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Columbia University staff removed over use of ‘ancient anti-Semitic tropes’

MEMO | July 9, 2024

Three senior administrators at Columbia University have been “permanently removed from their positions” and remain on leave due to texts exchanged during an on-campus event about Jewish life, the university’s President Minouche Shafik announced yesterday.

The issue in question occurred during a panel discussion in May titled “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present and Future” during which the deans exchanged texts disparaging students’ complaints about anti-Semitism.

Susan Chang-Kim, previously the vice dean and chief administrative officer, was dismissive of the students’ concerns, texting that they “come from such a place of privilege… hard to hear the woe is me.” Cristen Kromm, the former dean of undergraduate student life, used vomiting emojis and wrote, “Amazing what $$$$ can do.” Meanwhile, Matthew Patashnick, formerly the associate dean for student and family support, suggested that Jews on campus were just trying “to take full advantage of this moment. Huge fundraising potential.”

Shafik condemned their comments. In a letter released yesterday, she said that the comments were not only unprofessional, but also touched disturbingly on “ancient” anti-Semitic tropes. “Whether intended as such or not, these sentiments are unacceptable and deeply upsetting, conveying a lack of seriousness about the concerns and the experiences of members of our Jewish community that is antithetical to our University’s values and the standards we must uphold in our community.”

The event took place a month after university leaders called in New York City police to break up a pro-Palestinian protest camp which resulted in 108 arrests. Several students involved with the protest have been suspended and threatened with eviction from their graduate student housing for pro-Palestinian activism on campus.

Shafik described the decision to call in the police as an “extraordinary step” necessary to “support both the right to expression and the safety and functioning of our university” after the protesters refused to disperse.

Pro-Palestinian student groups condemned Columbia for allegedly supporting Israel while ignoring Palestinian suffering, and accused deans of labelling legitimate Palestinian resistance as “terrorism”. As pro-Palestinian protests escalated and Jewish students reported an increasingly hostile environment, Columbia came under growing scrutiny from students, alumni and even the US Congress regarding its response. The university is currently one of many institutions facing a federal investigation in this respect.

July 9, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

EU Commission Urges Digital ID, E-Health Records, and Touts “Anti-Disinformation” Efforts in Digital Decade Report

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 8, 2024

Earlier this week the EU Commission (EC) published its second report on what it calls “the state of the digital decade,” urging member countries to step up the push to increase access and incentivize the use of digital ID and electronic health records.

At the same time, the bloc is satisfied with how the crackdown on “disinformation,” “online harms,” and the like is progressing.

In a press release, the EC said the report was done to assess the progress made in reaching the objectives contained in the Digital Decade Policy Program (DDPP), targeting 2030 as the year of completion.

EU members have now for the first time contributed to the document with analyses of their national “Digital Decade strategic roadmaps.” And, here, the EC is not exactly satisfied: the members’ efforts will not meet the EU’s “level of ambition” if things continue to develop as they currently are, the document warns.

In that vein, while the report is generally upbeat on the uptake of digital ID (eID schemes) and the use of e-Health records, its authors point out that there are “still significant differences among countries” in terms of eID adoption.

To remedy member countries falling short on these issues, it is recommended that they push for increased access to eID and e-Health records in order to meet the objectives set for 2030.

The EU wants to see both these schemes available to 100% of citizens and businesses by that date – and reveals that eID is at this point available to 93% of citizens across the 27 of the bloc’s countries, “despite uneven take-up.”

Still, the EC’s report shows that policymakers in Brussels are optimistic that the EU digital ID Wallet will “incentivize” eID use.

And, the document’s authors are happy with the way the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA) is getting enforced. Critics, however, believe it is there to facilitate crackdowns on speech – under the guise of combating “disinformation,” etc.

The EU calls this, “strengthening the protection against online harms and disinformation,” while also mentioning that it is launching investigations (into online platforms) to make sure DSA is enforced.

And in order to reinforce the message that DSA is needed as a force for good, the report asserts that “online risks are on the rise and disinformation has been identified as one of the most destabilizing factors for our societies, requiring comprehensive, coordinated action across borders and actors.”

July 8, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Former FBI and Twitter Lawyer Jim Baker Joins Election Task Force Advocating for Social Media Censorship

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 5, 2024

From presidential election to another election, to Covid – to another election. That is how members of particular, mostly flying-under-the-radar power centers in the US have been moving over the last decades.

From time to time, however, circumstances demand that they show their faces: one is James “Jim” Baker, a former FBI lawyer whose “censorship portfolio” includes the infamous case of endorsing the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression – while he was on Twitter’s payroll.

And while there – Baker also wanted to know how come President Trump was not censored for a post saying – “Don’t fear Covid.”

