Spain’s Disinfo Crackdown Censorship Trap, Sanchez Faces Backlash
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 23, 2024
Spain is yet another EU country that is coming up with legislative measures which officials say are necessary to combat “disinformation” both on social sites and in traditional media.
Such a plan, consisting of 31 points, has been approved by Spain’s Council of Ministers (the main government body), but the opposition is already rejecting it as a ploy to censor free speech.
“More transparency and accountability” is how Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez would like the measures, which will be debated in parliament, to be perceived.
The debate should be interesting, not least considering that the minority government has come up with the proposal supposedly to tackle disinformation – but in the wake of corruption allegations involving the prime minister’s wife.
The accusations leveled at Begona Gomez earlier in the year led to an inquiry, and now the government is determined to push new measures through the parliament that would stop “the spread of false news.”
And this in particular – and coincidentally? – applies to such news when they concern “public institutions and individuals.”
It seems pretty transparent what prompted all this, but that’s not what Sanchez says he has in mind when he talks about transparency: the prime minister frames the plan as needed to protect both accurate information, and democracy.
And not only that, but make that democracy “freer and cleaner” as the justice minister in the left-wing coalition government, Felix Bolanos, chose to put it. And he may or may not be the only one who knows what that is supposed to mean.
Meanwhile, the key opposition, right-wing People’s Party said it would vote against the proposal, as they believe the entire endeavor has to do with ushering in more censorship.
The plan which Bolanos stated should “restore confidence” in the media can also be read as putting some not-so-subtle pressure on them.
Amendments to the penal code are among the proposed provisions, but also a closer government look into media outlet’s finances – referred to as yet more transparency, this time around revenues.
Reports say that to achieve all this, the Spanish government wants to set up “a special commission to combat disinformation” and, speaking of revenues, another measure is to “restrict the operation of corporate advertising in the media.”
Telegram Will Now Share Users’ IP Addresses and Phone Numbers With Governments in Response to Legal Requests
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 23, 2024
Telegram, the messaging app that once positioned itself as the rebel’s answer to Big Tech surveillance, has made a sharp U-turn on the “we protect your data at all costs” highway. On Monday, the company quietly updated its privacy policy to allow for the disclosure of user information—like those precious IP addresses and phone numbers—to law enforcement, but only, of course, if they present a valid legal request.
As we all know, no one has ever stretched the definition of “valid” to fit their agenda, right?
This revelation comes hot on the heels of a little incident back in August, when Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov found himself in handcuffs, detained by French authorities. What was the crime? Well, it appears Telegram was accused of playing hardball with French law enforcement, refusing to hand over data, leading to Durov’s arrest. It seems law enforcement didn’t take kindly to that level of noncompliance, especially after making 2,460 unanswered requests for information.
The Policy Flip-Flop
The new policy revision is a complete about-face from the one Telegram’s loyal fans were sold on. The old rules were crystal clear. Telegram might give up your details—your IP address and phone number—but only if you were a suspect in a terror case. The policy even reassured everyone that this kind of handover had never happened.
Not anymore.
Now, Telegram has widened the net. According to the newly revised policy, if you violate Telegram’s Terms of Service—you know, the thing no one ever reads—they may hand over your info if they get a “valid” order. The language is dripping with corporate hedging: “If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you’re a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities.”
Of course, Telegram is still committed to transparency—at least on paper. The company promises to disclose all such incidents in its quarterly transparency reports, which, conveniently, can be accessed via a dedicated bot.
Durov’s Declaration: Aimed at Who, Exactly?
Durov took to Telegram to tell users, “We have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world.”
He continued, “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.”
Durov further added, “These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods. We won’t let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.”
The French Connection
But what really forced Telegram’s hand? Let’s rewind to Durov’s August airport arrest, where things started to get clearer.
After allegedly over 2,400 ignored requests for data, French authorities had had enough. They brought in the National Gendarmerie to get to the bottom of Telegram’s refusal to cooperate.
Apparently, turning over data wasn’t an option until they started detaining CEOs.
Hillary Clinton’s Sordid History of Secrecy and Censorship
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | September 23, 2024
“You could drop Hillary into any trouble spot, come back in a month and… she will have made it better,” former President Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy. But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere.
As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth—or at least to call for hammering government critics. But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for fifteen years.
Last Monday evening, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda”—which she made no effort to define.
Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates. In 2021, she announced that there must be “a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the [social media] platforms currently enjoy.” Hillary made her utterance at a time when freedom in much of the world had been obliterated by governments responding to a pandemic that occurred as a result of U.S. government funding reckless experiments in Chinese government labs. The U.S. denial of its role in the lab leak was perhaps the biggest deceit of the decade but Hillary never kvetched about that scam regarding a program that contributed to millions of deaths. But that wasn’t disinformation—that was public service.
In 2022, Hillary wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.
That awkward fact didn’t deter Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz from declaring last month, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Who knew the Minnesota version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?
