Israeli Intelligence Uses Phone App to Troll and Mass Report People Off the Internet
By Eric Striker • National Justice • July 25, 2020
Much has been said in the Jewish media about mysterious Russian trolls influencing elections, but real cyber disinformation campaigns are being organized by the Israeli government out in the open.
A mobile phone app called Act.IL available for download in the Apple store recruits every day American Jews and organizes them in troll operations on social media in an attempt to control, steer and suppress public conversations about Zionism, BDS and Jewish power.
Act.IL’s founder and CEO, Yarden Ben Yosef, served in a “special combat” intelligence unit in the Israeli military. Most of the company’s staff is composed of spies. The program receives joint funding from billionaire GOP donor Sheldon Adelson and the Israeli state.
The app provides users with Amber Alert style pop ups featuring links to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc posts critical of Jews, Israel ,or supportive of Palestinians and BDS coupled with instructions for users to harass, brigade and mass report designated targets off the internet.
After each “mission,” trolls are given points. The most prolific harassers and stalkers are celebrated on a public scoreboard.
British media repeatedly claims Russian trolls are responsible for Brexit and tried to intervene in the last election, but no proof has ever been offered.
Meanwhile, Act.IL users were very active in cyber attacks targeting Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in hopes of undermining the electoral prospects of the UK’s Labour Party.
Neither British intelligence or media appears to be interested in this foreign meddling in their electoral process.
Politicians and celebrities are not the only ones targeted by this cyber warfare operation. Countless American college students, low level activists, and random internet posters who dare question Israel or Jewish power are swamped with state-organized harassment as well. Act.IL trolls even manipulated a Eurovision song contest poll.
Users are regularly instructed to drown employers with astroturfed complaints to get targets in the US and other countries fired.
According to @AntiBDSApp , which reports on the network’s antics, lately they have been bombarding left-wing articles in an attempt to differentiate Black Lives Matter, which Jews broadly support and see as useful, from the Palestinian cause, which they see as dangerous.
A foreign state actor indeed plays an important role in trying to control and influence discourse in America. The Lobby, USA, a heavily censored documentary by Al Jazeera details this web of espionage. Various other programs intended to harrass and terrorize American citizens, like the doxing platform Canary Mission (which puts white nationalists and Palestinian activists on hit lists) work in tandem with programs like Act.IL.
Because it’s Israel astroturfing support for Jewish power, don’t expect to hear much about from “foreign troll” hunters at BellingCat or the New York Times.
Labour letter demands RT UK’s license gets REVOKED in light of ‘damning’ Russia report that gave NO examples or proof
RT | July 23, 2020
An evidence-free parliamentary report accusing RT UK of being an instrument of ‘Russian influence’ in Britain is already being quoted as a pretext to ban the broadcaster, in a letter sent to Ofcom by a Labour shadow minister.
Labour MP Jo Stevens demanded that “Ofcom urgently reviews RT’s licence” and requested an urgent meeting with Dame Melanie Dawes of the regulatory agency to “discuss my concerns about the broadcaster,” in a letter sent Wednesday.
Stevens – signed as the Shadow secretary of state for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport – said the review was needed given the “troubling revelations in the Russia report about the role of RT and Sputnik in spreading Kremlin-backed disinformation in the UK.”
The shadow secretary further claimed that the parliamentary report, released on Tuesday, “sets out in black and white” the issues OFCOM has supposedly already identified with RT, and “exposes the role RT plays in the much wider issue of Russian influence.”
Unfortunately for Stevens, the report does no such thing. When asked to provide an “egregious” example of the alleged Russian interference, committee members were unable to give “any, egregious or otherwise,” as noted by the BBC’s Andrew Neill.
The committee did not even cite any of the British intelligence agencies – indeed, it excoriated them for allegedly refusing to investigate the ‘Russian meddling’ the parliamentarians asserted as fact – but relied instead on “open-sourced reporting.”