Well, Baker also seems to be staying true to himself – unfortunately, his “truth” appears to be to never miss the chance to support the wrong thing (the “RussiaGate” saga happens to be among them). Right now, he has joined something called “the National Task Force on Election Crises.”

It’s a crisis, alright. A crisis of online censorship that can, and does, produce multiple “election” crises and a rapid erosion of trust in legacy media and political institutions.

The group’s parent operation is the Protect Democracy Project.

There’s nothing particularly innovative about the group’s lobbying talking points: remove or downgrade “election misinformation” and make sure removing and labeling content (as false) is done ASAP by social and news media (time is clearly of the essence, at this point…)

As for the electoral process itself – which ended up highly and even dangerously contested perhaps for the first time in US democratic history in 2020 – the group Baker is now affiliated with seems to want the reasons by and large leading to that to remain intact.

Namely, things like “(preventing) cyber or other attacks by foreign adversaries or domestic disrupters, promot(ing) pre-canvassing of absentee ballots” – and working to discourage legal challenges to the election process.

Looks like Baker might be just the right man for the wrong job.

July 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The Supreme Court’s Superb Dissenting Opinion

At least three justices understand what is at stake here

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | July 5, 2024

Three justices of the Supreme Court actually read and understood the record in our case. Justice Alito, joined by Gorsuch and Thomas, wrote an important dissenting opinion. I’d like to share a few highlights here, as it provides a roadmap to ultimately prevailing in our case.

The three dissenting justices clearly recognize that we the plaintiffs were victims of the government’s unconstitutional censorship activities:

Among these victims were two States, whose public health officials were hampered in their ability to share their expertise with state residents; distinguished professors of medicine at Stanford and Harvard; a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine; the owner and operator of a news website; and Jill Hines, the director of a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.

Echoing the district court and circuit court opinions, the dissenting justices indicate the landmark importance of this free speech case:

If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years. Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government, and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts.

Unlike the majority opinion, which took the government’s claim to be combating “misinformation” at face value, the dissenting opinion recognized that much of the speech that the government suppressed was true:

The speech at issue falls squarely into those categories. It concerns the COVID–19 virus, which has killed more than a million Americans. Our country’s response to the COVID–19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic importance, and our dedication to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissenting views on such matters be allowed. I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID–19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value. Some was undoubtedly untrue or misleading, and some may have been downright dangerous. But we now know that valuable speech was also suppressed. That is what inevitably happens when entry to the marketplace of ideas is restricted.

The majority opinion suggested, without evidence, that our censorship was the result of the actions of social media platforms, who may have censored us even in the absence of government coercion. The dissenting opinion explains the flaws with this unwarranted assumption:

Of course, purely private entities like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment, and as a result, they may publish or decline to publish whatever they wish. But government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech, see National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 602 U. S. 175 (2024), and that is what happened in this case.

The record before us is vast. It contains evidence of communications between many different government actors and a variety of internet platforms, as well as evidence regarding the effects of those interactions on the seven different plaintiffs.

Alito focuses on Facebook and co-plaintiff Jill Hines as the clearest example (though by no means the only example) to illustrate the nature of the problem:

Here is what the record plainly shows. For months in 2021 and 2022, a coterie of officials at the highest levels of the Federal Government continuously harried and implicitly threatened Facebook with potentially crippling consequences if it did not comply with their wishes about the suppression of certain COVID–19-related speech. Not surprisingly, Facebook repeatedly yielded. As a result Hines was indisputably injured, and due to the officials’ continuing efforts, she was threatened with more of the same when she brought suit. These past and threatened future injuries were caused by and traceable to censorship that the officials coerced, and the injunctive relief she sought was an available and suitable remedy.

It’s hard to know how much more harm the Supreme Court would need to see before agreeing that at least one of the plaintiffs has standing. These examples could be multiplied. By refusing to examine the record and rule on the merits, Alito suggests that the Court actually provides a roadmap for future government censorship efforts:

This evidence was more than sufficient to establish Hines’s standing to sue, and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.

That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.

Alito then echoes arguments I published in The Federalist following oral arguments, regarding the key differences between newspapers and social media companies in terms of their interactions with government:

Internet platforms, although rich and powerful, are at the same time far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources. If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business. But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U. S. C. §230, which shields them from civil liability for content they spread. They are vulnerable to antitrust actions; indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described a potential antitrust lawsuit as an “existential” threat to his company. And because their substantial overseas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the European Union and other foreign jurisdictions, they rely on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect their interests.

This dynamic sets social media companies up to be vulnerable to government coercion, in precisely the way we argued before the Court:

For these and other reasons, internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability. When Facebook did not heed their requests as quickly or as fully as the officials wanted, the platform was publicly accused of “killing people” and subtly threatened with retaliation.