After the New York Post shot down Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as chief of a White House disinformation task force to find ways to protect women and LGBTQI+ politicians and journalists from vigorous criticism on the Internet (“online harassment and abuse”). Harris declared that such criticism could “preclude women from political decision-making about their own lives and communities, undermine the functioning of democracy.” To save democracy, the government must suppress criticism of women.
Five years ago, at an NAACP Detroit “Freedom Fund” dinner, Harris proclaimed, “We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.” She did not specify the precise degree of alleged rancor required to nullify a speaker’s constitutional rights. Based on Harris’s prior comments, she will likely sharply increase repression of her critics on social media if she wins in November.
Biden administration censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the Biden administration always “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites” and called for a cessation of all federal censorship tainting the 2024 election. Mace requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies…concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.” At last report, nobody on Capitol Hill was sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for an informative White House response.
Hillary’s own career exemplifies a political elitist righteously blindfolding all other Americans.
When she was secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to handle her official email. The State Department ignored seventeen FOIA requests for her emails and said it needed seventy-five years to comply with a FOIA request for Hillary’s aides’ emails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged off Hillary’s aides using a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails under subpoena by a congressional committee. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email coverup “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” An Inspector General report slammed FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG report “questioned whether the use of a subpoena or search warrant might have encouraged Clinton, her lawyers… or others to search harder for the missing devices (containing email), or ensured that they were being honest that they could not find them.” The FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton vivified how far federal law enforcement will twist the law to absolve the nation’s political elite, or at least those tied to the Democratic Party.
During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department gave grants to promote investigative journalism in numerous developing nations as part of its “good governance” programs. But exposing abuses was only a virtue outside U.S. territorial limits. Clinton vigorously covered up debacles in the $200 billion in foreign aid she shoveled out. From 2011 onward, AID’s acting inspector general massively deleted information on foreign aid debacles in audit reports, as The Washington Post reported in 2014. Clinton’s machinations helped delude Washington policymakers and Congress about the profound failures of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former secretary of State. Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.
Hillary believes that the lesson of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is that good citizens should shut up and grovel. In her 2017 memoir, Hillary claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed the peril of critics who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.” Did Hillary think Orwell dedicated the novel to Stalin? Hillary’s book noted that the regime in Orwell’s novel had physically tortured its victims to delude them. Hillary is comparatively humane, since she only wants to leave people forever in the dark—well, except for the scumbags who undermine the official storyline.
Hillary was a key player in the Barack Obama administration that believed that Americans had no right to learn the facts of the torture committed by the CIA after 9/11. When she was secretary of State in 2012, she declared, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.” But the more secrets politicians keep, the less trust they deserve.
Hillary’s vision of democracy permits only token interference by underlings. She believes that poohbahs like her have the right to rig elections to sanctify their power. In 2015, when she was running for the presidency, she condemned voter identification requirements as part of a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people.” A Washington Post headline aptly summarized her message: “Hillary Clinton Declares War on Voter ID.” This is the bargain Hillary offered; voters didn’t have to identify themselves and she didn’t disclose what she did in office. Subsequent Democratic Party attacks on Voter ID were more successful, leading to sixty million ballots for Biden, millions of which were counted but not verified.
To sanctify censorship, Hillary is again invoking the Russian peril. A 316-page report last year by Special Counsel John Durham noted that in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence.”
The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign.
Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers. The Federal Election Commission last year levied a $113,000 fine on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump campaign officials.
In Hillary’s new improved version of the Constitution, there is no free speech for “deplorables”—the vast swath of Americans she openly condemned in 2016. But this is the same mindset being shown by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Harris has scorned almost every opportunity to explain how she would use the power she is seeking to capture over American citizens. Instead, she is entitled to the Oval Office by acclamation of the mainstream media and all decent folks—or at least those who drive electric vehicles and donate to her campaign.
Is “disinformation” becoming simply another stick for rulers to use to flog uppity citizens? Denouncing disinformation sounds better than “shut up, peasants!” But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power and can persecute citizen who expose their abuses, how in Hades can American freedom survive? How can we permit our rulers to selectively squelch citizens based on alleged hateful comments when, as historian Henry Adams pointed out a century ago, politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
Ambitious politicians never lack pious pretenses for destroying freedom. But will censorship by the Biden administration steal the 2024 election for Harris? Unfortunately, according to Hillary Clinton, you are not worthy of knowing the answer.
TikTok Likely Coerced Into Scrubbing Sputnik Ahead of Pivotal US Vote to ‘Get Feds Off Their Back’
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 21.09.2024
Hugely popular video-sharing platform TikTak removed Sputnik International’s account without warning on Saturday, providing no explanation for its decision. Sputnik asked a leading US military and intelligence analyst and former Washington insider about the likely motive of the move.
While it has no legal leg to stand on and an utter lack of domestic support for a ban on TikTok, what the US State Department does have is “unlimited resources with which to prosecute TikTok as a company,” and the latter may have chosen to cooperate with the state by scrubbing Sputnik’s channel to try to “get the feds off their backs,” retired Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik.
