Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

A wave of censorship is coming ahead of the European elections

The owner of Facebook, Meta, will use Soros-funded NGOs as ‘an army of internet censors for the upcoming elections to the European Parliament’

By Grzegorz Górny | WPOLITYCE.PL | March 25, 2024

It isn’t just political parties that are getting ready for the European elections. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, in liaison with the EU, is in the process of creating an Elections Operations Center, with scores of experts and analysts to identify and resolve potential threats.

The center will monitor cyberspace for disinformation, manipulation, and the abuse of AI, removing any content it considers to be false, harmful, or dangerous. In other words, they will act as censors.

The monitoring of 27 countries with a total population of 450 million has, according to Meta, required an investment of $20 billion to increase the number of people working in this sphere four-fold to 40,000. This includes 15,000 content verifiers who will examine material on Facebook and Instagram in 70 languages.

However, this army of 15,000 censors may not be enough, which is why Meta has decided to liaise with 29 organizations across Europe that have been chosen to monitor as well. All must have the IFCN (International Fact-Checking Network) certificate to guarantee transparency and neutrality.

The problem is that the IFCN is a Poynter Institute initiative, funded by leftist and liberal foundations, including those supported by George Soros and Bill Gates, which has engaged in promoting abortion, euthanasia, gender ideology, mass migration, and the U.S. Democratic Party. So who will check whether or not they are being neutral?

The danger is that there will be the urge to suppress controversial content — content that may turn out to be true, as in the U.S. when people argued that Covid 19 came from a Chinese laboratory.

Recently, The Wall Street Journal, one of the most renowned and prestigious mainstream titles in the United States, published an article proving that Covid-19 was artificially created in a laboratory in Wuhan. But when four years ago, Steven Mosher, one of the most distinguished experts on China in the West, presented the same thesis, his article was negatively verified by “fact-checkers” and removed as fake news from social media.

We also saw how such censorious operations may look in the last U.S. presidential election. Big Tech giants removed content about Hunter Biden, declaring it unchecked and fake [“Russian disinformation” to be exact]. In reality, the information turned out to be true and reached the public after the election. What’s to prevent this from recurring in Europe?

March 25, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook Rolls Out “Link History” Showing How it Tracks All The Websites Users Visit

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 3, 2024

Facebook, just like the rest of Big Tech, has historically made a great effort to track users across the internet, even when they are not logged into the platform, for data collecting and ultimately monetary reasons.

Now, reports say that a new way to achieve this has been recently launched by the giant, and notably, for the first time this type of tracking is made visible. Called Link History, the new feature is found in the Facebook app as essentially one of the permissions, and “documents” every link a user clicks while using the app.

Once again, fully in vein of what Google, Microsoft, etc., are doing, Facebook says the change – putting all links in one place – is there for better user experience, and again habitually, while the feature is not mandatory, it is there by default and “hiding” behind a pretty solid wall of an “opt-out.”

Whatever the case may be, most users don’t bother jumping over that wall, allowing corporations to at once offer a choice – and in most cases have it their way.

In order to deactivate this on their app, users first need to be aware Link History exists, and then navigate to the appropriate setting in order to “opt out.”

But there is no shortage of criticism of this latest move, from the privacy point of view (although mainstream tech press curiously chooses to single out Facebook while praising Google and Apple as some sort of “privacy warriors” now).

This should be viewed as part of the big (political) picture where keeping pressure on Facebook as still the most influential social media is especially important in an election year – while at the same time rightfully questioning Facebook’s (persistent) motivation for pursuing cross-site user tracking.

A classic example of two things getting to be true at the same time.

Facebook (Meta) doesn’t exactly pretend it is working solely to make sure users “never lose a link again” and enjoy other things that benefit them. A part of Link History’s announcement spells this out: “When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies.”

What the statement doesn’t clarify is if any of the well-known, ultra-invasive methods it uses to track users will actually change in any way with the introduction of Link History.

January 3, 2024 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook greenlit ads inciting violence against Palestinians

The Cradle | November 24, 2023

The Intercept revealed on 21 November that Facebook has allowed incendiary advertisements that promote violence against Palestinians to appear on its platform; more specifically, several ads calling for a “Holocaust for the Palestinians.”

Even though such derogatory phrases are a direct violation of Facebook’s policies, ads containing phrases such as “wiping out Gazan women and children” were able to pass through moderation filters.

