Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says he “strongly” suspects federal government directed Twitter to blacklist his account

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 9, 2022

Stanford University Medical School professor and epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has responded to the bombshell revelation that Twitter secretly blacklisted his account by suggesting that the federal government could have been pulling the strings of this censorship.

“I suspect very strongly that there was some government direction of this,” Bhattacharya said during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. ”

Bhattacharya continued by discussing the findings from a Biden administration-social media censorship collusion lawsuit that he’s involved in.

The documents that have been released and the sworn statements that have been made as part of this lawsuit have revealed that federal government officials have pressured Big Tech companies to censor many pieces of content that they deemed to be “misinformation.”

One of the documents that’s pertinent to Bhattacharya is an email from then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci where he called for a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the premises of The Great Barrington Declaration — an anti-lockdown statement published by Bhattacharya and other leading epidemiologists.

“We’ve uncovered tremendous evidence that… there were federal agencies that were… directing social media companies about what to censor, even who to censor,” Bhattacharya told Ingraham. “If that is actually the case… that this blacklisting was directed by the government against American citizens, that’s a direct violation of my civil rights, it’s a direct violation of the , and every American should be outraged.”

Bhattacharya continued: “A lot of the leadership of Silicon Valley, a lot of… the people who give advice to Silicon Valley and to the government about about these content moderation policies, they’ve gone… way too far.”

The Stanford professor also commented on the far-reaching implications of this censorship of discussions about basic scientific policy.

“Imagine how different [things would have been],” Bhattacharya said. “All the small businesses could have stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion.”

Additionally, Bhattacharya suggested that the censors deployed these tactics because “their arguments were not strong enough to survive the light of day” and called for a “national conversation that brings us back to the American commitment to free speech rights, the American commitment to… open discussion, and… honest dealings.”

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the legal group that’s representing Bhattacharya in the Biden admin-Big Tech censorship collusion lawsuit, said:

“We already know the federal government had a hand in  censorship, especially of those who articulated perspectives that conflicted with government messaging on covid. As Elon Musk exposes further information about Twitter’s inner workings, we anticipate learning more about the extent of government involvement in blacklisting those who express disfavored views.”

Not only does the recent disclosure about Bhattacharya’s account being blacklisted shine a light on the pervasiveness of Big Tech’s censorship but it also demonstrates that Twitter was still engaged in this censorship more than a year after the pandemic began with Bhattacharya only joining Twitter in August 2021.

Twitter’s blacklisting of Bhattacharya’s account is the latest of several examples of the tech giants censoring him after he challenged the government’s Covid narrative. Reddit mods deleted The Great Barrington Declaration, Facebook deleted The Great Barrington Declaration page, and  deleted a public health roundtable featuring The Great Barrington Declaration authors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.

December 9, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US military official targets mom over Facebook post that criticized school’s promotion of “polysexual” art

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2022

After a New Jersey mom took to  to criticize posters in the entrance to a local school that promoted various sexual preferences, a high-ranking United States (US) military official from a local Joint Base accused her of causing “safety concerns” and flagged her post to state and local law enforcement.

The story was first covered by Chaos and Control which documented mom and Board of Education (BOE) member Angela Reading sharing her concerns about the posters in a public Facebook group on November 22. Some of the posters that Reading criticized promoted sexual preferences such as “pansexual” and “polysexual” (terms that refer to a sexual attraction towards people regardless of their gender).

In her post, Reading said she was “livid” after her seven-year-old daughter read the posters while attending an elementary “Math Night” and asked Reading what “polysexual” means.

“Why are elementary schools promoting/allowing elementary KIDS to research topics of sexuality and create posters?” Reading wrote in the Facebook post. “This is not in the state elementary standards (law) nor in the BOE-approved curriculum. It’s perverse and should be illegal to expose my kids to sexual content. Look up the terms, and you will see they are sexual in nature.”