“Of course, the better choice for Americans would be for TikTok to refuse to cooperate, forcing the federal government’s hand. If the incredibly popular and useful TikTok were to be banned in response to their refusal to remove selected overseas media, it would wake up the masses to the diminished state of their liberty,” she suggested.
Citing the ability of alternative news sources to break through establishment narratives using social media, including to provide an alternative, outsider’s take on US politics and candidates’ respective foreign policy positions, Kwiatkowski predicted that “any reversal of this unwarranted ban” on Sputnik will happen only after the vote, with the restrictions thus serving as “a direct example of the DoJ interfering with the election, and undermining the concept of an informed citizenry prior to an election.”
The deep state needs total “hegemony in the information arena, just as with financial and military power,” Kwiatkowski explained. “The US leadership team believes they can manage all narratives, and limit the flow of evidence that contradicts the current narrative. Domestically, this has worked well, as we saw with the instant domestic media reversal on the health and performance of Joe Biden. Internationally, this control is more of a challenge.”
Furthermore, the state actually has little choice but to continue its attempts to control the narrative and suppress the harmful impacts of its actions both at home and abroad, according to the observer, since the United States today is more and more coming to resemble a “failed state” – suffering from ballooning debt, an electoral system and government lacking transparency, and a leadership taking huge risks with the economy and Americans’ security through their foreign and domestic policies.
“Lastly, the CIA and the surveillance sector of government, which has long specialized in the manipulation of information abroad, and to a significant extent domestically, is more powerful than ever. Its world very much requires the suppression of information and the shaping of ‘truth’ in order to ‘succeed’,” Kwiatkowski stressed.
The federal government and the Justice Department operate using a legally dubious, unwritten code of conduct, Kwiatkowski said, pointing out there’s no legal requirement to ban foreign news sources, and that virtually all of the executive branch’s various bans, boycotts, embargos and other restrictions are unlawful under the Constitution.
“Likewise, the modern US surveillance state uses IT, telecommunications and social media companies as their extra-constitutional tool to directly violate the 1st and 4th Amendments that do not allow federal interference in the conduct of speech, movement, beliefs, assembly, redress of government, and security of body, property and communications. This is the world that TikTok and all social media companies operate in – do what the government tells you or face market losses, and criminal prosecution that while ultimately winnable, can bankrupt most businesses,” Kwiatkowski summed up.
How US Deep State Co-Opted TikTok
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 21.09.2024
TikTok wiped Sputnik’s account on Saturday, days after Washington announced draconian new restrictions on Russian media. The company offered no explanation.
The newest round of censorship comes amid the US establishment’s long war against TikTok amid much-touted (but never substantiated) claims by authorities that China uses the app for espionage and influence operations against American users.
The crux of US government claims is that the app sends US customer data to the Asian nation, where it can be seen by Chinese authorities or intelligence services. TikTok says its US data is firewalled from leaving the country via an agreement with American tech giant Oracle.
Joe Biden signed a law in April threatening to completely ban TikTok within 270 days unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance divests from US operations, setting the stage for a legal battle. The measure, packaged in alongside fresh appropriations for US-funded hot spots in Ukraine, Gaza and Taiwan, was rejected by a handful of progressive Democrats and MAGA Republicans, who deemed it a blatant assault on constitutionally afforded free speech.
Senator Rand Paul warned that “once you start objecting to content, what you’re objecting to is speech… The bottom line is, the more information, the better. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. That’s what happens in a free country.”
Congressman Thomas Massie characterized the ban threat as a “trojan horse,” giving the president expansive powers to crack down speech. “Some of us just don’t want the president picking which apps we can put on our phones, or which websites we can visit… We also think it’s dangerous to give the president that kind of power,” Massie said.
TikTok is already banned from use from devices owned by the US federal government, and by numerous state and city governments and universities.
It’s also been banned or restricted in multiple US-allied countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, at least eight EU countries.
Former president Donald Trump kicked off the TikTok censorship saga in 2020 after deeming it a “national security threat,” prompting the company to file a preliminary injunction to prevent such an eventuality. Trump reversed course this past spring, saying banning TikTok would only make Mark Zuckerberg’s “enemy of the people” Facebook “bigger.”
Elon Musk and Brazil: The conflict is more complex than it seems
By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 19, 2024
The suspension of services of X (formerly Twitter) in Brazil, as well as the threat of an $8,000 fine for anyone using a VPN to continue using the social network, has made global headlines. Although there had been previous reports of friction between X and the Brazilian political-legal system, the news of the suspension surprised many people, in Brazil and abroad.
For foreigners, especially those who consider themselves “anti-imperialist”, it is very difficult to construct a consistent interpretation of this conflict between Musk and Brazil because of the expectations critics of unipolarity have developed regarding Brazil under Lula’s return.
These are the same people who were shocked by Brazil’s hostility toward Nicolás Maduro and a series of other inconsistent positions taken by the Brazilian government on the international stage.
