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New Report: State Department Funded Fact-checkers to Censor ‘Lawful Speech’

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 18, 2024

The U.S. Department of State-funded domestic and international fact-checking entities that censored American independent media outlets and social media users who questioned the Biden administration’s COVID-19 and other policies, according to a congressional report.

The report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business stated:

“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech.”

The government’s actions fueled “a censorship ecosystem” that suppressed “individuals’ First Amendment rights” and “the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.”

The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”

The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.

The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

According to the House report, the federal government “assisted the private sector in detecting alleged MDM [misinformation-disinformation-malinformation] for moderation” and “worked with foreign governments with strict internet speech laws,” including European Union member states and the United Kingdom, to censor speech.

The report determined that the GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy violated international restrictions by “collaborating with fact-checking entities” to assess the content of domestic media outlets.

The “fact-checking” operations targeted independent media outlets, and as a result, “the scales are tipped in favor of outlets which express certain partisan narratives rather than holding the government accountable.”

Whether the State Department’s actions rise to “unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment is currently before the courts,” the report stated.

The State Department and several GEC officials are defendants in Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media to censor free speech.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden, a similar lawsuit that last year was consolidated with Murthy v. Missouri.

The Poynter Institute is a defendant in another censorship lawsuit, CHD v. Meta, that CHD filed against Facebook’s parent company.

NewsGuard partnered with CDC, WHO to censor online content

According to the report, NewsGuard used money it received from the GEC and the U.S. Department of Defense to fund efforts to lower the advertising revenue “of businesses purported to spread MDM.”

“A system that rates the credibility of press is fatally flawed as it is subject to the partisan lens of the assessor, making the ratings unreliable,” the report states.

NewsGuard leveraged taxpayer dollars to develop Misinformation Fingerprints, a product that “catalogues what it determines to be the most prominent falsehoods and ‘misinformation narratives’” circulating online, “essentially outsourcing the U.S. government’s perception of fact to NewsGuard,” the report states.

NewsGuard later partnered with dozens of companies, organizations, universities and media outlets, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“During the pandemic, the WHO enlisted NewsGuard for its input, including regular reports, on which COVID-19 narratives it determined to be misinformation were prevalent online,” the report states. “The WHO then contacted social media companies and search engines asking them to remove this content.”

‘Nobody wanted’ fact-checkers until ‘actual truths started getting out’

Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, told The Defender, “These so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are not in the business of actually checking facts. They are in the business of controlling narratives … Nobody wanted or needed these organizations until actual truths started getting out.”

Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told The Defender the government increasingly relies on censorship to promote its favored narratives.

“They need to institute more and more censorship,” Fitts said. “It’s hard to refute the gaslighting that flows from this imagination factory.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised that the State Department is “working to censor those who disagree with U.S. government policies and their globalist agenda.”

The report recommends that no federal funds “should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press” and that federal agencies “should not be outsourcing their perception of fact to speech-police organizations subject to partisan bias.”

GEC also faces the loss of its government funding. According to the Washington Examiner, “A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC.”

But for Boyle, this is not enough. He said the State Department has, “at a minimum,” committed “the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.”

Censorship ‘a pendulum that swings both ways’

The Gateway Pundit last week reported on additional links between the International Fact-Checking Network, other “fact-checking” firms and Big Tech.

In 2015, Poynter partnered with Google News Lab, which earlier that year, helped establish First Draft News. Active until 2022, First Draft was a consortium of social media verification groups that shared methods for combating “fake news.”

Another First Draft founder, fact-checking firm Bellingcat, also received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.

First Draft was previously led by Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a Brown University professor who, according to “Twitter Files” released last year, advised the Biden administration on COVID-19 “misinformation” — despite having no science or medical credentials.

In 2016, Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network partnered with First Draft “to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the [news] verification process.” Other partners included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, NBC News and BBC News.

