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US Report Reveals Push to Weaponize AI for Censorship

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 19, 2024

For a while now, emerging AI has been treated by the Biden-Harris administration, but also the EU, the UK, Canada, the UN, etc., as a scourge that powers dangerous forms of “disinformation” – and should be dealt with accordingly.

According to those governments/entities, the only “positive use” for AI as far as social media and online discourse go, would be to power more effective censorship (“moderation”).

A new report from the US House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government puts the emphasis on the push to use this technology for censorship as the explanation for the often disproportionate alarm over its role in “disinformation.”

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

The interim report’s name spells out its authors’ views on this quite clearly: the document is called, “Censorship’s Next Frontier: The Federal Government’s Attempt to Control Artificial Intelligence to Suppress Free Speech.”

The report’s main premise is well-known – that AI is now being funded, developed, and used by the government and third parties to add speed and scale to their censorship, and that the outgoing administration has been putting pressure on AI developers to build censorship into their models.

What’s new are the proposed steps to remedy this situation and make sure that future federal governments are not using AI for censorship. To this end, the Committee wants to see new legislation passed in Congress, AI development that respects the First Amendment and is open, decentralized, and “pro-freedom.”

The report recommends legislation along four principles, focused on preserving American’s right to free speech. The first is that the government cannot be involved when decisions are made in private algorithms or datasets regarding “misinformation” or “bias.”

The government should also be prohibited from funding censorship-related research or collaboration with foreign entities on AI regulation that leads to censorship.

Lastly, “Avoid needless AI regulation that gives the government coercive leverage,” the document recommends.

The Committee notes the current state of affairs where the Biden-Harris administration made a number of direct moves to regulate the space to its political satisfaction via executive orders, but also by pushing its policy through by giving out grants via the National Science Foundation, once again, aimed at building AI tools that “combat misinformation.”

But – “If allowed to develop in a free and open manner, AI could dramatically expand Americans’ capacity to create knowledge and express themselves,” the report states.

December 19, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

UK’s Online Censorship Law Drives Small Websites to Shut Down

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 19, 2024

The UK’s sweeping online censorship law – the Online Safety Act – that will be enforced from March of next year is already claiming its first victims.

The new legislative landscape in the country is now not providing any kind of safety for hundreds of small websites, including non-profit forums, that will have to shut down, unable to comply with the act – specifically, faced with what reports refer to as “disproportionate personal liability.”

The fines go up to the equivalent of USD 25 million, while the law also introduces new criminal offenses.

Earlier in the week, the act’s enforcer, Ofcom, published dozens of measures that online services are supposed to implement by March 16, including naming a person responsible – and accountable – for making sure a site or platform complies.

The law is presented as a new way to efficiently tackle illegal content, and in particular, provide new ways to ensure the safety of children online, including by age verification (“age checking”).

Opponents, however, reject it as “a censor’s charter” designed to force companies to step up monitoring and censorship on their platforms, including by scanning private communications and undermining encryption.

But another way that concrete harm can be done to the online ecosystem, while declaratively seeking to prevent harm, is now emerging with the example of small and community sites, where those running them are unwilling to take on the massive risk related both to the fines, and criminal responsibility in case they fail to “moderate” according to the act’s provisions.

UK press reports about one of the first examples of this, as the non-profit free hosting service Microcosm and its 300 sites – among them community hubs and forums dedicated to topics like cycling and tech – will go down in March, unable to live up to the “disproportionately high personal liability.”

“It’s too vague and too broad and I don’t want to take that personal risk,” Microcosm’s Dee Kitchen is quoted.

Although the general impression has been that only large corporate services will be affected by the law, in reality requirements and penalties for them are higher, but Ofcom made it clear that “very small micro businesses” are also subject to the legislation.

Microcosm’s decision illustrates what that will look like in practice, as sites – big and small – consider finding hosting overseas, or even leaving the UK market.

December 19, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

How the Captive Media Divides Us

By Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute | December 19, 2024

Most political differences in America today aren’t a result of moral differences, or even policy opinions. Rather, they are generated by divergent media consumption. There’s a huge difference between those whose news comes primarily from the corporate Big Five (CBS-Viacom, ABC-Disney, NBC-Universal, Fox-NewsCorp, and CNN-TimeWarner) and that handful of midsize legacy publications like PBS, The New York Times and Washington Post, than from those who get their news from independent media.

While the independent media can be inaccurate, it’s often when they contradict themselves. On the other hand, when the Big Five and its satellites are inaccurate, it’s typically in union, as a bloc, and always in defense of the Washington establishment.