But while investigating how committed the current Brazilian government is to the idea of a multipolar order is relevant, the fact is that Lula has only marginal involvement in the suspension of X in Brazil.
First of all, how is this issue being framed by both sides of the dispute? Generally, the issue of “X” in Brazil is being treated as a conflict between “respect for the law” versus “freedom of expression.” It is difficult to take this framing seriously for a number of reasons.
X, under Elon Musk, has consistently censored or reduced the reach of pro-Palestinian accounts since Musk’s visit to Israel. If X is not like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or the newer BlueSky, it clearly cannot be seen as a bastion of free speech.
On the other side, however, the situation is also a bit more complex than simply the duty of X to comply with Brazilian laws. Elon Musk has indeed raised some concerning points regarding Judge Alexandre de Moraes, who made decisions contrary to Brazilian internet norms and tried to force X to comply with them.
Even setting aside these decisions about social media account censorship, the handling of the X case itself has drawn criticism in Brazil.
The root of this conflict is the fact that Moraes has been leading a criminal inquiry for over five years, now known as the “fake news inquiry,” where he goes beyond the usual role of a passive and impartial judge and actively investigates and judges cases of “disinformation” that allegedly threaten “democracy” and Brazil’s electoral process. The rhetoric is very reminiscent of Orwellian narratives produced in Washington and Brussels.
As the political-legal establishment and its international partners are quite satisfied with the Brazilian government’s current stance on most issues, the main targets of these investigations are figures linked to the opposition.
Thus, in the context of this inquiry, Judge Moraes has ordered the suspension of social media accounts of those under investigation. Such decisions are legally questionable under Brazilian law. First, because the inquiry has far exceeded a reasonable time frame for conclusion and doesn’t appear to have a clear objective. Second, because suspending social media accounts of individuals without a conviction, in an inquiry that seems “endless,” is inappropriate. Third, because the Brazilian Internet Civil Framework, the country’s legislation on internet-related obligations for companies, stipulates that a social media account can only be blocked for specific violations of norms – and Judge Moraes, in his orders to X, never specified the reasons for the suspensions.
These are some of the main arguments, including those raised by Elon Musk, to challenge these judicial decisions.
The situation worsened when Moraes allegedly threatened X’s office employees in Brazil with imprisonment if they failed to comply with his decisions. Amidst this confusion, the Judiciary claims that X’s representative in Brazil has been evading court summonses. On the other hand, there are indications that Moraes’ staff sent the summons to the wrong email address when attempting to notify X.
Nonetheless, these threats explain why X decided to shut down its office in Brazil. Immediately afterward, Moraes ordered X to appoint a new legal representative in Brazil, which is mandatory for companies operating in the country.
Since X did not establish a new representation in Brazil, Moraes ordered the company’s suspension.
The situation would seem more reasonable if Moraes hadn’t also imposed a daily fine of $8,000 on any Brazilians using VPNs to continue accessing the social network. Needless to say, the order was immediately disobeyed by most Brazilian X users, and the Brazilian Bar Association filed an appeal to annul the fine.
The problem with the fine is that it casts doubt on the claim that this is merely a natural consequence of X not having legal representation in the country in accordance with the law. Why, then, impose fines on ordinary users who are not part of the inquiry and were not even notified of the decision (which, again, is unconstitutional under Brazilian law)?
Next, Moraes ordered the blocking of Starlink’s accounts, a company with different shareholders, to collect the fine imposed on X – once again, a decision that violates Brazil’s entire legal framework.
However, the issue transcends the legal debate and refers back to the fact that X is a space successfully used by sectors of Brazilian politics that oppose the “Juristocracy,” as well as the influence of foreign NGOs in Brazil and the current government.
Platforms like Meta, for example, are absolutely controlled by the U.S. Deep State and impose draconian restrictions on anyone who deviates from globalist ideological orthodoxy. Moreover, this may seem incomprehensible and unbelievable to our partners in other BRICS countries, but Brazil does not have an anti-Atlanticist, counter-hegemonic mass media. The Brazilian mass media belongs to an oligopoly that is deeply tied to U.S. media conglomerates.
In this sense, spaces like X represent an “oasis” used by both the right-wing opposition and the anti-imperialist left.
To understand what Moraes and other judges think of this, one only needs to recall a statement he made a few weeks ago: “At the turn of the century, there were no social networks; and we were happier,” said to loud applause from representatives of Brazil’s major TV networks and newspapers.
Naturally – we insist – Elon Musk is not exactly a victim here. He is far from it. For example, it is also true that his Tesla lost contracts to Chinese rivals in Brazil in recent years, which greatly irritated him. It is also true that he believes he can gain greater business penetration in the Brazilian market if Bolsonaro returns to power – and he openly uses his large presence on X to occasionally boost posts from opponents of the Lula government.