Nadim Nashif, the founder of 7amleh, a Palestinian organization specializing in social media research and advocacy, remarked that green lighting of these advertisements represents yet another misstep by Meta in its dealings with Palestinians, adding that “throughout the crisis, we have seen a continued pattern of Meta’s clear bias and discrimination against Palestinians.”

Advertisements in Hebrew and Arabic, breaching Facebook and Meta’s guidelines, were submitted. Some of these ads overtly promoted violence, explicitly urging the killing of Palestinian civilians.

The initiative to scrutinize Facebook’s automated content moderation system arose after Nashif noticed an advertisement on Facebook blatantly advocating for the assassination of Palestinian rights advocate Paul Larudee.

This promoted content bypassed Facebook’s automated systems to filter out dangerous material. Even though the advertisement was eventually taken down after a complaint was lodged, it raised serious concerns about how such explicit calls for murder, clearly against Facebook’s policies, managed to get approved for display on the platform.

The advertisement calling for the murder of the Palestinian rights advocate was sponsored by a far-right group known as Ad Kan, established by a former Israeli military official.

November 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli targets journalists, kills their families as Big Tech & Biden admin silence Palestinians

BY WYATT REED · THE GRAYZONE · OCTOBER 27, 2023

With Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killing at least twenty Palestinian journalists—and the Biden administration working to muzzle others—Big Tech is quietly coordinating with Tel Aviv to muzzle Palestinian media outfits.

Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed three Palestinian journalists on October 25 in one of the deadliest days for local reporters since the military’s bombing campaign began nearly three weeks before. As the hours passed, footage appeared showing the moment Ramallah-based journalist Mohammed Farra learned that his wife and children were all killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s Khan Younes neighborhood.

Similarly heart-rending scenes would play out more than once over the course of the day. Elsewhere in the besieged coastal enclave, an Israeli airstrike killed the wife, son, daughter and infant grandson of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh.

Israel’s attacks on Palestinian journalists came hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured “American Jewish community leaders” that he urged Qatar’s government “to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza” during a recent trip to Doha.

Suspicions that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Dahdouh’s family were quickly bolstered by comments from News 13 journalist Zvi Yehezkeli.

“Generally we know the target,” Yehezkeli told audiences within hours of the strike, adding, “for example, today there was a target: the family of an Al Jazeera reporter.”

“In general, we know,” he concluded.

If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Dahdouh’s outlet found itself in Israeli crosshairs. In 2021, the Israeli military leveled the Gaza tower that housed the officers of both the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The following year, Israeli forces assassinated renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, a veteran Jerusalem-based correspondent for Al Jazeera, in a shooting that drew international condemnation but was largely ignored by the US government, which echoes the Israeli government’s position that her killing was “unintentional.” Under Blinken, the State Department has distanced itself from its initial expressions of outrage and no longer calls for either an independent investigation or criminal charges for the perpetrators.

Big Tech censorship targets Palestinian journalists after Israel targets their homes

As the US and Israel rush to censor the voice of Palestinian journalists, Big Tech censorship has proven indispensable to Israel’s propaganda war. In the aftermath of October 7, multiple social media platforms have suspended or deactivated profiles belonging to numerous prominent journalists, human rights advocates, and Palestinian activists. The crackdown follows years of complaints alleging double standards when it comes to anti-Zionist content on social media.

Accounts operated by Eye On Palestine disappeared from Instagram, Facebook, and X on October 25, leaving more than 6 million followers unable to access one of the most popular resources providing firsthand footage of destruction in Gaza. A spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, insisted the suspensions were not politically motivated, asserting “We did not disable these accounts because of any content they were sharing.”

Despite Meta’s denial, it is worth recalling the company’s record of complying with Israeli government censorship requests. Following the approval of a so-called “Facebook Bill” aimed at clamping down on digital “incitement” in 2016, fanatical former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked bragged that Facebook, Twitter and Google were complying with 70 percent of their takedown orders.

Tamer Al Mishal, a Palestinian journalist who has served as a crucial Gaza-based news source for many years, put a face to that statistic. In September, Al Mishal made waves when he published an exposé on Al Jazeera illustrating how Meta coordinated with Israeli intelligence to stifle pro-Palestinian content. When he attempted to access his social media profile days later, the reporter made an alarming discovery: his Facebook page had completely ceased to exist.

He wasn’t the only one. The week before, Meta suspended the Instagram account of Palestinian influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza after he shared footage of the remnants of his apartment building, where 15 of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrikes.