I could detail one hundred of these blatant lies spun by the unified, corporate media over the past two decades, but for purposes of brevity let’s take a quick look at just ten widely reported lies in three sentences or less (and I’ll include extra links to news stories with the same false take, to total five sources for each story), refuted by primary sources or recanted by these same establishment media organs.

  • Lie #1: Wearing cloth masks helps prevent COVID. “Public health messages should target audiences not wearing cloth face coverings and reinforce positive attitudes, perceived norms, personal agency, and physical and health benefits of obtaining and wearing cloth face coverings consistently and correctly,” the CDC inveighed on July 17, 2020, even though the same report acknowledged “widespread use of cloth face coverings has not been studied among the U.S. population.” The captive media dutifully lectured the public (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about the alleged benefits of cloth masks in preventing COVID, even though the CDC had just re-published a meta-study of all nineteen public scientific studies of mass masking in May 2020 which concluded there was no scientific benefit for mass public cloth masking. And a giant study by Yale and Stanford researchers in Bangladesh in 2021 confirmed the earlier research, finding a very small benefit in wearing surgical masks “but see no statistically significant effect for cloth masks.”
  • Lie #2: Donald Trump is a Russian spy. “A New Report Adds Evidence That Trump Was a Russian Asset,” a Slate.com headline blared in 2021, adding in the subtitle, “He helped Putin manipulate the U.S. election in 2020, as he did in 2016” (2, 3, 4, 5). But the reality is that the Durham Report of the special prosecutor concluded on May 12, 2023 that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation” and found the entire affair was devoid of evidence and had been a joint operation between the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and friendly senior FBI officials, spread by a compliant media.
  • Lie #3: COVID vaccines have no serious side effects. “No serious safety concerns were found in the clinical trials of the vaccines that have been authorized for use in the United States,” FactCheck.org claimed on March 4, 2021 (2, 3, 4, 5), but within months the same “fact-checker” site had amended its claim to include deadly reactions in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (later pulled from the market for these reasons) and several serious side effects including myocarditis from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Likewise, the CDC has now published a long list of side effects, including myocarditis, pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, and anaphylaxis.
  • Lie #4: Russia put bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. “American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan—including targeting American troops,” New York Times reporter Charlie Savage claimed on June 26, 2020, in the heat of the election campaign, adding that President Trump “has yet to authorize any step” to counter it (2, 3, 4, 5). But, after the election, even NBC News admitted the whole story was fake from the beginning, as did other establishment-controlled outlets that echoed Biden administration admissions of the lack of proof for the highly politicized claim.
  • Lie #5: Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter,” Politico claimed of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, “outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation’” (2, 3, 4, 5). But the reality is the FBI testified under oath that the laptop story, which was suppressed on Facebook, Twitter and other social media before the election, was legitimate all along. And a congressional investigation revealed the “Russian disinformation” story was a result of the Joe Biden presidential campaign colluding with senior CIA officials.
  • Lie #6: Donald Trump said there were “good people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally. “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides’” blared the headline in The Atlantic, adding “The president backtracked from his remarks on Charlottesville just a day earlier” (2, 3, 4, 5). Even the fact-checkers observed this claim that Trump’s “both sides” quote was false from the start, and that the “both sides” quote was about a totally different topic, though establishment organs continue to repeat the lie to this day.
  • Lie #7: Donald Trump said Liz Cheney should face a firing squad. “Now he’s talking about a firing squad,” Joe Scarborough ranted on MSNBC, on November 4, 2024, “for a Republican who is long ranked as one of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, DC” (2, 3, 4, 5). But Trump did no such thing. He simply called former Congresswoman Cheney a chicken-hawk, saying she’d have a less bellicose worldview if she were on the front lines. This is why the fact-check sites quickly called out this lie, and even uber chicken-hawk Jonah Goldberg had to recant the same claim as Scarborough.
  • Lie #8: Hamas decapitated dozens of babies on October 7. “Dozens of babies were reportedly found dead, including some that had been beheaded,” NBC reported, “in an Israeli kibbutz Tuesday after the terrorist organization Hamas stormed the community” (2, 3, 4, 5). The reality that emerged from the widely spread story of Israeli propaganda was that no babies were beheaded, according to a France 24 investigation that looked through the names of the victims of the terrorist attack several weeks later, though one ten-month-old baby was killed by gunshot wounds in the combat crossfire.
  • Lie #9: Joe Biden is in the best shape of his life and sharp as a tack. “F you if you can’t handle the truth,” Joe Scarborough lashed out on MSNBC on March 5, 2024, “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever” (2, 3, 4, 5). Progressive YouTuber Matt Orfalea did a nice compilation of how official Washington dutifully recited the lines from the “sharp as a tack” talking points memos circulated by the DNC. But the reality was admitted almost universally after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with Donald Trump, ending talk about “cheap fakes.” CNN and the Associated Press published stories in July admitting the media ran cover for “forgetful” Biden as they tried to ramp up pressure to unceremoniously dump the winner of all the Democratic primaries that year and replace him with Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in August.
  • Lie #10: Internet censorship was just corporations being responsible. “Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday,” NBC news reported January 8, 2021, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” and not mentioning that the decision was based on extraordinary pressure from the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The removal of the sitting president of the United States from social media and many other prominent people was widely reported as entirely a corporate decision across the establishment media spectrum (2, 3, 4, 5). But the #TwitterFiles revealed these decisions were primarily the result of government pressure and not organic corporate decisions, with the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in Missouri v. Biden that the censored plaintiffs “presented extensive evidence of escalating threats—both public and private—by government officials aimed at social-media companies concerning their content-moderation decision.”

