RT | November 18, 2023
At least 15 British government departments have been engaged in a deliberate social media and internet profiling campaign against public experts in various fields to ensure that none of its critics are allowed to speak at the cabinet-sponsored events, the Observer reported on Saturday, citing a trove of data it had seen.
The government officials in each department had specific guidelines regulating what exactly they should look for and requesting them to compile and keep “secret files” on the speakers deemed to be critical of the cabinet, the paper said.
The profiling usually involved checking a person’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts as well as doing a Google search on such individuals using specific keywords like “criticism of the government or prime minister.” The officials were then advised to look through up to 10 pages of the search results or a period of between three and five years, the report said.
The UK Education Department – one of those engaged in the profiling campaign, according to the Observer – outright denied resorting to such practices in a response to the freedom of information request filed by the Privacy International group last year. The group was investigating social media monitoring by the government at that time.
“Making a concerted effort to search for negative information in this way is directed surveillance,” the Privacy International legal director, Caroline Wilson Palow, told the Observer.
The data on the practice were shared with the paper by a law firm, Leigh Day, that is currently pursuing legal action against the government on behalf of at least two persons affected by such practices.
“This is likely to have impacted large numbers of individuals, many of whom won’t know civil servants hold secret files on them. Such practices are extremely dangerous,” Tessa Gregory, partner at Leigh Day, told the Observer. The lawyer maintained that such hidden checks are in violation of data protection laws and potentially of equality and human rights laws as well.
One of those who hired Leigh Day was Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons expert and an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), one of the UK’s leading security think tanks. “The full extent of this is shocking and probably not fully known. I was lucky enough to be given clearcut, obvious evidence,” he told the paper, adding that he was also aware of 12 other experts who had found out that the government had been blacklisting them.
According to Kaszeta, he received a public apology from the government in July and was informed in August that the 15 departments in question had withdrawn those guidelines pending a Cabinet Office review.
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office told the Observer that the government was “reviewing the guidance and have temporarily withdrawn it to prevent any misinterpretation of the rules.”
Palestine Information Center – November 18, 2023
GAZA – The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it received referrals from five states seeking an investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan disclosed that South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti submitted the referrals.
Khan confirmed in a statement that the ICC is already investigating the situation in Gaza.
“In accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a State Party may refer to the Prosecutor a situation in which one or more crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court appear to have been committed requesting the Prosecutor to investigate the situation for the purpose of determining whether one or more specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes,” he said.
Khan mentioned the establishment of a specialized team upon assuming his term in June 2021, aimed at advancing the investigation in Palestine.
The prosecutor emphasized that the team will probe crimes suspected to be committed during the Israeli aggression on Gaza.
South Africa declared that it had submitted the referral request with “other countries that share the same concerns”, demanding that the International Criminal Court would urgently pay “attention to the seriousness of the current situation.”
The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed in a statement that Pretoria “urges other signatory states to the Rome Statute to join this referral request, or to submit their referral requests independently.”
The ICC opened an investigation in 2021 into war crimes suspected to be committed by the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine.
Since October 7, Israel has been waging a bloody aggression on the Gaza Strip, resulting in the martyrdom of more than 12,000 Palestinian civilians, most of whom are children and women.
By Gareth Porter | Ron Paul Institute | November 17, 2023
The Israeli military has attacked and is occupying parts of al-Shifa hospital in an ongoing operation in northern Gaza. It is the biggest and most modern hospital in Gaza, which has ceased to function normally because of a lack of power, while tens of thousands of displaced Gazans take shelter in it.
An attack on a hospital is normally considered a clear violation of the rules of war. The Israeli Defense Forces is justifying it by claiming that Shifa has long served as civilian medical cover for the command center of the entire Hamas war operations and weapons storage.
That IDF claim has been cited constantly in Israeli propaganda as an argument that Shifa — and other hospitals in Gaza — should not be accorded the normal legal hospital immunity from attack.
Israeli forces closed in on Shifa while demanding for the last few days that the staff and patients remaining in the hospital be evacuated immediately. CNN reported Monday night that “the Biden administration has now signaled that it supports the Israeli position, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday: ‘You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command-and-control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.’”