Therefore, the case transcends the superficial duality presented as “sovereignty vs. freedom of expression,” and is more accurately an expression of a dispute between different sectors of the Brazilian elite, both with international ties (let us remember that Moraes was part of the international scheme of Operation Car Wash, whose objective was to destroy Brazilian companies, imprison Lula, and overthrow Dilma Rousseff under the guidance of the U.S. Department of Justice), and both clearly hostile to the project of a new multipolar order.
Silence Speaks Volumes: Biden-Harris Admin Refuses To Comment on EU Censorship Threats
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 20, 2024
The Biden-Harris administration has reportedly sided with the EU against a major US social media company, X, and decided not to (at least publicly) contest the censorship threats against the platform.
This incident involves the now former EU Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton’s scandalous letter threatening X and owner Elon Musk ahead of his interview with President Trump.
Yet another emerging actor here is the US State Department, which, according to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, refused to publicly condemn those threats.
Breton, who was known as a strong proponent of censorship and clampdowns within the EU’s top bureaucracy, referred to the Digital Services Act (DSA) in his letter to Musk in early August, mere hours before Musk’s interview with Trump. Under the (opponents say, censorship) rules, X could have faced anything from big fines to the EU blocking the platform.
According to a report from Breitbart, Jordan revealed the State Department’s stance in this matter in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, where he also claims that Bliken’s department has internal documents revealing communications relevant to Breton’s conduct on that occasion – but it has not submitted them to the Committee.
To remedy that situation, Jordan is now asking that Blinken makes sure “all documents and communications between or among State Department personnel referring or relating to Mr. Breton’s August 12, 2024 letter to Mr. Musk” are made available to the Committee by October 1.
Breton chose to, in a manner clearly biased against Trump, “anticipate” that there may be “incitement to violence, hate, and racism” during the conversation between Musk and the former president, now presidential candidate. And so X was asked to act “preemptively” in order to prevent such – hypothetical – content from spreading in the EU.
Breton’s behavior in this instance can be viewed as a case of “prebunking” – but it was done at a very high level and basically turned into an attempt to meddle in another country’s affairs by muzzling a US presidential candidate, and a US social platform.
However, this instance of meddling from abroad was ignored by the Biden-Harris White House. Jordan points out in his letter to Blinken that the State Department not only had not yet condemned Breton’s actions but also apparently had no intention to do so.
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s silence in the face of Mr. Breton’s threats against free speech in the United States signals to the world that it does not support free speech online and is unwilling to protect American companies from foreign actors who seek to punish their adherence to First Amendment principles at home,” reads Jordan’s letter.
Washington’s new plan to control the Global South
By Anna Belkina | RT | September 20, 2024
When US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced a new “joint diplomatic campaign” to be implemented in concert with Canada and the UK last week, he clearly set out the initiative’s goal – “to rally allies and partners around the world to join us in addressing the threat posed by RT and other machinery of Russian disinformation and covert influence.”
Make no mistake: there is nothing diplomatic in this latest US effort to silence any voice that does not adhere to the Washington- and London-dictated narratives about the world.
The point of all news media is to inform. Any information has the potential to influence people. Thus, the collective West has set out to curtail all potential influence that is not theirs.
Helping hand
James Rubin, the coordinator for the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, elaborated on how this plan would work in an interview with his ex-wife, Christiane Amanpour, on CNN.
“Other countries will make decisions for themselves,” of course, but the charitable, the always-benevolent, the never self-interested American hand will be “helping other governments come to their own decisions about how to treat” RT.
Ah, all those poor, hapless “other governments” that clearly cannot read, watch, think, and decide for themselves. They were just waiting for Big Brother to help them.
What Rubin was really doing was scapegoating RT – and by extension, all other independent voices in what is supposed to be a free and diverse global information space, reflecting a diverse, very complicated, multipolar world – for the increasingly diminishing buy-in of much of the world into Washington’s foreign policies, and propaganda campaigns that accompany them.
As Rubin admitted during his press conference, “one of the reasons […] why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be […] is because of the broad scope and reach of RT – where propaganda, disinformation, and lies are spread to millions if not billions of people around the world.”
Which countries refused to jump on board with the US and NATO support of the Kiev regime and the continuous escalation of the conflict? In reality, it is most of the world, including such geopolitical giants as India and China, who preferred to leave regional issues to the region in question.
Where official positions are concerned, it’s mostly NATO and its cohorts’ one billion vs our planet’s other seven. And while in those seven not everyone in the general population is of the same mind, neither is everyone in the US and other NATO countries.
Yet, due to the decades-long domination of the international information space by American and European mainstream news media (can you believe the BBC is over 100 years old?), many have been conditioned to think of the world – in the sense of who defines the global order, its rights and its wrongs – as the US and its vassal-state allies.
Notably, Mr Rubin specifically referred to Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa as regions where RT must be stopped. In other words, the so-called Global South. What’s got the US State Department so worried there?
RT’s success is Western media’s loss
Western military, political, and media establishments have been panicked over their loss of monopoly on global information in general, and about RT’s growing reach and influence in particular, for a while now. The self-proclaimed champions of free press, speech and thought cannot handle any of that free-thinkin’ they campaigned for.
