MEET THE EX-CIA AGENTS DECIDING FACEBOOK’S CONTENT POLICY
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | July 12, 2022
It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see.
Aaron is being interviewed in a bright warehouse-turned-studio. He is wearing a purple sweater and blue jeans. He comes across as a very likable, smiley person. It is not an easy job, of course, but someone has to make those calls. “Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do,” he says.
Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.
Berman’s case is far from unique, however. Studying Meta’s reports, as well as employment websites and databases, MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.
In previous investigations, this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.
TRUST ME, BRO
In a political sense, trust, safety and misinformation are the most sensitive parts of Meta’s operation. It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day. Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.
There are a number of other ex-CIA agents working in these fields. Deborah Berman, for example, spent 10 years as a data and intelligence analyst at the CIA before recently being brought on as a trust and safety project manager for Meta. Little is known about what she did at the agency, but her pre-agency publications indicate she was a specialist on Syria.
Between 2006 and 2010, Bryan Weisbard was a CIA intelligence officer, his job entailing, in his own words, leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns”. Directly after that, he became a diplomat (underlining how close the line is between those two professions), and is currently a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta.
Meanwhile, the LinkedIn profile of Cameron Harris – a CIA analyst until 2019 – notes that he is now a Meta trust and safety project manager.
Individuals from other state institutions abound as well. Emily Vacher was an FBI employee between 2001 and 2011, rising to the rank of supervisory special agent. From there she was headhunted by Facebook/Meta, and is now a director of trust and safety. Between 2010 and 2020, Mike Bradow worked for USAID, eventually becoming deputy director of policy for the organization. USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua. Since 2020, Meta has employed Bradow as a misinformation policy manager.
Others have similar pasts. Neil Potts, a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps, is vice president of trust and safety at Facebook. In 2020, Sherif Kamal left his job as a program manager at the Pentagon to take up the post of Meta trust and safety program manager.
Joey Chan currently holds the same trust and safety post as Kamal. Until last year, Chan was a U.S. Army officer commanding a company of over 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.
None of this is to say that any of those named are not conscientious, that they are bad people or bad at their job. Vacher, for example, helped design Facebook’s amber alert program, notifying people to missing children in their area. But hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power. Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.
Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, “woke” organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial. It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of “black sites” where prisoners are repeatedly tortured. Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.
One of these critics is Elizabeth Murray, who, in 2010, retired from a 27-year career at the CIA and other U.S. intelligence organizations. “This is insidious,” Murray told MintPress, adding,
I see it as part of the gradual and sinister migration of ambitious young professionals originally trained (with CIA’s virtually unlimited, U.S.-taxpayer funded pot of resources) to surveil and target ‘the bad guys’ during the so-called Global War on Terror of the post-9-11 era.”
MintPress also contacted Facebook/Meta for comment but has not received a response.
ARM’S LENGTH CONTROL
Some may ask what the big fuss is. There is a limited pool of individuals with the necessary skills and experience in these new tech and cybersecurity fields, and many of them come from government institutions. Casinos, after all, regularly hire card sharks to protect themselves. But there is little evidence that this is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper scenario; Facebook is certainly not hiring whistleblowers. The problem is not that these individuals are incompetant. The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online – and all with essentially no public oversight.
In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability. The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s. And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.
Again, this article is not claiming that any of the named individuals are nefarious actors, or even that they are anything but model employees. This is a structural problem. Put another way, if Facebook were hiring dozens of managers from Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB or GRU, everybody would recognize the inherent dangers. It should be little different when it hires individuals from the CIA, an organization responsible for some of the worst crimes of the modern era.
FROM STATE INTELLIGENCE TO PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE
Facebook has also hired a plethora of ex-national security state officers to run its intelligence and online security operations. Until 2013, Scott Stern was a targeting officer at the CIA, rising to become chief of targeting. In this role, he helped select the targets for U.S. drone strikes across South and West Asia. Today, however, as a senior manager of risk intelligence for Meta, “misinformation” and “malicious actors” are his targets. Hopefully he is more accurate at Facebook than at the CIA, where the government’s own internal assessments show that at least 90% of Afghans killed in drone strikes were innocent civilians.
Other former CIA men at Facebook include Mike Torrey, who left his job as a senior analyst at the agency to become Meta’s technical lead of detection, investigations and disruptions of complex information operations threats, and former CIA contractor Hagan Barnett, who is now head of harmful content operations at the Silicon Valley giant.
Meta’s intelligence and online security team includes individuals from virtually every government agency imaginable. In 2015, Department of Defense intelligence officer Suzanna Morrow left her post to become director of global security intelligence for Meta. The FBI is represented by threat investigations manager Ellen Nixon and head of cyber espionage investigations Mike Dvilyanski. Facebook’s influence operations policy manager Olga Belogolova had stints at the State Department and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Before Meta, David Agranovich and Nathaniel Gleicher both worked for the National Security Council. Agranovich is director of global threat disruption at Facebook while Gleicher is head of security policy. Hayley Chang, director and associate general counsel for cybersecurity and investigations, worked formerly for both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. And Meta’s global head of interaction operations, David Hansell, was once an Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency man.
One of Meta’s most outwardly-facing employees is its global threat intelligence lead for influence operations, Ben Nimmo, a character MintPress has covered before. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. He was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank.
Perhaps then, it is not surprising that Facebook never seems to find U.S. government influence operations online – they are part of one!
