Facebook’s desire for you to report your friends is the latest alarming step in its bid to take over the world
By Ramsha Afridi | RT | July 9, 2021
A test of a new feature that asks users to report friends they suspect may be becoming an extremist has been greeted with horror from Facebook users. It’s a bizarre precedent that we should all be concerned about.
Over the past few days, some Facebook users have reported seeing prompts asking them if they are concerned that someone they know might be becoming an extremist. Other users are being notified they may have been exposed to extremist content as they were naively reading political articles or watching videos on the platform.
Screenshots of the alerts have surfaced on social media.
Understandably, the move has shocked users. US representative for Colorado Lauren Boebart ironically tweeted, “Facebook just warned me that I may have been subjected to extremist content and asked me to report anyone I may know that is becoming an extremist. I have more than 200 coworkers I need to report.”
In a bid to calm concerns, Facebook issued a statement about the testing. It read, “This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk.”
Ultimately, what this means is that if the policy is implemented, Facebook is quite literally going to encourage people to report their friends for committing thought crimes. Even worse, Facebook will punish its own users who may have potentially committed wrongthink.
It’s quite the dystopia Facebook is leading us through, and begs the question: has society, as a whole, got to the point where reporting friends can be deemed as appropriate? And are we becoming docile and easier to control?
For example, individuals’ thoughts on issues such as mass migration should be free to be expressed on Facebook without fear of consequences. It is worrying that what could be interpreted as codes of political correctness are being implemented across the platform.
This is especially problematic as big tech like Facebook and the other giants are now the new public square. And the immense power they hold means they are behaving like monopolies. This raises the important question of why they are apparently involving themselves in the political opinions of its users.
Facebook’s claim that it is aiming to clamp down on “extremist content” by using new policies is questionable. In an era dominated by woke thinking, “extremist content” could mean anything, from something mildly offensive to a crude joke. So, the term is too subjective and vague, as the platform provides little indication of what it considers to be “extremist content”.
Of course, most of us do not want to witness extremist content or hateful behaviour. However, policing people in this way is a slippery slope, especially in a society where we value freedom of speech and diversity of opinions.
This is especially pertinent as Facebook is a powerful platform used by more than a third of the planet’s population, which has bestowed owner Mark Zuckerberg with massive influence and power. He essentially controls the timelines and newsfeeds of 2.7 billion people. Ultimately, in future it could be that in order to be allowed to use the platforms, one must completely oblige Facebook’s policies revolving around speech, which presumably will be determined by Zuckerberg. This is a chilling prospect and precedent.
Thankfully, the bizarre behaviour is being called out by some prominent people. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters slammed Zuckerberg during a recent press conference, describing Facebook’s policies as “insidious movement… to take over absolutely everything.” He’s absolutely right.
The truth of the matter is that Zuckerberg, who is now the fifth richest man in the world, probably has more influence over what information the masses are able to read and watch than any publication or media entity.
Facebook’s sharp algorithms are able to direct its billions of users towards any idea, organisation or partisan ideology in an instant. This power is immense. And its ability to effectively censor people, no matter how influential, has been seen in its treatment of President Trump.
It’s unclear how Facebook went from being a fun, quirky website to socialise on to being such a powerful player in the age of information. Day by day, it really does seem strange that tech oligarchs want to control our posts on their platforms by policing content.
What’s next? Could Facebook socially engineer the timelines of people suspected of being ‘extremists’ by the company itself? Who knows? Who thought we’d be where we are now?
If you don’t believe that Facebook’s latest test policy is a dangerously worrying precedent in a free society in 2021, then it is time to wake up.
Ramsha Afridi is a writer and a journalist based in the UK, she has written for publications such as the Telegraph and the Daily Express amongst others.
In Germany, burning the Israeli flag is a problem, but killing Palestinians isn’t
By Motasem A Dalloul | MEMO | July 6, 2021
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll met with the German Ambassador, Susanne Wasum-Rainer, on Monday along with visiting German parliamentarians. Roll thanked the German guests for their country’s strong support for Israel during its major military offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza from 10-21 May.
Germany’s unlimited support and cooperation make it a special friend of Israel. Among EU members it is the second-biggest supplier of weapons to the occupation state. Between 2009 and 2020, 24 per cent of Israel’s arms imports came from Germany.
When Israel treats international law, human rights, democratic principles, and liberal beliefs with contempt, Germany automatically takes its side, even when the result is the killing of innocent children and women. During the latest Israeli offensive, Germany supported Israel’s “right to defend itself” although it was killing civilians and destroying civilian buildings and infrastructure. The fact that an occupying state has no right to claim “self-defence” against the people under occupation was ignored by the Germans.