In practice that translated to articles published in the media and testimonies from experts such as Christopher Steele of the debunked “Trump-Russia dossier” infamy, or ex-American financier Bill Browder, who’s reinvented himself as a human rights crusader after being charged in Russia with tax evasion.
Democrats in the US infamously blamed Russia for their loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, using Steele’s spurious dossier as evidence. Labour currently holds only 202 seats in the 650-member House of Commons as a result of their historic collapse in 2019.
OFCOM is a supposedly independent regulatory agency tasked with ensuring impartial reporting by media outlets operating in the UK, and this kind of pressure from a political party is highly unusual and improper.
Twitter Bans “QAnon,” But Still Protects the Most Dangerous Disinfo
By Ulson Gunnar – New Eastern Outlook – 23.07.2020
While there are no doubts that the “QAnon” political movement is a purveyor of repeatedly absurd and unfounded claims, “predictions” so inaccurate and consistently wrong that it is difficult to take any of it seriously, Twitter’s move to across-the-board ban not only accounts associated with the movement but any talk of it citing fears of “offline harm” is even more absurd.
CNN in its article, “Twitter cracks down on QAnon accounts,” would claim (my emphasis):
Twitter is cracking down on accounts linked to QAnon, a group known for spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation online.
“We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm,” Twitter’s safety team said late Tuesday in a tweet. “In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service.”
CNN would also note specific measures Twitter is taking (my emphasis):
“We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks,” Twitter said.
While deliberate campaigns of disinformation are almost certainly going to lead people who believe it into making poor real-life decisions that could potentially lead to “offline harm,” QAnon is not the only source of such disinformation nor the most dangerous.
The Most Dangerous Liars are Not Only Safe, They Have Blue Check Marks
Twitter’s concern comes across particularly hollow when considering the US and European corporate media, outlets like CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the BBC, AP, AFP and Reuters.
They and their employees enjoy “blue check marks” handed out by Twitter and proudly displayed next to their names “proving” to others on Twitter that they are verified and “trusted.”
This includes lies and conspiracy theories regarding “weapons of mass destruction” they alleged were hidden in Iraq and required an invasion and subsequent occupation to “find” and “destroy.”Together, these “trusted” media platforms have repeatedly spread lies that have caused very real and catastrophic “offline harm.”
The weapons were never found, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be slaughtered in the resulting war, millions more displaced and the nation ravaged by conflict and instability from 2003 to present day with US forces still occupying the country and these “blue check mark” accounts still promoting the US occupation.
Similar, now verified lies, were used to sell US wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria as well as US-led regime change in Ukraine where the US and European corporate media deliberately concealed the central role Neo-Nazi political parties and armed groups played in ousting the elected Ukrainian government.
Corporate Media Repeats Disinfo While Covering QAnon’s Ban for Disinfo…
What’s even more ironic is that this same corporate media, protected and promoted and now with an even larger monopoly over narratives discussed on Twitter, repeated lies even as it discussed QAnon’s ban.
CNN would claim (my emphasis):
Followers make unfounded claims and then amplify them with doctored or out-of-context evidence posted on social media to support the allegations.
The anarchical group’s birth, and its continued seepage into mainstream American life, comes on the coattails of the Russian disinformation campaign that targeted US elections in 2016.
While the Russian campaign had an apparent objective — influence voters to elect Trump — QAnon is decentralized, having no clear objective aside from its popular slogan, “Question everything.”
The “Russian disinformation campaign that targeted US elections in 2016″ was investigated for years with zero evidence ever emerging that it ever occurred.
Not only was no evidence ever found, but those accusing Russia of election interference were themselves caught posing as Russians to swing US elections. This includes the shadowy “New Knowledge” group who even submitted reports to the US Congress regarding “Russian disinformation.”
The Washington Post’s article, “Secret campaign to use Russian-inspired tactics in 2017 Ala. election stirs anxiety for Democrats,” would reveal New Knowledge involved in interference in Alabama elections.