CYBER WAR, CYBER WARRIORS
While Meta has not unmasked any nefarious U.S. government action, it regularly uncovers what it claims are foreign disinformation campaigns. According to a recent Facebook report, the top five locations of coordinated inauthentic behavior between 2017 and 2020 on its platform are Russia, Iran, Myanmar, the United States and Ukraine. However, it was at pains to note that American operations were driven by fringe far-right elements, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, and not the government.
This is despite the fact that it is now well-established that the Pentagon fields a clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence public opinion, the majority of them doing so from their keyboards. A Newsweek exposé from last year called it “The largest undercover force the world has ever known,” adding,
The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”
Newsweek warned that this army was likely breaking both U.S. and international law by doing so, explaining that,
These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing ‘nonattribution’ and ‘misattribution’ techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called ‘publicly accessible information’—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”
As far back as 2011, The Guardian was reporting on this enormous cyber force, whose job it was to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” Yet the ex-military and ex-CIA officials Facebook employs do not seem to have found any trace of their former colleagues’ at work on the platform.
DIGITALLY SWINGING ELECTIONS
Since its beginnings in 2004, Facebook has grown to become a massive global empire and by far the most important news distributor the planet has ever known. The company boasts almost 3 billion active users, meaning that nearly 2 in 5 people worldwide use the platform. A recent 12-country study suggested that around 30% of the entire world gets its news via their Facebook feeds. This gives whoever is in charge of curating those feeds and controlling those algorithms inestimable power. It also represents a serious national security threat for all other countries, especially those that might wish to take a path independent from the United States. That those people are in large part former spooks makes this threat all the more perilous.
This is far from a hypothetical quandary. In November, less than a week before the country’s election, Facebook took the decision to delete hundreds of pages and accounts belonging to individuals and groups that supported the Nicaraguan Sandinista party – a longtime U.S. target for regime change. These included many of the nation’s most influential journalists and media outlets. Considering that around half of the country uses the platform for news and entertainment, the decision could barely have been more intrusive, and was likely designed to try to swing the election towards the pro-U.S. candidate.
Facebook claims that those accounts were bots engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” When those individuals migrated on to Twitter, recording videos identifying who they were to show they were not bots, Twitter immediately deleted those accounts too, in what was dubbed a coordinated attempt at suppression.
The individual behind this attempt was the aforementioned Ben Nimmo, who co-authored an unconvincing report, full of questionable assumptions and allegations. This included an insinuation that accounts following a pattern of activity whereby their Facebook usage levels peaked in the morning and afternoon and dwindled to almost nothing after midnight Nicaragua time suggested they were bots.
Facebook was also used by right-wing Cubans to attempt a U.S.-backed color revolution against the ruling Communist government last year.
Giving any individual or group that much control over the airwaves of communication raises huge questions about national security and sovereignty – doubly so when those individuals are so intimately connected to the U.S. national security state.
When asked what the public’s reaction would be to the news of such an intimate connection between Facebook her former employer, Murray stated that she was unsure whether many would be bothered:
I would like to think that the American public would strenuously object. However the CIA and other agencies have worked over many decades to cultivate a positive – indeed almost glamorous – image in the eyes of the vast majority of the public, mostly through TV series, Hollywood films, and favorable media coverage – so sadly my guess is that the vast majority of the public probably believes that these are the folks who should be in charge.”
However, she said, the news would likely land a very different way in countries that have been the target of Washington’s ire. “As you’re no doubt aware, the CIA has an atrocious public reputation in most parts of the world,” she added.
SPOOKS IN EVERY DEPARTMENT
MintPress has found former representatives of the U.S. national security state in virtually every politically sensitive department at Facebook. This includes even higher levels. Between 2020 and 2021, Kris Rose was a member of Meta’s governance oversight board – the group responsible for the overall direction of the platform. He left his job at the Director of National Intelligence as the president’s daily brief writer to take up the role. Before that, he had spent six years at the CIA as a political and counterterrorism analyst. Meanwhile, Gina Kim Sumilas, Facebook’s director and associate general counsel for the Asia Pacific region, spent nearly twelve years in the CIA before moving into the tech private sector.
There is also considerable overlap with the U.S. government in the company’s front facing staff. Kadia Koroma, for instance, was plucked from her position as an FBI spokesperson in January 2020 to become media relations manager at Facebook. Jeffrey Gelman, policy communications manager for Facebook’s oversight board, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and held influential roles in both the State Department and the National Security Council. And executive communications spokesman Kevin Lewis spent many years in the White House as President Obama’s spokesperson.
Meta’s vice president of legal strategy is Rachel Carlson Lieber, who went straight from the CIA into Facebook. Her first role at the Silicon Valley giant was as head of the North America regulatory and strategic response, a department that continues to feature a number of former state officials. This includes head of strategic programs, Robert Flaim, who spent more than twenty years as an FBI, and Erin Clancy, who left a 16-year career at the State Department to become a manager of strategic response policy.
Clancy’s official work centered around U.S. policy in the Middle East. Her own bio boasts that she worked on the U.S. sanctions regime placed on Iraq and Sudan. She also worked at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus at the time of the Arab Spring and the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. It is known that she also coordinated closely with the White Helmets, a controversial aid organization that some have alleged is far too close to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Even after her Facebook appointment, Clancy moonlighted as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a fellow at the Atlantic Council, the hawkish body that serves as NATO’s brain trust.
Why are these national security state officials so attractive to Meta? One reason, Murray explained, is financial. “By snagging a CIA employee a company can save a considerable sum,” she said, explaining that, “The individual has likely undergone extensive professional training (at taxpayer expense) and probably has a security clearance,” something that is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to obtain in private sector work. Therefore, companies dealing with matters of state secrecy (such as defense contractors) have historically courted both current and former officers to fill their ranks, enticing them with much higher salaries than they can receive in government service.