Not surprisingly these efforts bore fruit. Facebook adopted new rules that better conformed to the officials’ wishes, and many users who expressed disapproved views about the pandemic or COVID–19 vaccines were “deplatformed” or otherwise injured.

Alito perfectly describes how this abusive Stockholm Syndrome dynamic played out between Facebook and the White House:

What these events show is that top federal officials continuously and persistently hectored Facebook to crack down on what the officials saw as unhelpful social media posts, including not only posts that they thought were false or misleading but also stories that they did not claim to be literally false but nevertheless wanted obscured. And Facebook’s reactions to these efforts were not what one would expect from an independent news source or a journalistic entity dedicated to holding the Government accountable for its actions. Instead, Facebook’s responses resembled that of a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster. Facebook told White House officials that it would “work . . . to gain your trust.” When criticized, Facebook representatives whimpered that they “thought we were doing a better job” but promised to do more going forward. They pleaded to know how they could “get back to a good place” with the White House. And when denounced as “killing people,” Facebook responded by expressing a desire to “work together collaboratively” with its accuser. The picture is clear.

Here we have a major social media platform responding as though they are entirely subservient to government interests. The more they try to please the government by ramping up censorship, the more abusive and demanding the government becomes.

To the dubious claim that plaintiffs cannot allege potential future injuries because—on their word—the White House has backed off the social media companies, Alito (in contrast to the majority opinion) calls the government’s bluff:

The White House threats did not come with expiration dates, and it would be silly to assume that the threats lost their force merely because White House officials opted not to renew them on a regular basis.

As Alito later quips, “death threats can be very effective even if they are not delivered every day.”

Drawing an analogy to another free speech case (Vullo) that was heard on the same day as ours, Alito explains:

In Vullo, the alleged conduct was blunt. The head of the state commission with regulatory authority over insurance companies allegedly told executives at Lloyd’s directly and in no uncertain terms that she would be “‘less interested’” in punishing the company’s regulatory infractions if it ceased doing business with the National Rifle Association. The federal officials’ conduct here [in Murthy] was more subtle and sophisticated. The message was delivered piecemeal by various officials over a period of time in the form of aggressive questions, complaints, insistent requests, demands, and thinly veiled threats of potentially fatal reprisals. But the message was unmistakable, and it was duly received.

The Supreme Court majority was ready to knock down ham-fisted censorship (in Vullo) but gave a pass—at least for now—to sophisticated and debonair censorship (in Murthy).

The government’s defense of its behavior included the argument that it had the right to use the bully pulpit to “persuade” social media companies to do its bidding—”the government has free speech rights, too, don’t you see?” Alito sees right through this ruse:

This argument introduces a new understanding of the term “bully pulpit,” which was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt to denote a President’s excellent (i.e, “bully”) position (i.e., his “pulpit”) to persuade the public. But [Rob] Flaherty, [Andy] Slavitt, and other [White House] officials who emailed and telephoned Facebook were not speaking to the public from a figurative pulpit. On the contrary, they were engaged in a covert scheme of censorship that came to light only after the plaintiffs demanded their emails in discovery and a congressional Committee obtained them by subpoena. If these communications represented the exercise of the bully pulpit, then everything that top federal officials say behind closed doors to any private citizen must also represent the exercise of the President’s bully pulpit. That stretches the concept beyond the breaking point.

In any event, the Government is hard-pressed to find any prior example of the use of the bully pulpit to threaten censorship of private speech.

To repeat what I have said many times before: this case is not about constraining the government’s speech—as they falsely claim; it’s about stopping the government from constraining the speech of U.S. citizens.

The dissenting justices argue that the majority opinion applies a “new and heightened standard” of traceability in our case (p.20). Alito explains, again using the case of co-plaintiff Jill Hines, that she clearly has standing to bring the case (and we only need one plaintiff with standing to prevail):

Here, it is reasonable to infer (indeed, the inference leaps out from the record) that the efforts of the federal officials affected at least some of Facebook’s decisions to censor Hines. All of Facebook’s demotion, content-removal, and deplatforming decisions are governed by its policies. So when the White House pressured Facebook to amend some of the policies related to speech in which Hines engaged, those amendments necessarily impacted some of Facebook’s censorship decisions. Nothing more is needed. What the Court seems to want are a series of ironclad links—from a particular coercive communication to a particular change in Facebook’s rules or practice and then to a particular adverse action against Hines. No such chain was required in the Department of Commerce case, and neither should one be demanded here.

Furthermore, the Court’s majority opinion developed a novel, higher standard of repressibility of potential future harms to avoid ruling on the merits of our case:

As with traceability, the Court applies a new and elevated standard for redressability, which has never required plaintiffs to be “certain” that a court order would prevent future harm.