On 12 May, a German government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, refused to condemn Israel’s killing of 14 Palestinian children. He referred to the legitimate Palestinian resistance as “terrorist attacks” and that the resistance groups had to stop their action against Israel so that “people do not die”.
Seibert ignored the Israeli warplanes pounding the besieged Gaza Strip. He ignored the Israeli tanks firing indiscriminately towards densely-populated areas across Gaza. He ignored weeks of Israeli harassment and attacks on Palestinians worshipping in Al-Aqsa Mosque throughout Ramadan, and the residents of Jerusalem facing attacks by illegal settlers, which prompted the resistance groups to act. He ignored all of that.
On the same day, the deputy spokesman of the German Foreign Ministry, Christofer Burger, angered journalists when he said that the Palestinians had no right to self-defence. His claim that this right is only guaranteed by international law to sovereign states and Palestinians are not a state was palpable nonsense. All people living under occupation, collectively and individually, have the right to defend themselves and resist military occupation. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a military occupation.
On day ten of the Israeli offensive, when the occupation state had killed 66 children, 40 women, and 16 elderly people out of 266 Palestinians killed in total, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas insisted that, “Germany stands with Israel and its right to defend itself.” He even visited Israel to prove that his country’s support was not limited to words. “I came to Israel to show solidarity and support Israel. Israel’s security and that of the Jewish residents here are not negotiable.”
![German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in Berlin, Germany on June 23, 2021 [Abdulhamid Hoşbaş/Anadolu Agency]](https://i2.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20210623_2_48889287_66351096.jpg?resize=500%2C331&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
German FM Heiko Maas, June 23, 2021 [Abdulhamid Hoşbaş/Anadolu Agency]
Two days earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and “sharply condemned the continued rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel and assured the prime minister of the German government’s solidarity.” She showed great interest in Israel’s security and safety of its people and condemned only the legitimate Palestinian resistance.
Germany’s verbal support for Israeli brutality and aggression against the Palestinians was backed up by officials who claimed that peaceful protests during which Palestinian flags were flown and anti-Israel slogans were chanted were “anti-Semitic”. Calls for Israel to be held accountable for its breaches of international law were described as “hate speech”.
According to Seibert, “Anyone who uses such protests to shout out their hatred of Jews is abusing the right to protest [in Germany].” He described the pro-Palestine protests which raised awareness about the ongoing Israeli crimes as “anti-Semitic rallies”, and stressed that they “will not be tolerated by our democracy.”
During a debate in the German parliament during the Israeli offensive on Gaza, Maas condemned the pro-Palestine demonstrations and called for a violent crackdown on them. “There shouldn’t be one centimetre of space for anti-Semitism on our streets. Never again.”
Germany has since banned the Hamas flag in the country in response to pro-Palestine demonstrations. “We do not want the flags of terrorist organisations to be waved on German soil,” Thorsten Frei, a lawmaker for Merkel’s CDU, told Die Welt. A ban, he added, would send “a clear signal to our Jewish citizens.”
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Israeli daily Haaretz that Germany believes that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no jurisdiction to investigate Israeli war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories because of the “absence of the Palestinian state”. Germany is not only unconcerned about Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, but also does not even want those crimes to be investigated. Palestine was, of course, granted the status of a “non-member observer state” by the UN in November 2012, a move described as “de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine”.
Writing in Open Democracy, activist and sociologist Inna Michaeli said that Germans are against the entirely peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which seeks to end the Israeli occupation. Moreover, apparently, they do not like to hear anyone accusing Israel of killing children, despite this being “a description of horrendous reality — one in three Palestinians that Israel kills in Gaza are children.”
She asked rhetorically: “What should people chant when Israel is killing children? How can the victims express their rage and sorrow, how can they mourn their children who are killed again and again by Israel?”
Even the German mainstream media ignores Israeli brutality against the Palestinians. “Much of the mainstream media coverage of Nakba Day demonstrations did not even mention nor explain to the readers what the Nakba is, and its continuation in the form of ethnic cleansing and denial of Palestinians’ right to return,” Michaeli pointed out. “Berlin, with the largest Palestinian population in Europe, is home to people whose family members have been murdered by Israel in recent days. These protests are often framed as ‘anti’ Israel, but the fact that they are primarily ‘for’ Palestinian life is omitted.”