“What is new (or at least newly known to us!) is that now these professionals are being sought after by social media companies like Facebook, Google and others who are now heavily into monitoring, surveilling, and censoring content, and then sharing data about users with U.S. government entities,” Murray added.
Such is the need for these individuals in these fields that private companies often hire former national security agents to do the recruiting for them. For instance, John Papp, who spent 12 years at the CIA as a senior intelligence officer and 4 years as an imagery analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, went on to work as a recruiter for many of the largest defense contractors in Washington. These included Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, IBM and Lockheed Martin. Today, he works as a recruiter for Meta.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta also employs former spooks for their internal security operations. The company’s vice president, chief security officer is Nick Lovrien, a former counterterrorism operations officer at the CIA, while its head of insider protection is ex-CIA operational psychologist and “undercover officer” Nicole Alford.
Meanwhile, Meta’s director of global security governance – the individual reportedly responsible for the personal safety of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg – is Jill Leavens Jones. Jones left her job as a U.S. Secret Service special agent to take the appointment. And director of global security operations Alexander Carrillo continued on as a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard for several months after his appointment at Facebook. The company also hires former feds to work directly with law enforcement on legal issues. One example of this is former FBI special agent Brian Kelley.
A LONG PATTERN OF INFILTRATION
45 years ago, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein released an investigation documenting how the CIA had managed to infiltrate U.S. and global media. The CIA had placed hundreds of agents into newsrooms and had convinced hundreds more reporters to collaborate with them. These included individuals at some of the most influential outlets, including The New York Times. The CIA needed to do this clandestinely because any attempt to do so openly would harm the effectiveness of the operation and provoke stiff public resistance. But by 2015, there was barely a murmur of disapproval when Reuters announced that it was hiring 33-year veteran CIA manager and director Dawn Scalici as a global director, even when the company announced that her primary responsibility was to “advanc[e] Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”
Facebook, however, is vastly more influential than the New York Times or Reuters, reaching billions of people daily. In that sense, it stands to reason that it would be a prime target of any intelligence organization. It has become so big and ubiquitous that many consider it a de facto public commons and believe it should no longer be treated as a private company. Considering who is making many of the decisions on the platform, that distinction between public and private entities is even more blurry than many presume.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.
Another First Amendment lawsuit against Facebook censorship fails
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 20, 2022
The US judicial system has dismissed yet another lawsuit filed by censored users of Big Tech’s social media platforms, who allege First Amendment free speech violations.
This time it was the US District Court for the Northern District of California that granted a motion to dismiss filed by the defendant, Facebook (Meta). The plaintiff in this case, Richard Rogalinski, sued on First Amendment grounds after a number of his posts about Covid got censored on Facebook.
We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.
One of the posts expressed Rogalinski’s skepticism about the efficacy of masks, saying that he has not seen scientific evidence of their usefulness, but instead, “just talking heads who want to spread fear and control you.”
To this, Facebook’s “fact-checkers” reacted by adding a warning label claiming the post was “missing context.” The same warning was slapped on a post that saw the plaintiff criticize the Covid vaccine rollout.
Finally, a screenshot of a tweet posted by a doctor who promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine got labeled as “false information” by Facebook and removed.
Originally, the Florida resident filed a class action lawsuit in that state, but Facebook moved to either dismiss or transfer it, after which the judge transferred it to California.
In an attempt to fight against the usual defense that massive tech corporations have when censoring content and users – that they are private operations that have the right to do that, while the First Amendment applies only to state actors – Rogalinski mentioned statements made by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
In July 2021 – and the California judge noted in the ruling that this happened “after Meta took action against Rogalinski’s posts” – Psaki told a press conference that the Biden administration is “in regular touch” with major social media platforms, and actively flagging content posted on Facebook that the government thinks are “problematic” on misinformation grounds.
Rogalinski argued that the state “chose the targets and content of the statements that it deemed worthy of the defendant’s censorship” which then resulted in censorship by Facebook.
The plaintiff further accused the government and Meta of communicating directly and specifically about the censorship actions and engaging in the act together by sharing responsibility for the two-step process of censorship.
However, the court disagreed, citing several similar cases, including O’Handley v. Padilla, where the ruling reads that the government “can work with a private entity without converting that entity’s later decisions into state action.”
Facebook blocks #diedsuddenly hashtag
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 12, 2022
Facebook has hidden posts with the “#diedsuddenly” hashtag because it claims that some of these posts violate its far-reaching community standards. When users search for this hashtag, no results are displayed and Facebook shows a message stating that the results are hidden.
While Facebook doesn’t specify which rules these posts allegedly violated, Twitter users have been using the hashtag to share news stories about people who died suddenly. Most of these Twitter posts note that those who died were fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and allude to there being a connection between the vaccines and their deaths.
If Facebook users are posting similar content under this hashtag, the posts are likely to violate the tech giant’s ban on a wide range of COVID-19 vaccine claims. Facebook prohibits claims that “vaccines are toxic, dangerous, or cause autism” and reduces the distribution of “shocking stories” about the vaccines. One of Facebook’s examples of a shocking story is “Uncovered: See the 632 reports made of people who died within a week of having the new COVID-19 vaccine.”
The blocking of this hashtag is the latest of many examples of Facebook censoring content that is critical of or raises questions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has also mass censored anti-mask content, anti-lockdown content, and content that said the coronavirus came from a lab (a censorship policy that was suddenly reversed after the Biden admin announced that it would be investigating the origins of COVID).
