ADL report advocates for deplatforming at website infrastructure level
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 20, 2023
A new report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said pressuring online platforms and other internet services to remove those it deems to be far-right extremists is effective in limiting their reach. The report was authored by the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society Belfer fellow Megan Squire.
In preparing the report, Squire analyzed four deplatformed websites, including forum website The Donald, website The Daily Stormer, forum 8chan, and political commentator Nick Fuentes.
Squire compared the individuals and sites’ popularity before and after they were deplatformed, saying the objective is limiting the spread of hateful ideology, not cutting traffic. And according to Squire, deplatforming is an effective way of achieving that goal.
“Deplatforming websites—removing infrastructure services they need to operate such as website hosting—can reduce the spread and reach of extremism and hate online,” she wrote.
Deplatforming also financially affects content creators in other ways. For instance, Fuentes was removed from YouTube and forced to incur the cost of hosting his content on his website. On YouTube, he hosted the content for free and was able to monetize the content. Currently, “he has to run all of that infrastructure himself. He has to find the developers, he has to maintain the website, he has to pay for all that bandwidth,” Squire said.
However, the content creators in Squire’s report have survived even after deplatforming. Others have disappeared.
Squire notes that while deplatforming “works,” the creators of these websites and platforms often “bounce back because there is someone out there that will replatform them.”
Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure and security company, last year acknowledged in its Q3 2022 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its departure from its neutral position, including the recent blocking of the Kiwi Farms online forum, has resulted in significant negative feedback and a loss of potential customers.
The company has recognized that taking actions against its customers, including banning them from using its products, may cause harm to its brand and reputation. Publicly traded companies such as Cloudflare are obligated to file quarterly reports, which include a section on risk factors.
Banning Seymour Hersh’s “Offensive” Ideas
Subverting America’s Democracy—Now!
BY RON UNZ • FEBRUARY 17, 2023
In an unprecedented step, Youtube has severely restricted as “inappropriate or offensive” Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster Nord Stream Pipelines interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize more than a half-century ago in 1970 as the fiercely independent reporter who uncovered America’s My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. During his following decades at the New York Times and the New Yorker he broke some of the biggest stories in journalistic history, including the domestic spying activities of the CIA, the Abu Ghraib prison abuses of the Iraq War, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, while being honored with two National Magazine Awards, five George Polk Awards, and numerous other accolades.
Hersh’s long career arguably ranks him as the most renowned living American journalist, and indeed Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University described him as such in a recent interview.
Then late last week, Hersh dropped a bombshell as big as anything in his career, revealing on his Substack platform the exact details of how the Biden Administration had secretly destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, an attack on $30 billion of vital European energy infrastructure that constituted an act of war against Germany, one of our closest NATO allies.
- How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Seymour Hersh • Substack • February 8, 2023 • 5,200 Words
As I discussed in my own column, despite Hersh’s stellar career and the massive implications of his remarkable story, almost all our mainstream media outlets boycotted it, ensuring that it received minimal attention.
- Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words
Hersh said he wanted his story to stand on its own, and was only willing to do a very limited number of interviews, with the first of these being with a small radio podcaster:
He soon followed this up with a half-hour appearance on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, a leading left-liberal news program broadcast on more than 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide, many of them PBS and NPR affiliates.
During that interview, Hersh responded to criticisms and explained that Ukraine’s war with Russia was going far worse than reported by the American media. According to Hersh and some of his government sources, the American attack on the pipelines may have been a disastrous mistake that could result in the collapse of NATO once most Europeans became aware of what had happened.
Democracy Now! has 1.3 million subscribers on its large Youtube channel, and immediately released Hersh’s important interview on that platform. Within hours the segment was approaching 250,000 views on its way to a likely total of many millions, becoming one of the channel’s most popular videos. I naturally linked it in several comments on our website.
But the same day it was released, Youtube suddenly censored Hersh’s Democracy Now! appearance, claiming that it represented “a violation of community standards” and was “offensive”:
As a result, Hersh’s Democracy Now! segment can no longer be viewed anywhere except on the Youtube site itself, and then only after clicking through two layers of warnings. The obvious intent was to drastically reduce Hersh’s potential audience and this will surely succeed. I assume that these restrictions have been combined with the most severe sort of shadow-banning. So a segment that would have probably been seen by many millions will only get a small fraction of that total.