Omri Boehm is an Israeli philosophy lecturer in New York. “Whenever one attempts to raise this subject, one is immediately accused of anti-Semitism,” he noted. “It is impossible to simply state the facts. For example, that within Israel’s borders, three million Palestinians live under brutal military law without being recognised as Israeli citizens. The Germans do not want to see this.”
When pro-Palestine protesters burned an Israeli flag in Germany, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer described the act as “anti-Semitic” and said that Germany would crack down hard on anyone found to be spreading “anti-Semitic hatred” because “We will not tolerate Israeli flags burning on German soil.”
Commenting on this, Michaeli said: “Israeli flags matter, Palestinian lives do not. When people, politicians, and the media, care more about the burning of national flags than the burning of homes and neighbourhoods and the killing of entire families, they should really have a hard look at themselves.”
German support for Israel goes back to the early 1950s when reparations were paid to the state as the “heir” to the Holocaust victims who had no known surviving family. Billions of German marks and euros have been handed over in the intervening decades, helping to build Israel as a state. The fact that this is largely to the detriment of the people of occupied Palestine has, shamefully, been lost on successive German governments. Those parliamentarians who met Israeli officials earlier this week need to be educated about international laws and conventions, and the reality of Israel’s brutal military occupation which they and their colleagues in Berlin endorse so willingly.
A Country That Has Lost Its Way: U.S. Government and Corporations Combine to Strip Citizens of Their Rights
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 8, 2021
The American people have increasingly become aware that government surveillance and corporate censorship have combined to keep people ignorant and controlled. What is taking place has generated some dark humor. A friend of mine, also a former CIA officer, wrote to me recently and said tongue-in-cheek that he retains a lot of respect for the Agency because it is the only major government national security entity that does not read our mail and emails. Those jobs are the responsibility of the NSA and FBI. I responded that I would imagine that CIA does in fact read quite a lot of mail where it operates overseas but it is probably done the old-fashioned way by recruiting an underpaid mail clerk as an agent.
The whole issue of the government spying illegally on its own citizens has again made the news with the claims by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that NSA has been spying on him, presumably because he has connections that the government regards either as subversive or, in the new reckoning, as “extremists” who are potential “domestic terrorists.” Given the reasonable assumption that anyone who voted for Donald Trump might well fall under those categories, that means that something like half the U.S. population could be under suspicion.
Mass electronic surveillance of literally trillions of phone calls and messages worldwide without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment restrictions on searches without probable cause or a proper warrant issued by a judge has been the regular NSA authorized procedure at least since 9/11 and there is no reason to assume that it is no longer the practice. It basically is initiated by the agency involved (normally NSA or FBI) going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court or to some other appropriate judge to get a warrant on an individual where there is some probable cause. Probable cause can consist of “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” The Court then gives its approval, which it does in the case of FISA 99% of the time. When that individual is then surveilled, the names of his or her contacts are also added to the investigation. And it goes on from there, expanding and growing until it includes thousands of phone numbers and email addresses, individuals who are overwhelmingly innocent of any wrongdoing.
So, it is safe to assume that many of us are right at this moment eligible for being monitored electronically by the federal government. If one combines that with the Biden Administration’s June 1st announcement of a war on “domestic terrorism,” which it clearly considers to be a function of “white supremacists,” it is easy to see where all that is going. Biden pulled no punches, describing the threat from “white supremacy” as the “most lethal threat to the homeland today,” so that would mean that the government is doing all in its power to stamp it out, whatever it takes and whatever that means.
Surveilling ordinary Americans for what they might be thinking, which is what this comes down to, would be a George Orwellian 1984 tale for our times, updated from when Winston Smith was doing mandatory daily exercises in front of his television set. He slacked off a bit and the TV instantly admonished him. He then wondered whether it was possible that he and all the other residents of Airstrip One (once called Britain) are surveilled all the time. He concluded that they were.
So, if your television set suddenly speaks to you in the next few months, it might not be Alexa. The other development that has surfaced in the past couple of weeks is the increased corporate cooperation with what the government is saying and doing. Mainstream media has certainly done its share of obfuscation, including the current near total suppression of the story that a key witness who provided false testimony against journalist Julian Assange languishing in a British prison has turned out to be a pedophile, diagnosed sociopath and serial liar. But the major player is inevitably social media, which has enormous power in the United States and also elsewhere to shape opinions and propagate false information that serves the government agenda. The media has banned numerous groups, individuals, and links to sites from its pages, a barrier to free speech and freedom of expression. And it has, for example, enthusiastically cooperated fully with the essentially fraudulent government claims of Russian interference in the two most recent U.S. elections. It is censoring or denigrating material that is at variance with official policies, including, for example, Facebook’s pop-ups that appear whenever there is any article that contests the approved version of the response to the COVID virus.