In 2017, Google News Lab partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network “to dramatically increase the searchable output of fact-checkers worldwide, expand fact-checking to new markets and support fact-checking beyond politics, such as in sports, health and science.” The following year, Poynter acquired PolitiFact.com.

Google was also one of the original funders of The Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations that developed eight “trust indicators” to help the public “easily assess the integrity of news.”

These “trust indicators” later became “one of the sources being used by NewsGuard Technologies for a new product to improve news literacy,” and formed “a foundation for NewsGuard review development.”

Hinchliffe warned that the beneficiaries of censorship based on today’s “fact-checking” may become its targets in the future.

“One of the problems of censorship that operates under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, apart from stifling free speech and suppressing actual truths, is that it’s a pendulum that swings both ways,” he said. “The people calling for censorship now may be in a greater position of power to do so, but it will one day swing back at them.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 19, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What’s Behind Regime Change in Bangladesh

By Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook – 11.08.2024

Violent regime change in the South Asian country of Bangladesh unfolded rapidly and mostly by stealth as the rest of the world focused on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, growing tensions in the Middle East and a simmering confrontation between the US and China in the Asia-Pacific region.

The implications of the successful putsch, carried out by US-backed opposition groups, stands to impact South and Southeast Asia, as well as create instability along the peripheries of the two most populous nations on Earth, China and India.

Because of Russia’s close relations with both China and India, Russia itself stands to be affected as well.

Who Was Protesting and Who Was Behind Them? 

It was US government-funded media, Voice of America, in a 2023 article admitting the role the US ambassador to Bangladesh himself played in backing opposition in the South Asian country.

The article would admit in a photo caption that US Ambassador Peter Haas, “is popular in Bangladesh among pro-democracy and rights activists and critics of the Sheikh Hasina regime.”

The same article would admit to steps the US had already taken to pressure Bangladesh to conduct future elections in such a manner as to produce the desired outcome Washington sought, noting:

… the U.S. government announced that it had started “taking steps to impose visa restrictions” on Bangladeshi individuals who are found complicit in “undermining the democratic electoral process” in Bangladesh.

The article admits that the Awami League (AL) party, which had ruled in Bangladesh up until the recent, violent protests, had accused US Ambassador Haas of interfering in Bangladesh’s internal political affairs and specifically of supporting the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) as well as street violence on its behalf.

The “Muscle” 

While the Western media portrayed the unrest in Bangladesh as “pro-democracy” demonstrations led by “student protesters,” the BBC in its July 2023 article, “Bangladesh PM blames political foes for violence,” would obliquely admit that the BNP and the Jamaat-e-Islami movement, including its student wings, were behind the violence.

Since Bangladesh gained independence, it has banned Jammat-e-Islami on and off for decades, depending who held power, with the organization accused of having committed extensive acts of violence.

Voice of America, republishing an Associated Press article, would note that, “most of the senior leaders of the party have been hanged or jailed since 2013 after courts convicted them of crimes against humanity including killings, abductions and rapes in 1971.”

It should be noted that outside of Bangladesh, other governments have also designated Jammat-e-Islami as a terrorist organization, including the Russian Federation.

The US State Department, for its part, has published a report as recently as 2023 whitewashing the violent history and enduring threat the organization poses to Bangladesh, portraying Jammat-e-Islami instead as the victims of government “abuses.”

While the Western media has reported on the ban of Jammat-e-Islami, none of the reports have attempted to deny its involvement in the most recent protests.

The “Face” of the Protests 

Just like other protests organized by the US around the globe, it appears a conglomeration of violent organizations like Jammat-e-Islami along with so-called “civil society” groups funded by the US government as well as supporters of US-backed opposition parties took to the streets, each performing a vital role.

Violent street fronts create violence in a bid to escalate protests, civil society poses as the “face” of the movement both on the streets and across information space, while US-backed political parties use the resulting chaos to maneuver themselves into power.

Fulfilling the role of providing a “face” to the global public were a number of students from Dhaka University’s political science department including Nahid Islam and Nusrat Tabassum, both of whom have their own profile on the US and European government as well as Open Society-funded Front Line Defenders database.