While the misleading headline claims the interference used “Russian-inspired tactics,” in fact, the Post itself admits in its own article the tactics were simply to falsely accuse Russia of supporting a Republican candidate to poison voters against him.
The article explains (my emphasis):
The document, for example, says it “planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. We then tied that botnet to the Moore campaign digital director, making it appear as if he had purchased the accounts.” Morgan [CEO of New Knowledge] denied any knowledge of the incident involving Russian bots.
During the campaign, journalists wrote stories about Twitter accounts that appeared to be Russian followers of Moore.
Those accounts were later suspended by Twitter. The Post found an archived version of a misleading tweet and also several news reports and tweets by journalists during the Alabama election describing evidence that Russian bots were supporting Moore. The Project Birmingham document cited an article in the New York Post with the headline “Roy Moore flooded with fake Russian Twitter followers.”
Thus, not only was no evidence found that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election, those making those claims and even involved in the investigation were caught openly posing as “Russians” to taint targeted candidates and manipulate voters while simultaneously smearing Russia and adding extra weight to justify sanctions aimed at Russia’s economy.
Here we see the media covering QAnon’s banning, citing their own collection of debunked conspiracy theories, lies that have led to sanctions and conflict that have most certainly created “offline harm” for Russia, its economy and its people.
Should we hold our breath waiting for Twitter to ban them as well?
Twitter Shifting from Social Media to Programed Media
With QAnon purged from Twitter, the way will be paved for Twitter to blanket ban and purge others, not for specific abuses of their terms of policy, but simply for holding or promoting a certain point of view.
It won’t be long before Twitter is entirely dominated by corporate media accounts and ordinary people who listen rather than speak out of fear of being next in line for Twitter’s growing purges.
Social media is clearly being transformed from a platform where people communicate with each other on equal terms, into something resembling traditional programed media where giant conglomerates pick what the public sees, and the public consumes rather than interacts with or contributes to it.
For individuals, organizations and others seeking a social media platform, it is clear Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) have long since become something else. For nations who do not have their own Twitter and Facebook alternatives, the increasingly controlled and manipulated nature of both platforms pose obvious national security risks.
When a platform is purging ordinary people for “disinformation” but providing “blue check marks” to individuals and organizations that have literally lied nations into war and sent hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their graves, it no longer serves any other purpose but as a vehicle for propaganda and propaganda that will most certainly be aimed at these vulnerable nations to cause “offline harm.”
While more traditional armed forces of the air, land and sea are still crucial for a nation’s defense, it is clear that nations now also need to defend their information space. Nations that take this threat seriously will be prepared and able to weather the storm that is clearly brewing. Those that do not, will suffer the fate of others who have faced US-led conflicts, in part, precipitated by America’s and Europe’s control over social media.
Just a glitch? Google hides conservative & alt-media websites from search results for hours
RT | July 21, 2020
Google excluded major conservative and alt-media outlets from its search results for hours, hiding hits for sites like Breitbart and RedState even in searches for the outlets’ names – only to mysteriously revert to normal later.
Conservative sites were in a panic Tuesday morning, reporting they seemed to have been blacklisted from Google. Articles and pages published by PJ Media, Daily Caller, The Blaze, and many other sites were absent even from searches for the publication name, replaced by links to Wikipedia and other sites talking about the outlet in question – usually negatively.
While most of the affected sites hailed from the right side of the political spectrum, leftist sites whose views don’t conform to prevailing orthodoxy also appeared to fall victim to the purge. Mediaite’s Charlie Nash posted a screenshot of a Google search for MintPress News that included no hits from the left-leaning antiwar outlet, while another commenter noted Occupy Democrats was MIA.
Google was quick with the damage control, announcing it was “investigating this and any potentially related issues.” The search giant described the problem as if it was merely an issue with one specific search command rather than a politically-specific problem that somehow left establishment-friendly media alone.