Those Sullivan remarks were an obvious green light for the IDF to press on for complete evacuation of the hospital.
The problem with that “open source reporting” is that it is never anything more than unsupported claims based on mere supposition. In fact, when the history of supposedly damning revelations about Shifa hospital providing cover for Hamas military activities are examined more carefully it becomes clear that it has been no more than a thinly veiled excuse for the IDF to attack and close down Gaza’s most important provider of medical care for the population of Gaza.
A History of Deception
The Israeli claim that Shifa hospital was providing such a cover for an Hamas military presence there is in fact the longest running theme in Israeli war propaganda on Gaza, dating back nearly 15 years to the first days of the Gaza war of January 2009.
That was when Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, told Amos Harel of Haaretz newspaper that “many” senior Hamas officials were “believed” to be hiding in the “basements” of Shifa hospital, and that the Israelis knew all about those underground levels of the hospital, because they had originally been been built by the Egyptians before 1967 and extensively refurbished by the Israelis themselves in the mid-1980s.
Diskin also explained to Harel that Hamas was confident that it wouldn’t be attacked, because of the patients on the upper floors.
Apart from the fact that Israel’s intelligence service had admitted that it only suspected Hamas’ military presence under the hospital rather than having actual knowledge, Harel was, however, honest enough to report that his Palestinian contacts were telling him senior Hamas leaders never stayed in the same location but constantly moved from one location to another — a revelation that obviously made far more sense than the claim that those same senior Hamas officials were hanging out in a basement that was obviously well known to the Israelis.
Harel’s report also included a revelation — apparently from a Palestinian source — that raised problems for the nascent official Israeli propaganda line: “Some of the bunkers they are using,” Harel wrote, “were linked by tunnels Hamas built in recent years.”
The existence of numerous bunkers that could be used for command were thus independent of Shifa hospital, which the Israelis would always be able to invade. That reality clearly implied that it would make no sense for Hamas to depend on Shifa hospital for that purpose.
IDF Tale Resurfaces in Washington Post
Nevertheless, during the next Israeli-Palestinian war in July 2014, the IDF tale of the Hamas leaders’ secret hideaway in the basement of Shifa hospital re-emerged as if it were an unassailable fact that justified IDF threats to attack the hospital.
In a story published July 15, The Washington Post reported as unassailable fact that Shifa “has become the de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.”
Post reporter William Booth clearly did not see Hamas leaders in Al Shifa himself. Had he done so, he would have described the scene and identified one or two Hamas figures who had been pointed out to him at the hospital. So he was apparently passing on the self-interested claim of his Israeli interlocutors without informing Post readers that the information in question was far less reliable than it was made to appear.
The IDF became fixated on closing up another Gaza hospital in July 2014 Just two days after that initial appearance of the Shifa-Hamas theme in the 2014 war, Israeli airstrikes bombed Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City and forced its closure.
The IDF specialists created a video distributed three weeks later aimed at defending the destruction of Wafa hospital as a necessary response to Hamas using the hospital for military operations. But they had resorted to multiple levels of trickery to make their political point, as this writer discovered in investigating the video.
The IDF propagandists had spliced together videos from five years earlier and from different times of day so as to suggest that firing from an unused building more than 100 yards away from the hospital was a recent Hamas rocket attack on IDF forces. Then they spliced in an audio clip from an entirely different incident in which the IDF returned fire to try to show that the IDF bombing of Wafa hospital was justified.
At the end of July 2014, the Post reaffirmed its support for Israel’s primary propaganda theme in that six-week war. Terrence McCoy reported from Washington that Shifa Hospital had “become a de facto headquarters” of Hamas. That reporting reflected in turn the general readiness of much of the national press in Washington to accept the word of the Israelis as all they needed to know on that pivotal issue.
Eight years later, the same Israeli propaganda line immediately resurfaced after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, as the Israelis mounted a new propaganda offensive. On Oct. 27, IDF Spokesman Adm. Daniel Hagari, briefed the International press on the main lines of Israel’s position regarding Shifa hospital and Hamas operations: He repeated the line that a bunker underneath Shifa is Hamas’ main base of operation, and that Hamas operates “several tunnels inside and under” the hospital.