To wit, have a scroll:
THE FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES, US: “Washington is struggling in the battle for hearts and minds in the ‘Global South’, where Russian propaganda outlets are often more popular than Western media.”
NEWSWEEK : “… it’s in the Global South that Russia has reaped the most significant rewards. The popularity of the Kremlin-controlled TV station Russia Today is high…”
POLITICO : “… many of the Kremlin-backed accounts – especially those from sanctioned media outlets like RT and Sputnik – have an oversized digital reach. Collectively, these companies boast millions of followers in Europe, Latin America and Africa…”
ROYAL UNITED SERVICES INSTITUTE, UK: “Latin America has witnessed a growth in Russian information efforts. Just like in the Middle East, Russia is operating a number of popular media channels, such as RT en Espanol, Sputnik Mundo and Sputnik Brasil, with substantial followings.”
CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, US: “Russia’s […] media presence and influence [in Latin America] are unmatched… The reach of Russia’s technique has proven to be effective … Actualidad RT and Sputnik Mundo have become so mainstream in LAC, that in December 2022, RT Spanish won three prestigious Mexican journalism awards for their coverage of the war in Ukraine.”
WILSON CENTER, US: “Russia has successfully implemented long-term strategies to capture and influence intellectual elites in Latin America.”
ATLANTIC COUNCIL: “Russia has established a significant media and information footprint throughout the [Latin American] region with Russia Today and Sputnik News.”
EL MUNDO, SPAIN: “In addition to hybrid channels, [Russia] uses public companies such as Russia Today, whose propaganda is triumphing in Latin America – the Spanish-speaking version of RT […] is integrated into family daily life from Venezuela to Bolivia.”
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES, UK: “Egyptian media ran headlines and reports verbatim from RT Arabic, […] EU Reporter, an independent media outlet, reported that ‘Russian media outlets like RT Arabic and Sputnik are extremely popular, with RT Arabic becoming one of the most trafficked news websites in the country.’”
FOREIGN POLICY : “RT Arabic and Sputnik Arabic emerged as major sources of legitimate regional news in the Middle East.”
JOSEP BORRELL, HIGH REPRESENTATIVE OF THE EU FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND SECURITY POLICY: “When you go to some African countries and you see people supporting Putin, supporting what Putin is doing in Donbass, saying Putin has saved Donbass, now he will come to Africa and save us.”
ABC, SPAIN: “The Kremlin has tried to increase its influence in the media using Russia Today and Sputnik News. And there have also been collaboration agreements with local media, hiring African journalists and African activists, and at the same time generating news in Arabic, English or French to gain the support of the African population.”
Thank you, thank you very much.
Exporting censorship
Since RT’s launch in 2005, our journalists have brought to light countless stories and points of view disallowed in the Western mainstream. We have built a massive global audience and won the trust of viewers and readers worldwide.
But, despite Western elites’ declarations to the contrary, any voice that fails to fit into the rather cramped echo-chamber they have set up to accommodate supposedly free discourse, is inherently seen as illegitimate. Therefore, it must be silenced.
Which is why, having pushed out official RT channels from Western airwaves and digital platforms, they now want – nay, need and ought – to export their particular brand of censorship globally. They pledge to wage a coordinated campaign to force other nations into following their example, all so that the West can recover its information monopoly. They must “disrupt [RT] activities” everywhere. It is not enough for them to silo off their own people from inconvenient facts and alternative viewpoints. They have the megalomania and the audacity to say that no one in the world should hear them either.
This is especially so in the Global South countries – the ones that the US has gotten accustomed to patronizing, manipulating, dominating, undermining and overthrowing unsuitable-to-them regimes, and outright controlling in any way they could, over the last century.
Welcome to neocolonialism, Taylor’s 2024 Version.
Government folks have also already lined up Silicon Valley wunderkinds – the tech giants that are ever so eager to curry political favor in order to stay on the lax side of corporate regulation – in this endeavor. Meta, which blocked access to RT’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the EU in 2022, has overnight removed RT from its platforms – entirely and worldwide.
YouTube removed RT’s record-breaking channels everywhere that same year, but Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had already worked to “de-rank” RT and Sputnik in Google searches back in 2017.
After all, “RT is the top recommended source for news concerning Douma’s chemical weapons attack, Skripal poisoning and the Syrian White Helmets,” wrote the Atlantic Council in 2018. In 2019, “Bild conducted a test and entered the query ‘Ukraine’ into Google News. Again, among the top ten articles were three from RT Deutsch and Contra Magazin.” When people looked for news, they came to RT.
This could not stand.
A quick aside: despite all the claims by the Americans and the Brits about RT’s supposed attempts to “sow discord” in their societies, the network really should be lauded for bringing people together instead. In the US, where political bipartisanship is a near-extinct species, the Biden administration’s present-day efforts are fully endorsed by Fiona Hill, of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, who argued that “there has to be concerted action against RT.” In the UK, the recently elected Labor leadership has fully adopted their Tory predecessors’ anti-RT playbook.