Not only does Facebook mass censor content that goes against or questions government guidance and the legacy media narrative on COVID but it also partnered with the Pfizer-backed CDC Foundation to increase “vaccine uptake” and maintained a close relationship with US federal agencies on COVID messaging.
The tech giant has previously used hashtag blocking to censor many other topics including “#buchamassacre” (a block that it later said was a mistake), “#Revolution” (which was blocked on a July 4th weekend), and “#SaveTheChildren.”
Facebook introduces encrypted links to hinder privacy efforts
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 18, 2022
Facebook is actively fighting back the attempts by browsers to provide their users with better protection against unwanted tracking on the web.
And for all the talk about using encryption to ensure privacy and improve security in its apps, Facebook seems to have managed to find a way to turn encryption against internet users’ best interest.
In order to prevent browsers like Brave and Firefox from deploying URL stripping that removes tracking parameters added to links by Facebook and others, like Amazon, Facebook is reportedly turning to encrypting links.
Instead of changing tracking parameters in URLs, they are now encrypted and cannot be automatically removed. This means that browsers at this time cannot do anything to prevent tracking via Facebook URLs.
One recourse is to stop using Facebook, and another not to sign into it and delete site data and cookies often – since URL tracking alone is not as efficient a tracking tool for Facebook if not paired with the latter two.
For now at least, the URL stripping functionality is still useful in a large number of other cases where parameters are appended in order to track users across the internet when they’re not on the sites that are tracking them, Ghacks reports.
Until now, Facebook used its “click identifier” (fbclid): Google’s version is known as “gclid,” while Microsoft has “msclkid.” These added parameters have only one purpose – to track users, and are not needed for sites to operate correctly. Unless, that is, the personal data-hungry sites like Facebook make it impossible to remove them.
In that case, a link to a post will lead to the main Facebook page of an account, rather than the post itself.
Brave Browser has been stripping tracking from URLs by default for several years now, while Firefox introduced it (“Query Parameter Stripping”) with the version rolled out this June.
In Firefox, the feature is on by default only in so-called private browsing mode. Users can also activate it by going to the settings and choosing “strict” Tracking Protection, or via the configuration page (“about:config”).
Or they can use an add-on, like the open-source ClearURLs that automatically removes tracking elements from URLs to protect privacy.
Facebook blocks links to website detailing how users can get class action settlement payout from Facebook
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | June 27, 2022
Facebook is blocking links to the official class action claims page for a lawsuit settlement for users affected by privacy concerns. The page helps users receive their payout from Facebook and Facebook is marketing the page as “spam” or “abusive,” which prevents people from learning about how to claim.
“If you are a person who, between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, inclusive, were a Facebook User in the United States who visited non-Facebook websites that displayed the Facebook Like button, you may be eligible for a payment from a Class Action Settlement,” the website reads.
Reclaim The Net was alerted to the censorship by a reader and was able to confirm with David Strait, a partner at the DiCello Levitt Gutzler law firm, a party litigating the case, that fbinternettrackingsettlement.com is the official page for users to see if they’re eligible for a claim.
When users on Facebook Messenger try to share the link with someone, they’re greeted with a message saying, “(#368) The action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed,” hindering the sharing of the claim information.
On desktop, Facebook is blocking links to the page under its “spam” policy.
Twitter hires ‘alarming number’ of ex-spies – investigation
Samizdat | June 24, 2022
Twitter is hiring “an alarming number” of ex-FBI agents and other former “feds and spies,” independent outlet MintPress News is reporting, after conducting an analysis of employment and recruitment websites.
According to the research, in recent years the company employed “dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.”
“Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace,” MintPress wrote.
It provides several examples of such appointments. FBI veteran Karen Walsh who, according to her Twitter profile, served as a special agent for 21 years, has become a director of corporate resilience at the Silicon Valley-based company. Mark Jaroszewski, Twitter director of corporate security and risk, joined the Twitter team after 20+ years at the FBI.
Central Intelligence Agency and NATO think-tank Atlantic Council have also been named by MintPress as key incubators of personnel for Twitter.
“Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media,” the outlet stressed.
RT has checked open-access social media accounts of Twitter’s top managers and also discovered some former employees of the security services among them – in addition to the ones mentioned in the MintPress investigation.
MintPress News stresses that while Twitter’s HR policy might appear logical – the company hires specialists in the areas it needs – it creates some serious problems, not only for the company, but also for the security agencies and organizations. According to former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who is quoted by MintPress, many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs.
“The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” Rowley said.
MintPress claimed that the fact that Twitter recruits largely from the US national security organizations undermines the company’s claims about its neutrality, as the US government “is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world.”
Another risk is that “the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does – and act accordingly,” the outlet states. To prove this claim, the website analyzed a list – compiled by Twitter – of the countries allegedly conducting disinformation campaigns.
“One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of U.S. government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these ‘former’ spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations,” MintPress explained.
Twitter adds warning messages to the tweets and accounts of the state-affiliated media of Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, thus mirroring “US hostility” towards these countries, but does not add any warnings to the pages of state-affiliated media of US and its allies, the outlet highlighted.
Ultimately, MintPress found that Twitter is not the only social media platform that’s “cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state.”
“Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress,” it said, adding that the company has also employed former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo as its head of intelligence.
TikTok, according to the outlet, has been “filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department.”
Reddit and various media, including Thomson Reuters and multiple US TV channels have also been actively employing former spies, MintPress News claims.
“One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins,” it pointed out.