Such Youtube censorship of a top mainstream journalist on a leading mainstream channel seems completely unprecedented, a massive escalation of the previous measures directed against the political fringe. The move was probably driven by concerns of how Youtube had earlier allowed the views of other important public figures to circumvent the blockade of media gatekeepers:
Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, had spent many years making exactly these same points and blaming America and NATO for the simmering Ukraine crisis, but his warnings had been totally ignored by our political leadership and media. His hour-long lecture explaining these unpleasant realities had quietly sat on Youtube for six years, attracting relatively little attention, but then suddenly exploded in popularity…as the conflict unfolded
Mearsheimer’s lengthy explanation of the origins of the Ukraine war has now accumulated 28 million views, quite possibly more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet.
Mearsheimer’s other Ukraine interviews and lectures accumulated many millions of additional views, and as a direct consequence of his suddenly enormous Internet presence, the once-boycotted academic was invited to contribute lengthy expositions of his views to such extremely establishmentarian outlets as the Economist and Foreign Affairs, and selected to participate in prestigious public forums such as Canada’s Munk debate and Europe’s Holberg Debate. As a result, probably tens of millions worldwide became exposed to a perspective previously excluded from the Western mainstream media.
In another example, Jeffrey Sachs has expressed very similar concerns about the Ukraine war and over the last few months a couple of his interviews on Democracy Now! have accumulated well over 4 million views, while a different interview with geopolitical scholar Alfred McCoy had reached nearly 2 million more:
When Sachs suggested on Bloomberg TV that the American government had probably been responsible for the pipeline attacks, he was quickly yanked off the air, but his clip went super-viral on Twitter, accumulating several million views.
Meanwhile, the clips of President Biden and other top American national security officials promising to eliminate the Nord Stream pipelines and then crowing about the mysterious explosions that destroyed them have also became ubiquitious on the Internet.
Hersh’s work and record were widely promoted on Twitter.
Tucker Carlson had covered the pipeline attacks from the very beginning and immediately discussed Hersh’s remarkable reporting.
Similarly, Max Blumenthal and Aron Mate did the same on the Grayzone:
But the audiences of both these shows are already overwhelmingly hostile to the Biden Administration, so these segments would be far less threatening than Hersh’s own lengthy interview with Amy Goodman on a program often watched by Biden supporters. Other than that practical consideration, I see no reason why Hersh’s interview would have been censored.
The problem faced by our political establishment is that their current position on the Ukraine war has drawn increasing opposition from individuals with the highest public stature and credibility, not only top journalists and academics like Hersh, Mearsheimer, and Sachs, but also top national security experts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor and Ray McGovern.
Our failed current Ukraine war policy against Russia has only been maintained by one of the tightest information blockades in modern American history, with 99% of the mainstream media and a large majority of the alternative media tolerating no dissenting voices. But the disastrous potential flaws in our strategy become immediately become apparent once they are mentioned and a critical mass of leading figures has now begun to do so, with their views increasingly reaching the public. So a regime of unprecedented censorship may now be imposed to prevent the American people from hearing both sides of the story.
Hence a factual interview of one of our most renowned journalists by a leading media outlet has been stamped “offensive” and heavily suppressed.
Such restrictions are hardly unknown to me. Just days after I published my first April 2020 article pointing to strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic was result of a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), our entire website was banned by Facebook with all our pages deranked by Google.
Related Reading:
Logically Unsound
Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023
Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to
- monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
- “tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
- outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.
Picture credit: UK Column News
Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.
No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.
HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.
Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.
Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:
- Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
- HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
- HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
- The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.
Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.
It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.
Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:
“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.
For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.
All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.
Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.
By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:
“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.
Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base. Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.
For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.
The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?
For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.
The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.
Call to action:
- Please share this article with friends, family and colleagues
- If you haven’t already done so, please sign up for HART’s free regular bulletin here.