Not going away
Let me be clear: RT is not going anywhere, in the West nor in the Global South. Our journalists will continue to do their jobs. We will continue to find ways to have our voice heard. Our audiences “of millions if not billions of people around the world” expect nothing less of us. This is our duty to the global community.
As for the global community, where does it stand, in the face of this new US-led campaign?
The Hindu, one of India’s newspapers of record, reported that already “US officials have spoken to [India’s] Ministry of External Affairs about joining their actions against what they call ‘Russian disinformation’, by revoking accreditations and designating [RT] journalists under the ‘Foreign Missions Act’. However, while the ministry has been silent on the issue, government officials said that the debate on sanctions is not relevant to India, while a former diplomat said that banning media organizations showed ‘double standards’ by Western countries… An official said that the matter ‘does not pertain’ to India and pointed out that India does not follow unilateral sanctions that are not approved by the United Nations.”
We are confident that the rest of the truly independent world will follow suit.
Anna Belkina is RT’s deputy editor in chief and head of communications, marketing and strategic development.
They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 11
Everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | September 19, 2024
New Report: State Department Funded Fact-checkers to Censor ‘Lawful Speech’
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 18, 2024
The U.S. Department of State-funded domestic and international fact-checking entities that censored American independent media outlets and social media users who questioned the Biden administration’s COVID-19 and other policies, according to a congressional report.
The report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business stated:
“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech.”
The government’s actions fueled “a censorship ecosystem” that suppressed “individuals’ First Amendment rights” and “the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.”
The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”
The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.
The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to the House report, the federal government “assisted the private sector in detecting alleged MDM [misinformation-disinformation-malinformation] for moderation” and “worked with foreign governments with strict internet speech laws,” including European Union member states and the United Kingdom, to censor speech.
The report determined that the GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy violated international restrictions by “collaborating with fact-checking entities” to assess the content of domestic media outlets.
The “fact-checking” operations targeted independent media outlets, and as a result, “the scales are tipped in favor of outlets which express certain partisan narratives rather than holding the government accountable.”
Whether the State Department’s actions rise to “unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment is currently before the courts,” the report stated.
The State Department and several GEC officials are defendants in Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media to censor free speech.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden, a similar lawsuit that last year was consolidated with Murthy v. Missouri.
The Poynter Institute is a defendant in another censorship lawsuit, CHD v. Meta, that CHD filed against Facebook’s parent company.
NewsGuard partnered with CDC, WHO to censor online content
According to the report, NewsGuard used money it received from the GEC and the U.S. Department of Defense to fund efforts to lower the advertising revenue “of businesses purported to spread MDM.”
“A system that rates the credibility of press is fatally flawed as it is subject to the partisan lens of the assessor, making the ratings unreliable,” the report states.
NewsGuard leveraged taxpayer dollars to develop Misinformation Fingerprints, a product that “catalogues what it determines to be the most prominent falsehoods and ‘misinformation narratives’” circulating online, “essentially outsourcing the U.S. government’s perception of fact to NewsGuard,” the report states.
NewsGuard later partnered with dozens of companies, organizations, universities and media outlets, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General and the World Health Organization (WHO).
“During the pandemic, the WHO enlisted NewsGuard for its input, including regular reports, on which COVID-19 narratives it determined to be misinformation were prevalent online,” the report states. “The WHO then contacted social media companies and search engines asking them to remove this content.”
‘Nobody wanted’ fact-checkers until ‘actual truths started getting out’
Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, told The Defender, “These so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are not in the business of actually checking facts. They are in the business of controlling narratives … Nobody wanted or needed these organizations until actual truths started getting out.”
Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told The Defender the government increasingly relies on censorship to promote its favored narratives.
“They need to institute more and more censorship,” Fitts said. “It’s hard to refute the gaslighting that flows from this imagination factory.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised that the State Department is “working to censor those who disagree with U.S. government policies and their globalist agenda.”
The report recommends that no federal funds “should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press” and that federal agencies “should not be outsourcing their perception of fact to speech-police organizations subject to partisan bias.”
GEC also faces the loss of its government funding. According to the Washington Examiner, “A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC.”
But for Boyle, this is not enough. He said the State Department has, “at a minimum,” committed “the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.”
Censorship ‘a pendulum that swings both ways’
The Gateway Pundit last week reported on additional links between the International Fact-Checking Network, other “fact-checking” firms and Big Tech.
In 2015, Poynter partnered with Google News Lab, which earlier that year, helped establish First Draft News. Active until 2022, First Draft was a consortium of social media verification groups that shared methods for combating “fake news.”
Another First Draft founder, fact-checking firm Bellingcat, also received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.
First Draft was previously led by Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a Brown University professor who, according to “Twitter Files” released last year, advised the Biden administration on COVID-19 “misinformation” — despite having no science or medical credentials.
In 2016, Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network partnered with First Draft “to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the [news] verification process.” Other partners included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, NBC News and BBC News.