“Palestinian journalists in Gaza are not just facing the Israeli occupation,” Shadi Abdelrahman, a local reporter with years of experience covering events in Gaza from the ground, explained to The Grayzone. “They also have to overcome a lot of censorship by Facebook, YouTube,” he told The Grayzone, adding: “anything on social media, they need to be very careful because they will get their accounts banned.”

“Working as a journalist in Gaza is not an easy job,” he says, not only “because you are being censored by social media, [but] also it can cause problems with Israeli authorities, especially if you’d like to leave through any crossing which is controlled by Israel.”

If you’re outspoken in your coverage, Abdelrahman says, Israeli authorities “will consider you as an enemy.”

During 2021’s Great March of Return, “those journalists who were attending the weekly marches and covering it were targeted deliberately by Israel.”

“Some of them were shot in the knees, some of them were shot in the legs. Some of them got killed,” Abdelrahman recalled.

On Instagram, meanwhile, users noted an apparent ‘glitch’ temporarily translated the Arabic word for “Palestinian” into “Palestinian terrorist.”

During an October 26 raid in Jenin, the Israeli army destroyed the memorial to Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent it killed there a year before.

October 28, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, Video, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook Censors Report On Study About Covid Vaccine mRNA Found in Breast Milk

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 6, 2023

Facebook has once more found itself at the helm of controversy regarding the censorship of accurate information concerning COVID-19. This is not the maiden voyage of the social media giant into the tempestuous waters of information control; earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded to having stifled truthful content about the pandemic at the behest of establishment voices.

His admission followed on the heels of both the US government and the World Health Organization declaring the curtain call on the COVID-19 public health emergency. This prompted Meta to retrench its medical “misinformation” policy, albeit the platform seemingly persists in its endeavor to silence certain narratives.

As reported by Public, the latest instance of censorship came to light when Facebook initiated a fact-check, labeled, and curtailed the visibility of an article titled “Covid Vaccine mRNA In Breast Milk Shows CDC Lied About Safety.” The scrutiny led by Facebook was not aimed at debunking the veracity of the article but instead was targeted at what it deemed as “missing context.”

The article, based on a recent Lancet study, brought to the public’s attention evidence of trace amounts of vaccine mRNA in breast milk, a finding that contradicts previous assurances by the CDC.

Despite the fact that these women were side-stepped in the original vaccine trials, they were given the green light for vaccination, based on the CDC’s now-questionable advice.

Facebook’s audit extrapolated the “context” that pregnant women ought to proceed with vaccination, thereby sidelining the primary discourse of the article which was to shed light on the misleading information dispersed by the CDC.

The methodology employed by Facebook in this instance extends beyond a mere examination of facts. By reducing the spread of the article, the platform effectively stifles a critical examination of the claims made by government health authorities, thereby undermining the public’s right to be informed and to engage in crucial discourse.

Facebook’s ongoing dalliance with censorship, especially of critical health-related information, raises significant questions about the role of social media platforms in the contemporary information ecosystem. The unfurling narrative underscores the necessity for a transparent, decentralized, and accountable framework for information dissemination, one that is immune to undue influence and serves the collective endeavor for truth.

October 6, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Meta Will Unmask Anonymous Dutch Facebook User Accused of “Defamation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 4, 2023

The Netherlands seems like a “land of the free” to some from the outside – at the very least, you are allowed to freely use narcotics still banned in most countries around the world.

So help yourself to that addiction – but if your “addiction” is to speak your mind, be “defamatory” (or accused of that online), and hope to remain anonymous – good luck.

Why people still use Facebook is up to them – but if they do, what the company is doing in this European country should dissuade them once and for all, if they have any notion of being anonymous online.

Sure, you can use a “nickname” – but if somebody wants to know who you are in the physical world, and have the habit of posting on Facebook – then those who want to know your actual name and address will get it from Facebook (Meta).

That’s the long and the short of a ruling of a Dutch court that ordered Facebook (specifically its European operation based in Ireland) to unmask a user, accused of “manipulating and making secret recordings of women he dated.”

Just like the “think of the children!” trope – this kind of justification is what most sane persons can get behind immediately. Fine – stop this guy – but then, where does it actually stop? For every other user, in a myriad other scenarios?

For the moment, that big picture perspective is what we don’t have from media reports. Instead, we know what the particular case, that could pave the way for a precedent of untold proportions, is about.

There are people in the world who go to Facebook to discuss their “dating experiences,” and the user, whose real identity has now been ordered to be “damasked,” was one of those. The comments the user posted appeared on “at least” two private groups on the platform.

The “subject” of these posts naturally disliked it, claiming reputation harm, but Facebook was not so sure. “It is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation,” is how the giant had put it.