Big Tech Censorship Website Full Fact Lobbies MPs to Include “Health Misinformation” in Online Safety Bill
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 20, 2022
Full Fact – a ‘fact-checking’ website funded by Google, Facebook and George Soros – has been lobbying MPs to include “health misinformation” in the Online Safety Bill. This would force websites to remove “legal but harmful” “misinformation” relating to health, including off-narrative information about COVID-19, lockdowns, masks and vaccines, or face crippling fines.
Last week Full Fact – which received 70% of its 2019 declared funding from Big Tech companies – sent an email to its subscribers urging them to write to their MP and ask him or her vote to address the “gap” left by the Government’s rejection of the Labour and SNP amendment that would have added “health misinformation” to the bill. Full Fact’s Policy and Parliamentary Relations Manager Alison Trew wrote:
Two years on from the outbreak of a global pandemic, it should be obvious that false or misleading claims about our health should be included in the types of online content addressed by the Bill.
A few weeks ago Full Fact’s Chief Executive, Will Moy, warned MPs that as it stands, the Online Safety Bill fails to meet the Government’s aim to make the U.K. the safest place in the world to be online.
Our fact checkers have seen first hand how COVID-19 misinformation has undermined public health, conspiracy theories have led to offline attacks, and disinformation – including on the war in Ukraine – has spread unchecked.
Digital minister Chris Philp told MPs this week that the Government agreed with the intention behind the amendment to tackle harmful health misinformation. And yet, disappointingly, the Government voted against the proposed changes.
This leaves a huge, and dangerous, gap in the Online Safety Bill. But there is still time for Parliament to close it.
Here’s the email in full.
Full Fact, which self-importantly describes itself as “the U.K.’s independent fact checking charity”, is well known to be a politically biased organisation with a history of partisan interventions in political debates. Government Minister Dominic Raab once said of it: “Who said Final [sic] Fact is the final arbiter of what the public get to see as the truth? There’s no God-given right, set in law. It doesn’t sound to me like they like the competition.”
However, various organisations including Google and Facebook use Full Fact to inform them as to what is “misinformation” that must be censored on their platforms. Worse, Raab’s Government is currently causing it to be “set in law” that websites must act on the “misinformation” that sites like Full Fact bring to their attention. The U.K.’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom said last year that its “list of claims that could be considered false or misleading is provided to us by Full Fact”.
Full Fact claims to be an “independent and impartial charity with a cross-party board”. But an investigation by David Scullion for the Critic found this was not true.
The organisation claims to have a board of trustees with “members from the three main UK-wide political parties”. There is a Labour Peer (Baroness Janet Royall), a Lib-Dem peer, (Lord John Sharkey) but their former Conservative Party member, Lord Richard Inglewood, no longer sits as a Tory. When I asked Full Fact who their Conservative member was they pointed out that one of their trustees donates to the Conservative Party and that they have “representatives of different political parties” on their board. This is different wording which allows for the fact that they don’t, or aren’t sure whether they have a Conservative Party member amongst them. I pointed out that a donor was different to a member, but I did not receive a reply and the text on their website was not corrected.
Scullion notes that the departing editor was an ex-Mirror and Buzzfeed reporter, and concludes: “Full Fact is a charity with a small output of research compared to its size, funded primarily by big-tech and staffed to a large extent by former public sector workers or ex-reporters from left-wing media.”
Full Fact misleadingly claims no one has to listen to it: “We don’t ask people to take our word for any conclusion we make. We provide links to all sources so that readers can check what we’ve said for themselves.”
But when major internet sites and broadcasting regulators are leaning on it to tell them what to censor, and when it has a “Head of Advocacy” and a “Policy and Parliamentary Relations Manager” who lobby Government to change the law, it clearly isn’t the case that no one has to take its word for it. Where it speaks, censorship can quickly follow.
Full Fact often gets things wrong. In February 2020 it joined in the now discredited effort to pour cold water on the lab leak theory, stating “There’s no evidence that the 2019 coronavirus originated in a Chinese Government laboratory”, despite many scientists at the time suspecting, based on the evidence, that was the case. Last year the site claimed the Daily Sceptic was being misleading in reporting Government data showing infection rates higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. It wrote:
This data had already caused widespread confusion, because it seemed to show for the month in question (August 9th to September 5th) that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s were more likely to test positive for Covid if they had been vaccinated than if they hadn’t. In particular, a chart displaying the data seemed to give this impression.
Despite pointing out to the site that the Government data and chart didn’t “seem” to show this but plainly did show this, and this was not a result of “confusion” or an “impression” on anyone’s part and the misinformation was entirely Full Fact’s in attempting to cast doubt on this, no correction was forthcoming.
Websites and other media checking one another’s facts is of course a worthwhile activity. That’s one reason free speech is so important, as it allows people to correct one another by drawing attention to new or overlooked evidence. But using biased fact-checking sites as a basis of censorship, as many websites and Government regulators are now in a habit of doing, is a fast-track to an authoritarian society where only officially approved speech and Government-endorsed ‘facts’ are allowed. It’s no surprise that Full Fact wants the Online Safety Bill strengthened to force websites to conform with the pronouncements of sites like itself. But that’s no reason for a Government which claims to care about freedom of speech to go along with it.
Missouri and Louisiana Attorneys General sue Biden over Big Tech ‘collusion’
Samizdat | May 6, 2022
Attorneys General from two Republican-led US states, Missouri and Louisiana, have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, Fox News reported on Thursday. The states are accusing high-ranking officials, including President Joe Biden, of having “pressured and colluded” with social media companies to censor and suppress information on a number of big stories over the past two years.