In 2017, Google News Lab partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network “to dramatically increase the searchable output of fact-checkers worldwide, expand fact-checking to new markets and support fact-checking beyond politics, such as in sports, health and science.” The following year, Poynter acquired PolitiFact.com.
Google was also one of the original funders of The Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations that developed eight “trust indicators” to help the public “easily assess the integrity of news.”
These “trust indicators” later became “one of the sources being used by NewsGuard Technologies for a new product to improve news literacy,” and formed “a foundation for NewsGuard review development.”
Hinchliffe warned that the beneficiaries of censorship based on today’s “fact-checking” may become its targets in the future.
“One of the problems of censorship that operates under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, apart from stifling free speech and suppressing actual truths, is that it’s a pendulum that swings both ways,” he said. “The people calling for censorship now may be in a greater position of power to do so, but it will one day swing back at them.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
German Citizens’ Forum Proposes Criminalizing “Disinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 19, 2024
A citizens’ council – established by Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser to help combat what she sees as “fake news,” has come up with a number of recommendations, including criminalizing whatever the authorities decide to consider to be the “spread of disinformation.”
The proposal is in line with Faeser’s own policies, which opponents see as strongly pro-censorship (and that includes trying to ban a magazine critical of the government).
No surprise also that Faeser’s ministry is open to the suggestions – a statement said it would be “analyzed.” Furthermore, the Interior Ministry will “examine the extent to which (the recommendations)” can be incorporated into its work.
All this is already being interpreted in the context of the previous conduct of Germany’s government, which critics say is not only free speech and media freedom-unfriendly – but is also, while declaratively fighting disinformation, giving a leg up to those media outlets that actually spread disinformation (the implication being, the kind of disinformation that suits the government.)
In a world where war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc., Faeser’s council’s full name is, “Forum against Fakes—Together for a Strong Democracy.” But it’s questionable how German democracy could benefit from an even more draconian clampdown on speech than what is currently happening.
91 percent of those participating in Fraser’s council (and that’s reportedly more than 420,000 people) have recommended that the ministry look into the possibility of “examining criminal prosecution and/or sanctioning the spread of disinformation.”
The council can be seen as a form of “policy laundering” – where a politician’s own ideas are put through a body said to represent citizens, to then be accepted as supposedly (all) citizens’ proposal.
In order to start prosecuting and punishing people for disinformation, there was no way of avoiding “defining” what it was. The attempt, however, is poor.
“Targeted false information that is spread in order to manipulate people. The aim is to influence public debates, divide society, and weaken cohesion and democracy.” That’s the “definition,” which is alarmingly broad and open to interpretation and manipulation.
Another point that the council’s recommendations make is that punishing people found to be “weakening cohesion” and such is to, basically, subject them to reeducation.
“Deter” and “increase awareness of wrongdoing” is how this is worded. However, observers are not sure such measures can coexist with Germany’s Basic Law and its provisions meant to protect freedom of expression.
G20 Embraces Digital ID Dream While Critics Warn of Surveillance Nightmare
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 19, 2024
The G20 organization, currently chaired by Brazil and recently holding a ministerial meeting there, is wasting no time falling in line with all the key policies advanced by many governments, and globalist elites.
After promising to do its bit in the “war on disinformation” (to the delight of the host, Brazil, whose present government is accused of censorship), G20 member countries “pledged allegiance” to the digital ID and the overall scheme that incorporates it – namely, the digital public infrastructure (DPI).
DPI already counts the UN, the EU, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Gates Foundation as policy backers and vocal promoters. Now G20 ministers with digital economy portfolios have issued a joint declaration to express their “commitment” to both DPI and “combating disinformation”, and there is also inevitably the talk of “AI.”
On the digital ID/DPI front, the ministers speak of “inclusive” DPI, and the same attribute is attached to AI. The declaration “acknowledges” the importance of things like innovation and competition in a digital economy, among other things, at the same time “reaffirming” the importance of digital transformation based on DPI.
Boilerplate remarks are made about transparency and protection of privacy and personal data – but these are the major concerns cited by opponents of this type of scheme, along with the overall fear that they facilitate new, more dangerous forms of mass surveillance through centralization of personal information and tracking of people’s activities.
Referring to digital ID as “a basic DPI,” the declaration further speaks of the Sustainable Development Goals (a UN agenda) and one of its targets to be achieved by 2030 by using digital ID (as a tool of “inclusion”) to provide “legal identity for all.”
Interestingly enough, free speech repression is not the only controversial policy where Brazil seems keen to lead the way; so is DPI, and the digital ID.
During the G20 meeting, Brazil promoted its DPI-related activities, including digital IDs based on biometrics. This policy is explained with buzzwords such as economic growth, sustainable development, and also, “easier access to financial services and government resources, particularly for underbanked populations.”
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From the Archives
Is Israel to blame for the Iraq War?
American Goy | March 10, 2008
I am so tired of this old canard that “Israel had nothing to do with USA’s war with Iraq – in fact, it officially advised America against it”.
Bullshit. … continue
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