After a few hours, searches were working normally again. However, those affected had their own suspicions about why this extremely specific search plague might have hit “wrongthink” websites all at once.
Perhaps realizing that simply returning the news sites to their rightful place in search results wouldn’t silence critics, Google later released a statement acknowledging “an issue that impacted some navigational and site: operator searches.” However, they denied any “particular sites or political ideologies” were targeted.
Project Veritas, one of the sites affected by the search blackout, interviewed a Google whistleblower last year who revealed the company has multiple “blacklists” for both YouTube and regular web search, one of which includes many of the sites that went missing on Tuesday.
Additionally, internal Google communications from 2016 show employees considered burying or blocking search results from conservative outlets in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s electoral victory, specifically naming the Daily Caller and Breitbart – both of which were affected by the temporary blackout. While it eventually opted to run “fact-checks” next to conservative articles instead, that program was short-lived, having been quietly discontinued after its many shortcomings were exposed by the right-leaning outlets it invariably targeted. The “fact-checks” sometimes critiqued statements the original articles had not even made, and occasionally ran alongside unrelated articles.
As November’s elections loom, Google and other tech firms are likely scrambling to prevent a rerun of 2016. With 88 percent of US search engine market share, Google’s results will figure heavily in the information American voters can access in the next few months.
Calls for Google to put Palestine back on the map
MEMO | July 21, 2020
Pro-Palestine activists have launched an online campaign calling on Google and Apple to put Palestine back on their maps, accusing the internet giants of trying to erase Palestinian identity and changing facts to suit American and Israeli objectives.
“According to Google, Palestine does not exist,” a change.org petition with over one million signatories says.
“Whether intentionally or otherwise, Google is making itself complicit in the Israeli government’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
Google has been replacing the names of Palestinian towns and villages with Israeli names, leading to fears that the search engine is normalising Israel’s planned annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank in line with US President Donald Trump’s controversial ‘peace plan‘.
“The omission of Palestine is a grievous insult to the people of Palestine and undermines the efforts of the millions of people who are involved in the campaign to secure Palestinian independence and freedom from Israeli occupation and oppression,” the petition adds, calling on Google to “clearly designate and identify the Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel.”
Owen Benjamin vs Patreon: Dissident Comedian Set to Deal Massive Blow to Big Tech Censors
By Eric Striker | National Justice | July 18, 2020
A potential mechanism for punishing tech censorship has materialized.
Nationalist comedian Owen Benjamin and 72 of his fans have won a tentative decision under California’s arbitration law, which was amended by legislation signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2019 to put the burden of fees in disputes on the party setting terms.
Prior to January 2020, Patreon’s Terms of Service encouraged disagreements to be settled via arbitration under the assumption that the money and time required would discourage consumers from even trying.
In the case against Patreon, the matter in need of arbitration is related to the company’s abrupt banning of Benjamin’s page for political reasons. Benjamin and his fans argue that the deplatforming amounts to tortious interference in their business contract. Thanks to Patreon, Benjamin cannot comply with his contractual obligation of providing content for money to his followers due to the tech platform failing in its role as financial middleman. Benjamin is asking for $3.5 million in damages.
What is unique about arbitration in California is that Patreon is on the hook for the legal and arbitration fees required for Benjamin and all 72 of the individual plaintiffs. This means they must pay at least $10,000 to each individual complainant, which in total could cost the corporation 10s of millions of dollars regardless of outcome.
Patreon has reacted to this process in an aggressive manner. They could make the whole thing go away simply by reinstating Benjamin’s account, but they decided to counter-sue and filed for an injunction against having to pay the fees for Benjamin’s fans, stating that they are ready to fight to “keep hate speech off the platform.” An article on the leftist click farm Daily Dot gloated about this, perceiving it as a corporation crushing little guys.
A dirty trick Patreon utilized was to change their Terms of Service shortly after Benjamin’s fans contacted them seeking arbitration — a step Patreon demands first be taken before action is brought before mediators. It seems unlikely that this will work.