Reading added: “How can my young children be accepting of people ‘who are sexually attracted to multiple genders’? They don’t know what sex is! Are adults talking about their sexual life with my kids and looking for affirmation? Are there elementary students engaged in polyamorous or multi-gender sexual activity who need my kids to know about it and cheer them on? I am very confused and very angry.”

Then the military official got involved.

Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Shilling responded to Reading’s post by accusing her of causing “safety concerns for many families.

He added that the Joint Base (McGuire, Fort Dix, and Lakehurst) has had its Security Forces “working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation to ensure the continued safety of the entire community.”

Schilling subsequently changed the name on his Facebook account to “Chris Topher” and deleted his LinkedIn account.

In a statement to Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Joint Base confirmed that it had “notified local law enforcement about the social media exchange, which is common information-sharing practice among law enforcement entities.”

However, Carlson pointed out that “a military base is not a ‘law enforcement’ agency.”

He added: “The purpose of the military is to defend us from foreign enemies, not to police our Facebook posts.”

In an interview with Carlson, Reading said that shortly after Schilling had targeted her, the local police chief contacted the admin of the Facebook group and told her that the post “should come down.” Reading agreed to have the post taken down and then contacted the police chief directly to remind him of the .

“We shouldn’t be utilizing government resources and our positions to pressure individuals to take down Facebook posts,” Reading said.

Reading’s story is the latest of many examples of federal and local government departments potentially violating the First Amendment by flagging posts for censorship.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 4 Comments

Poland pays US influencers to further war support

Free West Media | November 29, 2022

Poland has hired two US PR companies for a pro-Ukraine campaign in the West. According to the official statement, Poland’s state bank has hired MikeWorldWide and AMW PR for “a global campaign to inform the general public about the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine”.

The PR company MikeWorldWide, is closely linked to the US Democratic Party, and was tasked in September with boosting Western support to Ukraine through influencers and social media.

The primary objective “is to raise awareness among at least 50 million people of the actual dimension of the war in Ukraine and the scale of the damages,” according to MikeWorldWide’s services agreement with Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego.

Poland’s national bank will be paying $3 million for media exposure, including advertisements on Facebook, Twitter, NPR, USA Today, Spotify and Vox, as well as for influencers.

In November Poland’s state bank hired AMW PR, a New York-based media relations company, to “pitch the refugee and humanitarian crisis brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”.

AMW will work with US and Canadian journalists, producers, bloggers, and podcasters.

November 29, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The collapse of FTX is an embarrassment for globalists

By Lucy Wyatt | TCW Defending Freedom | November 23, 2022

The spectacular crash of FTX, discussed in TCW yesterday, is developing into a scandal of epic proportions. On Friday November 11 FTX filed for bankruptcy, owing in excess of $3.1billion to more than a million customers, including major institutional investors such as BlackRock and Sequoia Capital. After a brief two and half years of trading, FTX’s rise and fall has left many with more questions than answers. Not least because the scandal is revealing more than just a loss of money, exposing much that the globalists might prefer to remain hidden.

There are two schools of thought. One is that FTX, the world’s second biggest crypto exchange, was run by youthful MIT graduates who got out of their depth. The second is that FTX may have been set up as a scam from the beginning. Without doubt, FTX had the fingerprints of the globalists all over it. It was once heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, with its own page on their website describing FTX as a ‘cryptocurrency exchange built by traders, for traders’ and its founder regularly attended Davos gatherings. The key question that needs answering is cui bono, who benefited from FTX’s activities? Knowing that might give some clue as to its purpose.

Certainly, in respect of the age of those running the company, FTX was ideal. Globalists have a penchant for youth (vide WEF’s Young Global Leaders programme). Having the young nominally run things is a useful ploy. They attract other young who then form armies of ‘wokeists’ to play the role of useful idiots, as we see in Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil.  Youthfulness also creates its own tyranny in the sense that it cannot be challenged without appearing to stand in the way of ‘progress’. Thus the adults in the room become so overawed by the presence of these wunderkind that they forget to ask the obvious questions, such as ‘how much help did you have to get started?’