These lies help explain why independent media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, a comedian with a microphone, regularly get more than twenty million viewers for two-hour interviews with few commercials while CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, with their billion-dollar studios and networks, rarely crack one million viewers with their forty-four minutes of content in an hour. The American people no longer trust what I’ve come to label the “captive media,” and consume far more independent media content. The captive media can call Trump a rapist, a fascist, a threat to democracy, and, as the November election revealed, most Americans will simply no longer believe their claims.

And the #TwitterFiles reveal why the media organs pushing official lies are best labeled the “captive media” and not the mainstream media, legacy media or the corporate media. They have been captured by the U.S. intelligence agencies, often with dozens or even hundreds of “former” intelligence officers in place on-air and on staff.

The American national mental health crisis that emerged as a result of Trump’s election in 2024 was entirely one-sided; the people who raged like infants on social media and said Trump voters were horrible people were limited to those who digested nothing but captive Media outlets like CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the censorious Big Tech companies.

Why is it only the Democrats who are saying they can’t have Thanksgiving dinner with their family? Why didn’t Republicans have the same reaction after their loss to Joe Biden in 2020? Although many Republicans who watch Fox News did avoid Thanksgiving as a result of fear-mongering over the COVID vaccine skepticism.

Part of the answer to the question “Why just the Democrats?” is the structure of the media which political partisans consume. Democrats consume media solely within the FBI, CIA, ODNI matrix that the #TwitterFiles revealed to the public and rarely or never encounter media that contradicts the official narrative being sold. Google searches, like Facebook and most other social media, are curated by precisely the same intelligence agencies. So it’s possible for Democrats to live entirely within the captive media echo chamber (even as they earnestly believe they are getting “both sides” by listening to Republican Senator Lindsay Graham talk about Israeli babies being slaughtered on October 7 or former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney talk about Trump as a Putin asset) and assume that anyone with a heterodox opinion gets his information from some sketchy “dark web.” Republicans get a slightly different take with Fox News, and more importantly have trended toward relying progressively less on the captive media.

Republicans and independents hear something other than the captive media narrative.

The captive media echo chamber can occasionally be bipartisan, however. Back in 2020, in the throes of the COVID hysteria, Fox News viewers were also running around like fools with cloth masks on, viewing family members as ambulatory disease vectors, and judging those who took rational risks (or in the case of the experimental vaccine on young people who were getting myocarditis, avoided risks rationally) as bad or selfish persons.

Many Democrats are increasingly engaged in classic cult-like behavior as a result of the captive media drumbeat. “If you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you,” Dr. Amanda Calhoun of Yale University told ABC’s The View, “it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why.” The idea that Democrats should separate themselves from family and friends because they have different political opinions has become widespread in the captive media (2, 3, 4, 5). And it’s part of the very definition of cultish behavior, which includes when “subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends.”

The way to bring your friends and family out of the cult of the captive media matrix is to cut cable television out of your home, and to track the lies of the captive media and discuss them with family and friends as they’re exposed and recanted. Nobody likes being lied to.