The Benjamin “bears” — as his fans refer to themselves — were able to retain the consul of First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza, who appeared to defeat the arguments by Patreon’s lawyers in open court. A July 13th tentative ruling rejecting Patreon’s injunction was won. If the decision is made final, it will set a precedent that introduces an enormous cost for companies like Paypal, Stripe and other payment processors with arbitration clauses that like to destroy people’s livelihoods for their political beliefs.
Mike Cernovich has covered the case closely and is optimistic about its prospects. Legal expert Nick Rekieta believes that this ruling could be an historic victory for free speech. Reclaim The Net, an organization that fights for free expression on the internet, has called the arbitration law a “legal workaround for Big Tech censorship.” Aside from the Daily Dot and a snarky blogpost on Patheos, the Jewish media is by and large refusing to even speak about the case even though many tech companies are watching proceedings closely — evidence that they fear the likely outcome.
Countless lawsuits have been filed seeking to counter-attack against highly restrictive, college campus style tech multi-national censorship. Jared Taylor recently wrote a piece describing his attempt in 2018 to sue Twitter over its ban of his organization, citing that it falsely advertised itself as a free speech platform. Taylor’s lawsuit was thwarted in a rare and politically motivated action by an appeals court after initially winning the right to have his case heard.
Jewish organizations will not allow their most powerful tool for stifling debate to be nullified without a fight. There is a strong possibility that if Benjamin and the other plaintiffs are successful, California’s arbitration laws could be challenged by Big Tech all the way up to the Supreme Court.
If this were to happen, the court conservatives — which regularly put the interests of corporate America over the rights of citizens — could use its majority to rule that forcing Patreon to pay arbitration fees is unconstitutional. This is ironic, as both Donald Trump and the Republican Party claim to oppose tech censorship, yet until Benjamin’s lawsuit, no serious move against it has been made.
A final ruling on Patreon’s injunction is slated to be made in the coming weeks.
Bari We Hardly Knew You
Bari Weiss bids The New York Times farewell
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | July 17, 2020
This week’s resignation of neoconservative journalist Bari Weiss from the position of staff editor and contributor on the opinion page at The New York Times provoked considerable discussion both for and against her. Her resignation letter, which was quickly made public, depicts her as a brave non-conformist, a “conservative” among liberals (though she describes herself as a “centrist”), and someone who was willing to write stories that others at the Times would not touch. She was particularly critical of the dominant progressive “group think” at the management levels of the newspaper which created a “hostile environment” that did not tolerate any alternative viewpoints on breaking stories.
The resignation came shortly after the “scandal” at the newspaper that had led to the firing of opinion page chief editor James Bennet in June. Bennet was forced to walk the plank after a piece by Senator Tom Cotton appeared that advocated using military force to put down the unrest that is sweeping America’s cities. “Using military force” is apparently equivalent to “shooting demonstrators” in New York Times-speak, so when Bennett admitted that he had not even read the op-ed, he had to go for approving a piece that “did not meet the Times’ standards.”
Admittedly, Weiss makes some shrewd points about the state of journalism in the United States and how it has become a sounding board for what is appearing on Twitter. To her credit, she has been openly critical of the so-called “cancel culture” which seeks to restrict the free exchange of information and ideas, but she is also very selective about her own record. She claims that she was derided as a “Nazi, a bigot and a racist” because she questioned the reporting on issues like BLM and was not “inclusive” enough. But while she rightly decries what she describes as the tribalism of the corporate mainstream media, she does so without recognizing that she too has her own particular tribal allegiance. She makes a point of implying that she was the victim of anti-Semitism, accused of “writing about Jews again,” without any recognition that she herself has been a strident hardline apologist for Israel and for Jews in general in a journalism world that has been over-populated by mostly liberal Jews for many years.