In the case of the Swedish doom goblin, we are supposed to believe that she spontaneously started skolstrejk för klimatet. Yet curiously she has moments when she appeared incapable of answering questions about climate without a script.

Back in the USA, Mark Zuckerberg apparently built Facebook on the back of some Harvard campus networking in 2004, even though coincidentally the Pentagon had begun work on something similar called Lifelog. Facebook, of course, has the great advantage in terms of collecting data that its users voluntarily provide so much detail. This summer, as if to emphasise the close ties with intelligence services, Zuckerberg confessed to Joe Rogan that Facebook had followed FBI guidance over the Hunter Biden laptop affair and in effect ‘shadow banned’ the story. Even before that, the shine had come off Zuckerberg as his holding company Meta has continued to lose value; now 11,000 employees have been sacked. 

Then we have FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried (aka SBF or as some are calling him ‘less bankman; more fried’ and even ‘Sam Bankster Fraud’), the 30-year-old founder of the crypto exchange.

SBF ticked a lot of boxes for the globalists. He was part of the ‘Effective Altruism‘ movement which claims to be about ‘doing good better’. Which meant that he could use some of his $16billion net worth on not-for-profit charities dear to the globalists focused on planet-saving projects. In July 2021 he set up the FTX Foundation which spawned a number of initiatives such as research into stopping future pandemics; FTX Climate, a fund for research into climate change; the FTX Future Fund with areas of interest such as Artificial Intelligence and the risks from bioweapons, and FTX Community, concerned with poverty, animal welfare and community outreach. All good philanthropic stuff, the sort that globalists like.

Institutional investors were reassured by SBF’s collaboration with Congress to develop regulation for the crypto sphere. With such high moral standards and lots of virtue-signalling – saving the planet, working to improve regulation around crypto, hanging out with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, what could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately for investors, as bankruptcy proceedings are currently revealing, SBF and his colleagues were involved in an unethical and fraudulent operation. Little did investors realise that SBF was in effect running a Ponzi scheme which secretly reallocated client funds out of FTX into Alameda Research, SBF’s trading company, as collateral to cover risky trades. Because there was no oversight (FTX lacked a board of governance) and no one asked hard questions, FTX ran out of liquidity and became insolvent.

It could be said that SBF’s absence of moral boundaries was reflected in his unconventional lifestyle living in the Bahamas in a polyamorous set-up with several of his colleagues. His supposed girlfriend who was running Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison, is on record describing it as being like an ‘imperial Chinese harem’. He also had no problem being a slush fund for the Democrat Party, being the second largest donor after George Soros; or being involved in financing Ukraine. FTX helped the Ukraine government to set up a crypto donations website, ‘Aid for Ukraine‘, which has led to accusations of US tax money sent to Ukraine being cycled back to the US via FTX.

Those who believe that FTX was a deliberate scam from the start point to SBF’s work with Congress as the main reason for FTX’s creation. It suited those who regard the decentralised nature of crypto as a threat to centralised financial controls to have a Trojan Horse insider who could work to undermine the crypto space. Even crashing FTX helps their cause as now all crypto is tarred with the Ponzi accusation and, having lost money, institutional investors will stay away from the space. At the end of the day, these are all power games. SBF may well have been a victim of larger forces. He served his purpose and had his fun in the sun.

Meanwhile we should all be more wary of wunderkinder. Not least the World Economic Forum, which has deleted FTX from its website and doesn’t seem keen to discuss the matter further. I wonder why?

November 24, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , | 2 Comments

“You won’t answer the question” – Senator Rand Paul confronts FBI on scooping up online user data

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | November 19, 2022

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) confronted FBI Director Christopher Wray about the collusion with social media companies and whether the FBI scoops up private information to identify users.