Many of these captive media organs are engaging in a campaign against “disinformation” (as a ruse to resume government social media censorship), and this can be used to the advantage of people trying to rescue friends and family from the cult. Explaining in detail how the captive media reliably lies on behalf of the military-industrial-complex, the intelligence community and Big Pharma can bring them out as it has brought hundreds of millions of others out of the captive media matrix already.

December 19, 2024 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook restricting Palestinian news outlets post-October 7: BBC

Al Mayadeen | December 18, 2024

A study conducted by BBC found that Facebook has restricted Palestinian news media outlets, significantly reducing their audience reach throughout the Israeli war on Gaza.

After examining and analyzing Facebook data, BBC found that Palestinian newsrooms operating in Gaza and the West Bank saw drastic drops in online engagement since October 2023, when the war on the Gaza Strip was launched.

Leaks further showed that Instagram, also owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, has increasingly moderated comments by Palestinian accounts during the same period.

Meta, responding to the allegations, claimed that implications that it intentionally restricted “particular voices” were “unequivocally false.”

Given that Israeli authorities prohibited the entry of foreign journalists, only allowing a very limited number accompanied by army escorts, social media transpired as a key medium for those seeking direct information from inside Gaza.

Facebook pages of news outlets like Palestine TV, Wafa News Agency, and Palestinian Al-Watan News—based in the West Bank—have played a key role in providing updates to people around the globe.

BBC News Arabic analyzed engagement data from the Facebook pages of 20 major Palestinian news organizations, comparing data from the year before and the year after the October 7 operation and the subsequent events.

Findings: Palestinian media saw 77% drop in engagement

BBC found that in light of the war on Gaza, audience engagement with the examined Palestinian outliers dropped by 77%.

For example, although Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook, journalists from the newsroom shared data showing a 60% decline in the number of people seeing their posts. “Interaction was completely restricted, and our posts stopped reaching people,” said Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the channel.

Over the past year, Palestinian journalists have expressed concerns that their online content is being “shadow-banned” by Meta, meaning its visibility had been significantly reduced.

Comparative studies with Israeli, Arab media

A comparative study with 20 Israeli news outlets, including Yediot Ahronoth, Israel Hayom, and Channel 13, found that they experienced an increase in audience engagement by almost 37%.

Moreover, it is worth noting that Meta has faced accusations from Palestinians and human rights organizations of not moderating online content impartially. A 2021 independent report commissioned by the company claimed that these issues were not intentional but were due to a lack of Arabic-speaking moderators. As a result, some words and phrases were misinterpreted as offensive or violent.

For instance, the Arabic phrase “Alhamdulillah,” meaning “Praise be to God,” was sometimes auto-translated as “Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”

To determine if this could be related to the drop in engagement with Palestinian outlets, the BBC conducted a similar analysis on the Facebook pages of 30 major Arabic-language news sources based elsewhere, such as Sky News Arabia and Al Jazeera. These pages, however, experienced an average engagement increase of nearly 100%.

In response to the research, Meta acknowledged the “temporary product and policy measures” implemented in October 2023. The company explained that it faced challenges in balancing freedom of speech with its responsibility to enforce its policies, particularly given that Hamas is both US-sanctioned and classified as a “dangerous organization” under Meta’s guidelines.

Meta also noted that pages focusing solely on the war were more likely to experience a decline in engagement. “We acknowledge we make mistakes, but any implication that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false,” it noted.

Leaks: Meta imposes anti-Palestine algorithm

The BBC also spoke with five current and former Meta employees about the impact of the company’s policies on Palestinian users. One anonymous source shared internal documents revealing that Instagram’s algorithm was altered after the Hamas operation, making moderation stricter on Palestinian comments.

The employee stated that within a week of the operation, the code was changed to target Palestinians more aggressively. Internal communications showed concerns raised by an engineer about potential bias against Palestinian users.

Meta confirmed the algorithm change but argued it was necessary to address a “spike in hateful content” from the Palestinian territories. The company stated that the policy adjustments made at the start of the war have now been reversed, though it did not specify when this occurred.

“A lot of information can’t be published as it is too graphic – for example if the [Israeli] army commits a massacre and we film it, the video won’t spread,” Omar el-Qataa, one of the few photojournalists who stayed in northern Gaza, revealed, affirming his and his colleagues’ commitment to continue sharing news from the heart of Gaza.

Engineer fixes anti-Palestine bug, gets fired

Meta’s controversial conduct when it comes to spreading Palestinian voices has been a prominent topic of discussion for years, but more so since October 2023. In June 2024, the tech giant fired one of its engineers for fixing a bug causing the block of Instagram posts related to Palestine.

