Rep. Adam Schiff says YouTube’s ban of vaccine skepticism doesn’t go far enough
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 2, 2021
Rep. Adam Schiff praised YouTube’s decision to ban all vaccine skepticism but said it was not the “end of our fight against misinformation.”
On Wednesday afternoon, YouTube announced that it will ban all vaccine skepticism to stop the spread of what it says is misinformation. The ban not only applies to COVID vaccines but also any other vaccines that pharmaceutical companies produce.
While making the announcement, YouTube said: “Today’s policy update is an important step to address vaccine and health misinformation on our platform, and we’ll continue to invest across the board.”
YouTube’s decision was applauded by many, including Rep. Adam Schiff.
“YouTube’s curbing of anti-vaccine content is a strong first step,” the Democrat congressman wrote on Twitter. But this doesn’t mark the end of our fight against deadly misinformation. These policies must be enforced. And we must keep pushing for other companies to follow suit. What do you say, @Amazon and @Facebook?” hinting at his demands for more censorship.
YouTube Bans Mercola, Others Without Warning but Tips Off Media First
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | October 1, 2021
In a move to override the First Amendment with its own interpretation of what constitutes free speech, YouTube spent the last few days of September planning and executing a coup that included notifying major media of what they were doing before they pulled it off.
The coup was a sudden strike against Mercola.com, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others whose channels YouTube decided to shut down without as much as a single word of warning — except to news agencies that obviously were tipped off in advance.
According to the Washington Post, YouTube was specifically targeting channels “associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists … who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that’s contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country.”
Early in the work day September 29, the Post gave Dr. Mercola exactly 23 minutes to respond to a story they had to have already had written about. They contacted Mercola’s media department just after 9 a.m.; they broke the story at 9:35 a.m.
CNBC’s Jim Forkin must have had a tip too, from YouTube, as he contacted Mercola at 9:12 a.m., with just two sentences: “Have your videos been removed from YouTube?” and “Do you have a statement or comment?”
YouTube, meanwhile, quietly changed their policies regarding who gets to publish on their server and who gets banned. It was a deviously brilliant move: Just change the rules to match the (previously compliant) content of the individuals you want to remove, and provide users no time to remain in compliance of the new rules.
Israel officials intervene to have US academic removed
MEMO | October 1, 2021
Israeli diplomats reportedly put pressure on the dean of a US university to have a teacher critical of the occupation state removed using allegations of anti-Semitism. Details of the intervention by Israeli consular officials, in what has been slammed as another example of the gross interference by a foreign state, were reported by the Intercept.
Israeli consular officials in the southeast US arranged meetings with a dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remove graduate student, Kylie Broderick, from teaching the history department course called ‘The Conflict over Israel/Palestine’. Details of the visit by Israeli officials are said to have been exposed by two UNC professors who had knowledge of the meeting.
The intervention by the Israeli officials followed a pressure campaign by right-wing pro-Israel websites and an advocacy group who pointed to postings Broderick had made on Twitter that criticised Israel and Zionism and, without evidence, cited the postings as evidence of anti-Semitism.
Over the past few years there has been a concerted campaign to conflate anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel using the adoption of a highly controversial definition of racism known as the International Holocaust Definition of anti-Semitism. Seven of the 11 examples of anti-Semitism cited in the IHRA conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Critics have argued that its adoption has had a chilling effect on all levels of society especially in universities and campuses.
The two UNC professors revealed that in addition to the intervention by the Israeli government, the university faced pressure from a member of the US House of Representatives.
“It is not a new phenomenon where outside parties have tried to stifle academic freedom on this subject,” Broderick is reported saying. “But these people have never seen me teach, never seen my past evaluations which have said that I treat students fairly, and thus have no right to dictate what I say inside the classroom.”
“I think that a representative of a foreign government attempting to police an academic class is, in the first place, ridiculous, and an obvious overreaction to what is essentially an issue that started on Twitter,” Broderick added. “I also think it is strange that the Israeli consulate general was granted an audience. If this was a class on Hungary or Australia, would the university have permitted the attempted interference of a foreign government? The fact that this meeting happened at all is clearly a threat to academic freedom.”
French President Macron criticized for creating online “thought police” task force
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | September 30, 2021
The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has come under fire after forming a committee against online speech that critics are already calling the “thought police.” According to Macron, he considers “conspiracy theories” a “poison” to society.