Because many around the world are beginning to understand and look for evidence of US government involvement in regime change around the globe, the US has been more careful about how it supports such activities. While Nahid Islam, Nusrat Tabassum, and other core leaders of the “student” protests have no known, direct connections to the US government, Dhaka University does.

Its department of political science in particular, from which these “leaders” emerged, regularly conducts activities with Western-centric organizations and forums. The department is staffed by professors involved in US government-funded programs, including the so-called “Confronting Misinformation in Bangladesh (CMIB) project”. This includes professors Saima Ahmed and Dr. Kajalei Islam, who both serve as part of the project’s head team alongside US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) grantees and US State Department Fulbright scholars.

Considering how thoroughly Dhaka University’s political science department has been infiltrated by the US government through the extensive money and scholarships made available through the NED and Fulbright, the emergence of “students” serving US interests by posing as the face for US-backed regime change in Bangladesh comes as no surprise.

A Familiar Template 

The use of violent extremist-led street fronts and so-called “student protesters” to destabilize targeted nations, oust targeted governments, and help install into power US-backed opposition parties fits into a wider global pattern admitted to by the Western media itself.

In 2004, the London Guardian admitted to US-sponsored regime change across Eastern Europe targeting Belarus, Serbia, and Ukraine, as well as Georgia in the Caucasus region, stating of the unrest in Ukraine at the time, that:

… the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

The same article would also claim that, “the operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.” 

The same “template” would be used again across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, according to the New York Times in its article, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.”

The NYT would admit:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The article would mention the NED and its subsidiaries by name, as well as the US State Department and its partners from among US-based tech companies like Google and Facebook (now Meta), all as being involved in applying the same “template” described by the Guardian in 2004.

The 2011 unrest across the Arab World and the finally successful overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 both featured the use of US-backed extremist organizations. In Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda were utilized, while in Ukraine, neo-Nazi militias fulfilled this role. Both networks of violent extremists have since played extensive roles in the resulting wars following US regime change in these respective regions.

With the US openly pressuring Bangladesh to conduct elections according to Washington’s standards while its ambassador in Dhaka openly supported the opposition groups seeking to oust the Bangladeshi government, it is very clear this “template” has now been successfully applied to Bangladesh.

Who Do the US-Backed Protesters Want in Power? 

Associated Press (via Time magazine) in its article, Bangladesh Protesters Pitch Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus to Lead Interim Government, would report:

A key organizer of Bangladesh’s student protests said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was their choice as head of an interim government, a day after longtime Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned.

It would be the “student leaders” drawn from Dhaka University’s political science department who proposed Yunus’ name, and thus it should come as no surprise that Yunus himself is both a US State Department Fulbright scholar as well as a recipient of various awards furnished by the collective West to build up his credibility.

This includes the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to other US proxies around the globe, including Aung San Suu Kyi in neighboring Myanmar.

Yunus was also awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, and the US Congressional Medal in 2013. On the website of Yunus’ organization, the “Yunus Centre,” in a 2013 post titled, “Dr. Muhammad Yunus, first American Muslim recipient of Congressional Gold Medal,” he is bizarrely referred to as an “American Muslim,” despite no indication he has any actual American citizenship.

The Implications of Regime Change in Bangladesh 

Despite the obvious backing and affiliations all involved in the protests in Bangladesh have with the United States government, it should also be mentioned that both the BNP and Yunus himself have cultivated ties with American adversaries, including China.

Unfortunately, empty rhetoric about “democracy” and “freedom” has filled global information space regarding Bangladesh’s political crisis rather than any discussion of actual policy, foreign or domestic, the opposition may seek to implement if they take power. However, the deep involvement of the US in removing a sitting government from power in Bangladesh and Washington’s deep infiltration of Bangladesh’s education and political system bodes poorly for both Bangladesh and its neighbors.