Among the officials named as defendants are White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and the President’s Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci. They, and others, are accused of exerting undue pressure on, or working together, with a number of Big Tech companies such as Meta, Twitter and YouTube to suppress information regarding the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, the origins of Covid-19, and security concerns associated with mail-in voting during the pandemic.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry claim the Biden Administration has been doing so “under the guise of combating misinformation.”
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, describes the administration’s supposed efforts to hush up certain information as “one of its greatest assaults by federal government officials in the Nation’s history” on Americans’ constitutional right to free speech.
The filing goes on to claim that “Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’.”
In an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt explained the decision to file the lawsuit by saying that he would “not stand idly by while the Biden Administration attempts to trample on the First Amendment rights of Missourians and Americans.”
His colleague from the state of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, went so far as to characterize Big Tech as an “extension of Biden’s Big Government,” which is busy “suppressing truth and demonizing those who think differently.” Landry compared Joe Biden to Joseph Stalin over the president’s policies that allegedly aim to “censor free speech and propagandize the masses.” The Attorney General said the lawsuit was seeking to “ensure the rule of law and prevent the government from unconstitutional banning, chilling, and stifling of speech.”
Among the cases brought up in the filing are Twitter’s decision to disable the sharing of a 2020 New York Post story revolving around the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop that was recovered from a repair shop in Delaware. The report was later found to be accurate by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the two Attorneys General pointed out.
In a separate instance, Facebook supposedly censored posts suggesting that Covid-19 may have accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The Attorneys General claim that it was Anthony Fauci who orchestrated an effort to “discredit” the narrative while “exchanging emails with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, regarding the control and dissemination of Covid-19 information.” The campaign only began to wind down after more media outlets started reporting on the viability of the theory, the lawsuit alleges.
In addition, according to the filing, YouTube effectively censored Republican Senator Rand Paul and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for calling into question the effectiveness of wearing cloth masks during the Covid pandemic.
Another major case where “social-media platforms aggressively censored” speech, as Schmitt and Landry allege, was the run-up to the November 2020 presidential race. The Attorneys General claim that Donald Trump’s concerns regarding the security of mail-in voting were stifled by Big Tech at the time. Trump’s tweets were flagged, with a notice directing users to the facts surrounding the practice.
As further proof that the Biden administration has been exerting undue pressure on social media platforms to suppress free speech, the filing mentions Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s statement back in June 2021, where he said “we expect more from our technology companies… We’re asking them to monitor misinformation more closely.” Moreover, the latest launch of the new DHS disinformation board just goes to show that the current US political leadership is intent on ramping up its “campaign of censorship,” the Attorneys General warn.
Fox News, which covered the lawsuit filing, reached out to Meta, Twitter, YouTube as well as the White House for comment, but apparently none of them have replied so far.
Unless FullFact.org Says So Then It’s Not True, The UK Government Advises
By Rhoda Wilson – The Exposé – April 7, 2022
Most of us are aware that it’s not only online but also things published by corporate media that aren’t always what they seem. However, a major difference between government or corporate media reports and independent or citizen reports shared online, is the latter allows for public discourse and open debate, providing they are not censored, while corporate media and their fact-checking services do not – they prefer a top-down “above all” approach.
Denying public debate negates the all-important diversity of thought in a liberal and democratic society. Silencing counterarguments that challenge their preferred storyline enables governments and corporate media to create a one-sided narrative. A narrative that, left unchallenged, moves further and further away from the truth. But here’s a fact that you will not find on either GOV.UK or Full Fact: a lie cannot become truth, no matter how often it is repeated.
The SHAREChecklist attempts to provide advice on what to share and what not to share apparently for the good of others. Information that does not originate from their sources could be “harmful to share with our friends and families,” the UK government claims.
It’s important to understand that we, the people, are in the midst of an information war. One which began in earnest at the start of 2020. A battle in the public space for complete and truthful information while governments and their advisors attempt to manipulate our perceptions and behaviours so we obey their instructions, without question, even when those instructions prove to be harmful.
Even the most trusting know that governments and politicians hide the truth, manipulate the truth and even outright lie – it’s merely the extent that varies. We know that governments use mass media – television, radio and online – as tools to roll out their narratives to the public en masse. Additional government tools include initiatives such as their SHAREChecklist campaign.
At the very least corporate media is biased but as they sink deeper into an ever-narrowing storyline it is becoming apparent that reports are being manufactured and that they are activists seeking to implement an agenda, they are not journalists.
Fact-checking services do not provide facts they provide opinions. Last year, Facebook admitted in court that its “fact checks” are nothing more than statements of opinion. Not experts’ opinions but those of the “fact-checkers.” And self-described “fact-checkers” are not independent. They are dependent on donations from large corporations, the same corporations that work to craft a narrative and silence public debate through censorship.
The SHAREChecklist
As we work through the checklist what will become apparent is that in no way does the government advise, or even so much as hint at encouraging: critical thinking, comparing a variety of sources, open dialogue or debate. The checklist leads readers along a path to following a narrative set by a centralised coterie – the government or whoever is “advising” them.
The Government’s first bit of advice is to “make sure information comes from a trusted source.” This is common sense and something we should all be doing, and most likely instinctively are. What each of us believes are “trusted sources” is decisive.
A source that has been proven to lie without remorse is not a source to be trusted. Any source that consistently and persistently promotes Covid injections as “safe and effective” and so roll up your sleeve for another shot, for example, is not to be trusted. Within these sources, the lies are pathological and systemic. Such a source – the BBC, SAGE or UK government, for example – does not suddenly and inexplicably switch from being wanton liars to being truthful.
The second bit of advice the Government has to offer is to read beyond the headline – yet more common sense. A headline cannot contain all the substantive information that an article contains.