Macron claimed in an interview that conspiracy theories are a “key problem” for France and that he’s fighting against the idea that “all views are equal, that those of someone who is not a specialist but who has an opinion on the coronavirus are just as valid as those of a scientist.”
However, some have blasted the president for trying to impose an official narrative to secure a second presidency against conservative populists such Marine Le Pen.
François Bernard Huyghe, a political scientist at the Institute of Strategic and International Affairs in Paris, has criticized the president’s commission.
“I don’t think that multiplying laws, censoring social media accounts or treating people as cretins is the solution. It provokes the opposite effect to the one desired and the feeling that something is being hidden,” Huyghe stated in The Times.
Members of the committee will include 15 academics, as well as journalists, teachers and lawyers. Mr Macron asked them to submit a report on these topics, along with algorithms that are “enslaving the public.”
However, the chair of the commission, Gerald Bronner has denied all claims in involvement with the effect of the “thought police”, stating that “There is no question of censorship but of strengthening the space for common debates that are increasingly threatened by a succession of opinions.”
UK Military Wants to Spy on Social Media to Detect “Change in Population Sentiment”
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | September 30, 2021
The UK Ministry of Defence has inadvertently revealed its plan to spy on social media platforms in order to detect “change(s) in population sentiment.”
Despite ostensibly being about “better use of existing silos,” the MoD’s Data Strategy for Defence document explains how the military should move towards “Automated scanning of social media platforms” to detect “change in population sentiment.”
“Nowhere does the document explain why a strategy paper has gone so far off the beaten track that it promotes collecting data the MoD doesn’t have and using it for decidedly non-military purposes,” reports the Register.
Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the military has increasingly turned its attention inward towards its own citizens rather than doing what it should do, which is fighting foreign adversaries.
As author Laura Dodsworth revealed, GCHQ has embroiled itself in anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown messaging by targeting people who challenge the official COVID narrative online.
“She says some people believe they have been targeted by the 77th Brigade, part of the 6th Division of the Army,” reported the Telegraph.
According to the Ministry of Defence, the 77th Brigade uses “legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries.”
The military’s main “adversaries” are now apparently British citizens who complain about lockdown while questioning the efficacy and safety of vaccines.
Dodsworth said she “hit a brick wall” when attempting to get answers about the unit’s activities, noting, “and I find that when someone puts up a brick wall, it’s because that’s where the real story lies.”
The unit played its role in the broader agenda, facilitated by government-affiliated behavioral psychologists, to terrify the public into mass obedience to lockdown rules by exaggerating the threat posed by COVID.
If YouTube’s block of RT’s German channels is about ‘misinformation’, when will MSNBC & CNN be banned for Russiagate conspiracies?
By Glenn Diesen | RT | September 30, 2021
Russia is locked into yet another standoff with an American tech company. This time, it’s YouTube, which has taken down two of RT’s German-language news channels and provoked a furious response from Moscow’s most senior officials.
The decision, understood to have been taken over allegations the broadcaster tried to circumvent a ‘community standards strike’ handed down over ‘medical misinformation’, has seen Russia’s regulators rally round RT DE and its sister account, Der Fehlende Part.
Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal executive agency responsible for overseeing the media, warned Google it would be fined if did not end the suspension. At the same time, RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, cautioned that this was “a declaration of media war against Russia by Germany,” and argued in favour of retaliatory restrictions against German media in Russia.
The closure of German-language RT channels should be seen in the context of growing censorship in the West and hostility to Moscow’s media outlets.
The rise of censorship in the West
Censorship has acquired a new dictionary over the past few years, with the rise of concepts such as safe spaces, cancel culture, and de-platforming – which are synonyms for striking down what people can and can’t say. Terms like hate speech and propaganda are defined increasingly loosely and censorship is therefore imposed on a wider and more inconsistent basis. The US government works hand in glove with the private tech giants to re-label censorship at platform policies.
There is especially a growing effort to legitimise censoring news and media related to Russia, which is usually conducted under the auspices of “countering propaganda.” We are constantly informed that Russia is launching a disinformation and propaganda campaign against the West to undermine its democracies. The response to this alleged threat by Western governments is a firm campaign of one-sided fact-checkers and efforts to out-propaganda the supposed propagandists.