- Please read the Big Brother Watch Ministry of Truth report;
- Get active:
- If you have been affected by any of the ‘black ops’ outfits listed above, consider complaining, e.g. to the International Fact-Checking Network: https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/complaints-policy
- Consider complaining about Logically.ai’s activities to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport
- Write to Logically.ai’s shareholders, which include
- Vitruvian Partners
- Amazon Alexa Fund
- XTX Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of XTC Markets, a leading global algorithmic trading firm, and the
- Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance), managed by Mercia Asset Management PLC.
- The British Business Bank.
These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.
US State Department funds UK think tank that aids in censorship of Americans
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 16, 2023
The US State Department funds UK-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organization that partners with platforms to flag misinformation and disinformation. The organization has been accused of classifying conservative viewpoints as hate and disinformation.
In September 2021, the State Department awarded ISD a grant to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda” in the UK and Europe after it won the US-Paris Tech Challenge. The challenge was also won by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that has been accused of demonetizing conservative news websites by putting them on a blacklist used by advertisers, the Daily Caller reported.
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) funded the ISD to research Russian disinformation tactics on Wikipedia. However, the department insisted that it does not engage in content moderation on social media.
ISD has several partnerships with social media platforms on content moderation decisions. The organization is a member of Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council, which advises the platform on how to respond to misinformation.
ISD is also part of YouTube’s Trusted Flagger program, whose members are tasked with improving the platform’s enforcement of its guidelines and can flag more content than other users. Google said that it “prioritizes flags from Trusted Flaggers.”
The organization also has partnerships with Google to counter hate and extremism in the UK and Europe. It also partners with Amazon’s Audible, Facebook, and Microsoft.
ISD is mostly focused on extremism and terrorism. However, it has also been targeting what it deems misinformation and hate.
Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says no to digital ID
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023
The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, said that if he were to be elected Prime Minister, he would not impose digital IDs. He made the comment on a campaign trail in Windsor, Ontario.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced its federal Digital Identity Program last August.
“And to answer your question, I will never allow the government to impose a digital ID,” Poilievre said.
Poilievre’s comment came a few days after Alberta and Saskatchewan’s premiers said that they were not interested in a federal digital ID.
“The government of Saskatchewan is not creating a Digital ID nor will we accept any requirements for the creation of a digital ID tied to healthcare funding,” said Saskatchewan’s Premier Scott Moe.
Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith said that she fully supported what Moe said.
Transport Canada has recently announced that the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) project is ongoing, contrary to earlier reports suggesting that the project has been discontinued.
The KTDI is a collaborative effort between the World Economic Forum (WEF), Accenture, INTERPOL, various government entities, and the governments of the Netherlands and Canada. The project was initiated in 2018 to create a secure and decentralized digital identity system for travelers between the Netherlands and Canada. The system utilizes cryptographic encryption and distributed ledger technology to ensure the protection of travelers’ personal information.
The Silencing of the Inconvenient Truth About Face Masks
BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 13, 2023
How might strong advocates of community masking – who happen to occupy positions within the hierarchy that provide opportunities to influence research activity – go about achieving their aims? I suggest it would include some combination of discouraging the undertaking of robust research about mask effectiveness and potential harms, impeding and delaying the publication of unfavourable findings, and undermining the value of rigorous empirical science. A look at the history of the Cochrane mask reviews seems to offer an illuminating case study of these insidious forces in action.
Cochrane reviews are widely recognised to provide the most authoritative and comprehensive evaluation of the scientific evidence regarding specific healthcare interventions, and their raison d’être is to inform the decision-making process. On January 30th 2023, the latest version of the Cochrane review of the effectiveness of physical interventions (including masks) in reducing the spread of respiratory viruses was published. In keeping with their earlier reviews, the overarching conclusion of the authors confirmed what we already knew: masks achieve no appreciable reduction in viral transmission. Arguably of more interest are the indications that powerful forces within the academic world were at work to obstruct the dissemination of this inconvenient truth.
In regard to the potential benefits of mask-wearing, the findings of the review were emphatic: after considering 12 research trials (ten in the community and two among hospital workers) the main takeaway message was that face coverings made “little or no difference to influenza-like or COVID-19-like illness transmission”. When only studies where respiratory infections had been confirmed in a laboratory were included in the analysis, the conclusion was even more stark: “Wearing masks had no effect on… influenza or SARS-CoV-2 outcomes”. Furthermore, the type of mask used – the surgical variety or the higher-quality N95/P2 respirators – made no difference to the outcome.