Back in June, the Biden administration said it would also be working with some of the large high-technology and social media companies to “increase information sharing” to assist in combatting radicalization. Biden announced that his Justice Department would create ways for Americans to report radicalized friends and family to the government. One senior official put it this way: “We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs… If you see something, say something. This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.”
In other words, in plain English, the Biden Administration is calling on Americans to spy on friends, neighbors and family and reporting any “extremist” views to the authorities. Well, Facebook is now fully on board with more of the same, engaged in the “hot” war against the “white supremacists/extremists/domestic terrorists.” It has blocked or shut down many former contributors and also begun posting at least two versions of warnings to users. One targets individuals who might have personally been visiting an “extremist” site while the other encourages users to snitch on friends or family who might be enticed by such material. The personalized pop-up reads as follows: “[Name of Recipient], you many have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently – Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment. You can take action now to protect yourself and others.-Get support from experts-Spot the signs, understand the dangers of extremism and hear from people who escaped violent groups.”
The snitch on friends version reads: “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?-We care about preventing extremism on Facebook. Others in your situation have received confidential support. How you can help. Hear stories and get advice from people who escaped violent extremist groups-Get support.”
To be sure, one has to ask how Facebook knows that one has visited an “extremist” site since they have blocked such material. Are they somehow hacking into the personal accounts of their own users? The situation is dire, no doubt about it, but it has provoked a backlash, including this post: “Become the extremist Facebook warned you about!” One also has to wonder how Facebook will deal with individuals who complain about some other groups with a demonstrated history of promoting violence, including black lives matter, that are not white supremacist related. It will almost certainly do nothing, just like the federal government’s demonstrated “racially sensitive” supine response to a year of riot, burning, looting and homicide. In truth Americans are standing at the edge of a precipice with just one more “crisis” possibly coming that will tip everyone over the edge so we wind up with a totalitarian government which works hard to keep everyone safe by doing the opposite. We are almost there, and if you doubt it just go take a look at Facebook.
Congressman Ken Buck challenges Zuckerberg on COVID censorship and more
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim the Net | July 4, 2021
In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, GOP Rep. Ken Buck, from Colorado, criticized Facebook’s content moderation policies. Buck pointed out, among other things, how Facebook’s content moderation practices are biased against some opinions.
“During the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook removed more than 7 million posts that purportedly spread misinformation about the virus, and your company placed contextual notes on more than 98 million posts it deemed as potentially misleading,” Buck wrote. “Monitoring posts across Facebook and Instagram for misinformation about COVID has been an undoubtedly herculean task, but Facebook has vigorously taken on this challenge.”
Buck said that the platform censored content on the origins of the pandemic and the Hunter Biden story for “the supposed interest of public informational safety.”
“Your company is only able to selectively moderate content based on the political agenda of your company and its employees because Facebook possesses monopoly power over the market,” Buck wrote. He warned that “stifling ideas can backfire if it leads people to believe there’s a ‘real story’ that is being suppressed.’”
In both cases (the Hunter Biden story and the origins of the pandemic), “Facebook has had the embarrassing position of having to defend its censorship of legitimate content.” In recent months, more evidence has emerged that supports the lab leak theory. Additionally, “the unconditional erasure of reports that were damaging to the-candidate Joe Biden regarding his son, Hunter Biden, has since proved to be unfounded.”
Buck continued to point out that Facebook has been keen on censoring legal content, but has failed to remove “illegal and sexually abusive content.”
“The company appears to have an astonishing lack of concern about illegal and sexually abusive content that is rampantly permitted on your company’s platforms,” Buck wrote to Zuckerberg.
“Facebook has established a rigorous system for policing speech that is Constitutionally protected, yet your company’s failure to effectively screen illegal and exploitative content represents a misalignment of values that is deeply disconcerting.”
Buck’s letter also highlights Zuckerberg’s recent testimony in Congress about reforms to Section 230, expressing disapproval of Zuckerberg’s recommendation of what the Congressman described as “counterproductive actions.”
“Recently, you testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. In this hearing, you advocated for vaguely defined Section 230 reforms, saying that the law should ‘condition immunity for the larger platforms on having a generally effective system in place to moderate clearly illegal types of content,’” Buck wrote.