“Is  or any other social media company supplying private messages or data on American users that is not compelled by the government or the FBI?” Paul asked Wray. “No warrant, no subpoena, they’re just supplying you information on their users?”

“I don’t believe so, but I can’t sit here and be sure of that as I sit here,” Wray replied.

“Can you give us a yes or no by going back to your team and asking? Because it’s a very specific question. Because if they are, it’s against the law,” Paul said, invoking the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. “This was done to protect the privacy of people so we could feel like we can send an email or direct message to people without having that information given over. It’s a very specific question: Will you get with your team of lawyers and give us a specific answer? Because this is the law. If you’re doing it, then we need to go to court to prevent you from receiving this information.”

“Well, I can tell you that I’m quite confident that we’re following the law —, ” Wray started.

“Well, that’s not the answer, ” Paul responded.

“ — but what I will also follow up with you to make sure we get you more information; more detailed information,” Wray added.

“Is the FBI obtaining anonymous social media data and then using technical methods to pierce the anonymous nature of the data?” Paul questioned.

Wray paused before asking, “Anonymous social media data?”

“So you purchase data,” Paul said. “People purchase data all the time and we sort of tolerate it for advertising and things because it’s anonymous data. Are you purchasing what is said to be anonymous data through the marketplace and then piercing the anonymous nature to attach individual names to that data? Are you purchasing data and then piercing the anonymous nature of that data?”

“So the manner in which we use — we usually use the term commercial data — is probably longer than I can explain here. But again, let me —, ” Wray said appearing to dodge the question.

“So you will not answer the question of whether or not you’re attaching names to anonymous data,” Paul stated.

“I think it’s a more complicated answer than I can give here,” Wray responded.

“So, so far we’re 0 for 2 at getting you to answer this, but you’re pledging you will actually answer the question because you have to realize the frustration; we’ll write you a letter and your team of lawyers will write back with a 15-page letter that says nothing and you won’t answer the question. These are very specific. This is whether you’re obeying the law, whether we can have confidence. I want to have confidence,” Paul said.

“We are obeying the law,” Wray responded.

“Well, you’re saying that, but you won’t tell us the answer,” Paul stated. “You aren’t telling me the answer. And the answer is: Are you collecting data not compelled by a warrant? That would not be in compliance with the law. But you won’t answer that you’re not collecting that data.”

Eventually, Paul asked, “Are you getting tips and leads from social media companies?”

“We get tips and leads from companies, absolutely,” Wray acknowledged.

“You may think this is jolly well to get all this stuff without a warrant that people volunteer to you, but many of us are alarmed that you’re getting this information that are private communications between people because it is against the law – it’s against the law for Facebook or social media companies to give it to you, but it’s also against the law for you to receive it,” Paul ended.

Related: Commercial surveillance is state surveillance

November 22, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Video | , , | 3 Comments

Did Federal Censors Swing the 2020 Election?

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | November 14, 2022

Did the Russiagate conspiracy entitle the federal government to censor Americans forever? Did federal shenanigans swing the 2020 election? A new report reveals how a new federal agency and federal grantees exploited a 2016 scam to launch the greatest covert censorship campaign in U.S. history.

In 2016, top FBI officials and the Obama administration fueled a conspiracy that the Trump presidential campaign was colluding with the Russian government. Numerous false FBI claims spurred a massive wiretapping operation approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The allegations led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating before admitting that there was nothing to prosecute for his primary charge. But by that point, Trump had been irredeemably tainted and the Democrats had exploited the controversy to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.

Thanks to Russiagate, Congress created a new federal agency in 2018—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA was purportedly intended to fight foreign threats to election security and U.S. infrastructure. But the agency quickly shifted its target to American citizens. As a report last week from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) revealed, “Any U.S. citizen posting what DHS considered misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure.”