The problem is that what is framed as counter-propaganda usually looks indistinguishable from propaganda, and merely undermines and ignores the arguments on the other side. Propaganda is the science of persuading an audience without reason by instead appealing to group psychology and emotional rhetoric. If propaganda entails “closing the mind to argument,” then countering propaganda implies appealing to reason by objectively presenting competing arguments.
British philosopher Bertrand Russell is known for arguing during the Cold War that countering communist propaganda did not necessitate simply censoring the Soviet Union, as such a move would merely give space for British propaganda. Instead, he envisioned counter-propaganda as facilitating all perspectives by, for example, organising a debate between Stalin and the Archbishop of Canterbury. By redefining propaganda as anything that presents Russia favourably – debates that give Russian arguments a platform and legitimacy are deemed dangerous and thus require censorship. Under this new definition of propaganda, even the Russian Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine and Russian cartoons are considered propaganda.
It is only a year ago that Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal unfolded ahead of the US presidential election, purporting to reveal that now-US President Joe Biden was involved in corruption with Ukraine and China. Fearing that this revelation could cause Joe Biden to lose the election, the Biden campaign adopted the same Russiagate playbook as the Clinton campaign – blame Russia.
By labelling the entire scandal a Russian disinformation campaign, the media chose not to report on the matter while social media platforms outright censored the story from their platforms. Well, last week the evidence was in – the incriminating emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop were completely authentic and Moscow had absolutely nothing to do with it. Much like the conspiracy theories linking former President Donald Trump to the Kremlin and the tale of Russia placing bounties on US troops in Afghanistan – the disinformation came from the Western media.
In many cases, mainstream outlets have championed claims that were at the time unsubstantiated, and now fully discredited, without ever correcting themselves. American networks including MSNBC and CNN have played host to some of the most egregiously untrue Russia-gate conspiracy theories. Those, like Rachel Maddow, who unapologetically championed them, have never faced repercussions for their careers, and their sensationalist content still sits online proud as punch and without retraction or amendment. Accountability, it seems, is something reserved for other people.
Western states are also countering alleged Russian disinformation with ‘fact-checkers’. The problem is that these fact-checkers do not actually check facts, they check narratives, impose their own, and thereby operate as a Ministry of Truth.
Case in point, the EU fact-checkers label the reference to ‘coup’ to describe the events in Ukraine in February 2014 as Russian disinformation, as it was argued to supposedly have been a ‘democratic revolution’ and that former leader Viktor Yanukovich chose to leave the country voluntarily.
Actual fact-checkers would check objective facts: Did the OSCE characterise the election of President Yanukovich as free and fair? – Yes. Did the removal of Yanukovich from power violate the Ukrainian constitution? – Yes. Did the toppling of Yanukovich enjoy support from a democratic majority of the Ukrainian population? – No. Did the US and EU support the removal of Yanukovich? – Yes. Instead of fact-checking, the fact-checkers employ ambiguous and contradictory terms such as ‘democratic revolution’ to delegitimise the Russian position. Subsequently, these fact-checkers send an unmistakable signal to Western media that they cannot discuss the extent to which a coup occurred in Ukraine, as this can be considered peddling Russian disinformation.
Diversity of perspectives demands a diversity of media
The media landscape is polarising both domestically and internationally. Within the US, liberals who appear on conservative media platforms are chastised for their lack of loyalty to the group. Within Europe, the media polarises between pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit, or between pro-EU and anti-EU.
Groupthink is amplified and the subsequent polarisation implies that the nuances disappear as political questions are framed as a struggle between right and wrong, or good and evil. With the death of objective reporting, the solution for the audience to remain informed is a diversity of media – both CNN and Fox News, both The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, both Haaretz and Al Jazeera.
The Western media acts in conformity with a heavy anti-Russian bias that reflects the alliance system and security architecture of a divided Europe. Those interested in Russian politics should by no means limit themselves to RT as the sole arbiter of truth, but RT is an important contribution to a severely polarised media landscape.
The Western media has exceptionally poor reporting on Russia, as it is ideologically constrained from recognising Russian security concerns. All political questions are filtered through the simplistic and outdated binary stereotypes of ‘democracy’ versus ‘authoritarianism’ that provides little if any heuristic value to understand the complexities of the socio-economic, political, and military conflicts.
The inability to recognise that the West can threaten Russian security makes it impossible to have any reasonable analysis of Russian foreign policy. By neglecting external threats and limiting the analysis of Russia to its internal characteristics, Russian policies can only be explained by referencing Putin’s belligerent personality or nostalgia for empire.