Next, the claimant was told that perhaps, the issue should be resolved privately (this doesn’t seem to be a case of “revenge porn” or anything on that magnitude).

But then, the lawsuit came, despite Meta apparently “defending the anonymous user’s right to freedom of expression.”

And now, the court “ordered Meta to provide ‘basic subscriber information’ on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account’,” – but not to remove the posts, “or flag any others that may have been shared in private groups,” say reports.

The cherry on the court order’s cake:

“According to settled case law, under certain circumstances Meta has an obligation to provide identifying data, even if the content of the relevant messages is not unmistakably unlawful.”

August 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 2 Comments

Billionaire Biden Donor Bankrolled 2020 Election Social Media Censorship Effort

BY LEE FANG | JUNE 8, 2023

The Department of Homeland Security’s controversial social media censorship effort during the 2020 election was propped up by a partisan billionaire.

Newly obtained documents, acquired through a public records request, confirm that Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, financed a specialized portal maintained by the Center for Internet Security (CIS). This portal was used to facilitate the swift removal of predominantly conservative messages on Twitter and Facebook during the previous presidential election.

Omidyar, previously identified as one of the largest donors to campaign groups supporting Joe Biden’s presidential bid, donated $45 million to the “Sixteen Thirty Fund” in 2020. This dark money group mobilized Democratic voters and financed pro-Biden Super PACs. However, Omidyar’s direct involvement in the DHS partnership, which is now facing increased scrutiny, remained undisclosed until now.

The funding provided by Omidyar to CIS was used to establish a Misinformation Reporting Portal (MiRP). A team from CIS continuously monitored this portal 24/7 from September 28 to November 6, 2020, as revealed in a post-election report, “Election Infrastructure Misinformation Reporting.” The Democracy Fund, Omidyar’s foundation, supported the creation of the MiRP through a direct grant, according to the report.

The misinformation reporting portal served to rapidly identify and remove instances of alleged misinformation. CIS’s report acknowledged that the flagged content ranged from “intentional misinformation to honest mistakes.” Of the content reported by CIS, 61% “resulted in positive action,” which the group defined as content takedowns or labeling.

This MiRP system was used by a coalition of liberal-leaning research groups and overseen by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), a sub-agency of the DHS that has led the government’s push to censor social media. Despite government backing for the project, the effort was partisan – the Democratic National Committee was part of the consortium, but not the Republican National Committee, indicating a partisan bias.

“In addition to sharing all reports with CISA, some reports were shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the CIS report noted. The effort focused on “election narratives” deemed conspiratorial or inaccurate.

Tax records appear to confirm the Omidyar funding. The Democracy Fund’s 990 disclosure shows that it donated $130,000 to CIS in 2020. The grant, however, is listed as support for “election security best practices,” a vague description that belied the true function of the MiRP portal.

CIS did not respond to a request for comment. The Omidyar Network discussed this inquiry with me but stopped responding before publication.

Evidence of this MiRP system first emerged in emails I obtained from a visit to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters in December. In an email thread dated October 1, 2020, Twitter attorney Stacia Cardille mentioned receiving outreach from DHS, forwarding a censorship demand from CISA, CIS official Aaron Wilson, and a representative from the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition monitoring misinformation.

The alleged misinformation mentioned in the October 1 thread revolved around conservative warnings regarding potential risks associated with mail-in voting—a concern voiced by partisans from both sides. Twitter, however, took action against conservative accounts but did not similarly act against Democrats who warned against mail-in ballots, as I’ve previously reported. For instance, former D.N.C. chairman Howard Dean tweeted during the election: “Do not vote by mail. Ok to vote now early and drop your ballot off in person at the proper office. Too late to trust trumps postmaster thug.”

The Dean tweet was noted by Twitter’s content moderation team but no action was taken, while similar messages warning against mail-in voting from conservative accounts were censored.

The CIS report provides a comprehensive explanation of the public-private apparatus employed to influence content on social media. In doing so, the report also debunks recent myths. In April, MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan made a false claim that journalist Matt Taibbi deliberately misrepresented his case under oath during his congressional testimony on CISA’s role in shaping social media decisions. Hasan suggested that Taibbi had willfully conflated CISA with CIS during his testimony. This claim led Representative Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I) to accuse Taibbi of perjury in a letter.

The CIS report I obtained contradicts Hasan and Plaskett, clarifying that “CIS and CISA worked together to ensure the reports were sent to the social media platform within an hour of their receipt.” CIS also played a pivotal role in triaging the material while maintaining the government partnership with disinformation research think tanks.