Palestinian-American engineer Ferras Hamad, who has been employed at Meta since 2021, filed a lawsuit in a California state court for discrimination and wrongful termination, accusing the company of bias against Palestinians. He said the company even deleted internal employee communications mentioning the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and conducted investigations into their use of the Palestinian flag emoji.

The lawsuit further states that no similar investigations have been launched before for employees posting Israeli or Ukrainian flag emojis in similar contexts.

Hamad notes that his dismissal was due to an incident in December regarding an emergency procedure to troubleshoot severe problems with the platforms, known within Meta as a SEV or “site event”.

According to the complaints in the lawsuit, Hamad noticed irregularities in the SEV policies related to restricting content posted by Palestinian Instagram accounts, such as posts being prevented from appearing in searches and feeds.

Read more: Al Mayadeen English unpublished by FB, asserting pro-‘Israel’ bias

December 18, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s secret service urges neo-Nazis to target MP

RT | December 18, 2024

The spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service (HUR), Andrey Yusov, has called on “radicals” to go after opposition MP Yury Boyko for criticizing Kiev’s crackdown on the Russian language and attempts to “de-communize” the country.

Over the weekend, Boyko, who had previously served as the co-chairman of the now-banned Opposition Platform – For Life party, published a video in which he spoke in defense of the Russian language and condemned Kiev’s demolition of monuments, renaming of cities, and the ban on the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The politician currently heads the parliamentary group Platform for Life and Peace in the Ukrainian Rada.

Boyko’s video sparked a backlash from a number of top Ukrainian officials, including the head of the presidential office, Andrey Ermak, who called the criticisms “Russian narratives.”

Meanwhile, writing on Facebook, Yusov claimed that the fact that Boyko was still free was a call for action for radical groups in Ukraine and suggested that the “Derussification, decolonization and decommunization of Ukraine should move so fast that no bastard could even have the time to record a Тiktok.”

Evgeny Karas, a notorious far-right activist and leader of the neo-Nazi S14 group, whose members have a record of harassing minorities and have been accused of high-profile political murders, also called for violence against Boyko.

”Commissioned officers, civilians and demobilized for family reasons, join the squadron of the Holy Inquisition,” Karas wrote on Telegram, calling on them to “roll up their sleeves” and punish Boyko.

On Tuesday, Boyko was summoned for questioning by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), after which he posted another video in which he apologized for his previous comments.

“If any Ukrainians <…> were offended by my words, I want to apologize and say that we must all be united,” the politician said in a video published by the news outlet Strana.

Boyko’s Opposition Platform – For Life party, which was the second largest party in terms of seats in parliament, was banned along with other opposition parties following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. The authorities in Kiev claimed that the opposition had been involved in subversive activities and have prosecuted several MPs linked to the party.

December 18, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

House Strikes a Blow To Censorship in Landmark Defense Bill Vote

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 16, 2024

A new chapter in the fight against censorship unfolded as the US House of Representatives approved the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2025. While 124 Democrats opposed the bill, its passage marked a significant step in addressing concerns over biased media practices and government spending.

Among its provisions, the legislation includes a prohibition on contracts with firms like NewsGuard Technologies, an organization criticized and accused of targeting certain media outlets.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson praised the bill’s contents, highlighting its focus on accountability in government spending and ensuring a level playing field for media voices.

Founded in 2018, NewsGuard claims to serve as a nonpartisan fact-checking organization, rating the reliability of news websites. However, critics argue that its actions reveal a far different agenda. The group has been accused of systematically targeting certain outlets while shielding some publishers from scrutiny.

Its self-proclaimed mission to “promote truth” often directs readers to government-endorsed sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a practice that raises questions about impartiality – especially since it has received funding from government sources.

Breitbart, The Drudge Report, and The Daily Mail are among the prominent outlets that have been ranked poorly by NewsGuard.

Reports indicate that the organization allegedly advises advertisers to avoid these sites, effectively stripping them of revenue. Critics see this as financial censorship—a strategy to silence dissenting voices while funneling resources toward establishment-backed media.

In recent years, these concerns have deepened, particularly following revelations that the US Department of Defense (DOD) awarded NewsGuard $749,387 in taxpayer funds in September 2021.

December 16, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Biden Regime Launches Task Force on Chinese Censorship, Drawing Criticism for Hypocrisy

By Didi Rankovic – Reclaim The Net – December 16, 2024

The Biden-Harris administration has revealed it was setting up an action group to “monitor and address the effects” of any censorship or intimidation of Americans by China.