Having established that the Court should have found that we have standing, Alito proceeds to analyze the record on the merits, using the following legal framework:

The principle recognized in Bantam Books and Vullo requires a court to distinguish between permissible persuasion and unconstitutional coercion, and in Vullo, we looked to three leading factors that are helpful in making that determination: (1) the authority of the government officialswho are alleged to have engaged in coercion, (2) the natureof statements made by those officials, and (3) the reactions of the third party alleged to have been coerced. 602 U. S., at 189–190, and n. 4, 191–194. In this case, all three factors point to coercion.

Although the government tries to spin their interactions with social media platforms as fairly benign, examination of the record in this regard leaves no doubt: “The totality of this record—constant haranguing, dozens of demands for compliance, and references to potential consequences—evince ‘a scheme of state censorship.’” Lest there be any doubt in this regard, “Facebook’s responses to the officials’ persistent inquiries, criticisms, and threats show that the platform perceived the statements as something more than mere recommendations.” Alito concludes, “In sum, the officials wielded potent authority. Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Facebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield.”

From here we return to the District Court in Louisiana for trial, where we have an excellent judge (Terry Doughty). We will be granted additional discovery, in which we anticipate getting enough additional “smoking guns” to cross the high standing bar set by the majority Supreme Court opinion. The District court has combined our case with an analogous case filed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is clearly named and targeted in several government censorship missives—so between Hines and Kennedy there should be no questions on the issue of standing, even under the novel and strict criteria that SCOTUS requires in this case.

In other words, we will prevail in the end. I anticipate being back at the Supreme Court in another year or two for the final ruling. At that point, SCOTUS will not be able to temporize or look away as they did this time. And when judges examine the record in our case, they have only reached one conclusion: the government engaged in unconstitutional censorship on a mass scale. And it has to stop.

July 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Advertiser Alliance Members Are Called To Testify After Allegations of Efforts To “Demonetize, and Censor Disfavored Viewpoints”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 5, 2024

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) is back in the headlines big time – what with the recent decision of X to rejoin the group, and now, as anticipated, the US Congress is stepping up its attempts to shed more light on what GARM actually does, censorship-wise.

Once again it is House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan who is trying to hold Big Tech – and in this case, “the advertising industrial complex” as it were – accountable.

GARM is a World Economic Forum (WEF)-affiliated initiative, launched by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA); the latter by its own admission represents more than 150 biggest brands and over 60 advertiser associations around the world.

“Brand safety” is what the group says it is offering to these clients. But Jordan, and many conservatives and media outlets and businesses – allied or perceived to be allied with them – have strong suspicions that GARM can and is being used as yet another avenue of censorship and suppression – this time via actions that result in demonetization or boycott of those who hold “disfavored views.”

Concerning GARM, Jordan started fighting what supporters must see as “the good fight” last year (first by requesting information and then by issuing a subpoena once that was ignored).

Then, this March, the Committee sent letters to five members of the GARM Steering Team including Unilever and GroupM (a media investment group) asking for access to documents and communications that might prove the overall anti-conservative bias executed by the imitative.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Jordan was not in the mood to sugarcoat the issue, as he sees it: “This coordination does not always revolve around ‘brand safety’ and ‘harmful’ content as GARM publicly claims, but instead the desire to censor conservative and other views that GARM members disfavor,” he wrote, adding that this results in content creators losing revenue, in a way that may be illegal and collusive under the Sherman (antitrust) Act.

In late June, Jordan wrote to Unilever again, and the inclusion of GroupM is pertinent given that the March letter mentioned several leading conservative media outlets as alleged targets of this conduct.

The letter is asking top representatives of the two corporations to publicly testify regarding the Committee’s misgivings around their activities.

According to a Committee spokesman’s comments made in March, “everything is on the table” in case of non-compliance with this series of requests – including more subpoenas, and congressional hearings.

July 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

X Re-Joins Pro-Censorship Advertisers’ Alliance

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 2, 2024

Given how X has gone out of its way to reveal the depth and breadth of online censorship via the Twitter Files, this makes for an awkward reunion: the company has decided to rejoin the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

It’s a pro-censorship, World Economic Forum-affiliated advertisers’ group, that achieves its objectives through the “brand safety” route (i.e., the censorship “brand” here would be demonetization). And last summer, it was scrutinized by the US Congress.

GARM is one of those outfits whose roots are very entangled (comes in handy when somebody tries to probe your activities, though) – and the chronology is not insignificant either: formed in 2019 as a World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) initiative, partnered with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

Then came another “partnership” – that with WEF (World Economic Forum), specifically, its Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment, and Sport project – a “flagship” one.

In May 2023, the US House Judiciary Committee wanted to know what exactly was happening here, and whether “brand safety” as a concept, as exercised by these entities, could be linked to censorship of online speech.