In essence, CIS and CISA worked in close collaboration to exert pressure on platforms like Twitter, aiming to remove conservative political expression deemed untrustworthy. The project was a public-private venture, overseen by government agencies, and supported by a system financed entirely by a Democratic donor.

The report makes recommendations for future elections. It notes that misinformation reporting may require dedicated government funding, with a “transition to the operational side of CIS” under the CISA umbrella, as well as better operational support from social media platforms.

The CIS report is part of a batch of documents recently received from Kate Starbird, an advisory board member of CISA at the University of Washington, via a records request. As I reported on Tuesday, the Justice Department intervened last year to impede the release of records from Starbird’s team. Starbird has also accused journalists seeking these records of “harassment,” likening it to a cyber attack.

Nevertheless, these inquiries are part of a broader public examination of government-backed censorship. As previously reported, Starbird’s advisory panel advocated for an expanded role for CISA, calling for an extension of its monitoring to include various platforms such as social media, mainstream media, cable news, hyper-partisan media, talk radio, and other online resources.

To support their argument for such a broad mandate, CISA advisors highlighted the detrimental effects of alleged misinformation on key democratic institutions like the courts, as well as other sectors such as the financial system and public health measures, suggesting that virtually any major public interest concern may be used as justification for broad censorship.

June 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

First COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit in U.S. Targets U.S. Government, Social Media Giants

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 23, 2023

Five people injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with a father whose 16-year-old son died from vaccine-induced cardiac arrest, are suing the Biden administration and top U.S. public health officials.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, the plaintiffs — including Brianne Dressen who suffered severe nerve damage after taking the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine — allege the U.S. government colluded with social media companies to censor them when they posted stories about their personal vaccine injury experiences.

Defendants include President Biden and top-ranking White House officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This is the first lawsuit brought by U.S. citizens injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.

Dressen — a preschool teacher from Saratoga Springs, Utah — volunteered to participate in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial for its COVID-19 shot. Now, she says, she is “collateral damage of the pandemic.”

Dressen co-chairs React19, a “science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from longterm COVID-19 vaccine adverse events globally.”

After receiving the AstraZeneca shot, Dressen experienced extensive adverse effects — including doubled and blurry vision, severe sensitivity to sound and light, heart and blood pressure fluctuations and intense brain fog — that worsened over time.

She said Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, GoFundMe, Reddit and Instagram removed content she posted about her injuries.

According to Dressen, the plaintiffs’ experiences of censorship “pale in comparison to the thousands of Americans we know who all have experienced the same thing.”

“There is nothing scarier than reaching out for help only to be silenced,” Dressen told The Defender. “It was as scary as the vaccine reaction itself.

“Our constitutional freedoms must be protected, regardless of whether or not we are in a national emergency,” Dressen added.

Dressen — who now experiences “permanent disability” with “ups and downs” — said she and the other plaintiffs are “not fighting this fight for a select few” but are fighting on behalf of the “tens of thousands who are experiencing the same kind of censorship.”

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed the suit on behalf of Dressen and the other plaintiffs, who include Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, Suzanna Newell and Ernest Ramirez.

All but Ramirez experienced COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries. Ramirez received the Moderna vaccine with no adverse effect  — but his 16-year-old son died of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

Newell is a former triathlete from St. Paul, Minnesota, who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after she got the vaccine and who now relies on a walker or cane to get around.

Case challenges ‘shocking’ government mass-censorship

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs experienced “heavy and ongoing censorship” on social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and GoFundMe — “when they attempted to share “ their personal experiences after they, or a loved one, were medically harmed after taking the vaccine.”

For instance, TikTok on multiple occasions removed Holland’s video posts in which she shared her personal experiences related to her COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries and recovery process.

TikTok said the videos violated “Community Guidelines” for posting “violent and graphic content” and for “integrity and authenticity” concerns.

According to the complaint:

“This case challenges the government’s mass-censorship program and the shocking role that it has played (and still plays) in ensuring that disfavored viewpoints deemed a threat to its agenda are suppressed.

“This sprawling censorship enterprise has involved the efforts of myriad federal agencies and government actors (including within the White House itself) to direct, coerce, and, ultimately, work in concert with social media platforms to censor, muffle, and flag as ‘misinformation’ speech that conflicts with the government’s preferred narrative — including speech that the government explicitly acknowledges to be true.”