CISA and DHS realized that they could not directly muzzle Americans so they colluded with a number of federal grantees who comprised the Election Integrity Project, a coalition formed in mid-2020. The result was “censorship by proxy,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed, bludgeoning social media companies into submission. The DHS-spurred crackdown in 2020 resulted in the suppression of “22 million tweets labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter” and “hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted” thanks to changes that would not have occurred without “‘huge regulatory pressure’ from government,” FFO reported.

Once the government claims a prerogative to censor “misinformation,” the definition of misinformation mushrooms to serve political purposes. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about how social media posts were targeted that were merely purportedly guilty of offenses such as “exaggerate issue,” “misleading stats” and “out of context.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods continually uncorked by presidential candidates Trump and Biden.

Prior to the 2020 election, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” FFO reported. Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to push through electoral changes that opened the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. Some states like Michigan sent absentee ballots to all voters, violating the Election Clause of the Constitution (which specifies that state legislatures make the rules for federal elections).

Election regimes that scrutinized mail-in ballots routinely had a high rejection rate.  New York City relied on mail-in ballots for a June 2020 primary that the New York Daily News derided as a “dumpster fire.” Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes,” The Washington Post noted, thanks largely to missing postmarks or signatures. Trump claimed that the shift to mail-in ballots could result in “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history.”

But federal string-pulling minimized controversies. FFO noted, “Pre-censoring U.S. citizen debate about mail-in ballots five months before an election has the impact of devastating the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures.” Rather than the traditional scrutiny for mail-in ballots, many locales defaulted to accepting practically any piece of paper with a mark. Mail-in ballots determined the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump received more votes on Election Day but 43,000 mail-in ballots in three states sealed Biden’s victory—a minuscule portion of the tens of millions of mail-in votes he received.

In a July 28, 2020 article for the American Institute for Economic Research, I warned that the controversies over mail-in ballots could lead to “the death of political legitimacy…Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.”

Until I read the new FFO report, I did not realize that “the biggest category for [2020] censorship was  ‘delegitimization’… defined to mean any speech that ‘casts doubt’ on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues [which] made all conservative and populist criticism of the administration of the election pre-banned at the narrative level, five months in advance of Election Day.” Damn, no wonder that article of mine got so little traction on Twitter and Facebook! “Delegitimization” resulted in “72% of its censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative during the 2020 election.”

The entire process looks like a Monty Python parody of democracy. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who heads FFO, observed, “The same obscure DHS subagency tasked with election security also gained the power to censor any questions about election security.”

How much impact did federal censorship and suppression have on the most recent elections? The Election Integrity Project browbeat tech companies to accept “that social media posts about the 2022 elections be censorable under a low bar of simply ‘misleading,’” according to FFO. For the midterm elections, “the Election Integrity Project is tightly monitoring and working to censor ‘discussions surrounding the delays in counting ballots’ being ‘framed as fraud,’” FFO reported. Damned convenient considering the debacle in Arizona—which was foreseen if not foreordained. In a Washington speech just before the election, President Biden told listeners that “in some cases we won’t know the winner…until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.” Biden stressed that citizens must be “patient. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

But it never consistently worked that way before in American history. Arizona’s voting machines dismally failed on Election Day and Democrats are vehemently resisting a hand recount of all ballots.

The real goal is to control Americans’ minds—and not just on Election Day. Jen Easterly, the NSA honcho who Biden chose to run CISA, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation… is incredibly important.” And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam. In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept recently reported. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. If the feds can censor most if not almost all of their online critics, their cons become almost irrefutable. Perhaps that is the only way that many federal policies can retain any shard of legitimacy. As Mike Benz warns, “DHS is carrying out an official state policy that if public trust is not earned, it must be installed.” That is a recipe for the death of democracy.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Name-Calling, ‘Fact-Checking’ and Censorship in the Covid Era

BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | NOVEMBER 11, 2022

One novel feature of the pandemic, from the standpoint of public debate, is the fact that so much name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship was aimed not just at random dissidents but at credentialed scientists.