The US has obvious motivations in creating chaos along China’s periphery. With a violent conflict already raging in Myanmar, Bangladesh’s neighbor to the east, extending that chaos to Bangladesh itself serves to destabilize the wider region even further. It specifically opens the door to derail joint projects between China and Bangladesh and create another potential chokepoint along China’s so-called “String of Pearls” network of ports supporting its extensive maritime shipping to the Middle East and beyond.

It also places pressure on India. With the prospect of a political crisis on its own border growing, New Delhi may be pressured into concessions to the US regarding its relationship with Russia and its role in buying and selling Russian energy to circumvent Western sanctions.

Whatever transpires in the weeks and months ahead in the fallout of US-backed regime change in Bangladesh, it is important to understand just how deeply involved the US still is all around the globe, even in countries that often are omitted from daily headlines and geopolitical analysis. It is also important to understand the necessity for greater awareness of how the US interferes around the globe and how it can be both exposed and stopped.

Successful US interference anywhere around the globe helps further enable US interference everywhere else.

 

August 11, 2024 Posted by | Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment

Google is Criticized As it Suspends Reform UK Ads During Election Campaign

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 22, 2024

Google has suspended the advertising account of Reform UK, a political party in the United Kingdom, formerly known as the Brexit Party. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, took to Twitter to express his outrage, labeling the move as “election interference.”

Google’s suspension comes at the height of the election campaign with, less than two weeks to go until the country goes to a vote on July 4th.

In his tweet, Farage stated: “🚨 ELECTION INTERFERENCE ALERT 🚨 Big Tech giant @Google has BLOCKED our Ad Accounts. They are trying to stop the Reform message.” He also called on Matt Brittin, President of Google Europe, Middle East, and Africa, to address the issue urgently, indicating the party’s demand for immediate action.

This incident raises significant concerns about the role of Big Tech companies in political processes, particularly in the context of advertising and free speech, and during a campaign season where time is of the essence.

While Google has not yet publicly responded to Farage’s allegations or provided a detailed explanation for the suspension, such actions are typically justified by violations of the company’s advertising policies.

Reform UK, which has positioned itself as a critic of the establishment and advocate for major reforms in British politics, relies heavily on digital platforms to disseminate its message.

June 22, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

Google Tightens Influence on UK Elections with New “Moderation” Tactics

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

Google has found itself yet another election to “support.”

After the company made announcements to this effect related to the EU (European Parliament) June ballot, voters in the UK can now also look forward to – or dread, as the case may be – the tech giant’s role in their upcoming general election.

A blog post by Google UK Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy Katie O’Donovan announced even more “moderation” and a flurry of other measures, most of which have become tried-and-tested instruments of Google’s censorship over the past years.

They are divided in three categories – pushing (“surfacing”) content and sources of information picked by Google as authoritative and of high quality, along with YouTube information panels, investing in what it calls Trust & Safety operations, as well as “equipping campaigns with the best-in-class security tools and training.”

Another common point is combating “misinformation” – together with what the blog post refers to as “the wider ecosystem.” That concerns Google News Initiative and PA Media, a private news agency, and their Election Check 24, which is supposed to safeguard the UK election from “mis- and dis-information.”

Searches related to voting are “rigged” to return results manipulated to boost what Google considers authoritative sources – notably, the UK government’s site.

As for AI, the promise is that users of Google platforms will receive “help navigating” that type of content.

This includes the obligation for advertisers to reveal that ads “include synthetic content that inauthentically depicts real or realistic-looking people or events” (this definition can easily be stretched to cover parody, memes, and similar).

“Disclosure” here, however, is still differentiated from Google’s outright ban on manipulated media that it decides “misleads people.” Such content is labeled, and banned if considered as having the ability to maybe pose “a serious risk of egregious harm.”

And then there’s Google’s AI chatbot Gemini, which the giant has restricted in terms of what types of election-related queries it will respond to – once again, as a way to root out “misinformation” while promoting “fairness.”