Additionally, clickbait headlines, for example, are common practice in all forms of media. To avoid a knee jerk response to the attention-seeking text we should not take an article, or post online, at its headline. Corporate media, as with marketing agencies, are particularly adept at clickbait headlines, texts and thumbnails. And, of course, the UK government has SPI-B and the Nudge Unit to advise them on how to use psychology to maximise public “engagement” and “cooperation.” The checkmark or tick symbol incorporated into the SHAREChecklist logo is an example of typical Nudge Unit behavioural psychology.
Again, in its third bit of advice, the Government advises some additional common sense: “check the facts.” What is notable about this point is that, according to the UK government, there are a limited number of sources that provide these “facts.” Actually, there are only two: themselves, of course, and “fact-checkers,” namely Full Fact.
The BBC frequently and repeatedly tells its viewers that it is a trusted source, bringing you the all facts. Yet, SHAREChecklist does not recommend them as a source to “check the facts.” This may or may not be an indication of how the Government views BBC’s “fact-based” reporting or, possibly, recognition that the public has, by and large, lost its trust in the BBC.
Taking on board the first two bits of advice – “trusted source” and “read beyond the headline,” in this case the Government’s headline – we take a brief look at the Government recommended “fact-checker” Full Fact later in this article.
The fourth bit of the Government’s advice is as true for images and videos shared online as it is for images and videos shown on television. There have been many examples of dubious images and videos published by corporate media over the past two years that deserve to be questioned. There is no source of information, “official” or unofficial, that we should not test for accuracy and reliability. Stay sceptical. Criticism is not only legitimate, it is necessary.
The final bit of advice the Government gives is that typos could be an indication that the information is false. How are those with dyslexia or learning difficulties supposed to feel reading that? For those who find it hard to express their thoughts and ideas in writing, you’re in good company. While Albert Einstein loved mathematics and science, he disliked grammar and had problems with spelling.
After singling out typos, then comes the sneaky bit: “official guidance” – in other words, the Government’s or the centralised coterie’s guidance – has been “carefully checked” presumably for spelling and grammatical errors. So naturally, the Government’s typo-free publications must be true – of course! On that basis, if you want to avoid being censored download Grammarly now!
Who Is Full Fact?
Full Fact’s website states: “We’re developing world-leading technology and new research to spot repeated claims, and find out how bad information can be tackled at a global scale. And we campaign for change that will make bad information rarer and less harmful.”
Who are the people and organisations behind Full Fact? Who are they campaigning for? Who is determining what information is “bad”?
In 2012, UK Column published an article about Full Fact, ‘Faux Facts – The disturbing Truth About fullfact.org’, digging a little deeper into “this interesting little non-profit company, headed by Tory Party donor and Anne Freud Centre Chairman Michael Samuel.”
In 2019 Daily Mail wrote that Full Fact was at the centre of an election row with the Tories and was forced to defend its credibility after it stepped into a social media war after an election debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. Daily Mail quoted Dominic Raab: “Who said Final Fact is the final arbiter of what the public gets to see as the truth? There’s no god-given right, set in law.”
“Foundations set up by eBay creator Pierre Omidyar and left-wing investor George Soros have also joined tech giants in giving six-figure sums to London-based Full Fact along with thousands of unnamed individual donors paying between £25 and £5,000 each,” Daily Mail reported.
A 2021 article published in The Critic noted the board of trustees included Labour peer Baroness Janet Royall, Lib-Dem peer Lord John Sharkey and former Conservative Party member Lord Richard Inglewood. These three peers are still trustees and Michael Samuel is still chairman.
The Critic article goes on to note that Full Fact is a charity with a small output of research compared to its size, funded primarily by big-tech and staffed to a large extent by former public sector workers or ex-reporters from left-wing media. “Full Fact’s website reports that they were paid £1.1 million by Facebook and £206,500 by Google in 2019, plus a monthly payment of £7,300 worth of free advertising by the search giant. The funding by big-tech in 2019 makes up roughly 70% of their declared funding for the year,” The Critic wrote.
As you can see for yourself in the table below Full Fact is still predominantly funded, and so their opinions are influenced, by the notorious online censor organisations – Facebook, which includes WhatsApp, and Google, which includes YouTube. In 2021, almost 40% of Full Fact’s “donations” came from Facebook and Google.
Full Fact Funders 2021
Full Fact does not pass the government’s SHAREChecklist test and, according to UK government advice, their articles may be “harmful” if shared with friends and families – do not share them.
| Full Fact Funding 2021 retrieved 6 April 2022 | ||
| £305,119.64 | Third Party Fact Checking programme | |
| £116,352.14 | Framework for collaboration during misinformation crises | |
| £59,634.83 | Health fellowship | |
| Hundreds of individual donors and gift aid | £370,148.00 | Core funding |
| Mohn Westlake Foundation | £250,000.00 | Core funding |
| Google AI for Good Impact Challenge | £235,222.77 | Automated fact checking |
| Nuffield Foundation | £100,000.00 | Fact checking and annual report |
| Luminate | £75,789.87 | Core funding |
| Esmée Fairbairn Foundation | £68,333.33 | Core funding |
| £61,809.84 | WhatsApp fact checking service | |
| International Fact Checking Network & WhatsApp | £53,737.20 | Vaccine Grant Program |
| Baillie Gifford | £50,000.00 | Core funding |
| John Ellerman Foundation | £50,000.00 | Core funding |
| Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust | £50,000.00 | Core funding |
| The Buchanan Programme | £49,801.68 | Core funding |
| The Dulverton Trust | £35,000.00 | Core funding |
| Gill Family Foundation | £30,000.00 | Core funding |
| James Padolsey | £30,000.00 | Core funding |
| International Fact Checking Network & National Endowment for Democracy | £26,576.58 | Fact-Checkers Working Together Research Program |
| Colefax Charitable Trust | £25,000.00 | Core funding |
| The M J Samuel Charitable Trust | £17,500.00 | Core funding |
| International Fact Checking Network & YouTube | £17,064.56 | Fact Checking Development Grant |
| Highway One Trust | £10,000.00 | Policy team |
| William de Winton | £10,000.00 | Core funding |
| Reed Foundation | £9,000.00 | Core funding |
| Good Thinking Society | £8,000.00 | Core funding |
| Dorothy Bishop | £6,000.00 | Core funding |
| Cecil Pilkington Charitable Trust | £5,000.00 | Core funding |
| Tinsley Charitable Trust | £5,000.00 | Core funding |
Facebook is accused of censoring criticism of Black Lives Matter spending
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 10, 2022
Facebook is being accused of censoring any information that paints the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in a negative light – and doing that regardless of the merit and accuracy of those reports.