Signed by President Joe Biden, the memorandum addressed heads of executive departments and agencies, while the task force is to be led by the assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and the director of the National Economic Council.

This move comes after the administration spent the past four years doubling and tripling down on policies encouraging unprecedented censorship at home and being sued and investigated for colluding (through pressure via third parties) with social platforms and other tech companies to do its (unconstitutional) bidding.

Hypocrisy this may be, but that might be the least of the problems with this sudden spurt of activity by an administration that is weeks away from exiting, stage left.

If we choose to forget that many of the censorship and surveillance mechanisms that permeated the soon-to-be former administration’s activities were regularly mentioned by critics as “inspired” by those used by China’s authorities, the question remains: why establish an entirely new “task force” and why now?

The departments and agencies that will be represented at assistant secretary or above level include the departments of state, defense, treasury, commerce, agriculture, education, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, the director of National Intelligence, etc. – plus, “other agencies and offices as the President may, from time to time, designate.”

Opponents of the Chinese authorities and their notorious brand of censorship welcome the move and believe it should be endorsed by the incoming Trump administration, but also – somehow – expanded to China itself.

Declarative statements about the purpose of such “monitoring” outfits are one thing, but recent history shows how far those can veer off course.

One cautionary tale is the Department of Homeland Security’s Global Engagement Sector (GEC) which was set up to direct, lead, and coordinate US government efforts countering foreign state propaganda and disinformation.

What that turned out to be, however, is a weapon of censorship pointed at Americans, that used third parties to circumvent legal constraints and push biased, partisan narratives at home.

December 16, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Canadian Doctor Fights for Free Speech at Supreme Court Over Covid Censorship

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 13, 2024

A Canadian doctor who was censored for discussing Covid topics during the pandemic is taking her legal battle to the country’s Supreme Court, in a bid to have free speech restrictions imposed on her finally removed.

Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill made the decision after the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled to uphold three “cautions” she received for tweets opposing what she considered to be harmful Covid lockdowns, published in August 2020.

These cautions were issued by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) in February 2021. The state’s medical regulator in 2020 warned medical professionals that the opinions they express should be in line with whatever the government or public health institutions decide is the correct information.

That included lockdowns, which Gill openly criticized early on, and continues to believe were ineffective in dealing with the pandemic. Besides her opinion, Gill also offered what her legal counsel says is “ample evidence” to CPSO to support her stance on the ineffectiveness of lockdowns.

As for the cautions, the doctor believes CPSO used them to censor her right to free expression, guaranteed by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Twitter, where she posted her thoughts on the situation developing in 2020, has in the meantime become X, and this social platform is now supporting her by covering the legal costs, as she continues her effort to appeal against CPSO-imposed speech restrictions.

Those costs amounted to $6,000 as the lower court ruled to uphold the regulator’s decisions that targeted Gill in 2021.

Gill expressed her gratitude to X and Elon Musk for the support, and provided links about the details of the case in a post, saying that to “first do no harm” as a physician meant opposing lockdowns – and that this triggered a 5-year “unjust journey” for her.

“The growing overreach of regulators into monitoring the speech of professionals on social media has become a matter of national concern to the public, which loses the benefit of hearing a variety of opinions when professionals’ speech is chilled out of fear of punishment,” Gill’s lawyer Lisa Bildy said in a statement.

According to Bildy, her client spoke against lockdowns and other harmful Covid-era mandates aligning evidence-based concerns and her conscience – rather than obeying CPSO’s “edict” to align with whatever the authorities decided were the right measures.

December 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Canadian mayor fined for LGBT thought crime of refusing to bend over

By Rachel Marsden | RT | December 13, 2024

The mayor of the Canadian township of Emo (pop: 1,204), which borders the US state of Minnesota, has to personally pay an LGBTQ group $5,000 for injury to their self-respect. And that’s on top of the $10,000 that the town has to fork over.

According to official documents, the drama started in 2020 when Borderland Pride, a Canadian non-profit group, requested that the town officials officially recognize Pride Month in June of that year. The town had done so in previous years, but reportedly decided to amend their proclamations policy – which had yet to be adopted when this latest request came through. So the group’s request was rejected in a 3-2 council vote that year.

It’s not like this particular policy amendment was high priority, particularly at the height of the Covid fiasco, since they barely had any requests anyway. This one group alone represented half of all of the town’s requests for declarations, proclamations, or flag displays from April 2019 to April 2020.