So the Committee subpoenaed the World Federation of Advertisers (and GARM), asking for records that might show whether these groups “coordinated efforts to demonetize and censor disfavored speech online.”

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan was at the time concerned that this conduct might have run afoul of US antitrust laws.

For X, despite the strides the platform has made toward protecting users’ speech since the Twitter takeover, the GARM relationship is most likely simply about (ad) money – and one of the several efforts to make the platform profitable at last.

Those who were hoping for a “free speech absolutism” on a platform like this might be disappointed, the Congress might investigate some more; but ultimately, the move represents a “realpolitik-style” compromise.

And so X is “excited” and “proud” to be back as a GARM member. The company’s “Safety” account posted something about “the safety of our global town square” apparently being relevant to this decision, but did not elaborate.

Now listed by GARM along with X are YouTube and Chanel – and, in between, some of the biggest pharma and telecoms out there.

Big Money, one might say.

July 4, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Iranian filmmaker Bashir Biazar released from French detention

Al Mayadeen | July 3, 2024

Iranian filmmaker and musician Bashir Biazar has been released from detention in France and is en route back to Iran, as confirmed by an official from Iran’s Presidential Office.

Bashir Biazar’s detention, which lasted over a month, sparked an international outcry and accusations of political motivations by French authorities.

He was arrested on charges that included “Iranian propaganda,” “anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism,” and alleged social media activities deemed detrimental to public order in France, according to documents obtained by Press TV.

The charges against Biazar were vehemently rejected by human rights activists, officials, and his supporters, who argued they were unfounded and driven by political agendas targeting Iran.

Rachid Lemoudaa, a French lawyer representing Biazar, told AFP that “There is nothing, in terms of law, that justifies this measure. Bashir Biazar expressed himself on his Instagram account, as anyone could do freely in a state governed by the rule of law,” adding that he believes the issue is “political, and politics has no place in law.”

July 3, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

European Council Makes Countering “Disinformation and Hate Speech” Part of Its Strategic Agenda

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 2, 2024

The EU Council has managed to nestle fighting “disinformation and hate speech” between such issues as the Middle East, Ukraine, and migration – not to mention while at the same time appointing a new set of “apparatchiks,” in the wake of the European Parliament elections.

This proceeds from the Council’s 2024-2029 strategic agenda, adopted on June 27. This document represents a “five-year plan” to guide the bloc’s policy and goals.

Under the heading, “A free and democratic Europe,” the document addresses different ways in which “European values” will be upheld going forward. The Council’s conclusions state that in order to strengthen the EU’s “democratic resilience,” what it decides is disinformation and hate speech will have to be countered.

These categories of speech are infamously arbitrarily defined, even in legislation, and habitually used as a tool of censorship – but the conclusions count combating them among the strategic goal of fending off foreign interference and destabilization.

In other words, those individuals or organizations that are found to be “guilty” of hate speech or disinformation might face the grim possibility of being treated as, essentially, a threat to the EU’s security.

Another promise the document makes in the same breath is that tech giants will be made to “take their responsibility for safeguarding democratic dialogue online.”

Does this mean there will be more or less censorship in the EU over the next five years? The Brussels bureaucrats are at this point so practiced at churning out platitudes that, theoretically, this statement could be interpreted either way.

However, in conjunction with the “misinformation” etc., talk, it is fairly clear which course the EU intends to keep when it comes to online freedom of expression.

AI is not explicitly mentioned as a threat (either to the EU or by the EU, as the technology that can be used to ramp up censorship, aka, “combat misinformation”).

However, you name it, the EU supposedly has it: under the part of the conclusions addressing competitiveness, increasing capacities related to AI sits right there with growing defense, space, quantum technologies, semiconductors, health, biotechnologies capabilities – not to mention “net-zero technologies, mobility, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and advanced materials.”

It’s a pretty comprehensive bridge the EU appears to be trying to sell to its member-states and their citizens.

July 3, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Journal Retracts Peer-Reviewed Study Linking COVID Vaccines to Cancer After Reuters ‘Fact Checks’ It

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 1, 2024

The journal Cureus last week retracted a Japanese study that found statistically significant increases in cancer mortality following COVID-19 vaccination, especially after the third COVID-19 shot.

The journal said on its website, “Upon post-publication review, it has been determined that the correlation between mortality rates and vaccination status cannot be proven with the data presented in this article.” This invalidated the results, prompting the retraction, the journal said.

Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., all-cause mortality researcher and former physics professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, who also has published in Cureus, on X called the retraction “baseless.”

“Showing data in support of vaccine-induced cancer is not allowed: burn it,” he wrote.

Other scientists also expressed frustration with the retraction.