The information space is becoming a key battleground in great power rivalry, and for the sake of an informed population, we have to hope what some see as propaganda is countered with reason – not just more propaganda.
Glenn Diesen is a Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.
Russia will take ‘zero tolerance’ approach to US tech giant YouTube’s ‘censorship’ of RT’s German-language channels
RT | September 29, 2021
YouTube has violated Russian law by taking down two German-language channels run by RT, the Kremlin has insisted, cautioning that the American tech giant will face serious consequences unless it urgently reinstates the accounts.
Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary said that “there are of course signs that Russian law has been broken” after the platform moved to ban RT DE and Der Fehlende Part from its site. “In fact, it has been broken very brazenly,” Dmitry Peskov added. “Because of this, it is a case of censorship, and of obstructing the dissemination of information by the media, and so on.”
Peskov added that “there must be zero tolerance for such violations of the law,” insisting that “if our regulators deem this is a violation of legislation then we can’t exclude the possibility we will take measures to force this network to comply with the law.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Moscow’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, published a letter sent to YouTube’s parent company, Google, demanding all restrictions be lifted from RT’s channels. The purportedly permanent deletion was imposed after the German-language broadcaster allegedly attempted to circumvent a ‘community guidelines’ strike, handed down for ‘medical misinformation’ in four videos. The details of the purported breach are not yet clear, but RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, has said that it amounts to “a declaration of media war against Russia by Germany.”
Roskomnadzor went on to tell Google that, if the site does not comply with the order, “legislation allows us to take measures including completely or partially blocking access to it.”
Moscow’s Foreign Ministry has also announced that it is considering taking steps against German news outlets in retaliation over the decision. “Adopting reciprocal measures against the German media in Russia which, by the way, has been repeatedly shown to have interfered in our country’s internal affairs, seems not only appropriate but necessary,” it said in a statement.
Officials went on to say that such restrictions are “the only possible way to focus our partners’ attention on a constructive and meaningful dialogue around this unacceptable situation.” According to the diplomats, YouTube acted not out of adherence to its community policies but with the “obvious connivance, if not the insistence,” of German authorities.
Berlin has denied involvement in the decision and insists that the matter is one for YouTube alone.
YouTube deletes 2 channels of RT DE with 600K subscribers over ‘community guidelines’ violation
RT | September 28, 2021
YouTube has permanently deleted two of RT’s German-language channels, the news outlet has announced. RT DE was listed among top News & Politics channels on the social media platform, with hundreds of millions of views.
The Google-owned video service “has deleted the RT DE channel, as well as our second channel DFP [Der Fehlende Part, “the missing piece”], without the right to restoration,” Dinara Toktosunova, head of RT in Germany, announced on her Telegram channel on Tuesday.
The main RT DE channel was barred from live-streaming and uploading videos for seven days since September 21, on the basis of a strike over “community guidelines” violations, for alleged “medical misinformation” in four videos. YouTube did not elaborate on what specifically was questionable in the clips. The videos, some weeks while others months old, focused on the Covid-19 crisis. They featured, among others, an interview with German epidemiologist Friedrich Puerner, who was critical of the governmental ways of battling the pandemic.
The strike was due to expire on Tuesday, but YouTube removed the channel. The social media platform said in a statement: “We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines. Because of this, we have removed your channel from Youtube.”
The same thing happened with DFP, which had no strikes and posted RT DE content. A YouTube representative later confirmed that publishing material on the DFP was, according to the tech giant, a violation of the strike handed to RT DE’s main channel. As a result, both channels were deleted.
RT DE was among the top five German-language channels in YouTube’s News and Politics category, based on Tubular Labs data for August, with over 600,000 subscribers and almost 547 million total views.
In recent months, RT DE has faced mounting pressure in Germany, including over its plans to launch a TV broadcast later this year. In mid-August, Luxembourg denied RT’s application for a German-language broadcast license. Chancellor Angela Merkel denied pressuring the neighbouring country to do so, despite multiple German outlets reporting that representatives from Berlin met with Luxembourg officials to discuss the issue.
Ahead of the planned TV launch, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said some German media outlets had waged “an outright information war” against RT. The same month, Die Welt – owned by the Axel Springer conglomerate – published two opinion pieces that German courts later found contained false claims about RT DE.