BLM rose to prominence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020, when many Americans chose to donate money to this organization as a way of supporting initiatives geared towards strengthening racial justice.
The movement was raising money with that promise. But reports have in the meantime suggested that not all of the $66.5 million in donations received by October 2020 was actually used for that purpose.
On Monday, the New York Post ran a story, based on an Intelligencer report, about BLM leaders using these donation funds to buy a $6 million house in California. Facebook’s reaction was to censor the article, preventing it from being shared, and slap the “abusive” label on it.
The real estate listing said it was a 6,500-square-foot home with more than six bedrooms and bathrooms, a pool and parking for more than 20 cars, and it was purchased in October 2020 by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors’ consulting firm’s financial manager Dyane Pascall.
The ownership of the property was transferred to an LLC in Delaware, ensuring that “the ultimate identity of the property’s new owner was not disclosed to the public,” the report said.
The house was seen in the background of a video Cullors and two other BLM leaders posted on the anniversary of Floyd’s death last June. The video shows Cullors complaining of being “in survival mode” because of a previous report into yet more BLM real estate purchases – the Post’s April article said Cullors had bought four high-end houses worth $3.2 million.
Reason writes that it’s unclear why Facebook is trying to hide this information – “unless it sees its role as merely running interference for political allies, hiding credible journalism when it’s damning to them.”
The New York Post has been no stranger to suppression of its reporting over the years – on Facebook, and other giant social networks like Twitter. Their stories about the possibility that the Covid pandemic was the result of a lab leak, and the Hunter Biden laptop reporting both faced various forms of censorship on these platforms – only to later be vindicated.
Russia bans Facebook and Instagram
Samizdat | March 21, 2022
A Moscow court on Monday banned Facebook and Instagram in Russia as extremist organizations, after the platforms’ owner, US-tech giant Meta, allowed online hate speech against the country’s nationals. The judge had rejected the request by Meta’s lawyers to stop or delay the proceedings against the social media giant.
The case correspondence, which was read out in court, suggested that Instagram had ignored around 4,600 demands to remove false content about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, and 1,800 demands to delete calls for illegal protest.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) has fully backed the ban on Meta, with the agency’s representative saying in court that the tech giant’s actions “were aimed against Russia and its armed forces.” He called on the judge to outlaw the US company and to “immediately” implement this decision.
The prosecutor acknowledged in court that there were technical means for users to bypass the ban in case it’s introduced and still access Facebook and Instagram. However, he assured that Russians “won’t be held liable for simply using Meta’s products.”
Russia’s Prosecutor General had filed a legal complaint demanding that Meta’s platforms be outlawed and the company itself designated an extremist organization in Russia, after Instagram and Facebook said they would allow hate speech and calls for violence against Russian nationals amid Moscow’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine. The US firm later clarified that the deviation from its rules was temporary and implemented only on Ukrainian territory, so that the locals could vent their anger over the conflict.
The development prompted Russia to block Instagram, which had 80 million users in the country. Facebook had been made inaccessible earlier, in response to the platform’s clampdown on the accounts of the Russian media.
The lawsuit isn’t aiming to restrict WhatsApp, due to it being simply a communication tool.
During the hearings on Monday, Meta’s lawyers asked the judge to drop or to postpone the proceedings. They argued that the lawsuit shouldn’t be handled by a Russian court as Meta is registered in the US and because of this fact the proceedings should be transferred to America. The defense also complained that it wasn’t given enough time to properly prepare for the case, which was filed just over a week ago. The defense insisted that Meta has “changed its policy after public discussions and now declares that Russophobia and calls for violence against Russian citizens are unacceptable.”
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The Ways of the Jewish Slave Traders
NOI RESEARCH GROUP • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 8, 2024
“As Mr. Yakub continued to preach for converts, he told his people that he would make the others work for them. (This promise came to pass.) Naturally, there are always some people around who would like to have others do their work. Those are the ones who fell for Mr. Yakub’s teaching, 100 per cent.” — The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, chapter 55 of Message to the Blackman in America titled “The Making of Devil”
“Three blessings a Jewish man is obligated to pray daily: ‘(Blessed art Thou,) Who did not make me a gentile; Who did not make me a woman; and Who did not make me a slave.’” — Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 43b–44a
The story of the Jewish American experience that most Jews want to believe, and want the world to believe, is one of almost endless historical victimhood. They insist that they fled anti-Semitic oppression in Europe, landing safely on Ellis Island long after the Civil War’s end in 1865, and certainly some did. … continue
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