It is plausible to assume that the conclusions of the Cochrane scholars did not make easy reading for the pro-mask establishment. The Covid era has been characterised by extraordinarily high levels of censorship of views that did not tally with the dominant public health narrative, and this silencing of alternative perspectives has often been evident within the academic and research spheres. A close inspection of the two most recent updates to the Cochrane review – their development and content – suggests that these malign forces of suppression may have been targeting this initiative in an effort to dilute the impact of its masks-are-ineffectual message. There are five observations consistent with this premise.
1. Scarcity of robust studies
It is intriguing that, three years after the start of the Covid event, there is a dearth of prospective randomised controlled trials (RCTs) – the type that provide the most robust kind of scientific evidence – to evaluate the efficacy of community masking as a means of reducing viral transmission. In the words of the Cochrane review authors, there was a “relative paucity” of such studies “given the importance of the question”. In a politicised environment, where Covid policy was often determined without recourse to empirical evidence, perhaps those in power did not want to fund research that would provide a definitive answer to the question of whether masks offered an effective viral barrier, particularly in light of the earlier discouraging results?
2. Unpublished research
In November 2020, the Danish mask study – the first RCT of mask efficacy specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus – found that masks achieved no significant benefit for the wearer. Despite this ground-breaking conclusion, the research was initially rejected by at least three prestigious medical journals. This publication bias is also evident in the current Cochrane review where the authors, when discussing the range of RCTs included in the analysis, state that: “We identified four ongoing studies, of which one is finalised, but unreported, evaluating masks concurrent with the COVID‐19 pandemic” (my emphasis). Why would a finalised RCT, on such a pressing issue as mask effectiveness, not be published? The most likely answer, in this censorial environment, is that it came to the ‘wrong’ conclusion.
3. A disregard of the harms of masking
Very few of the studies included in the Cochrane review addressed the potential harms of wearing masks; harms were “rarely measured and poorly reported”. When one considers the wide range of credible negative consequences (physical, social and psychological) associated with mass masking in the community, this is a glaring omission. Once again, the most plausible reason for this inattention to harms in mask research in the last three years is political pressure – Government policy makers urgently sought evidence to support their premature decisions to impose mask mandates, to demonstrate their effectiveness as a viral barrier, and were disinclined to investigate the potential harms.
4. Publication delays
A blatant indication of top-down censorial influence on the ‘masks don’t work’ message is the way that publication of one of the Cochrane review updates was delayed. The previous 2020 version, incorporating updates up until January 2020, had passed peer review and was finalised by April of the same year. Extraordinarily, its publication was delayed until November 2020 due to “unexplained editorial decisions“. According to lead author, Dr. Tom Jefferson, this extra scrutiny was “a very unexpected event in Cochrane, especially during a period in which the topic of the review and the setting of policy was of global importance”.
It is unlikely to be coincidence that this window of delay corresponds to the period when the U.K. and other Governments, under intense pressure from pro-mask groups, U-turned and imposed mask mandates on their populations. In the midst of this policy flip-flop, it would have caused considerable political embarrassment to our public health leaders should the Cochrane group – the source of the most authoritative and comprehensive scientific evidence – have broadcast its conclusion that masks are ineffective as a viral barrier. In the words of Dr. Jefferson, by the time their report was published in November 2020, “the advisers had changed their minds about the evidence, and the policies had been set”.
The latest Cochrane review update includes studies up to October 2022. Its publication three months later suggest that this edition was not delayed, presumably because, at a time when most of society is unmasked, its conclusions are likely to evoke less discomfort for policy makers.
5. Editorial interference
An explicit example of the top-down interference with the Cochrane review process (referred to above) is an editorial that accompanied the 2020 edition. Including statements such as, “Waiting for strong evidence is a recipe for paralysis”, the content of this commentary appears totally at odds with the ethos of the Cochrane initiative. Indeed, this decisions-before-evidence assertion mirrors the proclamations of pro-mask zealot Professor Trish Greenhalgh, who has previously stated that the rigorous search for empirical evidence is the “enemy of good policy“.