“Simply because a company has established a system to review potentially illegal content does not create any standard for ensuring such content is systematically removed from the platform,” he explained. “I agree with you that no system is perfect, but if Congress were to adopt your recommendation, it would codify the status quo and fail to address the issues that are pervasive across Facebook.”
The letter concluded with a plea to Zuckerberg: “I urge you to take necessary steps to ensure your platform is an open platform for the free and open exchange of ideas and an unwelcoming place for illegal and exploitative content.”
Facebook blocks #Revolution hashtag on July 4th weekend
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim the Net | July 4, 2021
Facebook users are blocked from the hashtag #Revolution. The timing of the censorship is rather suspect considering this the 4th of July Weekend, a commemoration of the declaration of independence, which was brought about by the revolutionary wars.
If you search #Revolution on Facebook, you get the following message:
“Posts with #Revolution are temporarily hidden here. Some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards.”
Clicking the “Learn more” link on the warning redirects you to Facebook’s long page of Community Standards, not an explanation on why #Revolution is censored.
Even more confusing is that the platform allows you to include #Revolution in your post. What is the point of being allowed to type something you cannot see/search?
“Welcome to the re-education of America on Independence Day weekend…” Congressman Thomas Massie commented, showing the censorship.
YouTube suspends Right Side Broadcasting network prior to Trump rally
By Christina Maas | Reclaim the Net | July 3, 2021
Right Side Broadcasting Network has been announced that it has been banned from broadcasting on YouTube for seven days, just hours before a Trump rally that it planned to cover.
Also, many of the channel’s videos of President Donald Trump’s events and rallies have been deleted from its popular channel.
YouTube deleted videos that had several million views.
Footage of Trump at the first “Save America” rally in Ohio last week was deleted, as well as footage of his speech at the North Carolina GOP Convention.
YouTube says the videos violate its “Community Guidelines” of “spam, deceptive practices and scams,” an increasingly given reason when videos are deleted on the platform these days.
RSBN will be using its own app and Rumble to broadcast the July 3rd rally.
RSBN was founded in 2015 by Joe Seales. The conservative media company rose in popularity for live streaming Trump’s rallies on YouTube. The over 3,000 videos on RSBN’s YouTube channel have millions of views.
YouTube censors video of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Satoshi Ōmura discussing ivermectin
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | July 2, 2021
Before the coronavirus pandemic, ivermectin was described as a “wonder” drug by the medical community. And in 2015, Dr. Satoshi Ōmura and Dr. William C. Campbell were awarded half the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work that led to the development of ivermectin.
“The importance of Ivermectin for improving the health and wellbeing of millions of individuals with River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis, primarily in the poorest regions of the world, is immeasurable,” the Nobel Assembly stated in its press release for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
But after the pandemic began, the tech giants have gone all out to purge content that recommends ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
And today, these Big Tech policies against ivermectin resulted in one of Ōmura’s speeches where he discussed ivermectin being struck down for “violating YouTube’s community guidelines.”
“When the fascists at YouTube censor the Noble Prize winner Dr. Satoshi Omura, a man whose discoveries have saved a hundred million + from blindness, the world has entered a very, very dark place,” Australian Member of Parliament Craig Kelly tweeted. “I cannot express in words how angry & sad this makes me & fearful for the future.”
Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care, an alliance of physicians and scholars that has committed to “research and develop lifesaving protocols for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in all stages of illness,” also spoke out against the censorship and warned that “brilliant scientists and lifesaving science are systematically being gagged.”
Ōmura joins the ranks of many other senators, lawmakers, medical journals, biologists, and YouTubers who have been censored by Big Tech for discussing ivermectin.
Retraction of paper on vaccine deaths spurs call for more scrutiny of COVID-19 death reports
Medical journal sets much higher burden to show deaths from vaccine than from COVID, say authors of retracted paper.
By Greg Piper | Just the News | July 2, 2021
Should public health authorities scrutinize deaths attributed to COVID-19 as closely as they scrutinize deaths attributed to COVID-19 vaccines?
Defenders of a controversial study on the risk-benefit ratio of COVID-19 vaccines are calling hypocrisy on a medical journal for retracting the paper a week after publishing it, following the resignations of several journal editors in protest.
In a Friday retraction notice in the journal Vaccines, the editor in chief and “several” editorial board members said the paper’s authors were not able to “satisfactorily” answer claims that they conflated correlation with causation.