“Unfortunately, one more scientific study that challenges the established narrative gets retracted,” Panagis Polykretis, Ph.D., a researcher at Italy’s Institute of Applied Physics at the National Research Council said in an email shared with The Defender. “One more outrageous and unjustified example of censorship takes place!”

The study, published in April, analyzed official Japanese government statistics to compare age-adjusted cancer mortality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022) with pre-pandemic rates.

The researchers found a 2.1% mortality increase in 2021 and a 9.6% increase In 2022.

They determined that age-adjusted death rates for leukemia, breast, pancreatic and lip/oral/pharyngeal cancers increased significantly in 2022 after a large portion of the Japanese population had received the third dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

Overall, they found no significant cancer-related excess mortality in 2020, but a 1.1% increase in 2021 after the rollout of the first and second vaccine doses, and a 2.1% increase in 2022.

Mortality for some cancers increased by as much as 9.7%, according to the study.

The paper also discussed possible mechanisms by which multiple mRNA vaccines could influence cancer rates and called for further research into the issue.

The findings suggested the vaccines may be accelerating cancer deaths in patients with preexisting tumors, according to John Campbell, Ph.D., who discussed the study on his YouTube show.

The paper went through a “rigorous peer review process,” according to Polykretis, who detailed the retraction saga on his Substack, before Cureus accepted the paper on April 8.

Less than a month after the paper’s publication, Reuters issued a “fact check” of a social media post that cited the paper. Reuters called the analysis “flawed” and said the study “assumes without evidence that vaccines are the cause of the cancer death rates they observe.”

The “Fact Check” article also stated the paper offered no proof of “turbo cancers” — a claim the study authors don’t make.

On June 12, Graham Parker-Finger, director of publishing for the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, notified the authors about concerns with their paper, citing the Reuters Fact Check, Polykretis reported.

An “expression of concern” was posted that same day and about a month later the journal retracted the article.

The article has been viewed over 287,000 times.

Polykretis asked, since when does a scientific journal’s editorial board judge scientific studies “on the basis of poorly written, not backed by scientific data and not peer-reviewed fact-checking” articles?

M. Nathaniel Mead is co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper to provide an extensive analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trial data and post-injection injuries. Mead, whose article also was printed and then retracted by Cureus, told The Defender this latest retraction was “unfortunate but also quite revealing.”

He said:

“The Gibo et al. retraction makes it official: Even though Cureus has now published many counter-establishment narrative papers related to adverse events, it is clearly ‘unsafe’ for any authors presenting papers that expose the likely mortality risk of these gene-based prodrugs.

“As you will recall, our comprehensive ‘Lessons Learned’ review and analysis also was heavily focused on the mortality aspect. So that’s where Springer-Nature seems to be drawing the line — after they accept the paper.

“Scientists seeking to publish on mortality-related aspects of the Covid mod mRNA injections obviously need to be extra cautious when considering their publishing options. These weaponized, predatory retractions will likely continue for as long as these products remain on the market.”

Dr. John Adler at Stanford University and Dr. Alexander Muacevic at the University of Munich Hospitals co-founded Cureus in 2009 as a web-based, peer-reviewed, open-access general medical journal with low-cost barriers to publication.

The academic publishing giant Springer Nature bought Cureus in December 2022.

Springer Nature is a publishing conglomerate founded in 2015 through a merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillian, Macmillan Education and Springer Science+Business Media.

The publisher generated 1.8 billion euros in 2022, showing continuous year-over-year growth since 2020.

The Defender asked the editors at Cureus and Springer Nature to comment on the retraction and the allegations of censorship.

Parker-Finger responded, “Concerns were raised following publication, so we undertook a post-publication review, in line with good publishing practice, which led us to conclude that retraction was warranted for the reasons outlined in the retraction note.”

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.

July 1, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Blinken Bets Big on AI to Combat “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 1, 2024

The current US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, has revealed that his department is testing AI-based tools as a way to fight “misinformation.”

In conversation with the State Department’s chief data and AI officer Matthew Graviss, he cited a number of initiatives – such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Washington’s Enterprise AI Strategy as the foundations for the ultimate goal – using AI to “advance our foreign policy.”

The second part of the push to equip the State Department with AI tools is to – “strengthen this institution.”

According to Blinken, his department is a leader within the government when it comes to testing and “harnessing” the technology. Some reports speak about this as combating whatever happens to be considered foreign disinformation.

And while on the subject of meddling, the Washington Times says AI tests are “part of an ambitious media monitoring and analysis project that spans the globe.”

As sinister as that may sound, packaging the message as the need to combat (only) “foreign disinformation” certainly makes the policy more palatable at home, where the department’s past activity features in congressional probes into government-orchestrated online censorship.

This scrutiny is presented as something hindering the Department of State’s “anti-disinformation” work – while the tools now in development are quite openly described as a possible different means “to pursue the same goals.”

Blinken’s remarks reveal how the technology is used seemingly innocuously as a (translation and summarization) tool “in multilateral organizations;” but then he praised the ability of AI-powered tools to make mass surveillance (“monitoring”) cover a much larger number of media, making its scope and scale “vast,” as the report put it.

And also – combat “disinformation” – which Blinken quite dramatically refers to as “one of the poisons in the international system today.”

“We have one program that we’re using that is able to basically ingest a million articles every day from around the world — to be able to do that in a couple hundred countries in over a hundred languages — and then immediately translate, synthesize and give you a clear picture of what’s happening in the information space immediately,” the secretary is quoted as saying.

But given the scale of the operation, and the shortcomings of the current limitations of AI – those in the know might wish Blinken good luck with the accuracy and reliability of getting that “immediate, clear picture.”

However, when the “AI weapon” is pointed at online platforms as a means of identifying and censoring “disfavored” speech, it is objectively more likely to be efficient.

And the State Department is no stranger to such – strange given its mission – activities: after all, it is the home of the investigated-by-Congress and highly controversial Global Engagement Center.

July 1, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

The Supreme Court Ruling Isn’t the End of the Online Free Speech Battle

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | June 30, 2024

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) civil rights group is not giving up on the free speech fight it has been conducting on behalf of the respondents/plaintiffs in the Murthy v. Missouri case. The tactic is now to go for expanded discovery, aimed at demonstrating direct harm caused by government censorship.

A statement to this effect comes after the US Supreme Court voted 6-3 to lift a preliminary injunction that prevented the White House and several powerful agencies (CDC, FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Surgeon General’s Office) from interacting with social media companies by “encouraging” (or coercing) them to carry out censorship of lawful and protected speech.

The ruling is seen by critics and those who brought and supported the case aimed at ending this type of collusion as yet another blow to the First Amendment, and to make things worse, shortly ahead of another US presidential election.

NCLA said that the Supreme Court decision – which overturned the injunction previously ordered by a district court and upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit – leaves its clients “without redress.”

This is despite the fact their original lawsuit had to do with blacklisting, shadow-banning, deranking, account termination, and other forms of censorship, believed to have been done because of pressure coming from the government.

This was happening during the time of the previous campaign and in the wake of the election – concerning, among others, the issues that featured prominently in that campaign, namely those around Covid controversies.

But the NCLA said that despite the Supreme Court ruling which “practically erased the First Amendment and permitted government to co-opt private entities, like social media platforms, to accomplish its censorship aims” – the battle for free speech will continue in lower courts.

NCLA litigation counsel Jenin Younes has told the Federalist Radio Hour podcast that the rights group is not giving up and it has decided to pursue the case on the merits in the district court. “We want to get more discovery,” said Younes.

In the NCLA’s press release, Younes said that the Supreme Court has “green lighted the government’s unprecedented censorship regime, which resulted in the censorship of top scientists like our clients on the areas of their expertise,” adding:

“This decision is a travesty for the First Amendment, for Americans’ rights to free speech, and for the pursuit of scientific and other knowledge.”

One of the dissenting Supreme Court justices, Samuel Alito, expressed a similar sentiment as he warned that the government’s actions were “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”

June 30, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Supreme Court Punts on Technicalities and the Censorship Leviathan Soldiers On

In a disappointing 6-3 ruling the court found that the states and individual plaintiffs lack standing to seek an injunction against the government

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | June 26, 2024

The Supreme Court issued a very disappointing ruling today in our Murthy v. Missouri case. Note that this is not a final ruling, but only a ruling on the preliminary injunction. The case will continue. The key takeaway from the Court was this finding:

Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant.

The Supreme Court punted here, refusing to opine on the merits of the case. The standing finding rests on technicalities that I will do my best to explain. To clarify, this ruling that we lack standing on the preliminary injunction does not mean we lack standing to bring the case to the trial. The case will move to the trial phase at the District Court now, where we will seek additional discovery and continue to expose the government’s elaborate censorship machinery. I hope we can uncover sufficient evidence for the Supreme Court not to continue to look the other way when it comes to a final ruling.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett explains:

Here, the plaintiffs’ theories of standing depend on the platforms’ actions—yet the plaintiffs do not seek to enjoin the platforms from restricting any posts or accounts. Instead, they seek to enjoin the Government agencies and officials from pressuring or encouraging the platforms to suppress protected speech in the future.

But this is manifestly untrue: it was the platforms actions done at the behest of the government. The whole Constitutional problem is one of joint action, where the state forced third parties to censor. I don’t see how the Court could miss this obvious fact, given the evidence we presented. The ruling continues:

The plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of at least one Government defendant.