In the words of Dr. Jefferson, the 2020 Cochrane editorial “seemed to undermine our work” and had the effect of “completely subverting the precautionary principle”. The lead author of the editorial was Dr. Soares-Weiser (Cochrane’s Chief Editor) who is “responsible for ensuring that the Cochrane Library meets its strategic goals of supporting health care decision-making by consistently publishing timely, high-priority, high-quality reviews”. Clearly, the 2020 Cochrane mask review failed her ‘timely’ criterion and her trivialisation of the value of empirical evidence is at odds with the ‘high-quality reviews’ aspiration.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS consultant clinical psychologist and a co-founder of the Smile Free campaign that opposes mask mandates.
The New York City Department of Health created “Misinformation Response Unit” to monitor social media
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene set up a “Misinformation Response Unit” to monitor what it would determine to be “dangerous misinformation” posted on social media, non-US sites, and non-English media in the US.
This “misinformation” mostly had to do with Covid vaccination – the Department was determined to drive vaccination rates up by spreading its word, and in this gathered over 100 partners whose job was to craft positive messaging around the controversial subject.
Among those the dedicated new unit is working with is Public Good Projects, otherwise known for receiving funding from a lobbying group representing two major Covid vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna.
Their “good” work here also included sending Twitter, on a weekly basis, lists of posts slated for censorship.
In an article published by the NEJM Catalyst journal, those behind the effort are now assessing the Unit’s work as successful, what with it being able to “rapidly identify messages” deemed as containing inaccurate information about the virus, vaccines, treatment, etc.
And although admitting that “vaccine hesitancy” remains high around the world even two years after the vaccines were first introduced – and this is something attributed to “disinformation and misinformation” and continues to worry the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Surgeon General, as well as “medical experts” – the New York City Health Department thinks that it did well in getting its own narrative out, particularly in traditional media.
However, it needed help on the internet and so, in 2021, the NYC Health Commissioner penned a letter to the largest social networks asking them to engage in “broader efforts to curtail deliberate disinformation, particularly from the most notorious spreaders of disinformation and from non-English language sources.”
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
This is also where the Public Good Projects came in, to enlist social media “microinfluencers” to spread pro-vaccine messages, and train others to come up with campaigns.
The email Dave A. Chokshi, New York City health commissioner, addressed to then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with the subject line reading, “Vaccine Misinformation,” urges the pair to “take immediate action to stop the spread of fraudulent and inaccurate information about COVID-19 vaccines” on their platforms.
Chokshi wanted this action to be “effective and vigorous” and asserted that misinformation on these sites, as understood by the city’s Health Department, was “costing New Yorkers their lives.”
Twitter and Facebook were then urged to do the following: “Consistently and promptly remove all misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines from your platforms and ban any user that repeatedly posts misinformation, including the Dirty Dozen; redesign the algorithms used by your platforms to avoid amplifying misinformation, particularly among non-English languages; provide greater transparency to your data to allow health departments to better identify, track and understand the spread of misinformation, and amplify messaging from trusted public health experts and local partners.”
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New Book
Trans agenda is ‘normalization of sadism’ – US author
RT | September 23, 2026
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full report
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Refaat Al-Areer Was The Canary In The Coal Mine In Israel’s War On The Truth
- Israeli election committee bars candidate from Knesset race over Gaza war opposition
- French-Lebanese man files war crimes complaint over Israeli attacks
- Mahan Air Flight Lands in China Despite US Threat against Iranian Airlines
- US eyes $10bn fund to rebuild war-battered Gulf infrastructure
- Trump meets Rodríguez near Maduro’s prison as Venezuela’s oil flows to US
- Trita Parsi: Middle East Unraveling — Are We on the Path to World War?
- Iran FM meets with US envoy on UN meeting’s sidelines at American side’s insistence: Report
- Qatar PM calls for Gulf security framework with Iran, says war must be ‘wake-up call’
- China condemns US extortion of Iranian airlines, rejects Washington’s ‘illegal’ sanctions threats
- If Americans Knew
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- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