Earlier this year, Commerzbank abruptly and without explanation announced that it was shutting down accounts associated with RT DE. When the outlet reached out to other German banks, its inquiries about doing business were ignored or rejected.
Blame Doctors And Hospitals, Not The Virus, For COVID Deaths
By Joel S. Hirschhorn | Principia Scientific | September 28, 2021
Very, very few physicians are courageous enough to stand up against the vaccine-but-not-early treatment with generics tyranny pushing mass COVID vaccination.
Few will prescribe ivermectin. Few acknowledge the many vaccine risks that for most people outweigh the benefits.
Few accept the science that natural immunity is better than vaccine immunity and people with it should not get the jab.
When Americans see the data on COVID deaths of over 600,000 who or what should they blame? The truth is this: Better than blaming the virus they should blame hospitals and the vast majority of physicians. Why?
Because the medical establishment has never had the courage to stand up to the medical tyranny engineered by Fauci and implemented by the CDC and FDA.
People still are dying from COVID because their physicians refuse to genuinely follow the science and prescribe cheap, safe and proven generics like ivermectin.
Of course, there have always been a minority of doctors who have since March 2020 been curing their patients of COVID by using a variety of protocols that hospitals and their doctors refuse to use.
Why are so many nurses and physicians refusing to be vaccinated? Because they have seen on a daily basis large numbers of patients suffering and dying not from the virus but from the COVID vaccines.
Now one of the most respected physicians and medical researchers, Dr. Robert Malone, has spearheaded a movement to combat medical tyranny by organizing physicians from all over the world and creating just days ago a Physicians Declaration. Here are some key highlights from this historic action.
— There is an unprecedented assault on our ability to care for our patients.
— Public policy [think Fauci] has chosen to ignore fundamental concepts of science, health and wellness, instead embracing a “one size fits all” treatment strategy [think COVID vaccines] that results in too much illness and death when the individualized, personalized approach to health care is safe and equally or more effective.
–Thousands of physicians are being denied the right to provide treatment to their patients [think ivermectin], as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to incubate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat [other than using vaccines].
— Physicians must defend their right to prescribe treatment, observing the tenet FIRST, DO NO HARM. Physicians shall not be restricted from prescribing safe and effective treatments [other than vaccines]. These restrictions continue to cause unnecessary sickness and death. The rights of patients, after being fully informed about the risks and benefits of each option [especially vaccines], must be restored to receive those treatments [such as ivermectin].
— We invite patients, who believe in the importance of the physician-patient relationship and the ability to be active participants in their care, to demand access to science-based medical care.
That last point is where you the reader must join this revolt and demand from your physicians and hospitals your right to get access to generic medicines like ivermectin. Print the Declaration and give it to your doctor.
If this Declaration simply remains words but not profound changes in the practice of medicine in this pandemic, then all hope for saving lives will be lost.
We are rapidly approaching the point where more people will die from COVID vaccines than the virus.
Fauci and his allies will not easily admit their many evil wrong actions. If you want to examine extensive medical science details on the emerging Vaccine Dystopia, then read this truth-telling article.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff demands Facebook censor “disinformation”

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 26, 2021
Salesforce CEO, and Time Magazine owner, Marc Benioff has criticized Facebook allowing the spread of “disinformation” on its platforms.
In an interview on CNN, Benioff said: “This digital revolution really kind of has the world in its grip. And in that grip, you can see the amount of mistrust and misinformation that is happening.”
According to the tech billionaire, what he says is misinformation on social media is making it harder to solve climate change.
“Look at how it is affecting the world. You can talk about the political process. You can talk about climate. You can talk about the pandemic,” Benioff said. “In each and every major topic, it gets connected back to the mistrust that is happening and especially the amount of it being seeded by the social networks. It must stop now.”
Benioff singled out Facebook as the platform with the greatest misinformation problem. He has been one of Facebook’s most vocal critics and has previously called for the breaking up of the Zuckerberg empire, which is now worth approximately $1 trillion.
“Some of these social media companies, especially Facebook, you can see that they don’t really care that their platform is filled with all of this disinformation,” Benioff said.
He continued to suggest that Congress should do something to address the disinformation problem on Facebook.
“I own Time and I am held accountable for what is produced on my platform,” Benioff said, adding that mainstream media outlets are also held accountable. “In regards to Facebook, they are not held accountable. So they do not have an incentive from the government. That has to change.”