This falls under what the company considers to be “a responsible approach to generative AI products.”

But as always, AI is also seen as a “tool for good” – for example, when it allows for building “faster and more adaptable enforcement systems.”

June 2, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Google fires more employees protesting giant deal with Israel

Press TV – April 23, 2024

Google has fired about 20 more employees over recent protests against a deal between the US technology giant and Israel.

The activist group No Tech for Apartheid said on Monday that the new layoffs bring to more than 50 the total number of Google workers dismissed in the past week.

“The corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers and reassert its power over them,” said Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid.

Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson confirmed the company had sacked more employees after continuing its investigation into the April 16 anti-Israel demonstrations, which included sit-ins at offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California.

The protesters held posters reading, “No More Genocide For Profit,” “No cloud apartheid,” “We Stand with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers” and “Don’t be evil, stop retaliation”.

They denounced Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon to supply the Israeli regime with cloud computing services.

The contract dates back to 2021. However, the protests followed a report in Time magazine earlier this month, citing an internal company document, that the Israeli ministry of military affairs is a Google Cloud customer.

No Tech for Apartheid said the report showed that Google had “built custom tools” for the Israeli ministry of military affairs and had “doubled down on contracting” with the regime’s army after the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip began.

Israel waged its brutal war on the besieged Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 34,183 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 77,143 others.

Since the start of the onslaught, the US, Israel’s most dedicated ally, has fast-tracked arms shipments to the occupying regime and blocked UN resolutions that called for a Gaza truce.

April 23, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Euro-Med seeks probe into role of tech firms in Israeli killing of Gaza civilians

Press TV – April 21, 2024

The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has said that the role of major technology companies and international social media platforms in the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel in the besieged Gaza Strip must be investigated.

“These companies need to be held accountable if found to be complicit or not to have taken adequate precautions to prevent access to, and exploitation of, users’ information,” the Euro-Med said on Sunday.

The human rights group documented accounts of Palestinian civilians, who, as a consequence of their social media activity, have been singled out as suspects by Israel, despite having taken no military action.

The group noted that there are frequent reports that Israel uses a number of artificial intelligence-supported technological systems to illegally track and monitor Palestinians,

“Google and Israel are collaborating on several technology initiatives, including Project Nimbus, which provides the Israeli army with tools for the increased monitoring and illegal data collection of Palestinians, thereby broadening Israeli policies of denial and persecution, plus other crimes against the Palestinian people,” it said.

This project in particular has prompted significant criticism, driving dozens of company employees to protest and resign, with others being fired over their protests.

UN experts earlier this month said the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and related military directives by Israel in Gaza was leading to an unprecedented toll on the civilian population and infrastructure.

According to the experts, the systematic and widespread destruction of housing, services and civilian infrastructure represents a crime against humanity.

Widespread destruction in Gaza has put the concept of ‘domicide’ in focus in recent months. The concept is increasingly accepted in academia but is not a distinct crime against humanity under international law.

The UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese, recently described domicide, as well as numerous war crimes and acts of genocide in her report to the Human Rights Council.

Palestinians continue to endure a US-Israeli genocidal war in the besieged Gaza strip, the scene of death and destruction on a daily basis.

The ministry of health in Gaza reports that some 48 Palestinians were killed and 79 others were injured in Gaza in the past 24 hours.

That brings up the total number of victims since October 7 to a staggering number of more than 34,000. Almost 77,000 others have also been wounded.

Hospitals in Gaza are lacking enough medicine and equipment to treat the wounded.

April 21, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Google To Start Running “Prebunk” Ads and Quizzing YouTube Viewers To Fight So-Called “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 20, 2024

Prebunking – until relatively recently it was just one of the fringe concepts in the relentless “war on misinformation industrial complex.”

A short way to describe it is as a dystopian version of debunking false or incorrect information. But here the idea is to stop users (“help them identify”) unwanted content, before they can even see it.