Maximum Suffering
But Hamas’ tunnels outside Shifa could obviously be used for the same function of command of military operations without having to bother with Shifa hospital.
So the drumbeat of Israeli concern about the alleged Hamas command bunker underneath Shifa appears to have been a phony issue from the start, aimed merely at bringing pressure to bear on the medical system, namely to close down Shifa as the largest, most modern and most effective hospital in Gaza to create the maximum amount of suffering to the people of Gaza.
As of Tuesday, Shifa Hospital had ceased to function, as it had no electricity, having run out of fuel. The Israelis gallantly offered the hospital 300 liters of fuel — enough to function for about six minutes according to the hospital’s calculation.
They thus failed to take any emergency action to save 36 babies facing possible death from the non-functioning incubators after three had already died.
The scene at Shifa hospital early on Wednesday was eerie, as Israel tanks rumbled into the hospital grounds and Israeli troops entered the darkened main hospital building.
IDF spokesman Hagari would say only that Israeli forces were carrying out an operation “based on intelligence information and an operational necessity” and that it was in a “specified area in Shifa hospital”.
Later Wednesday the IDF’s Peter Lerner told CNN that the operation at al-Shifa hospital was “ongoing” and would say only that it had not found any sign of hostages in the hospital.
The Gazans who have been staying in Shifa have been afraid to take the approved routes away from the hospital because of relentless Israeli attacks on civilians trying to do so. The IDF will no doubt continue to use force against the hundreds of thousands huddled there to make them leave.
And now that Israel has control over many thousands of military age males in the hospital, it is doubtful that they will be allowed to go free, since they are considered as potential Hamas fighters.
The time has come for a reckoning on the long-running IDF propaganda ploy of claiming that Shifa has been used to hide Hamas’s command center.
Unless the IDF can show journalists convincing evidence of that long-claimed Hamas command presence under the hospital, they should stand for the truth and denounce that massive Israeli deception about Gaza.
By Drago Bosnic | November 17, 2023
For well over a year and a half, we have been listening and reading about all the mythical “victories” of the Kiev regime forces. If we were to believe the mainstream propaganda machine, Russia is about to collapse, its forces are in disarray, President Putin is in perpetual hiding in some bunker, etc. And yet, concurrently, that same mainstream propaganda machine is publishing texts about the massive increase in the number of forcibly conscripted women in the Neo-Nazi junta forces. This begs the obvious question, why? Why would the side that’s supposedly “winning” enforce conscription on anyone, let alone women? Men are far more suitable to be soldiers for evident biological reasons (unless you’re an ultra-liberal, “woke” extremist).
Women can surely play a part in the defense of their own country, but ideally, this shouldn’t be encouraged. Warfare has always been quite an ugly business, even for the toughest of men, as evidenced by the number of veterans with PTSD. In this regard, frontline units are particularly exposed to the horrors of war and female soldiers should certainly be kept as far as possible from direct combat zones. The dread that male POWs (prisoners of war) can go through is more than enough, while women in the same situation are at the risk of experiencing even worse horrors. This alone should disqualify female soldiers from serving in frontline units. Notwithstanding many famous women who served in wars during momentous times in history, this is something that should be an axiom.
However, it seems the Kiev regime didn’t get the memo. Worse yet, not only are they sending women to the trenches, but are now forcibly conscripting pregnant ones. Yes, you read that right – pregnant Ukrainian women are being sent to the frontline. Anyone remotely sane would call that a war crime. Those who are sending them can only be described as enemies of their own people. Pregnant women are by far the most precious humans one could possibly imagine and treating them with anything less than absolute care is simply criminal. Taking into account the unrelenting demographic collapse of Ukraine, women (particularly pregnant ones) should be the top priority in terms of ensuring their safety and well-being. However, the Neo-Nazi junta and its NATO overlords have other plans.