Apparently, the fact that we are still being censored on several platforms is insufficient to establish this? A related issue is one of traceability: the Court insists that we show that particular instances of censorship are directly linked to particular government actions. But this traceability standard presents an impossibly high burden for plaintiffs’—any plaintiffs—to meet. The government conducts its communications with social media companies in secrecy, and subpoenaed documents tell only a small part of the story—they can’t capture phone conversations or private meetings, for example.

On this standard, so long as the government does not name names of individuals in writing that it wants censored, then the government can exercise broad censorship powers and no one who is directly or indirectly harmed can have any recourse to legal redress. For example, the government could order Facebook and YouTube to censor anyone favorable towards the Great Barrington Declaration, a document critiquing our pandemic response written by my co-plaintiffs Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. So long as those censored were not specifically named by the government, any person on the receiving end of this censorship would not be able to definitively establish in court that their censorship was government-driven.

The upshot is the government can continue to censor so long as the targets are ideas, topics, themes, and not specifically named individuals. In other words, it can do precisely what the First Amendment forbids: content-based censorship.

Try, if you can, to follow the byzantine logic of this judicial reasoning:

The plaintiffs suggest that the platforms continue to suppress their speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure. But the plaintiffs have a redressability problem. Without evidence of continued pressure from the defendants, the platforms remain free to enforce, or not to enforce, their policies—even those tainted by initial governmental coercion. And the available evidence indicates that the platforms have continued to enforce their policies against COVID–19 misinformation even as the Federal Government has wound down its own pandemic response measures. Enjoining the Government defendants, therefore, is unlikely to affect the platforms’ content-moderation decisions.

Translation: even if the government coerced platforms to censor you in the past, and platforms continue to censor you according to these same policies—and without any evidence (just taking the government’s word for it) that the government is not coercing platforms anymore—plaintiffs cannot prove that they will likely be harmed in the future, which is one of the necessary criteria for a preliminary injunction. Translation: they got away with it in the past, and we trust they won’t do it again in the future. Or if they do, you won’t be able to prove they were targeting you by name.

Let me try an analogy here: the government placed its boot on the platforms’ face, and the platforms tried to resist but eventually complied, however reluctantly, as the record in our case showed. Now the government claims it’s no longer stomping on the platforms’ face, which means the platform is free to go against the government’s directives now if they so choose. Forgive me if I think this strains all plausibility.

Finally, for purposes of the injunction at least, the Court rejected our argument, grounded in prior First Amendment cases, that free speech protects the rights of the listener and not just the speaker.

The plaintiffs next assert a “right to listen” theory of standing. The individual plaintiffs argue that the First Amendment protects their interest in reading and engaging with the content of other speakers on social media. This theory is startlingly broad, as it would grant all social-media users the right to sue over someone else’s censorship—at least so long as they claim an interest in that person’s speech. While the Court has recognized a “First Amendment right to receive information and ideas,” the Court has identified a cognizable injury only where the listener has a concrete, specific connection to the speaker. Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U. S. 753, 762. Attempting to satisfy this requirement, the plaintiffs emphasize that hearing unfettered speech on social media is critical to their work as scientists, pundits, and activists. But they do not point to any specific instance of content moderation that caused them identifiable harm. They have therefore failed to establish an injury that is sufficiently “concrete and particularized.” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 560. The state plaintiffs assert a sovereign interest in hearing from their citizens on social media, but they have not identified any specific speakers or topics that they have been unable to hear or follow.

Again, try to follow the logic here: plaintiffs “do not point to any specific instance of content moderation that caused them identifiable harm” and the two states “have not not identified any specific speakers or topics that they have been unable to hear or follow.” But wait a minute. Those instances are not available for us to find precisely because the information was censored, which means we cannot access it! That information went down the digital censorship memory hole incinerator—it was effectively destroyed by being removed—so how can we possibly present it to the court? The crime itself made the evidence disappear. Under this impossible burden of proof, how can any Americans possibly assert their First Amendment rights?

Justice Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, wrote a blistering dissent to this ruling. I’ll post more on that later. It is disappointing that we only have three justices of the Supreme Court who seem to understand what is at stake in this case.

In the meantime, rest assured that we will continue to fight the government’s censorship leviathan in court. As the case goes back to the District Court for trial we anticipate more discovery, which will allow us to continue to shine a light on the government’s unconstitutional behavior. Perhaps we will uncover communications that even meet the Supreme Court’s impossibly high traceability standard. Some individuals were specifically named and targeted in the government’s missives to social media companies, and at least one of them—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—has filed an analogous case already. Maybe a Presidential candidate will fare better on the standing issue than we did.

This is not the end, my friends. Just one battle in what will prove to be a long war. Onwards!

June 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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