Analyzing data from the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre, known as LAREB, the paper’s authors estimated COVID-19 vaccines take two lives for every three they save. The country leads Europe in vaccine adverse-reaction reporting.
Authors Harald Walach, Rainer Klement and Wouter Aukema challenged criticism from Eugene van Puijenbroek, who leads LAREB’s scientific department, that they had misused its data.
“This starts a long-overdue debate on how to gauge the safety of COVID-19 vaccines,” they wrote in a statement provided to Retraction Watch Thursday.
“Currently we only have association, we agree, and we never said anything else. But the same is true with fatalities as consequences of SARS-CoV2-infections [sic],” which are “rarely vetted by autopsy or second opinion” to confirm they were caused by the novel coronavirus, rather than incidental to infection.
Brown University epidemiologist Andrew Bostom wasn’t impressed by the journal’s “baloney” explanation for the retraction, either. “The [vaccine] deaths are as causally related as C19 deaths which allow for any positive test within 30-60 days of a death from any cause to be tallied as a C19 death,” he wrote in a Twitter message to Just the News.
Bostom pointed to a June study, not yet peer-reviewed, of a sample of deaths in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System reported through April. The sample was limited to people who got early vaccinations, primarily elderly or those with “significant health conditions.”
Researchers at the University of London and New Zealand’s Massey University found that they could rule out “vaccine reaction” as a contributing factor in just 14% of deaths. “Contrary to claims that most of these reports are made by lay-people and are hence clinically unreliable, we identified health service employees as the reporter in at least 67%,” they wrote:
Correlation versus causation is also an ongoing issue in research on the effectiveness of masks in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Commenters immediately challenged a Thursday report in MedPage Today on a study that purported to find masks effective in stopping in-school transmission, but had no control group of mask-optional schools.
‘Largest vaccination experiment in history of medicine’
The journal Vaccines was under internal pressure to retract the paper almost immediately. Two of its editors, virologist Florian Krammer and immunologist Katie Ewer, publicly announced their resignations on Twitter within three days of publication.
Science magazine reported four more resignations from Vaccines by July 1, including the journal’s founding editor in chief. Ewer made the same correlation-versus-causation argument and complained that the paper was “being used by anti-vaxxers and COVID-19-deniers as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are not safe.”
Only one of the three peer reviewers was identified by name, Anne Ulrich, chair of biochemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Her review said the authors made “plausible and convincing arguments” for why they chose the Dutch adverse-reaction data, and their analysis was “performed responsibly … without methodological flaws” and with “necessary caveats.”
After controversy, Ulrich told Science the analysis was done “responsibly and without flaws.” (One of the anonymous reviewers was confused why the authors compared the Dutch adverse-reaction data with “number needed to vaccinate” data from a large Israeli field study.)
The journal’s retraction said the paper’s authors reached “incorrect and distorted conclusions” by ignoring the caveats in LAREB, the Dutch reporting system.
Both “healthcare professionals and patients are invited to report suspicions of adverse events that may be associated with vaccination,” but “a causal relation” is not needed. It also said the paper falsely claimed “fatal cases were certified by medical specialists.”
After the journal announced the investigation, Aukema, one of the authors, tweeted that the Dutch reporting system was unlike most in the EU by “timely reporting” adverse reactions to the European Medicines Agency, “so theirs is the best data available.”
According to Science, LAREB official van Puijenbroek wrote to Vaccines the day after the paper’s publication, making the same arguments that appeared in the retraction. He did not respond to an email from Just the News asking for that message, which does not appear to be posted anywhere.
In the statement the paper’s authors gave Retraction Watch, they challenged van Puijenbroek’s characterization of the register’s data.
Just this spring, the LAREB official told the journal Regulatory Science that the Dutch register received more than half of its 34,000 adverse-reaction drug reports in 2019 from “marketing authorisation holders.” The rest came from “healthcare professionals and patients.”
The majority of reports came from parties who “by law, are required to report,” and LAREB says it checks all submissions for “completeness and possible ambiguities,” requesting additional information if necessary. If it’s treating COVID-19 vaccine reports differently, it should say so, the authors wrote.
Treating all deaths following COVID-19 infection as virus-caused deaths, which created a staggering official death toll, has given rise to “an unprecedented sloppy regulation process” that allowed the novel mRNA vaccine technology to be widely tested in humans for the first time, they wrote.
Van Puijenbroek is tacitly arguing that “the largest vaccination experiment in the history of medicine cannot be assessed for safety and unforeseeable toxicities,” but the authors believe “it is mandatory” to use existing “imperfect data” to gauge vaccine safety.
To conclusively end this debate, governments or “university consortia” should set up a transparent “systematic observational post-marketing surveillance study” across a large group of vaccinated people, they said.
mRNA technology pioneer blasts Big Tech censorship
Dr. Malone’s LinkedIn account was deleted
By Christina Maas | Reclaim the Net | July 2, 2021
Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA technology, is being censored by Big Tech platforms. According to Malone, the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines carry some risks that are being downplayed by public health bodies and his statements are coming up against ‘misinformation’ policies on many social media platforms.
Malone’s team conducted early research on mRNA back in 1990, showing that nanoparticles could transfect mRNA into cells before Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó worked on solving some of the obstacles in introducing mRNA into cells throughout the 90s.
Malone’s personal LinkedIn account was removed this week without warning or explanation.
“The historic record of what I have done, stated, figured out (and when) etc. over time is a key part of establishing my credibility and track record as a professional,” Robert Malone tweeted Wednesday. “And that has been erased completely and arbitrarily without warning or explanation.”
The premium LinkedIn account for the government and biotech consultancy business he runs with his wife Jill was not removed.
“He was given no notice, no warnings,” Jill wrote in a statement to Just the News. “He has a 10-15 year old account – has never even had a warning. 6,000 followers.”
It appears LinkedIn took issue with a recent post Malone made about Health Canada responding to the concerns he and other experts raised about the presence of the “spike protein” in the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.
The Canadian health regulator warned about a small number of cases involving heart inflammation in young male adults and adolescents observed after receiving the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
In the since-unavailable post, Malone wrote: “This is certainly a big step forward in my opinion – particularly in contrast to the communication (or lack thereof) and denial from the US and other governments. At least we are now discussing the merits and limitations of the scientific data.”
The Microsoft-owned professional networking platform refused a request for comment on why Malone’s account was removed.
This was not the first time Malone was censored by a mainstream social media platform. A few days ago, YouTube removed an episode of the DarkHorse podcast, run by evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, where Malone warned about the spike protein in the coronavirus vaccines.
Following the removal, he appeared on Fox News and claimed that the CDC was yet to conduct “risk benefit analyses” of the vaccines, warning that in young people, the vaccines’ “benefits probably don’t outweigh the risks.”
YouTube demonetized the two channels that broadcast the DarkHorse episodes, a move Weinstein said would affect “more than half of our family income.”
According to Jill, YouTube “seems to be banning any content with him [Malone] in it.” She is of the opinion the platform is targeting her husband for contradicting the narrative by the WHO and CDC, which insist that the vaccines are safe.
According to Martin Kulldorf, a Harvard Medical Professor who was locked out of his Twitter account for a month for expressing skepticism on the effectiveness of masks, such censorship is dangerous.
Speaking to Just the News, Kulldorf said: “Open debate is especially important during a public health emergency when many important public health question[s] do not yet have a known answer.”
He said Big Tech platforms should reinstate all suspended accounts, because “To censor and silence scientists under such circumstances can lead to many unnecessary deaths.”
Judge dismisses Children’s Health Defense lawsuit against Facebook censorship
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 1, 2021
A Northern District of California court has dismissed a complaint claiming that the First Amendment had been violated when Facebook started censoring the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) page.
The complaint was brought against Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and three third-party fact-checkers that the giant outsources to.
CHD, an activist group chaired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., asked to proceed with the case that alleges government-sponsored censorship, therefore making the First Amendment relevant even if Facebook is a privately-owned company. The complaint also cited false disparagement and wire fraud.
The issues that are the subject of censorship concern vaccines and public health agencies, and the plaintiff focused its argument on how the First Amendment was being challenged here by “the authorities openly censoring unwanted critique of its narrative.”
The defendants then filed a motion to dismiss, which Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California, after hearing both sides’ arguments on Wednesday, decided to accept.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
Where it concerns the First Amendment, the ruling states that the allegations failed to show that “Zuckerberg personally” was involved in censoring CHD – clearly, the court does not believe in the “command responsibility” of a CEO.
Next, the US federal government is exonerated, as the judge established that it did not form a “joint enterprise” with the social media company for the purpose of censoring the page.
“Emails between Zuckerberg and Dr. Fauci about a COVID information ‘hub’ on Facebook do not relate to any actions taken regarding CHD’s Facebook page,” the ruling stated.
And Judge Illston didn’t understand some members of Congress speaking publicly about the need for companies like Facebook to censor “misinformation,” including about vaccines, to constitute government coercion – and says she found no evidence that Facebook was pressured specifically into censoring CHD.