Their request for the town to fly the rainbow flag for a week, and to send the group photos of it with the town’s officials for use on social media, reportedly wasn’t considered since the town didn’t even have a flagpole.

So here comes a complaint by the group to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal – which was decided on November 20, 2024.

The role of such tribunals across Canada is to deal exclusively with complaints about discrimination on the basis of prohibited factors like race, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and criminal convictions. Because if actual courts had to deal with things like this, they’d be clogged up like a frat house toilet after Frosh Week. If the complainant can prove that there was at least a 50 percent chance of discrimination on one of these bases, then it can order cash awards and other remedies. So step right up! Take a spin! Win cash and prizes!

In the case of Borderland Pride against the Township of Emo, the tribunal accepted at face value that the council didn’t consider hanging the flag because of its lack of a flagpole. It did however note that the flag could have been “displayed” somewhere else other than on a flagpole. But it stopped short of ordering the mayor to walk around with it like a Superman cape.

The tribunal also accepted that two of the three council votes against issuing the Pride Month proclamation occurred in good faith and were merely the result of not wanting to adopt any proclamations before the new policy governing them was put into place. It was only the mayor’s “no” vote that was problematic.

During the council meeting in question, after discussing what they should do with the Pride flag display request in the absence of a flagpole, but before the vote against the Pride Month proclamation, Mayor Harold McQuaker said, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin… there’s no flags being flown for the straight people.”

Uh oh, here’s comes the forbidden-thinking patrol!

The tribunal ruled that the mayor’s comment was “dismissive of Borderland Pride’s flag request and demonstrated a lack of understanding of the importance to Borderland Pride and other members of the LGBTQ2 community of the Pride flag” and constitutes discrimination.

Suddenly, because of the mayor’s pro-heterosexual comments, it must mean that he hates gays. So it’s decided that “on the preponderance of evidence,” the rejection of the Pride proclamation was, more likely than not, the end-result of the mayor’s homophobia, and couldn’t be because he aligned with the other two Council “no” votes on the need for the policy amendment to deal with it first.

“I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “We just don’t have a flagpole at our town hall,” McQuaker recently told the Toronto Sun. But cognitive deviance is cognitive deviance, and like a colon polyp, best to nip it in the bud so there’s zero risk of it ever potentially developing into systemic cancer.

So here come the experts to tell the tribunal about how malignant this mayor’s thinking already is.

According to Dr. Emily Saewyc, an LGBTQ specialist who testified at the hearing, research suggests that “anti-LGBTQ rhetoric by President Trump, Vice-President Pence, and members of Trump’s cabinet during his presidency visibly increased the amount of hate and violence” towards these minorities. Or, you know, maybe people are just fed up with having special interest agenda shoved down their throats in make-work projects for activists at a time when citizens of all stripes are facing common and federating hardships. She then attempted to draw a parallel with the “homophobic and hateful social media posts about Borderland Pride and the LGBTQ2 community” after the vote – as though people would have been cheering the LGBTQ cause had the mayor not been such a bigot and supported Pride Month.

Right, because the key to people embracing wokeism is just to firehose even more of it into the public domain. Guess she hasn’t heard about the impact on brands like Bud Light and Jaguar after going woke. Or the public outcry after the Paris Olympics opening ceremony featuring what many interpreted as being a tranny wreck version of the Last Supper.

Borderland Pride wanted the tribunal to allow it to choose a week for the Township to have 2020 Pride Month now, and to force it to hold Pride Month every June going forward. It refused. But it did order Mayor McQuaker to attend a sort of re-education camp. Within 30 days, he has to provide Borderland Pride with proof that he’s completed the province’s human rights training course.

McQuaker has basically told the tribunal to shove it, refusing to pay or take the course, calling it “extortion,” according to the Toronto Sun.

All of this is the sort of blueprint that demonstrates exactly how special interest agendas end up hijacking the most basic aspects of daily life, through relentless activist browbeating that has a chilling effect on anyone who fails to passionately cater to their sacred cows.

December 13, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Five Eyes Urges Broader Censorship Under “Protect the Children” Campaign

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 12, 2024

A network facilitating spy agencies’ intelligence-sharing between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, known as Five Eyes, has its sights set on encryption, and proceeding from that, also online anonymity.

Even more online censorship would also not be a bad idea – these are some of the highlights from the first public-facing paper the organizations behind this group have published.

We obtained a copy of the paper for you here.

