of RT’s Serbian-language reporting?” the outlet asked. “Their move mainly speaks about the lack of media freedom in the West, especially since the posts on your YouTube channel in no way violated the company’s rules of conduct.”
The Serbian-language news site was launched on November 15, with plans to begin TV broadcasts by 2024. It was able to open a YouTube account and post content even though the Google-owned platform had previously banned all “Russian” media.
Enacted in March, the ban followed demands by the EU to block RT and Sputnik channels in the bloc’s territory. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki explained the platform had created a new policy regarding “verified violent events,” which puts “denial or trivialization” of the conflict in Ukraine in the same category as denying the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, YouTube continued to operate in Russia so that its citizens could have access to “independent news,” she said, adding that one of the lessons of the conflict in Ukraine is that “information can be weaponized.”
RT sued YouTube in May. In October, an arbitration court in Moscow ruled that video platform must unblock RT’s accounts or face a daily fine of 100,000 rubles ($1,694), doubling every week. The same court had frozen Google’s assets in Russia, valued at 500 million rubles ($8.4 million), to ensure the verdict could be enforced.
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Russia and China quietly take over natural gas markets in Asia, with Qatar gone
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Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
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