A short way to describe what’s wrong with the “war on misinformation” is that it all too easily turns into a smokescreen for plain censorship of lawful and factually correct speech.

And now, prebunking is moving from ideations pushed by murky “fact-checking” and similar outfits, to the very top of the mainstream – Google.

The company that in effect controls the search market and some of the largest social platforms in the world (outside China) has announced that its latest anti-misinformation campaign will incorporate prebunking.

No doubt with an eye on the US election later in the year, Google’s attention is now on Europe, specifically the EU ahead of the European Parliament vote in June.

Google is acting in unison with the EU and its Digital Services Act which require tech giants to act on whatever is chosen to be considered “misinformation” and suppress it. Much of this is (at least they say so) driven by “Russia Scare,” and so both Google’s Jigsaw unit and the EU are talking about “democracy at risk.”

As for Google’s version of “prebunking,” it, at least in Europe, comes in the form of animated ads, reports say. They will play not only on YouTube but also other platforms like TikTok, and target Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland – the EU countries with the largest number of voters.

Jigsaw says prebunking bypasses “polarized debates” and “works equally effectively across the political spectrum.”

User experience may suffer at the expense of this “pre-reeducation.”

“Viewers watching the ads on YouTube will be asked to fill in a short multiple-choice questionnaire, designed to gauge what they have learned about misinformation,” Reuters describes Google’s prebunking technique.

These days, agencies like Reuters describe Jigsaw as an internal Google unit “which operates to tackle threats to societies.”

How noble of Jigsaw, and obliging towards Google of Reuters – but in 2016, reports were still talking about Jigsaw as rather what it really is – a rebrand of Google Ideas.

And, The Guardian explained at the time, this was “the web giant’s controversial diplomatic arm, founded in 2010 and headed by ex-US State Department policy wonk Jared Cohen,” adding – “Jigsaw’s stated mission is to use technology to tackle geopolitics.”

(Geo)politics may these days have been rebranded as “misinformation.”

But otherwise, little has changed.

February 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Experiments With “Faster and More Adaptable” Censorship of “Harmful” Content Ahead of 2024 US Elections

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 20, 2023

In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Big Tech engaged in unprecedented levels of election censorship, most notably by censoring the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before voters went to the polls.

And with the 2024 US presidential election less than a year away, both Google and its video sharing platform, YouTube, have confirmed that they plan to censor content they deem to be “harmful” in the run-up to the election.

In its announcement, Google noted that it already censors content that it deems to be “manipulated media” or “hate and harassment” — two broad, subjective terms that have been used by tech giants to justify mass censorship.

However, ahead of 2024, the tech giant has started using large language models (LLMs) to experiment with “building faster and more adaptable” censorship systems that will allow it to “take action even more quickly when new threats emerge.”

Google will also be censoring election-related responses in Bard (its generative AI chatbot) and Search Generative Experience (its generative AI search results).

In addition to these censorship measures, Google will be continuing its long-standing practice of artificially boosting content that it deems to be “authoritative” in Google Search and Google News. While this tactic doesn’t result in the removal of content, it can result in disfavored narratives being suppressed and drowned out by these so-called authoritative sources, which are mostly pre-selected legacy media outlets.

Like Google, YouTube confirmed that it will enforce its existing censorship policies ahead of the 2024 elections, including those that apply to election “misinformation” and “harmful conspiracy theories.” These policies resulted in the censorship of tens of thousands of videos and many popular channels in the buildup to and aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

The video sharing platform will also boost videos from authoritative sources — a policy that resulted in independent creators being 14x less likely to be recommended on election-related content after the 2020 elections.

Additionally, YouTube will demonetize videos that it deems to contain “demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust or participation in elections.”

Outside of these direct censorship tactics, YouTube will label “altered or synthetic election content” that doesn’t violate any of its rules. Although these labels won’t result in content suppression, similar labels on other platforms have confused users and resulted in them believing that real but selectively edited videos are fake. Plus, legacy media outlets often use these labels to bolster their censorship demands.