Kim Mack Rosenberg, the Children Health Defense’s (CHD) acting outside general counsel, said the new lawsuit is important because it exists “at the intersection” of COVID-19 vaccine injury and COVID-19 censorship.

“The complaint here alleges — as have other cases — a massive censorship program to control the narrative and promote the government’s COVID-19 propaganda,” Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.

She added:

“Silencing those who have been injured, like the plaintiffs in this case, by the very product promoted — and in some cases mandated — by the government is particularly egregious and causes further, albeit, different injury to those individuals, whose First Amendment rights have also been violated.

“Moreover, censoring these injured individuals injures the public, depriving them of important information and discourse on these issues.”

Missouri and Louisiana in May 2022 filed a landmark lawsuit against top-ranking Biden administration officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants to suppress free speech on topics like COVID-19 and election security.

Former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt alleges the Biden administration led “the largest speech censorship operation in recent history” by working with social media companies to suppress and censor information later acknowledged as truthful.”

In March, CHD Chairman on Leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD filed a class action lawsuit against Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech, including facts and opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Commenting on the new lawsuit, Peggy Little, senior litigation counsel for NCLA, said in a statement:

“Americans injured by experimentally approved Covid vaccines are being deplatformed, silenced, suppressed, defamed and cancelled by their own government for reaching out to others simply to share and receive information critical to their physical and mental well-being.

“Government actors have bullied, threatened and coerced social media companies to strip these plaintiffs of their First Amendment rights of association and speech. Suppression of speech critical of the government by the very government actors mandating the vaccine is frightening.

“NCLA’s lawsuit seeks to restore these plaintiffs’ civil liberties and the free flow of information guaranteed by the First Amendment for all Americans. We must never again lose our constitutional bearings in a pandemic.”

Casey Norman, one of the NCLA lawyers representing Dressen and the other plaintiffs, agreed. He said that the government claims it suppresses “so-called misinformation” for the sake of “public safety and welfare.”

“Fortunately,” Norman added, “the First Amendment says otherwise: the government may neither censor our clients nor induce others to do so.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

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.

May 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Facebook Censoring The Inconvenient Truth About Antarctic Temperatures

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | May 6, 2023

This post came up on my Facebook today:

https://www.facebook.com/william.dunn.1238/posts/pfbid036joG1b82T95G59BVS3uTQT1wYL26XMEBFVyMWto8CdzfBhTWBQ7YecGyr9GREWxol

When you click on SEE WHY, this comes up:

And this is the story the Facebook censors don’t want you to see:

May be an image of arctic and text that says "ANTARCTICA JUST SET NEW EW COLD RECORD 35° F BELOW ZERO ANTARCTICA HASN'T WARMED IN 70 YEARS 10000oaks.com"

Quite why Facebook would want to rely on the USA Today for its source of science is a mystery. Perhaps they should have actually checked what real scientists are saying:

Abstract

The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.

In this paper, we investigate whether the high orography of the Antarctic ice sheet (AIS) has helped delay warming over the continent. To that end, we contrast the Antarctic climate response to CO2-doubling with present-day orography to the response with a flattened AIS. To corroborate our findings, we perform this exercise with two different climate models. We find that, with a flattened AIS, CO2-doubling induces more latent heat transport toward the Antarctic continent, greater moisture convergence over the continent and, as a result, more surface-amplified condensational heating. Greater moisture convergence over the continent is made possible by flattening of moist isentropic surfaces, which decreases humidity gradients along the trajectories on which extratropical poleward moisture transport predominantly occurs, thereby enabling more moisture to reach the pole. Furthermore, the polar meridional cell disappears when the AIS is flattened, permitting greater CO2-forced warm temperature advection toward the Antarctic continent. Our results suggest that the high elevation of the present AIS plays a significant role in decreasing the susceptibility of the Antarctic continent to CO2-forced warming.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-00143-w

I’ll post this on Facebook and see how long it takes for the censors to strike!

May 6, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Ukraine working with FBI to censor social media – official

RT | April 28, 2023

Ukrainian intelligence has partnered with the FBI and other US government agencies to remove ‘Russian’ content on Silicon Valley platforms, a senior official told independent journalist Lee Fang earlier this week at the RSA Convention in San Francisco.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the US, we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” Ilya Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), told Fang.

Vitiuk spoke at the cyber security conference, sitting on a panel alongside FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran, Special Agent Alex Kobzanets from the San Francisco field office, and Laura Galante from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Fang noted that the Ukrainian official thanked the many “private sector allies” in the US, including Google, Amazon, Starlink, and CrowdStrike – the DNC contractor that claimed ‘Russian hacking’ in 2016 but later testified it had no evidence for it.

