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Every social media company censoring for government – Elon Musk

RT | December 27, 2022

All social media platforms work with the US government to censor content, Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday. Documents released by Musk following his purchase of Twitter showed that the platform colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and Covid-19.

“*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” Musk tweeted, adding that “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Musk was referring to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi, which suggested that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the runup to the 2020 election.

In addition to Twitter, the government was in contact “with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi claimed. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest.” CIA agents “nearly always” sat in on meetings of these firms with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Taibbi claimed, explaining that although this task force was convened to fight alleged election interference by foreign states, it made “mountains of domestic moderation requests.”

A lawsuit filed earlier this year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that officials from no fewer than 12 government agencies met weekly with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and other Big Tech firms in 2020 to decide which narratives and users to censor, with topics ranging from alleged election interference to Covid-19.

A self-described “free speech absolutist,” Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October. He has since released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies. Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.

The FBI said last week that correspondence between its agents and Twitter staff “show nothing more than examples of our tradition [of] longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.”

The White House has refused to answer allegations that the FBI directed Twitter to censor information damaging to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senator Mark Warner asks social platforms to curb Ukraine misinformation

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 26, 2022

Big Tech giants are increasingly positioning themselves, and being positioned by politicians, as speech police. And ever-increasing crises are being used as a justification for it.

Despite the fact that Twitter’s attempts to police inauthentic activity regarding the conflict have already gone awry, and it’s almost always independent journalists that suffer the most, politicians are demanding more.

Virginia’s Sen. Mark Warner has written to all major social media companies, urging them to make efforts to become the police of misinformation on social media with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In the letter to Alphabet, Meta, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, and Telegram, Warner urged the companies to increase their efforts to stop the spread of “harmful misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and a wide range of scams and frauds that opportunistically exploit confusion, desperation, and grief.”

We obtained a copy of the letters for you here: Meta, Twitter, Google, Reddit, TikTok, Telegram

Warner asked the companies to look out for “malign influence activity related to the conflict,” and increase resources to identify fake accounts. He also suggested the establishment of reporting channels where experts can share credible information.

In the letter to Alphabet, which owns YouTube and Google, Warner asked the company to stop monetizing content “publicly attributed to have associations with Russian influence activity.”

He claimed that his staff identified TASS, Sputnik, and RT as having content “specifically focused on the Ukraine conflict to be monetized with YouTube ads – including, somewhat perversely, an ad by a major U.S. government contractor.”

“As one of the world’s largest communications platforms, your company has a clear responsibility to ensure that your products are not used to facilitate human rights abuses, undermine humanitarian and emergency service responses, or advance harmful disinformation,” Warner wrote.

The senator encouraged the companies to figure out how they will ensure Ukrainians get emergency communications. Warner also warned about the accounts of Ukrainian authorities and humanitarian groups being hacked.

February 26, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , , | 4 Comments

Sound familiar? Reddit says US-UK trade deal leaks may be tied to Russia, citing speculation from… of course, Atlantic Council

RT | December 7, 2019

A trove of secret papers cited by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in attacking the Tories may have links to Moscow, Reddit has announced. The proof? The US-UK-NATO-funded Atlantic Council says it isn’t sure but it might be true.

The leaked documents, which were shared on the discussion site several weeks ago, point to evidence that the United States would demand a market share in the UK’s National Health Service in any trade talks after Brexit. In a statement, Reddit said that it believed that the accounts that had shared the documents were “part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia.”

The vague wording is further muddled by the source that Reddit cites: The Atlantic Council. Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the think tank, said that the leaks “closely resemble techniques” allegedly employed by Russia. He noted, however, that “we do not have all the data that allows us to make a final determination in this case.”

While media outlets rushed to hype the “findings” as definitive proof of Russia’s involvement, some journalists noted obvious holes in the story.

Aside from the Atlantic Council’s clear conflict of interest in the story (it’s a US and UK-funded think tank, allegedly investigating leaks that damage both governments), Nimmo’s prominence in this saga of alleged Russian meddling is also cause for concern. The self-professed disinformation fighter has links to the now-exposed Integrity Initiative, a shadowy group funded by the British Foreign Office that masquerades as an independent disinformation-busting ‘charity.’ In fact, Integrity Initiative even used its platform to spread talking points aimed at linking Corbyn to the Kremlin.

December 7, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , , , | 1 Comment