Academics who’d reached esteemed positions within their field were denounced as ‘Covid deniers’, accused of spreading ‘misinformation’, and subjected to multiple forms of censorship.

Renowned scholars had warning labels attached to their tweets, and found their articles blacklisted on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. In one particularly egregious case, the Great Barrington Declaration was downranked by Google, so that when users searched for it, articles critical of the Declaration appeared above the Declaration itself.

Somehow, Big Tech firms felt they were in position to adjudicate complex scientific debates. This would be like two scientists having an argument at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park, but the groundskeeper keeps blasting an airhorn every time one of them speaks.

And it wasn’t just Big Tech that restricted one side’s freedom of speech. Academics who questioned the mainstream view on Covid faced sanctions from their universities, journals and professional associations.

In a recent paper, Yaffa Shir-Raz and colleagues analysed the tactics that were used against dissenting scientists, based on semi-structured interviews with some of the targets. Their findings have already been summarised by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, but it’s worth pulling out a few anecdotes from the paper.

One interviewee recounted that he/she was even censored on Google docs – a program for creating documents and spreadsheets (like Microsoft Office):

Google Docs started restricting and censoring my ability to share documents… This is not Twitter throwing me off like they did. This is an organisation telling me that I cannot send a private communication to a colleague or to a friend, or to a family member.

Another interviewee explained that his/her employment contract was re-written after he/she deviated from the narrative:

They offered me a new contract… we got some new terms for you, because my old contract was not restricted. The new one basically had like seven or eight restrictions of my First Amendment rights… basically I couldn’t talk to the press, I couldn’t speak in public… unless I said, these are my opinions not that of my employer… It was a relatively short conversation. I said that’s never going to happen, I’m never going to sign that thing.

A third interviewee described how he/she was cancelled by several organisations without any due process:

There was a whole series of actions taken again with no due process and no explanation… I received a notice from the [medical association] that I was being stripped from a committee position… I received a letter from a journal…where I was the Editor-in-Chief, being stripped of the editorship, again with no due process, no phone calls no, tractable explanation… I received a letter from the National Institutes of Health being stripped from a longstanding committee position.

Remember, these were all “established doctors and scientists”, not foreign spies engaged in subversion.

The point isn’t that dissenting scientists were right about everything (although they were right about a lot). It’s that we can’t have a proper debate if one side faces a barrage of name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship. Enforcing a narrative around Covid shouldn’t be the role of Big Tech companies. And it certainly shouldn’t be the role of academic institutions.

November 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Facebook launches new tools to “combat climate misinformation”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | November 9, 2022

The world’s largest social network, , has announced plans to increase its elevation of “authoritative climate information” and expand its “fact checking” of content that it deems to be climate misinformation.

Facebook will expand its fact-checking tools by increasing the availability of its “Climate Science Center” (a page that contains “factual resources from the world’s leading climate organizations and actionable steps people can take in their everyday lives to combat climate change”) to 165 countries and expanding its “Climate Inform Labels” (labels that are added to Facebook posts and link to posts from the Climate Science Center).

The tech giant has also launched a “Climate Science Literacy Initiative” that will “pre-bunk climate misinformation” by running ads that “feature five of the most common techniques used to misrepresent climate change.”

To boost “authoritative” climate information, Facebook is testing a new “Climate Pledges” feature in Groups and has committed to amplifying the voices of “trusted organizations in the climate space.”

This new Climate Pledges feature was developed with inputs from the  (UN) and contains what it calls “expert-backed climate solutions” that “spark conversation” within Groups and “help people understand the most impactful actions they can take.”

Facebook is also working closely with several climate change groups such as Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Facebook will boost these organizations by “providing ad credits, insights and support to help them share reliable information about climate change, and inform users about common techniques used to spread myths about climate science.”

Facebook’s announcement of these changes follows it and other tech giants facing mounting pressure to censor content that challenges the mainstream climate change narrative as climate groupsscience groups, and even tech employees demand more censorship.