“I don’t know how many times we’ve called the CEOs here in San Francisco to drive to their office on a Sunday afternoon and really engage with our Ukrainian partners,” Kobzanets said during the panel.

According to Vitiuk, the SBU tells the FBI that a certain person or account is “probably Russia’s influence” in order to get them censored. He described the FBI as his agency’s “top partner” and US cyber support as a “psychological game changer” for Ukraine.

“Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not,” Vitiuk told Fang when asked how the SBU determines what might be disinformation. “Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

By way of example, Vitiuk cited reports of tensions between President Vladimir Zelensky and Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, saying they were completely fabricated by Russia. In early March, the openly pro-Ukraine German tabloid Bild reported on their disagreements about military tactics.

Fang has previously documented US government plans to work with social media platforms on censoring “disinformation” related to “the nature of US support to Ukraine.” In December, he also revealed that the Pentagon had teamed up with Twitter to “amplify certain messages” for the US military.

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | 1 Comment

EU demands more online censorship

RT | April 25, 2023

The European Commission has designated 19 online platforms under its Digital Services Act, a move that opens them up to hefty fines if they target advertisements at certain users, publish illegal content, or fail to “address the spread of disinformation.”

In an announcement on Tuesday, the commission named 17 “Very Large Online Platforms” and two “Very Large Online Search Engines,” defined as those reaching at least 45 million monthly active users. Among the platforms cited are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, while Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the two designated search engines.

The decision means that as of August, these platforms must be in compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that came into force in November.

To avoid fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover, the commission stated that these platforms must label all advertisements as such and avoid targeting ads at users based on “sensitive data” such as their ethnicity, sexuality, or political orientation.

Targeting ads toward children will no longer be permitted, and platforms will have to “redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety of minors,” the commission said.

Regarding content moderation, platforms will be required to restrict the “dissemination of illegal content” and “address the spread of disinformation.” The entire text of the DSA mentions the word “disinformation” 13 times without defining it. Free speech activists have argued that the term is often used by governments to silence factually correct yet politically inconvenient narratives.

The commission also warned that platforms and search engines will need to address “negative effects on freedom of expression,” a requirement that could clash with the demand to tackle “disinformation.”

While the DSA was being drafted last year, EU officials singled out Twitter as a company that would be forced to comply with its requirements. Immediately after billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform and set about rolling back some of its restrictive speech policies, EU industry chief Thierry Breton declared that “in Europe, the bird will fly by our European rules.”

Two months later, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova warned that Twitter would face “sanctions” if it breached the DSA. Jourova cited Musk’s banning of several prominent journalists – who shared information on his whereabouts – as potential DSA violations.

April 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook Should Keep Removing COVID ‘Misinformation,’ Oversight Board Says

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 21, 2023

The oversight board for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, on Thursday recommended the social media giant “maintain its current policy” of removing COVID-19 “misinformation” from its platform until the World Health Organization declares an end to the global pandemic.

The board made the recommendation despite widespread outcry about social media censorship after the Twitter Files and several ongoing lawsuits revealed collusion between state actors and social media companies to censor dissenting opinions and factual information that contradict official narratives, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The recommendation came in response to a request by Meta in July that the oversight board — an independent panel of tech and legal experts selected by Meta to weigh in on content policy issues — assess whether “a less restrictive approach” to censoring misinformation might “better align with its values and human rights responsibilities.”

Meta’s current misinformation policy sets different categories of harm content might cause, making that content subject to removal. Content is censored if the platform deems that it contributes to the “risk of imminent physical harm,” could cause “interference” with the functioning of political processes or contains “certain highly deceptive manipulated media.”

But the board didn’t find inconsistency between Meta’s “misinformation policy” and its “values and human rights responsibilities.” Instead, it said Meta’s current “exceptional measures” of eliminating disinformation are “justified.”

The board also urged Meta to “begin a process” to reassess which “misleading claims” it removes, to be more transparent about government requests for information, to consider making its “misinformation” policies more localized and to investigate how the architecture of the platform facilitates the spread of misinformation.

Meta said Thursday it will publicly respond to the board’s non-binding recommendations within 60 days.

Suzanne Nossel, a board member and CEO of PEN America, told The Washington Post that the board’s recommendations are not just relevant to COVID-19, but could shape Meta’s approach to anticipated future global health emergencies.

“The decision is less perhaps about the COVID pandemic per se or exclusively than about … how Meta should handle its responsibilities in the context of a fast-moving public health emergency,” she said.