Bari Weiss’s letter included an overwrought description of Pulitzer Prize winning black writer Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, as “a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati,” suggesting that she does indeed nurture an agenda focused on Jewish-related issues. Glenn Greenwald recalls how she, in 2012, speaking before a conference of the American Zionist Movement, stated that she had dedicated herself to the “connection between advocacy journalism and Zionism.” Greenwald has also documented how she, starting when she was a sophomore at Columbia, was in the forefront of efforts to silence all criticism of Israel, particularly that which was allegedly coming from professors of Arab background. He observes that her objective was no less than “trying to suppress criticisms of Israel from college campuses… Anyone remotely familiar with the wars over the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University, in which Weiss played a starring role, knows that her claim here — that the campaign was just a benign attempt to protect students’ rights — is utterly false. The campaign was designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and its central demand was that those professors (some of whom lacked tenure) be disciplined for their transgressions… That the campaign against these Arab professors was about suppressing criticisms of Israel and intimidating and punishing professors who voiced such criticisms was barely hidden. The New York Civil Liberties Union — historically reluctant to involve itself in disputes involving Israel — strongly condemned the campaign against these Arab professors at Columbia that Weiss helped to lead.”
Given all the pressure from Weiss and her associates, as well as threats from prominent Jewish donors to the college, the university investigated the charges. It found that “… for several years, after pieces appeared in the tabloid press blasting the department as anti-Israel, many non-students, clearly hostile and with ideological agendas, had been attending classes in the [Middle East Studies] department, interrupting lectures with hostile asides and inhibiting classroom debate.” All the professors were cleared of the charges leveled against them and the report concluded that they had been the victims and not the perpetrators of an organized harassment campaign.
Weiss, the epicenter of the campaign of vilification and academic censorship, was furious at the exoneration of the instructors and both held a press conference to denounce the findings while also organizing demonstrations by Jewish students. She complained that the issue of “large scale intimidation of pro-Israel students” had not been addressed.
Weiss was hired by The Times in 2017 around the same time that the much better-known Jerusalem Post and Wall Street Journal alumnus Bret Stephens was also brought on board. Both she and Stephens are unflinching in their support of Israel and they joined a Times staff that was hardly anti-Israeli. The Times for long has been something like an uncritical sounding board for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but recently, it has indeed allowed some pieces by Tom Friedman and others that are critical of the Israeli plan to annex much of the Palestinian West Bank. But the arguments are always framed around the premise that the move would be “bad for Israel,” leaving the Palestinian victims on the sidelines as hapless observers of the deliberations.
In retrospect, it is difficult to understand what the stink over Bari Weiss is all about, apart from the fact that she is clearly engaging in self-promotion to get another job. A quick perusal of the list of her undistinguished NYT articles does indeed suggest that roughly half of what she wrote was either about Israel or Jews. As an editor, she commissioned interviews and op-eds by people that she may have considered either “centrist” or “conservative,” but, again, she, and they, hardly had much impact. Whatever her “new perspective” was perceived to be by NYT management when she was hired is somewhat elusive.
Sure, the print media in the United States is run largely by progressives and is subject to groupthink on most issues, but that has been the case since before Weiss arrived and will continue to be so long after she is gone. And she won’t have to worry about pleasing her key constituency. Bret Stephens can continue to beat the drum for Israel at The New York Times in her absence.
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.
Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist
Mark Jacobson
Retraction Watch | July 9, 2020
A Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million — then dropped the suit — has been ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees based on a statute “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Mark Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.
At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:
It’s not incompetently drafted, but it’s clearly vexatious and intended to silence dissent about an alleged scientist’s peer-reviewed article.
In February 2018, following a hearing at which PNAS argued for the case to be dismissed, Jacobson dropped the suit, telling us that he “was expecting them to settle.” The defendants then filed, based on the anti-SLAPP — for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” — statute in Washington, DC, for Jacobson to pay their legal fees.
In April of this year, as noted then by Forbes, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Carroll Wingo, who has been presiding over the case, ruled that Jacobson would have to pay those fees. In that ruling, Wingo wrote that the Court
finds that the three asserted “egregious errors” are statements reflecting scientific disagreements, which were appropriately explored and challenged in scientific publications; they simply do not attack Dr. Jacobson’s honesty or accuse him of misconduct.
Jacobson appealed that decision, but Wingo upheld it in a June 25 order.
Jacobson could be on the hook for more than $600,000, the total of what the plaintiffs have told the court were their legal costs — $535,900 for PNAS, and $75,000 for Clack.
Paul Thaler of Cohen Seglias, which has been representing Jacobson, noted in comments to Retraction Watch that the judge had not yet ruled on how much Jacobson should pay:
The Court must now determine the level of attorneys’ fees to charge, which ranges from $0 to the amounts requested by the Clack and NAS attorneys (see legal fee requests and replies for arguments in both directions). Once that is done, Prof. Jacobson will decide whether to appeal the questions of whether the publication of false facts with provable “yes/no” answers (such as the false claim that a table has maximum values when it factually has average values) are indeed questions of fact or of scientific disagreement and whether legal fees are allowed in a case of a voluntary dismissal without prejudice.
Despite dropping the suit, and the judge’s ruling, Jacobson continues to insist in comments to Retraction Watch that there were false claims in the Clack et al paper:
This case has always been about three false factual claims, including two of modeling “errors” or “bugs,” claimed by Dr. Clack and published by NAS that damaged the reputations of myself and my coauthors. What has come out is that the Clack attorney has now admitted in a Court document that Dr. Clack now makes no claim of a “bug in the source code” of our model, despite Dr. Clack’s rampant claim throughout his paper that we made “modeling errors.” Dr. Clack has also admitted in writing that our paper includes Canadian hydropower, yet neither he nor NAS has corrected this admitted error in the Clack Paper. Third, all evidence points to the fact that Table 1 of our paper contains average, not maximum values, indicating that Dr. Clack’s claim regarding modeling error on this issues is factually wrong as well. Thus, it is more clear than ever that the three false facts published by the Clack Authors were indeed false facts and not questions of scientific disagreement. I regret that it was impossible to have these errors corrected upon our first request rather than having to go through this drawn-out process to restore the reputations of myself and my coauthors.
Clack told Retraction Watch that Jacobson’s comments were not an accurate reflection of the paper he and his colleagues published. (For Clack’s responses to each of Jacobson’s claims, see this PDF; for our attempts to fact-check Jacobson’s claims by asking for evidence, see this PDF.) Clark said:
We have had to repeatedly defend against this individual who is unhappy that his responses to critique were not well received and many scientists and the public did not consider his responses adequate to explain the errors and implausible assumptions in his original PNAS paper.
Clack also said:
Jacobson sued myself and PNAS for publishing a critique of his work that he didn’t like. He chose not to sue the entire author team, but rather only myself. To get published in PNAS, we had passed peer reviewed, and editorial reviews; one reason it took so long to publish. There was a lot of information in our paper and there were many, many problems (a lot were contained in the [supplemental information]). We had 21 authors who all worked on the paper, checked the working and agreed on its content and conclusions. Jacobson had an opportunity to respond concurrently with the release of our paper. We just noted the content of his (and coauthors’) PNAS paper and showed that there were assumption issues, errors, mistakes and wrong conclusions drawn from them.
Science “should be a platform that all ideas should be critiqued and examined,” Clack told Retraction Watch :
That is why it is a slow methodical process. No one should be above being held accountable for errors or mistakes. Humans are imperfect, and so mistakes will happen, it is the job of science to correct and build from them. If there are critiques people should publish them because in the end it will only slow human progress if they do not. It should be the institutions job to protect those that publish such critiques (which most universities do).
Clack called on Stanford and other universities to pay attention to what their faculty are doing in the courts:
However, further, it should be an area that Universities (such as Stanford) should look into more. They should scrutinize whether academics are weaponizing legal avenues to hold back contrary science to their own work. Everyone has the right to pursue legal claims, but there should be a process set up as university employees that if they pursue it around academic literature or work, they have to get approval from the governing body at that university. Otherwise, there could be academics or others who use legal threats to halt publication of works that might contradict their own.