Regarding the filing’s count addressing wire fraud, the judge threw the case out saying that CHD had no valid argument either under the Lanham Act or RICO.
CHD sought to link Facebook’s censorship with more than a political or ideological matter, but one of monetary value, effectively accusing the giant of collusion for monetary gains with government’s health agencies, vaccine manufacturers, and the telecommunications industry.
Specifically, CHD has been strongly critical of the WHO, CDC and FCC, accusing them of corruption.
DC AG subpoenas Facebook for data on ALL users that have spread “COVID-19 misinformation”
Unmasking people for wrongthink
By Tom Parke | Reclaim the Net | July 2, 2021
The District of Columbia (DC) Attorney General (AG) Karl Racine, a Democrat, has subpoenaed Facebook for a wide range of records related to “COVID-19 misinformation” on the platform.
The subpoena was filed on June 21 and demands that Facebook identify all groups, pages, and accounts that have violated the platform’s far-reaching COVID-19 misinformation rules.
It also calls for Facebook to release an internal study that looked at vaccine hesitancy among its users. Media reports on this study in March claimed that it showed that non-rule breaking Facebook content may be causing “substantial” harm.
If Facebook were to comply with this subpoena, it would likely impact millions of users. Facebook has removed more than 18 million pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram for violating its COVID-19 misinformation rules and applied warning labels to more than 167 million pieces of COVID-19 content.
The subpoena is part of a previously undisclosed investigation into whether Facebook is violating consumer protection laws.
Racine’s director of communications, Abbie McDonough, told Politico that the investigation is part of an effort to ensure that Facebook cracks down on “vaccine misinformation.”
“Facebook has said it’s taking action to address the proliferation of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on its site,” McDonough said. “But then when pressed to show its work, Facebook refused. AG Racine’s investigation aims to make sure Facebook is truly taking all steps possible to minimize vaccine misinformation on its site and support public health.”
The move follows previous reports of Democrats working with Big Tech to censor content that they deem to be misinformation.
Most notably, a recent lawsuit showed evidence of Democrats flagging alleged misinformation to Twitter via a “partner portal” and Twitter responding by removing the flagged tweets.
Another example of this is Democrats demanding that Facebook and Twitter “address” 12 prominent vaccine skeptics in April. Since they made their demands, four of these vaccine skeptics have had their social media accounts shut down.
Lawmakers have also suggested that the federal government may have “induced Facebook to censor certain speech in violation of the First Amendment” and demanded that the tech giant explain why it censored lab leak theories.
This attempt from the DC AG to identify Facebook users for posting COVID-19 misinformation comes as the tech giant is using increasingly aggressive measures to target people based on the content they share and interact with.
Yesterday, it started asking users whether they’re concerned about their friends “becoming an extremist” and warned users that they “may have been exposed to harmful extremist content.”
And in May, a whistleblower revealed that Facebook is using a secret internal filter to flag “liberty-based” and “religious-based” vaccine skepticism and using a secret algorithm to suppress negative vaccine experiences.
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Argentina’s Javier Milei sells out his country for Israel
- Putting Nukes in Finland Won’t Make Country Safer, Finnish Politician Cautions
- Ukrainian drone strike kills worker at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant
- What the West Hides About Soviet Role in De-Colonization
- Villains of Judea: Douglas Feith
- US pension fund invests hundreds of millions in weapons firms supplying Israel
- US bill to grant Americans serving in Israeli army same rights as US troops
- What a president, a movie star, a congressman, and a cell phone all dared to say
- ‘An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership’: Merz
- Pakistan Throws Open Its Gates for Iran’s Transit Trade to Third Countries
- If Americans Knew
- Palestinians in Gaza Want to Rebuild Food Systems. Israel Isn’t Letting Them.
- Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel
- Sheep Theft Sent Shockwaves Through a Palestinian Village. Then, a 12-year-old Boy Was Shot Dead
- Trump alum helps Israel mount AI influence campaign
- Dispatches From Catastrophe
- Despite Denials, AIPAC Is Now Funding Campaign of Ala Stanford In Philadelphia
- Israel’s neighbors are irate about its treatment of religious sites
- Israel escalates in Gaza: killing, torture, hunger – Daily Update
- Six Months into Gaza Ceasefire, Setting the Record Straight About Aid
- ‘Silent suffering’: Why children in Gaza are losing their ability to speak
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
Aletho News 