What they are really after is an endless supply of cannon fodder. So far, there have been at least a quarter of a million KIA (killed in action), while there are several times more WIA/MIA (wounded/missing in action). Some, such as the US Army Colonel Douglas McGregor (ret.) claim that the numbers are far worse. According to his estimate, there are upwards of half a million Ukrainian men who have died in battle so far. The numbers might be up for debate, but there’s no doubt they’re horrendous. However, that’s still not enough for the political West and its favorite puppet regime. The Neo-Nazi junta forces are actively conscripting women to replace those losses, as attempts to forcibly draft Ukrainian refugees living abroad failed, with the host countries simply refusing to enforce it.
Hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians who haven’t got the chance to leave the country are in hiding, as there’s no other way to avoid the ruthless draft commissions that regularly grab people in the streets and then send them off to frontline units. Obviously, those who are loyal to the Kiev regime are exempt, as well as those who can afford to pay hefty bribes to military medical commissions (MMCs). Thus, sons of numerous corrupt oligarchs get the chance to live their lavish lifestyles abroad (all at the expense of the Ukrainian people), while pregnant women are sent to war. What’s more, recently released combat footage shows some have already been captured by the Russian military. The video in question shows a woman shouting “[I’m] pregnant!” while surrendering to Russian soldiers.
Although it could be argued that the female soldier in the video is simply saying this out of fear, there have already been complaints from pregnant women who got conscription notices. As there are upwards of 50,000 female soldiers currently serving in various units, the number of pregnant ones is difficult to determine, but it could easily be in the hundreds (if not even thousands). And while legal limitations previously protected women by barring them from serving in frontline units, most of those have been lifted after the special military operation (SMO) started. Thus, female soldiers can now serve as machine gunners, tank commanders, snipers, truck drivers, etc. Unfortunately, this is hardly surprising given that people with severe physical and mental disabilities are also being deemed “fit for service“.
The Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky is obsessed with pleasing his NATO overlords and this includes military “victories” at any cost. This only resulted in further escalation of the conflict between Zelensky and the Kiev regime’s top commander, General Valery Zaluzhny. The latter simply doesn’t want to throw away the lives of countless soldiers just to accomplish tactical “victories” that don’t really change the overall situation on the battlefield. Zelensky’s direct meddling in military affairs (for which he completely lacks any sort of expertise) is a constant source of frustration for Zaluzhny and his officers. He’s simply so out of touch that this is making the already miserable lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers even more difficult, as they’re without proper training and supplies.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
By Richard Kelly | The view from down here | November 13, 2023
An email from the editor of a major daily Melbourne newspaper has come into my possession. I won’t say how, since it might incriminate me as being part of a household that pays for a subscription. Let’s just say that it’s possible that the subscription was taken out using an email address that I have access to. Or something. The very first words of the email are:
As a subscription benefit, from today [masthead name redacted] editor [name redacted] will send you an exclusive analysis of the week’s most important stories each Friday.
That’s what I call a ‘marmalade dropper’, a statement so utterly preposterous that to read it over breakfast would cause such a fit of apoplexy that one would choke on one’s marmalade toast and drop it on the floor, for it to be consumed by the dog.
Luckily, I’d had breakfast already. Intrigued by this alleged ‘benefit’, which might better be regarded as a ‘threat’, I read on. The newish editor started off by quoting a former editor:
[Masthead redacted] “does certain things differently from other newspapers simply because … we’re not there as a means of simply passing a word from a mouth to an eye, we’ve a responsibility to our readers and to society in general”.
That is an unabashed endorsement of the practice of selecting and then framing the stories they deem fit to print, rather than simply reporting the bare facts. Then this:
Readers of [masthead redacted] want more than the kind of imitable journalism they can find on countless free-to-read news sites and unoriginal, uninspiring and sometimes unhinged publications.
The editor couldn’t resist, either through spite or an inferiority complex, a swipe at other news sites. Too gutless to name those he thinks ‘unhinged’.
It goes on:
… our readers want depth and quality, excellence and rigour. They want a publication with scruples that is willing to fight for its readers, its city, and hold power to account, without fear or favour. One that will doggedly pursue public interest investigations to shine light on the darkest parts of our society, but also celebrate Melbourne’s successes and be constructive and mature in its approach to difficult subjects.