Collectively, these announcements from Google and YouTube signal an intention to supercharge the mass censorship playbook that was deployed during the 2020 election and resulted in a two-tiered system where independent creators that dared to have dissenting or alternative opinions about the election were censored while legacy media outlets had their election narrative boosted across Google’s platforms.

Related: 

How Big Tech Normalized the Censorship of the President

December 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Google removes Israel boycott app

MEMO | December 5, 2023

Google has removed a mobile app from its store that helps people boycott companies linked to Israel.

The @NoThanks boycott account on social media confirmed that its NoThanks app was temporarily removed because its description contained a sentence about determining if “your hand supports killing children in Palestine or not.”

“The app has been suspended from the Google store for this sentence, I have removed it in the new update and the store will review it and release it again.”

However the new version was also suspended, but the developer is in talks with Google Play to have it reinstated.

“This app,” NoThanks explained on X, “is a peaceful form of protest, and it’s essential to clarify that the app is not antisemitic, despite attempts by other certain news and reports to describe it as such.”

The creator of the NoThanks boycott app revealed on 7 November that it will assist individuals in identifying companies that support Israel by scanning product barcodes to obtain information about the product’s origins and the company selling it.

By 29 November, the app had been downloaded over 100,000 times on Google Play. Earlier today, the developer said emails had now been circulated calling for him to be sacked from his internship for trying to harm “businesses run by Jews”, according to the author of the email.

December 5, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , | 1 Comment

YouTube Boasts About Elevating “Quality” Content, Collaborating With the WHO, and Suppressing “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 15, 2023

YouTube (Google) is yet another in a series of tech behemoths that feel the need to declare their stance on content, including its effective algorithmic manipulation, just as US primaries are ushering the country into another year of presidential elections.

Beating around that bush – Google representatives now talk about processes, procedures, and tools of censorship of health-related information that, unfortunately, can easily be “repurposed” to serve other, for example, political ends.

Much of the conversation rests on what Google wants to portray as its laurels from “the previous epidemic” – which too many people and creators see from a diametrically opposed point of view, as a dark time of nearly unbridled censorship and suppression of free speech.

A video now published by Yahoo Finance reveals not only that Google has a “chief clinical officer,” but also how that officer, Michael Howell, sees the role of this super powerful tech corporation in determining what users are likely to see, see first, or see at all on a platform like YouTube.

Howell, naturally, sees nothing wrong with this and even, to all intents and purposes, brags that YouTube is working to make sure legacy media have advantage over independent creators, and that the latter may easily face censorship.

That’s the takeaway from his words, which he chose to phrase thus: YouTube works to “lift up high quality content, even as we work to lower, and make less prominent content that isn’t accurate or helpful to users.”

The whole interview is positioned as an exploration of how “misinformation grows and spreads” supposedly in sync with the amount of content and the number of users. There is even the assertion made by Yahoo that medical sector “misinformation” is not only very present among users but also “in the broader medical community.”

While this may or may not signal continued censorship of “disfavored” medical professionals, YouTube Head of Healthcare & Public Health (yes, that’s a YouTube job title these days, too) Dr. Garth Graham shared that the platform is the first to start “labeling health information that’s coming from licensed doctors, licensed nurses, licensed healthcare professionals.”

And even after all these years of sometimes completely arbitrary censorship YouTube is supposed to be taken as a “credible source of information (users) can trust” – as it works with the National Academy of Medicine and of course, the World Health Organization (WHO) to craft its definitions, and then “raise that up” – i.e., algorithmically promote, at the expense of other content.

Graham had more curious things to say, such as that while clearly committed to censoring what (or, whatever) Google decides is “delicate (sic) and dangerous information” – people are still supposed to view it as an “open platform”!

Either Graham doesn’t know what an open platform is, or he hopes YouTube/Google users don’t.

There’s also a good amount of patronizing toward those users, as in them needing to be hand-held (by Google) pretty much all the way in order to discern information from misinformation and make appropriate decisions.