Not only has there been an increased push for Big Tech platforms to censor climate content that deviates from the mainstream narrative but influential groupsbanks, and executives are also pushing for increased tracking and surveillance of individual carbon usage as a proposed strategy for combating climate change.

November 10, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

US agencies working directly with Big Tech to police Internet content

By Drago Bosnic | November 1, 2022

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the United States effectively became a police state. Government control and direct surveillance, the legality of which remains questionable at best, has been the norm ever since. With the advent of new technologies and the expansion of the so-called Big Tech (Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, etc.), the government managed to acquire unprecedented access to the personal information of not just its own citizens, but hundreds of millions of others around the world as well.

For decades, Big Tech denied any involvement with US agencies, despite it being common knowledge for the vast majority of users. However, the level of cooperation and integration between the US government and the aforementioned Internet giants (all of which are private companies) has been truly staggering.

Back in August, while on the Joe Rogan podcast, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the FBI worked with the company to suppress so-called “Russian propaganda” shortly before the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was published by the New York Post. However, new reports now indicate that this Big Tech-US government collusion goes much deeper, according to the leaked documents acquired by The Intercept. Their investigation revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is “quietly broadening control over speech it considers dangerous.” Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

According to the report, the work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”, a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens US interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the US government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information, The Intercept reports.

During a March 2022 meeting, FBI official Laura Dehmlow warned that the “threat of subversive information on social media” could undermine support for the US government – stressing that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.” Interestingly, Dehmlow’s insistence on preventing the fall of support for the US government is clearly a priority over telling the truth. What’s more, the US agencies seem to have a strict bias towards certain power structures within the US establishment, primarily those dominated by the DNC neoliberals and partially the GOP neoconservatives. This was particularly noticeable during Donald Trump’s presidency, when undermining the 45th US president through disinformation and conspiracy theories such as the alleged “Russian election meddling” wasn’t seen as a “threat to our democracy”.

Expectedly, the Big Tech companies denied involvement. Twitter told The Intercept that they “do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions” and that they “independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules.” However, the claim doesn’t seem very convincing given the sheer amount of coordinated efforts by the Big Tech companies (seemingly unrelated, as they are all officially separate private entities) to suppress so-called MDM (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation). Having every Big Tech corporation banning or restricting millions of users in a virtually identical manner can only be described as a cooperative effort directed by the same authority. The Intercept report indicates that this authority is none other than the US government itself.

The issue at hand is the fact that various interest groups within the US establishment are controlling what hundreds of millions of people get to see as the “undeniable truth”, or worse yet, billions when taking the global scale into account. Whether it’s the election meddling designed to push their preferred candidates or promoting wars around the world, these entities should be denied such a tremendous amount of power.

The so-called “struggle against MDM (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation)” has become the No. 1 pretext to suppress any information deemed as such. This has gone so far that private companies are now fining their customers, with PayPal deducting $2500 from anyone’s account for “spreading MDM”. It’s clear that such a level of control is quite uncomfortable, to say the least. The question is, where does it stop?

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 1, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Court: Facebook “fact-check’ label does not mean that the assessment is “objective fact”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 15, 2022

US TV host and journalist John Stossel sued Facebook (Meta) and its third-party “fact-checkers” – specifically, Science Feedback, as several of these groups’ parent companies, and its site Climate Feedback – for defamation.

But the US District Court, Northern District of  has granted both ’s motion to dismiss the defamation complaint with prejudice (meaning that it cannot be refiled), as well as Meta’s and Science Feedback’s anti-SLAPP motions.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

One of Stossel’s videos, “Government Fueled Fires,” got labeled as “missing context,” and then deliberately downranked by ’s algorithms, resulting in traffic and revenue loss from his account with more than a million followers.

The video was seen as “downplaying” climate change as the decisive factor and primary cause of the 2020 California wildfires, asserting instead that although the phenomenon plays a role, it was bad policies that contributed the most to the scale of that natural disaster.