“Fight for its readers”? Did it fight for those who were shot in the back with rubber bullets when Victoria Police corralled them at the Shrine of Remembrance? “Doggedly pursue public interest investigations”? Did they doggedly pursue the hotel quarantine fiasco? As I recall it was only Peta Credlin who had the guts to ask the then Premier any hard questions about this and other Covid crimes. Did they ever get to the bottom of who ordered the curfew? Was it the Premier, the Chief Health Officer, or the Police Commissioner?
“… be constructive and mature in its approach to difficult subjects”? What a string of weasel words that is! The translation is “ignore totally any concerns about vaccine safety and smear anyone who raises the issue”.
But there’s more. The email goes on to list the things they did talk about in the last 12 months. See if you can spot what’s missing.
… war crimes of Australia’s most decorated soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith. We promoted mature discussion about the future of Melbourne and its suburbs. We broke the news that the nation’s biggest plastic bag recycling scheme was continuing to operate even though its recycling function had collapsed, resulting in millions of bags being stuffed into warehouses across the country.
We exposed huge failings in the Department of Home Affairs across a range of stories that exposed a failure to prevent human trafficking and questionable payments of Australian taxpayer money to foreign officials. When we reported that the influential head of that department, Mike Pezzullo, had attempted to influence and cosy up to politicians, he was stood down pending an investigation.
We pored over every detail of the state government’s cancellation of the Commonwealth Games and exposed the shambolic management of that decision. We sent reporters to cover a war in the Middle East with huge emotional impacts on many in Australia, and indeed on domestic politics.
We led the coverage of one of the most extraordinary murder investigations in recent history. We’ve looked at the schools we send our children to and turned our attention to the burgeoning suburbs where Melburnians are increasingly choosing to live.
We fought for our readers’ right to know what is happening within the justice system, by opposing suppression orders and battling for access to court documents in the Magistrates’, County and Supreme Courts, all the way up to the High Court of Australia.
We’ve celebrated the city’s major events. We didn’t miss a beat during one of the great AFL seasons. We took readers inside the Lord’s Long Room at one of the most controversial moments in its history and we replayed the Bairstow dismissal as frequently as we possibly could.
What great stuff. Plastic bag recycling. Australian Rules football. Cricket dismissals. Phonics in schools. A reporter sent to a war zone. A spectator at the bankruptcy of third-world Victoria, epitomised by the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games and the Airport Rail.
There’s an enormous gaping hole in the coverage, just like there’s an enormous gaping space in the foyers of office towers all over the city, as the utter destruction of our once beautiful Melbourne echoes the utter destruction of lives and livelihoods caused by mask mandates, ‘social distancing’ and vaccine mandates. Nothing about the morality of excluding people from daily society. No mention of excess mortality. No mention of the Forest of the Fallen. Nothing about the imminent WHO changes. Nothing about the dangers of Digital ID or the Misinformation Bill. Nothing about the risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies. Evidently the editor sees no “responsibility to our readers and to society in general” in respect of these issues. I’ll be waiting for an age, I think, to get that kind of coverage.
A final quote from the email is even more chilling:
You, our subscribers, made all this and more possible by supporting our journalism. And I can assure you, this is only the start of what we believe we can accomplish as a newsroom.
So what is it that they are only at the start of accomplishing as a newsroom? What is it, other than suppressing some stories and promoting others, that they want to do?
At least I don’t pay for this stuff. Oh, wait.
Palestine Information Center – November 16, 2023
GAZA – The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said that the Israeli army has launched more than 1,000 strikes, utilizing internationally prohibited white phosphorus, on populated areas since it started its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on October 7.
In a statement on Thursday, the Euro-Med Monitor said it had documented the Israeli army’s indiscriminate use of white phosphorus against civilians, describing it as an “incendiary substance that burns human flesh and causes lifelong suffering.”
Euro-Med said that its team received testimonies affirming that the Israeli army carried out 300 strikes with white phosphorus bombs and projectiles within a period of about 40 minutes on Wednesday evening, November 15, on a residential block in Beit Lahia town, north of Gaza.