“So, you know, we’re an open platform, but the real goal is how do you balance getting good information to people at the right time (…) while making sure that we remove delicate or dangerous information.”

Asked how Google has already managed (shocker) to get the government to participate in posting videos promoting their policies and what “conversations” preceded this, the Google exec said that “the entire healthcare eco-system” was already “energized” to get their message across.

And he counted the government as well as hospitals and physicians as part of this eco-system. One of them, last but not least, is the WHO.

What we know for certain from a great number of internal documents that have emerged over the past months both from Twitter and Facebook is that these two were being “led” to do certain things by the government and its agencies.

Google’s position in the interview is suggested to be the opposite – namely, at one point Howell is asked if the company basically instructed all these national and international healthcare players on what content to make, and have “trending” (mostly artificially, one might add.)

Howell dances around this question – or statement – by saying that the (pandemic) produced a community of creators from the health sector.

But as we know, many of them also got their voices silenced, however, that is not something anyone should expect Google to address.

Instead, the talk is obviously about the “approved” community of healthcare creators.

But, says Howell: “If there’s no good content out there that people want to watch, it’s very hard to show (that) content to users.”

And, cynics would say – then you write an algorithm that shoves that content into everybody’s “recommended” videos anyway.

But, Howell decided to claim that “people responded well to YouTube’s partnerships” – where that last word means, government and international bodies and institutions.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | 1 Comment

RFK Jr. Sues YouTube and Google, Alleges ‘Misinformation Policies’ Violated His First Amendment Rights

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 4, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense founder and chairman on leave, this week filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, alleging the social media giant violated his First Amendment rights.

According to Kennedy, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president of the U.S., YouTube engaged in a “censorship campaign” that included removing videos of his speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire and interviews he did with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and podcaster Joe Rogan.

The complaint, filed Aug. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges the U.S. government has taken “extraordinary steps” under Joe Biden’s leadership “to silence people it does not want Americans to hear,” including himself and many others.

That censorship makes it difficult for Kennedy to reach millions of voters and also for his supporters to amplify his message, the complaint says.

The lawsuit predicts the censorship will continue throughout Kennedy’s campaign, intensifying as the primaries approach.

“Mr. Kennedy often speaks at length about topics people would like to ignore, including the negative health effects of toxic chemicals and potential safety concerns about the COVID-19 shots,” the complaint reads. Then YouTube uses its “medical misinformation” policies — developed in partnership with federal government agencies and the Biden administration — to justify removing his videos.

In doing so, the platform censored not only Kennedy’s comments on medical issues, but the entire content of his speeches and interviews, according to the suit.

Although YouTube is a private company, it is not simply a publisher, the complaint alleges — it has become “an important platform for political discourse in America, a digital town square that voters trust as a place to get news and opinions about the issues of the day.”

According to the complaint:

“YouTube operates as a public forum, the digital equivalent of a town square. As such, it cannot remove protected speech, especially political speech, based on its viewpoint. …

“There is a sufficiently close nexus between YouTube and the federal government such that YouTube’s actions may be fairly treated as that of the government itself.”

Although YouTube cited its own COVID-19 vaccine misinformation policies to censor Kennedy, those policies “rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored,” according to the lawsuit.

For example, the suit says YouTube doesn’t allow content that “contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19,” and the guidance on those policies only changes based on government decisions.

Kennedy also called YouTube’s medical misinformation policies “unconstitutional” because they are “vague” and “overbroad” and “because they give unnamed government officials, who the policies depend entirely on, the unfettered discretion to decide what information gets removed from YouTube.”

Kennedy is seeking injunctive relief to prohibit YouTube from further censoring his speech, and the restoration of any videos of his political speech removed during the campaign.

Kennedy also seeks a declaration that Google and YouTube violated his First Amendment rights and that its medical disinformation policies are unconstitutional.

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

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

August 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

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