In April 2021, Stossel published another video, “Are We Doomed?”, that discusses what the journalist calls environmental alarmists and their claims. This one received the “partly false information” from Facebook’s “fact-checking partner.”

Stossel’s failed lawsuit sought to prove that Facebook and the “fact-checker” in question defamed him in the first instance by falsely inferring that he made a statement he says he never did, and in the other, by accusing him of making false statements.

The court explained its decision by saying that, although called a “fact-check program” what Facebook is actually doing – and has the right to do – is “reflect a subjective judgment about the accuracy and reliability of assertions made.”

Therefore, the use of the term “fact” isn’t to say that Facebook is under an obligation to establish actual facts, and apply its censorship accordingly. “Simply because the process by which content is assessed and a label applied is called a ‘fact-check’ does not mean that the assessment itself is an actionable statement of objective fact.”

The defamation complaint was dismissed based on CDA’s Section 230 and the protections it affords Facebook in crafting (and wording) its policies.

Facebook’s and “fact-checker’s” motions to dismiss based on anti-SLAPP (Anti-Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) rules were granted because Facebook is a public forum, the court said.

October 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

Facebook suspended British Cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra for sharing report by Florida’s Surgeon General

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 14, 2022

Esteemed British cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra called  an “enemy of democracy” after he was suspended by the Big Tech platform for three days for sharing a post by Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo alleging Covid vaccines elevate the risk of cardiac-related deaths in men between the ages of 18 and 39.

Dr. Lapado was himself censored by rival platform Twitter over his post.

Malhotra was initially suspended for 24 hours for sharing Ladapo’s post. The suspension was extended to three days after Facebook flagged a post from two weeks ago, where Dr. Malhotra said that COVID-19 vaccines should be “suspended until all the raw data (from the trials) has been released for independent analysis.”

Speaking to GB News, Malhotra said, “Facebook is an enemy of democracy.”

He added: “The fact checking only goes in one direction.

“Think of the number of commentators who told us that vaccines stopped transmission during the rollouts. Where were the labels of ‘medical misinformation’ then?”

About the suspension being extended to three days, he said: “This post is two weeks old. They’re trawling through my Facebook looking for misinformation.

“They are clearly following an agenda here.”

October 15, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

The FBI is sued for withholding Facebook censorship records

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 7, 2022

The FBI has been sued for withholding records of communications with Facebook about the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that before the 2020 election, the FBI warned Facebook about Russian propaganda.

“The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that,’” he said.

The FBI did not explicitly mention the laptop story but Facebook thought the story fit the pattern that the federal agency described and decided to limit the reach of the story.

Following Zuckerberg’s comments, the America First Legal (AFL), a legal nonprofit founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, requested the FBI for the communications it had with Facebook between October 1, 2020, and November 15, 2020. The FBI refused to comply, claiming the request could not be done “with a reasonable amount of effort” because it was “overly broad.”

This week, the AFL filed a lawsuit to force the FBI to comply with its request.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The lawsuit states: “Barely a month before the 2022 midterm election, FBI officials continue to suppress information of great interest to American voters and stonewall AFL’s request for records relating to the FBI’s collusive scheme with Facebook to censor news and information about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

The AFL is convinced there was “comprehensive collusion” between the FBI and Big Tech to put Joe Biden in the White House.

“The evidence is that during the 2020 Presidential election campaign, the FBI conspired and combined with large corporations, including Facebook, to censor and suppress the damning evidence of

Biden family corruption and influence peddling found on Hunter Biden’s laptop,” said AFL Senior Counselor Reed Rubinstein.

“This was done to help Joe Biden and the Democrats win the 2020 election.”

Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley wrote letters to FBI Director Chris Wray and Zuckerberg asking for the names of the employees involved in the communications about “Russian disinformation.”

“The American people deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden,” the senators said in the letters.

October 7, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , | 1 Comment