“The night before, a large number of white phosphorus shells were reportedly seen falling on a crowded populated area in Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, north of Gaza City. Similar attacks also occurred on several occasions in al-Shati refugee camp in western Gaza and the town and camp of Jabalia, north of the Strip,” Euro-Med elaborated.
“Palestinian residents said they suffered from severe shortness of breath and coughing as a result of inhaling white phosphorus in the midst of extremely unpleasant odors spreading in the air and severe blurred vision due to the thick white smoke,” Euro-Med cited.
According to Euro-Med, people exposed to white phosphorus can suffer from respiratory damage, organ failure, and other serious and life-altering injuries, including burns that are extremely difficult to treat and cannot be relieved with water.
“The escalating use of white phosphorus and smoke bombs against densely populated areas comes within the framework of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing that are being practiced by the Israeli army in order to force half of the Gaza’s population to leave their homes, shelters and hospitals and move to areas in the south of the Gaza Valley.”
Euro-Med accused Israel of persisting in violating the principles of proportionality and precaution by launching random attacks on the Gaza Strip and directly targeting the lives and health of civilians, and using internationally prohibited weapons in flagrant violation of the international humanitarian law and the rules of war.
“In addition to that, Israel uses bombs with huge destructive power against populated areas, and such bombs pose the single greatest threat to civilians in modern armed conflicts. This explains the severity of the massive destruction that turns entire residential neighborhoods into rubble and ruins in the Gaza Strip.”
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | November 14, 2023
Presidential hopeful from the Republican party, Nikki Haley, has come out in favor of removing online anonymity, recruiting all social media account holders to verify their accounts with a government ID.
Haley said anonymous social media accounts and “misinformation” are a “national security threat.”
However, her sentiments have fueled concerns surrounding censorship and freedom of speech.
Haley, in an interview with Fox News, emphasized her demand for transparency in social media algorithms. The understanding of algorithms, she believes, would reveal the reasons behind certain content delivery on these platforms.
Haley voiced her concerns over the surge in unidentifiable accounts on social media and the alleged misinformation she says they disseminate. She affirms these as potential threats to national security that need to be addressed swiftly and decidedly. She expressed her viewpoint, maintaining that “Every person on social media should be verified by their name. It’s a national security threat.”
“I want everybody’s name,” Haley said on the Ruthless podcast.
Haley also proposed a strategy to mitigate bot activity originating from Russia, Iran, and China by implementing stringent verifications for social media accounts. She believes this measure would improve conduct on these platforms, positing that the knowledge of their posts being seen by known relations would lead to a rise in “civility.”
In oppressive regimes, anonymity is often a shield for dissidents and activists. It allows them to speak out against government abuses, organize protests, and share information without immediately revealing their identity. Mandatory ID verification would strip away this layer of protection, making it easier for authoritarian governments to identify, track, and prosecute individuals who oppose them.
Knowing that their identities could be easily uncovered, many would-be dissidents might choose to remain silent rather than risk their safety. This chilling effect on free speech would be detrimental to the fight for human rights and democracy. In countries where dissent is already dangerous, further suppression of free speech can strengthen authoritarian rule.
Authoritarian regimes often employ extensive surveillance to monitor and control their citizens. Mandatory ID verification on social media would hand these governments another tool for surveillance. This could lead to more targeted repression, as governments could more easily identify and monitor the activities of dissidents when social media platforms are compelled to hand over the information they hold on users.
The Constitutional Implications of Haley’s Demands
The First Amendment of the US Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression. Mandatory ID verification on social media could be seen as a form of censorship, limiting individuals’ ability to speak freely online. Historically, the Supreme Court has been protective of anonymous speech as a vital part of the freedom of expression, as seen in cases like Talley v. California (1960) and McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995). These cases underscore the right to distribute anonymous literature and the protection of anonymous speech, respectively.
Related to the First Amendment, there’s a historical precedent for the right to anonymity in political speech. In the Federalist Papers, for example, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote under the pseudonym “Publius” to argue for the ratification of the Constitution itself. Without the right to anonymity, there would be no America as we know it.
This anonymity allowed for the free exchange of ideas without fear of retribution. Requiring ID verification could discourage individuals from expressing unpopular or dissenting opinions, thus stifling democratic discourse.
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.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 