For me personally, I had no institution to defend me, and I am very honored and proud that Dentons (my lawyers) agreed to help me with my defense, because Jacobson’s filings were substantial in word count.
Indeed, on page seven of her June 25 order, Wingo called one of Jacobson’s motions — filed at nearly twice the page limit the court allowed — a “particularly egregious” violation.
YouTube censors video about daily life for Palestinians
If Americans Knew | July 8, 2020
YouTube does not want American high school students to know the truth about the Israeli occupation of Palestine.YouTube is censoring an eight-minute video entitled “Daily Life in Occupied Palestine.” The video, produced by If Americans Knew, contains video clips of Israeli actions against Palestinian men, women, and children, both Muslim and Christian. It also provides statistical and historical information about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The US gives Israel over $10 million per day.
YouTube first removed the video claiming that it “violates YouTube guidelines.” When this claim was appealed, reviewers at the company admitted that it “does not violate YouTube guidelines.”
YouTube restored the video, but is prohibiting high school students from viewing it, and discouraging adults from watching it.
When people click on the video, they see a black screen with the unusually dire warning: “The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.”
This has caused a significant reduction of views.
If Americans Knew has appealed these actions, writing to YouTube that the video—
“hasn’t been identified by ‘the YouTube Community’ as offensive; the information it contains has been labeled offensive by Israel partisans – that’s very different.
“We went to great lengths to censor all scenes of blood and gore, and even profane language. The purpose of this video is to educate the public about the ongoing situation in Israel-Palestine.”
In point of fact, the video is entirely within the range of footage shown on nightly TV. The only viewers for whom this is “offensive” are the Israel apologists whose lobby enables the violence it contains.
High school students study U.S. History, World History, and Government. They will soon be voters. Many are politically active and volunteer in diverse political campaigns. They regularly see movies filled with violence. There are laws in at least 12 states mandating that schools teach about the Nazi holocaust, an extremely violent episode in European history.
It is deeply inappropriate for YouTube to prevent American students from viewing a factual video about one of the most urgent issues in today’s world, and about a country that receives more US tax money than any other.
It is similarly inappropriate for YouTube to work to discourage adults from viewing the video and thus learning about what our money to Israel funds.
While YouTube, a Google subsidiary, is a private company, its dominance of the video hosting market confers certain responsibilities of fairness on it.
We ask that people who oppose censorship and believe that Americans need to learn facts about this urgent issue tell YouTube to remove its prohibition against students viewing the video, and remove its damaging warning screen.
Please sign this petition and share it widely.
Please also share our blog post of the video and our Facebook post of it as widely as possible.
Lithuania’s Television Commission Bans Broadcasting of Five RT Channels
Sputnik – 08.07.2020
The Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission (LRTK) has banned the broadcasting of five RT channels in the country, following the example of neighbouring Latvia, commission chairman Mantas Martisius said on Wednesday.
“Yes, we can confirm this. The decision will come into force after being published on the LRTK website,” Martisius said.
The ban is applicable to RT, RT HD, RT Spanish, RT Documentary HD and RT Documentary, and will go into effect on Thursday, LRTK chairman explained.
Last week, Latvia banned the broadcasting of seven RT channels (namely RT, RT HD, RT Arabic, RT Spanish, RT Documentary HD, RT Documentary, RT TV), saying they are all owned by Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency Director-General Dmitry Kiselev, who is under EU sanctions. Notably, Rossiya Segodnya and RT are two different legal entities, RT is not chaired by Kiselev, and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan is not under any EU sanctions.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, has slammed Latvia’s decision to ban seven RT channels as a disgraceful and illegal move.
Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu said on Tuesday that the government was mulling the possibility to ban RT broadcasting in the country.
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Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion
By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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