And Five Eyes is not above promoting its ultimate and much more far-reaching goals by using the good old “think of the children” – the paper’s title is, Young People and Violent Extremism: A Call for Collective Action.

Both it and an accompanying press release choose to consider online encryption as merely a tool used by criminals. At the same time, the paper is ignoring the fact that the entire internet ecosystem, from communications to banking and everything in between, requires strong encryption both for privacy, and security.

But, Five Eyes focuses only on communications, which they vaguely refer to as online environments, and ones that can allow sex offenders access to children, they also mention extremists, and equally vaguely, “other” malign actors.

Since encrypted platforms provide anonymity, the spies from the five countries (who refer to the state of affairs as, “a large degree of anonymity”) don’t like that either – and again link it to negative scenarios, such as “radicalization to violence.”

The paper is not specific on the exact mechanisms that would ramp up online censorship, but mentions both governments and the tech industry; the first category should “strengthen legislative support for law enforcement,” while the other is urged to “take greater responsibility for the harm done on their platforms.”

Gaming platforms Discord, Instagram, Roblox as well as TikTok are singled out as “seemingly innocuous” – but the way Five Eyes sees it, they make violent extremism content “more accessible.”

The “whole-of-society response” is the proposed solution to the problem of radicalization of minors in these countries. And the documents vow the alliance will continue working with “government agencies, the education sector, mental health and social well-being services, communities and technology companies.”

“It is important to work together early as once law enforcement and security agencies need to become involved, it is often too late,” the paper warns.

And so, a network whose members are likely, in one capacity or another, behind many of the existing attacks on online encryption and anonymity – has now come out as the campaign’s supposedly “latest recruit.”

December 12, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Al-Qaeda Rides Again… in Syria

By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | December 11, 2024

As Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Christmas, a hell has been unleashed inside Syria with the seizure of the country by the re-named “al-Qaeda in Syria” now called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Its leader is a former deputy commander of ISIS, Abu Mohammed al-Julani.

While neocons and the mainstream media in the US and Europe celebrate the overthrow of the Assad government – a priority since the Obama Administration – as with previous US “liberations” in Libya and Iraq the outcome is proving to be anything but liberating. Christian churches are being ransacked and believers abused.

Sharia law has been announced by the new justice minister, Shadi Alwaisi.

Public executions of those who oppose the rule of al-Julani – who still has a $10 million bounty on his head from the US State Department even as he is funded by the CIA – have begun across the country. (Extremely graphic link here).

Just today, Christian Churches in Syria were warned not to hold Christmas services, not to hold Christmas parades, and not to even display the image of St. Nicholas! This is what the mainstream media told us was the new “inclusive” government in Syria.

December 12, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

State Department to Shut Down Controversial Censorship Hub but Critics May Call It a Rebrand

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 12, 2024

The US State Department looks set to shut down the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which has for a long time faced accusations of deviating from its stated role abroad, and instead engaging in, and facilitating censorship at home.

This has been revealed in a filing in the Daily Wire v. US Department of State case, in which the latter informed the court that members of Congress were told last Friday about the upcoming move.

However, even though GEC as such is “substantially likely” to cease operations on December 24, the idea seems to be a simple reshuffle – as both the funding and the staff would continue their work in other State Department offices and bureaus.

According to a spokesperson, this development is the result of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) not providing for an extension of GEC. And now the State Department is “hopeful that Congress extends this important mandate through other means before the December 24 termination date,” said the spokesperson.

That mandate, on paper, is supposed to be directing, leading, and coordinating the US government’s “countering of foreign propaganda and disinformation” – in foreign countries. And the State Department continues to maintain that this is in fact the role of GEC and that it is critically important for that work to continue.

But critics say that the office, which was created in 2016, in reality, represents a central component of partisan censorship targeting Americans – particularly conservative and “disfavored” voices.

As evidence of this kept mounting, Republican members of the House of Representatives first investigated the activities of this office, particularly the way it was handing out grants (the suspicion is that GEC “delegated” censorship to third parties in order not to openly violate the Constitution).

Now, House Republicans have decided not to approve the planned 8-year extension of GEC. One of those controversial grants, worth $100,000, went to the Global Disinformation Index – a UK-based group accused of compiling a list of conservative media that advertisers were supposed to boycott and thus deprive of revenue.

But even if GEC will no longer exist as such, the intent is clearly to reassign employees and keep funding their work. What that work will actually be going forward, should depend on the incoming administration’s new State Department.

December 12, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

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