How Facebook and Instagram censor COVID ‘misinformation’

The recommendation specifically assessed Meta’s “misinformation about health during public emergencies” policy, under which it removes 80 distinct “COVID-19 misinformation claims” posted on its platforms, such as claiming masking or social distancing lack efficacy or that the vaccines can have serious side effects.

Between March 2020 and July 2022, Facebook and Instagram, also owned by Meta, removed 27 million instances of COVID-19 “misinformation,” 1.3 million of which were restored on appeal.

The social media giant also designates a second type of COVID-19 “misinformation,” which does not reach the standard of removal, but is still subject to manipulation by the platform.

For example, information in that category is “fact-checked” where it is labeled as “false” or “missing context,” and then linked to a fact-checking article. That content is then also demoted so that it appears less frequently and prominently in users’ feeds.

Meta also treated other information with what it calls “neutral labels,” where it labeled posts with statements such as “some unapproved COVID-19 treatments may cause serious harm” and then directed people to Meta’s COVID-19 information center, which provides approved information from public health authorities.

Last July, the company said it had connected more than 2 billion people across 189 countries to “trustworthy information” through the portal. But it decided to stop using the neutral labels in December 2022, to ensure they would remain effective in other health emergencies, according to the oversight board’s report.

The basis for determining what is misinformation is whether the information conforms to what public health authorities deem to be true, according to the board’s recommendation and the Facebook policy page.

But throughout the pandemic, public health authorities have had to concede they were wrong about things — and that they lied about things — they had previously pronounced to be science-backed facts.

These “facts” include, for example, flip-flopping on masks, the lab-leak hypothesis, the effectiveness of natural immunity and numerous claims about vaccine efficacy, including that it stops transmission.

That means the platforms eliminated and demoted facts and information that were true. Even CNN conceded that “the company applied the labels to a wide range of claims both true and untrue about vaccines, treatments and other topics related to the virus.”

‘This kind of abuse of power should terrify all of us’

The board recommendations don’t mention the events that led Meta to consider changing its policies — controversy over recent revelations about how government officials coerced social media companies into toeing the government line.

In 2021, President Biden directly criticized Facebook and other platforms, saying they allowed “vaccine misinformation” to spread and they contributed to deaths from COVID-19.

He said they were “killing people” and that the pandemic was only “among the unvaccinated.”

Biden’s accusation was accompanied by threats of regulatory action from from high-ranking members of the administration — including White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — if the social media companies did not comply.

Psaki said government officials were in regular touch with social media platforms, telling them what — and in some cases whom — to censor, Jenin Younes reported.

DHS even created a video in 2021, since removed from youtube, encouraging children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge U.S. government narratives on COVID-19.

Writing in Tablet Magazine this month, civil liberties attorney Jenin Younes recounted the story of a Facebook support group for people who experienced adverse events related to the COVID-19 vaccines being shut down for spreading harmful “misinformation.”

Last month, in the Twitter Files release about Stanford University’s Virality project, Matt Taiibbi revealed that Stanford, with the backing of several government agencies, had created a cross-platform digital ticketing system that was processing censorship requests for all of the social media platforms, including Meta’s.

The Virality Project claimed its objective “is to detect, analyze, and respond to incidents of false and misleading narratives related to COVID-19 vaccines across online ecosystems.”

Taibbi said the Virality Project was “defining true things as disinformation or misinformation or malformation,” which he said signifies “a new evolution of the disinformation process away from trying to figure out what’s true and what’s not and just going directly to political narrative.”

That reflects Meta’s policy to censor statements that don’t conform to official public health authority doctrine as “misinformation.”

Meta’s policies do not mention the tips and directions it receives from government agencies about misinformation.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday published an op-ed in The Hill calling for an end to censorship practices, pointing out that statements about COVID-19 made on platforms like Facebook that are now supported by evidence were flagged as disinformation.

”Statements including my own, that our government once labeled as ‘disinformation,’ such as the efficacy of masks, naturally acquired immunity, and the origins of COVID-19, are now supported by evidence,” he said.

“In reality, the most significant source of disinformation during the pandemic, with the most influence and greatest impact on people’s lives, was the U.S. government,” he added.

Rand pointed to critiques of DHS’s “abusive practices” by organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and highlighted a Brennan Center for Justice report published last month that found at least 12 DHS programs for tracking what Americans are saying online.

“This kind of abuse of power should terrify all of us regardless of which side of the aisle you are on,” he said.

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

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.

April 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries