How the Big-Tech monopolies are hurting their own value
By David James | OffGuardian | February 19, 2021
The increasing censorship by the tech monopolies is rightly prompting protests from those who see it as an attack on free speech. What has been less noticed, however, is that the social media companies are adopting one of the strangest, and potentially most self-defeating, business strategies ever devised.
They are telling a large slice of their customer base – possibly as many as 100 million in the US and tens of millions elsewhere – to get lost. It represents a massive opportunity for new players and it seems a near certainty that citizen Donald Trump – who is very much a business person and not so much a politician – will be looking closely at it, as will many others.
[David’s prediction was actually right on the money – this was published just the day after he submitted his article – ed.]
It is common for monopolies or oligopolies to treat their customers with disdain, although they usually spend some of their marketing budget pretending otherwise. What never happens, though, is for monopolies to tell a large number of their customers to go away.
It is the equivalent of JD Rockefeller, owner of the infamous monopoly Standard Oil, refusing to sell petrol to anyone who voted for the Democratic party. What it confirms is that these companies have become political entities rather than businesses, a change of direction that will inevitably weaken them.
The social media company most vulnerable is also the most aggressive. Twitter has deplatformed Trump and is removing, at a rapid rate, users it deems to be ‘contravening the terms of service’ or ‘violating community standards’, or whatever. The company is valued at $US57 billion yet its sales are falling and it only started to make profits in 2018, when it recorded a $US191 million profit.
By 2019 it was back in the red and in 2020 it came in with a massive $US1.4 billion loss. Although the share price has almost doubled over the last year – as Keynes said, markets can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent – the vulnerability is unmistakable.
Such counterintuitive share price movement is not entirely without logic. Investors typically attempt to price the future value of a company, not the present. Social media companies get high valuations because investors expect that they will continue to grow: increase their customers, sales and profits. That is far less likely to happen when you tell a large portion of your customers to look elsewhere.
Facebook and Google are far less vulnerable than Twitter but they also have high valuations. The basic metric used to assess shares is the price-earnings ratio (PE). Facebook’s PE ratio is 35 and Google’s is 30, which are very high for mature companies. Roughly, it means that it will take, respectively, 35 and 30 years to pay back the value of the shares at the current level of profitability.
The only way that makes any sense is for these companies to continue growing, which was already difficult enough. Facebook boasts having over two billion users and Google over four billion users. They already saturate the market; there isn’t much upside. Achieving growth becomes even harder when you deliberately turn away customers. Indeed, it is a deliberate choice to shrink.
Google’s and Facebook’s shift in attitude towards customers is an object lesson in what happens when businesses get too big and underlines why effective anti-trust law is crucial for economic and social health. On the way up, they were exceptionally innovative; so effective at providing better value to advertisers that they destroyed much of the world’s mainstream media industry.
Yet now that they are in a position of power the focus has shifted. They have become increasingly concerned about aligning themselves with politicians and government to get legal protection for their market dominance. When Mark Zuckerberg donated $US400 million to ‘help’ local election offices in the recent US election, the commercial rationale was unmistakable.
To date, new competitors have been relatively small and, some, such as Parler and Telegram, are being openly attacked with blatant anti-competitive tactics by what is surely one of the worst cartels ever. Aggressively doing whatever is required to take out the competition is, of course, another typical behaviour of monopolies.
That is where Trump, and those associated with him, may prove to be significant. The biggest barrier to entry in the digital media space tends not to be the technology but the marketing. That is what Facebook and Google at one time excelled at; it was key to their success. Marketing is labour intensive and costly, which makes it difficult for would-be competitors to gain traction.
If there was an enterprise associated with Trump, however, marketing costs would be far lower. He already appeals to tens of million of supporters who are being told they are not wanted by the tech monopoly. He represents so-called ‘populism’, which is to say he is very popular.
That is what powerful political and corporate elites, and social media companies – ‘GloboCap’ – find intolerable and are attacking in what is being accurately described as an American coup. It is hard to imagine that the potential market pull associated with providing an alternative to what amounts to an attack on democracy will not be exploited commercially.
This is not to suggest that the social media giants will go out of business, although Twitter may get into real trouble. But it is worth noting that very few companies, even giant monopolies, last longer than 20 years. Many get acquired, which invariably works out badly (an example being AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, which will probably result in CNN being sold).
The most common reason businesses fail is that, when faced with new competitive threats, they are unable to innovate because they have become habituated into repeating what made them successful in the past.
That is exactly how Google and Facebook succeeded. When they offered advertisers a more cost-effective option than just space on a page, or a time slot in a program, almost no newspaper or television company was able to respond with a new way of providing value for their advertising customers. They simply went into a tail spin.
The tech giants seem unassailable now; Google and Facebook are two of the most highly valued companies in the world. But no company is invulnerable, and what the social media giants are doing to their customers is, from a business perspective, extremely unusual.
They are no longer just offering users the opportunity to “stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them,” to quote Facebook’s ‘vision statement.’ They are telling them what they can, and cannot, say. They are even trying to shape what they think.
It seems a near certainty that well-capitalised business interests will be noticing this – and preparing to eat their lunch. That could significantly affect what at the moment is looking like a descent into an information dictatorship.
The CDC’s double mask mannequin ‘study’ is lunacy dressed up as science
A new “public health” low
By Jordan Schachtel | The Dossier | February 10, 2021
The CDC has released a new “study” by the government health institution that claims to support the thesis that double-masking — or further sealing your mask in order to make it more difficult to breathe — will work to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
The “study,” which occurred in January, was nothing more than a handful of experiments on mannequins in a contained environment. Here are some photos from the CDC “study” that was published today:
No human beings were involved in this study. And yes, it was that simple. The CDC sprayed aerosols at mannequins and slapped a science™ label on their experiments.
There are endless amounts of clear, immediate, obvious issues with this “study” that causes a rational-minded person to send it to the dumpster.
First and foremost, it is not a completed study at all. These are mere experiments conducted on mannequins, not humans. A proper study on the efficacy of masks needs to be a randomized controlled trial involving human beings in their normal settings — such as the Danish mask study that showed there is no evidence that masks do anything to prevent COVID-19 — and not mannequins in a laboratory.
Second, as you can see on the double masked mannequin, the lifeless object is barely able to “see” over its double mask.
Third, these masks are very tightly sealed and secured to the face of the mannequins. It is not exactly rocket science to “discover” that it is more difficult to breathe in particles from outside of a contained environment when you fully seal something over your face.
However, this is unsustainable, as it would make breathing in oxygen (which, you know, is a thing that humans need to do) very difficult, and cause severe discomfort for regular use. Mannequins don’t have to worry about breathing or seeing, but humans do.
There are so many more potential variables and side effects involving mask-wearing, and how human behavior cannot be replicated through mannequin experiments. For more on this, check out the feed of cognitive scientist Mark Changhizi on Twitter @MarkChanghizi.
When you read the fine print of the “study,” even the CDC seems to acknowledge the aforementioned paradoxes in the following paragraph of their report:
“Finally, although use of double masking or knotting and tucking are two of many options that can optimize fit and enhance mask performance for source control and for wearer protection, double masking might impede breathing or obstruct peripheral vision for some wearers, and knotting and tucking can change the shape of the mask such that it no longer covers fully both the nose and the mouth of persons with larger faces.”
The CDC concludes its remarks by stating:
“Continued innovative efforts to improve the fit of cloth and medical procedure masks to enhance their performance merit attention.”
Not exactly much of a bombshell, but that’s not how the media and Big Tech interpreted it in order to advance their agenda.
The absurd CDC mannequin study has already been promoted by countless legacy media publications and propped up by social media sites as if it’s the gospel.
Twitter has promoted the “mask study” to #1 in its curated list, claiming, without evidence, that the CDC has “confirmed” the efficacy of double mask wearing.
Hi @TwitterSupport I’d like to report @Twitter for spreading misinformation 
February 10th 2021
77 Retweets277 Likes
There is no real, functional experiment-based science behind single-masking, so it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the “public health experts,” media stenographers, and power drunk politicians are now promoting double-masking as the “new science” to “stop the spread” of COVID-19.
Twitter suspends account of Russian arms control delegation, head diplomat wonders about censorship
RT | February 13, 2021
The Twitter account of the Russian delegation that represents the country at OSCE-hosted arms control talks in Vienna has been suspended by the US platform. The head of the team suggested it was an act of Big Tech censorship.
The unexplained ban of the account was reported on Saturday by Russia’s chief negotiator, Konstantin Gavrilov. He pondered what the reason for the decision might have been, suggesting it could have been retaliation for voicing Russia’s “alternative position … on the trends of the current [political-military] situation in Europe”.
The frozen account carried the standard Twitter notice, stating that the platform “suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules” at the time of posting.
Various arms control talks in Vienna are hosted by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). This week, the body hosted a key forum called the High-Level Military Doctrine Seminar, which is gathered once every five years. The Russian military, surprisingly, snubbed the event, citing “unfriendly” Western policies, but the Gavrilov-led delegation participated.
The Russian official said he would be asking OSCE Secretary General Helga Schmid to join Russia’s demand for clarification from Twitter, which he otherwise expected to be unanswered. Meanwhile, his own account would be used to publish relevant content, he added.
The Tycoon Plot
By ISRAEL SHAMIR • Unz Review • February 11, 2021
Millionaires want to make money. Billionaires want to make history. We may add that multi-billionaires take it further; they want mankind to adapt to their needs and wishes. As for people who control trillions, why, they care about our wishes as much as we care about ants while sweeping the garden. We do not apply ant-killer until anthills encroach on our flowerbeds; but we do not hesitate if we deem it necessary. Mankind came across many megalomaniacs; some of them had a lot of power. Genghis Khan was one. However, they were always territorially limited. Mighty Genghis could send tremors all the way to Rome, but the English and French didn’t have to care about the rising Mongol empire. New super-tycoons have no such limitations. Globalisation has allowed them to think outside the box. Their moves had been long anticipated by cinema, the world of dreams. As dreams allow a psychologist to ponder man’s desires and fears, cinematography offers insights into the collective ego of mankind. What did we fear in the relatively free Seventies?
A classic villain of 1970s and 80s was the evil tycoon. James Bond took on some of them. Meet Hugo Drax of the Moonraker, or Karl Stromberg of The Spy Who Loved Me; these guys were willing to destroy mankind to replace it with a better version. Stromberg planned to trigger a global nuclear war and survive it underwater. Drax intended to poison mankind with his deadly gas and repopulate the world with his new chosen ones. Another one was de Wynter, the super-villain of The Avengers, played by Sean Connery. He controlled the world weather, and could kill us all off by hurricanes and tsunamis.
Before the tycoons, when the Cold war raged, a villain was a KGB agent or a Chinese operative. As détente calmed relations between the blocks, the agents went out of fashion; later, the fantastic villains of Marvel came into a vogue. The evil tycoons were uncomfortably close to the real thing; and they moved from the cinematic world into our reality.
The world we live in is the world formed by evil tycoons. They are the modern Demiurges, the evil creators of the Gnostics, an early sect that confronted the Church. Like the Demiurges, they are practically omnipotent; stronger than the State. The government needs lot of permissions and authorisations to spend a penny. If a penny had been misspent, the dark word ‘corruption’ will sound. ‘Corruption’ is a silly concept; by applying it, the oligarchs eliminated state competition, for they can pay whatever they want to whomever they wish. The State must observe intricate arcane rules, while the tycoons have no such limits. As a result, they shape our minds and lives, making the State a poor legitimate king among powerful and wealthy barons.
The Corona crisis is a result of their activity. Now, a group of WHO scientists completed its four weeks inspection tour of Wuhan trying to find out how the virus found its way to humans; some of them think (as President Trump did) the virus escaped the Wuhan Lab. Matt Ridley of The Daily Telegraph concluded his piece analysing their findings: “A growing number of top experts [he provides the list] say that a lab leak remains a plausible scientific hypothesis to be investigated”. It is rather unlikely, said the WHO, but other explanations (pangolins etc) also border on the improbable. The Chinese are understandably upset. Hua Chunying, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Affairs ministry (the Chinese counterpart for the State Department’s Ned Price) rejected the idea saying, “The United States should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, and invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States”. The Guardian report said she promoted “a conspiracy theory that it came from a US army lab”; while Ms Hua accused the US of spreading “conspiracy theories and lies” tracing the source to Wuhan. Whatever we say is a fact-based result of diligent research; whatever you say is a conspiracy theory – both the US and China representatives subscribe to this mantra.
Our own Ron Unz made an excellent analysis of these accusations and counter-accusations in his April 2020 piece. He noted that the virus attack in Wuhan took place at the worst possible time and place for the Chinese; therefore, an incidental release (or intentional release by the Chinese) is extremely unlikely. Ron Unz suggested that it was an American biowarfare attack upon China. Didn’t American people suffer from the disease? Yes, the US government is “grotesquely and manifestly incompetent” and they were likely to expect “a massive coronavirus outbreak in China would never spread back to America”.
Perhaps, but a better explanation is that some evil tycoon(s) played the part of Karl Stromberg who intended to nuke both Moscow and New York causing war and world-wide devastation, as in the James Bond movie. It could be somebody like Bill Gates, who is a major investor in Wuhan Lab. A fact-checking site with its weasel language admitted that the Lab “has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but Bill Gates can hardly be called a “partner” in the laboratory.” Sure, not a partner. Just an investor, and that is more important than a partner. And he is not the only one; other multi-billionaires also are involved in bioresearch, in vaccine manufacturing, in Big Pharma. “Glaxo, BlackRock, and Bill Gates are all partners, but not owners of Pfizer”, says another fact-checker. “In 2015, Anthony Fauci did issue a USD 3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but not to “create the coronavirus” – the fact-checking site adds. Well, you could not possibly expect Fauci to word the grant in such a straightforward way, could you?
Perhaps it is too formidable a job even for an evil tycoon like Gates. A plot of several evil tycoons is more likely. Together, they could try to change the world and mankind to suit them.
The evil tycoons could poison China on their New Year holiday and take this uppity state down a ring or two. They could import the virus into the US to undermine and remove Trump whom they hated. (He was certain to win the elections but for Corona.) They could poison Europe to weaken it and make it more docile and obedient to their demands – and to buy their assets on the cheap. Corona and lockdown did not harm them for they are normally withdrawn from the bustle of the common man’s life.
The billionaires control the media; that much we know, and the part media has played in the Corona crisis was enormous. The media coverage of the crisis has a huge hidden cost. Try to publish information you consider important on the front page of a newspaper. It will cost you a lot. Still, all newspapers belonging to the Billionaires’ Media block beginning with the New York Times and ending with Haaretz gave at least a third of its front page to Corona news each day. The sheer cost of this advertising runs into billions. Will we ever know who paid for it?
Steven Soderbergh’s (2011) film Contagion predicted many features of the Covid-19, notably the origin of the virus. In the film, the disease originates from bats in China and is spread through markets where contaminated pork meat is sold. How could Soderbergh (or his script writer Scott Z. Burns) possibly know eight years before the event that the contagion should originate in the Chinese bats? Who told him? Wouldn’t you expect he knew something? Burns was instructed by WHO experts, the CNN site explains. Isn’t it interesting that the same Bill Gates is a major donor of WHO? Is it entirely impossible that already in 2011 Gates’ people began to leak some details of the future virus through their own WHO to Hollywood?
The tycoons could force a weak state to follow their instructions. Scientists do obey orders: otherwise, no grants, no positions. In April 2020, the German scientists were ordered, “to instill the fear of Corona”. And they did it, as we learned this week, producing numbers of dead on demand.
It seems that tycoons gained most from the Corona Crisis. Their assets grew by trillions, while the assets of the middle classes decreased by the same amount. More importantly, all states suffered from the crisis; they took loans and credit, they were responsible for their citizens’ health, while billionaires just had fun and enjoyed it. For this reason, I tend to dismiss the case against states, be it the US or China, while (some) billionaires appear the only possible villains.
These billionaires are able to influence people much better that the state. Consider Pierre Omidyar. Besides being the owner of eBay, he is the force behind hundreds of NGOs. His organisations form the ‘progressive’ agenda and train the foot soldiers of the Green Deal. Roslyn Fuller of Spiked-online checked the plethora of NGOs he employs.
She says his NGOs and charities are “engaged in ‘social engineering’ – that is, using their resources to artificially change the structure of society to how they think it should be. If successful this would amount to an extreme circumvention of democracy, utilising money not just to win elections, but to substitute paid or subsidised content for actual support, and thereby flip an entire political culture on to a different track by amplifying some voices and drowning out others.”
He is just one of the Masters of Discourse, next to the infamous George Soros. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon are even more powerful. The billionaires have immense clout and they decide what we can and can’t say and write. Just last week Amazon banned my Cabbala of Power, a book that was sold by them for some ten years. The estimable The Unz Review is banned on Facebook and shadow-banned on Google. Twitter switched-off President Trump, showing who is the real boss of the United States. Probably almost all movements described as ‘leftists’ nowadays are engineered by the tycoons like Omidyar or Soros. True left had been left for dead on the battlefield of ideas.
The tycoons are directly involved in the Corona Crisis, because its results are good for them. And it means they have us where they want to have us, and they won’t let us out. We are cancelled until we regain the government and cancel them.
SAGE, as British Corona management team rather presumptuously named itself (it included the ridiculous figure of Neil Ferguson, he of the millions of predicted deaths), already declared that lockdowns will be a part of British life for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. The Guardian, the Voice of the Oligarchs, gently pooh-poohed them, for it is not good to declare what must happen right away. Let people have some hope, so they run to vaccinate themselves, and then only afterwards can we reveal that, sorry, it does not help, you still have to don a mask and observe social distance and, yes, suffer lockdowns. “It’s much easier to follow the rules if we think of them as temporary.”
The plotters’ plans aren’t secret; they were described by Klaus Schwab in his book The Great Reset. Schwab is not a great thinker, being merely a weak scientist with just a few publications, and not a good or even decent writer. He had to collaborate with a journalist Thierry Malleret to produce the book. He is just a voice for the tycoons. But the question is, will he/they get what they want?
My preliminary answer is No. We recently had an important event, Davos-2021, the online gathering of tycoons and their intellectual henchmen. For the first time in many years, they invited Vladimir Putin. Chairman Xi gave the first talk. The idea was to demonstrate that Russia and China agree to their plans. I was very worried, I must admit, and the Chinese leader’s speech didn’t calm me (as opposed to our friend Pepe Escobar who celebrated his appearance). Yes, Xi said China will proceed at its own speed and by its own route but towards the same goals. Sustainable, inclusive, all the dog-whistle words were there. I expected an even worse talk by Putin. For years he has wanted to be invited and co-opted by the Western decision-makers, and here was a great opportunity to jump on their bandwagon.
Putin surprised me. He flatly refused the offer of Schwab and his ilk. He condemned the manner of recent pre-Covid growth, for all the growth went into a few deep pockets. Moreover, he noted that digital tycoons are dangerous for the world. In his own words, “Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, are de facto competing with states. In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal. Maybe so but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests”.
The tycoons were probably amazed. In 2007 in Munich, they laughed at him. Max Boot, a Russian Jewish émigré, called Putin, “The louse that roared” and added, “in Putin’s sinister and absurd rhetoric, you can hear an empire dying”. Mad Max didn’t know yet which empire is dying.
Putin was supposed to be softened up by pro-Navalny demos on January 23 (The Davos talk was on January 27), but he was not. Quite the reverse. The Russian President does not like to be pushed. The demo on January 31 was met with force; those detained were sentenced to heavy (by Russian standards) fines. Three European diplomats were expelled from Russia for joining the demonstration. Josep Borrell, a Spanish diplomat and a representative of the EU, went to Moscow and was harshly treated. In the concluding press-conference, the Russian minister for foreign affairs Sergey Lavrov told the press that Russia does not (repeat, not) consider the EU to be a “reliable partner”. The expulsions were carried out at the same time. In addition, Putin warned the West that ‘sanctions’ (acts of economic warfare) could cause Russia to use direct military force. It was probably the first such warning since 1968.
At the same time, Russia practically ended corona restrictions. Bars and restaurants have been opened for night revellers; sport events have returned; schools are open; in some parts of Russia, the masks became “recommended” instead of “compulsory”. Russians are now allowed to travel and return freely from many countries. The Russians have easy access for their vaccine Sputnik-V that was deemed by The Lancet the best of all existing Corona vaccines. It is a coup comparable to the first Sputnik launched in 1957, the Western experts said. Thus Russia has derailed the Grand Reset.
This development had caused a huge shift in consciousness in Russia. If until now (since 1970, at least) the Russian educated classes tended to feel inferior to the West, the prosperous lands of the free, then this has now changed. One of the leading Russian theatre directors, Constantine Bogomolov declared that the West is undone. The West’s compulsory political correctness, its culture-cancelling, its kneeling and boot-licking of BLM, its cult of transgenders, its fear of ‘harassment’ and sex, its obligatory smile, its wokeness, its fear of death (and of life!), are comparable to the behaviour of Alex, the victim of Clockwork Orange therapy, said Bogomolov.
The young man [Alex] does not just get rid of aggression – he is sick of music, he cannot see a naked woman, sex disgusts him. And in response to the blow, he licks the boot of the striker. The modern West is such a criminal who has undergone chemical castration and lobotomy. Hence this false smile of goodwill and all-acceptance, frozen on the face of a Western person. This is not the smile of Culture. It is a smile of degeneration.
He concludes:
The West tells us: Russia is at the tail of progress.
Wrong.
Just by chance, we have found ourselves at the tail of a runaway train, rushing headlong into [Hieronymus] Bosch’s hell, where we will be greeted by smiling multicultural, gender-neutral devils.
We should uncouple our carriage off the train, make a sign of cross and start rebuilding our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of. The Europe they have lost.
Take notice of his call to ‘make the sign of the cross’. In the West, the churches are barred, service had been discontinued. The Anglican Church is on the verge of dying, with its Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating BLM, removing statues from the churches, accepting every SAGE edict locking the churches up. Meanwhile Russian churches are all open and worshippers are pouring into their cathedrals every feast and Sunday.
Russian boys and girls are flirting with each other, fearless of MeToo and harassment charges. Russian cafes are open. Whoever wants, can get a jab against Covid, or ignore it.
For the first time in many years, Russia shows the way for the West. This is good. Perhaps, the West, after a long-needed correction, will be able to overtake Russia again. Though Russia showed the way of socialism to Europe, the best results of socialism were achieved elsewhere, in the North of Europe. Good old Europe (and the US, its overseas offshoot) are still able to repeat this feat and get rid of the plotting tycoons and their preaching of compulsory love. At this occasion, perhaps banning all tycoons is a good idea. In the better world before their rise, there were no multi-billionaires. History is not over; we are entering the most interesting part of it. Be of good cheer!
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
FBI laments that deplatforming of ‘extremists’ makes it harder to spy on Americans
RT | January 22, 2021
Law enforcement is complaining about social media platforms’ full-frontal assault on American political dissidents’ freedom of speech, crying that removing so-called ‘extremists’ from the internet makes it harder to spy on them.
A former FBI profiler recently took to NBC to complain that while Big Tech restricting Americans’ ability to freely communicate was all well and good, it was making it harder for the US intelligence apparatus to properly snoop on every aspect of these people’s lives.
FBI alum Clint Van Zandt complained that a 70-year-old man involved in the raid on the Capitol earlier this month was totally unknown to the bureau, showing up with a truck full of Molotov cocktails, a rifle, and some “improvised grenades” unheralded by any sort of presence on social media.
Leaving aside the laughable image of the US’ deep-pocketed intelligence apparatus being thwarted by a 70-year-old man from Alabama – who, it’s worth pointing out, is not known to have even entered the Capitol building (!) – FBI agents like Van Zandt and their local counterparts in small-town sheriffs’ offices are really worried that if social media keeps purging Trump supporters and other undesirables, these platforms will create an unstoppable army of Lonnie Coffmans.
Lonnie Coffman, the man in question, had no criminal record or ties to any extremist groups, but “was struggling financially and fixated on right-wing views,” Van Zandt explained, adding – in all seriousness – that the senior citizen was the sort of threat that keeps FBI agents “up at night.”
“The purging of people with radical views from popular social platforms, which has escalated in recent weeks, deprives investigators of a crucial tool in tracking people who might move along the continuum of ideation to action,” the former agent said.
In plain English, the profiler lamented that mass deplatforming prevents FBI agents from both spying on the majority of Americans whom it considers to be potential domestic terrorism threats and entrapping wannabe criminals by posing as terrorists, militia members, and other law-breakers.
Indeed, given that nearly all high-profile FBI cases involve the bureau entrapping suspects, and that this work is increasingly done online, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have become crucial tools in what the FBI describes as its fight against domestic extremism. Ordinary Americans might describe the agency’s work, however, as an unjustifiable effort to lure ordinary people into committing crimes in order to make the FBI and the rest of the US’ sprawling intelligence apparatus seem indispensable.
So please, Twitter and Facebook, the next time you highlight a bunch of users whose views fall outside the ever-more-stifling claustrophobia of the mainstream media and prepare to hit ‘delete’, think of the FBI.
Now that – according to such free-speech-loathing figures as former CIA director John Brennan and House intel committee chair Adam Schiff – the War on Terror is coming home, the FBI is going to need all the help it can get to manufacture the terror statistics that could possibly justify criminalizing political dissent in a nation whose Bill of Rights includes an ironclad guarantee to protect the individual right to free speech. The bureau certainly isn’t going to get that if it hasn’t been cultivating a pool of bored young men with no economic future across multiple platforms, stringing them along with promises of things that go boom.
Why Twitter and FB must ban the NY Times
By Jon Rappoport | January 19, 2021
Message to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey: you have to ban the NY Times. Now.
I’ve got the hard evidence.
The Times, on at least three separate occasions, has published terribly corrosive information that would destroy the official COVID narrative.
Do you realize what that means? People could form a different picture of the pandemic. They could, after reading the Times, decide the situation ISN’T DANGEROUS, AND THE LOCKDOWNS AREN’T NECESSARY. THEY COULD DECIDE ONLY A FOOL WOULD LINE UP FOR THE VACCINE.
I’ll lay it all out for you, dear reader. I’m sure you’ll agree Twitter and FB must take action at once.
ONE: September 22, 2020, the Times : “These Coronavirus Trials Don’t Answer the One Question We Need to Know”:
“If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its serious complications?”
“The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases.”
“But that’s not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the problem.”
“According to the protocols for their studies, which they released late last week, a vaccine could meet the companies’ benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild Covid-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death.”
“To say a vaccine works should mean that most people no longer run the risk of getting seriously sick. That’s not what these trials will determine.”
TAKEAWAY from the Times : The vaccine clinical trials are ONLY designed to show effectiveness in preventing mild cases of COVID, which nobody should care about, because mild cases naturally run their course and cause no harm. THERE IS NO NEED FOR A VACCINE THAT PREVENTS MILD CASES.
Therefore, the leading vaccine clinical trials are useless, irrelevant, misleading, and deceptive.
Therefore, what rational human would choose to receive the COVID vaccine?
TWO: On August 29, 2020, the New York Times published a long article headlined, “Your coronavirus test is positive. Maybe it shouldn’t be.”
Its main message? “The standard [COVID PCR] tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus…Most of these people are not likely to be contagious…”
“In three sets of testing data… compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.”
“On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.”
TAKEAWAY from the Times : The 90% of people tested, who “carry barely any virus,” are FALSE POSITIVES. Up to 90% of ALL people who have been labeled “COVID cases” are not COVID cases. This fact would downgrade the pandemic to “just another flu season.” And there would be no reason for lockdowns.
THREE: NY Times, January 22, 2007, “Faith in Quick Tests [PCR Tests] Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t.”
“Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing… By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing…”
“For months, nearly everyone involved thought the medical center had had a huge whooping cough outbreak, with extensive ramifications. Nearly 1,000 health care workers at the hospital in Lebanon, N.H., were given a preliminary test and furloughed from work until their results were in; 142 people, including Dr. Herndon, were told they appeared to have the disease; and thousands were given antibiotics and a vaccine for protection. Hospital beds were taken out of commission, including some in intensive care.”
“Then, about eight months later, health care workers were dumbfounded to receive an e-mail message from the hospital administration informing them that the whole thing was a false alarm.”
“Now, as they look back on the episode, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists say the problem was that they placed too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test [PCR] that led them astray.”
“There are no national data on pseudo-epidemics caused by an overreliance on such molecular tests, said Dr. Trish M. Perl, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and past president of the Society of Health Care Epidemiologists of America. But, she said, pseudo-epidemics happen all the time. The Dartmouth case may have been one the largest, but it was by no means an exception, she said.”
“Many of the new molecular [PCR] tests are quick but technically demanding, and each laboratory may do them in its own way. These tests, called ‘home brews,’ are not commercially available, and there are no good estimates of their error rates. But their very sensitivity makes false positives likely, and when hundreds or thousands of people are tested, as occurred at Dartmouth, false positives can make it seem like there is an epidemic.”
“’You’re in a little bit of no man’s land,’ with the new molecular [PCR] tests, said Dr. Mark Perkins, an infectious disease specialist and chief scientific officer at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, a nonprofit foundation supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ‘All bets are off on exact performance’.”
“With pertussis, she [Dr. Kretsinger, CDC] said, ‘there are probably 100 different P.C.R. protocols and methods being used throughout the country,’ and it is unclear how often any of them are accurate. ‘We have had a number of outbreaks where we believe that despite the presence of P.C.R.-positive results, the disease was not pertussis,’ Dr. Kretsinger added.”
“Dr. Cathy A. Petti, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah, said the story had one clear lesson.”
“’The big message is that every lab is vulnerable to having false positives,’ Dr. Petti said. ‘No single test result is absolute and that is even more important with a test result based on P.C.R’.”
TAKEAWAY frrom the Times : No large study validating the uniformity of PCR results, from lab to lab, has ever been done. At least a dozen very large studies should have checked for uniform results, before unleashing the PCR on the public; but no, this was not the case. It is still not the case.
Now imagine the scandalous information in these three NY Times articles appearing everywhere—on Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc. It would be terrible for Bill Gates, Fauci, and other great leaders in the Holy Church of Biological Mysticism.
Political leaders and public health experts would have, on their hands, a major refutation of their whole narrative about the “deadly pandemic.”
We can’t allow that.
We must protect the public from the Times.
The only way to achieve this is through censorship.
Ban the NY Times from Twitter and Facebook.
Do it now.
If Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg refuse, Attorneys General of all 50 states should sue them at once.
Freeze their personal and corporate bank accounts.
Place them on a special list of “COVID insurrectionists.”
As for the Times, seize their assets, remove them from online platforms, stop the distribution of their newspapers—using military force, if necessary—and cut off all communication from their wire service to other news outlets.
Keeping the public safe is paramount. This is our duty.
CENSORSHIP IS FREEDOM.
MIND CONTROL IS LOVE.
LOCKDOWNS LEAD TO PROSPERITY.
That is all for now.
SOURCES:
[1] nytimes.com/2020/09/22/opinion/covid-vaccine-coronavirus.html
[2] nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
[3] nytimes.com/2007/01/22/health/22whoop.html
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX.
Twitter Plots Mass Censorship
By Stephen Lendman | January 16, 2021
Big Brother is no longer fiction. It hasn’t been for some time, notably post-9/11, what I earlier called the mother of all state-sponsored false flags.
What’s going on in the US and West includes mass surveillance and growing online censorship of content diverging from the official narrative.
It’s unrelated to national security and foreign threats — everything to do with controlling the message, what totalitarian rule is all about.
What’s unconstitutional is fast becoming the new abnormal.
In Orwell’s envisioned future, Big Brother was “watching,” adding:
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.”
“How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.”
“It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.”
Controlling the message includes filtering out unwanted content — done today with electronic ease.
According to Project Verifas, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is “laying out a roadmap for future political censorship,” adding:
Besides blocking Trump from its platform permanently and removing 70,000 or more accounts, “(t)his is going to be much bigger” ahead, he said.
“(I)t’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and go on beyond the inauguration.”
“So, the focus is certainly on (censoring and silencing) Trump…”
“But also, we need to think much longer term around how these dynamics play out over time.”
“I don’t believe this is going away anytime soon.”
“You know, the US is extremely divided. Our platform is showing that every single day.”
Diversity of opinions and actions according to the rule of law is what free societies are all about.
Restricting things for mass conformity, according to what higher powers demand, is tyranny — where the US and other Western societies are heading.
A Project Veritasm (PV) video reveals Dorsey’s plot against a free and open society.
He called for greater toughness against Trump and his supporters that number in the millions.
A Twitter insider provided PV with Dorsey’s diabolical plot against constitutionally guaranteed free expression.
Established as an NGO in 2011 by James O’Keefe, PV “investigates and exposes corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.”
“O’Keefe serves as the CEO and Chairman of the Board so that he can continue to lead and teach his fellow journalists, as well as protect and nurture the (PV) culture.”
It publishes important information it believes is reliable and vital for everyone to know without “advocat(ing) specific solutions” from investigative work.
An earlier PV report called the NYT an American Soviet era Pravda, not how it operates today that includes publishing some of my articles.
An undercover video obtained by PV included the strategy of the Times’ editor for videos Nick Dudich, admitting the broadsheet manipulates content.
Dudich admitted using gatekeeper power to “choose what goes out and what doesn’t go out.”
“We caught (The Times ) admitting” to censoring content, said PV.
“When (it colludes with) You Tube… the bastard child of that relationship is fake news” — a longstanding Times specialty.
PV’s O’Keefe questioned what news sources You Tube considers “legitimate,” adding:
If the company operates as a news business, it’s “going to have to answer for the sins of (its) news partners.”
A separate undercover PV video caught Dudich saying he worked for Hillary’s presidential campaign, adding he didn’t join the Times to “be objective.”
The self-styled newspaper of record is the closest thing to a US ministry of propaganda.
It betrays readers by reinventing reality, burying vital truths, the same unacceptable actions practiced by other establishment and social media like Twitter, Facebook, and others.
Stephen Lendman is the author of:
How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War
and
The Sheep Syndrome
By Peter Koenig for the Saker Blog | January 15, 2021
Today and during the last few days new “measures” – restrictions of freedom imposed by governments for reasons of “public health security”, i. e. preventing the spread of covid infections – have been tightened throughout Europe. Literally, these treacherous governments say, “we have to tighten the screws”. Seriously. WTF – who do they think they are? Servant of the people who elected them and who pay them. This is high treason. But people take it without asking too many questions, some complaints but not strong enough… we are living in the midst of the Sheep Syndrome.
They – these supposedly people friendly governments – call them “measures”, a euphemism for lockdown – sounds better in the ears of a public tired of continuous and more and more repressions. This second, in some countries even third lockdown, includes further business closing, more severe control on home-office work, police-enhanced social distancing, mask wearing, no indoor group activities, only 5 people may meet in an apartment… and, and, and.
For example, there are about 75 studies – give or take a couple – about the uselessness and even dangers of mask wearing. They especially address the danger for children and young adults… but nobody, nobody in the bought-compromised and coerced, bribed – western governments pays any attention to them, nor does, of course, the presstitute mainstream media. They keep to the narrative – MUST wear a mask – MUST keep the safe 6ft. distance – police enforced.
They also impose homeoffice, knowing damn well that any serious psychologist and sociologist tells you how devastating this is for the individual – loneliness, lack of physical contact, encounter and interaction with colleagues – as well as for society as a whole. Without physical contact it breaks apart. This is of course all merciless – thus, all restaurant closings, all events where people gather and interchange, is forbidden.
People are unhappy. Yes, but not enough to stop this tyranny! – Well, I better behave otherwise I’m going to be punished. – FEAR! – Fear leads to the sheep syndrome – that deep-deep social disease which besets us today – and has done so for a while. People, we got to get out of it.
—
But, it seems, people are not yet tired enough to stand up in unison, screaming “enough is enough”, we do not continue this is government tyranny, we stop obeying.
And yes, to give the tyranny more weight, more credibility, it is enhanced by a so-called Task Force (TF), a group of coopted “scientists”, especially established by the Powers that Be, to inform them what to do. It is an old method of a decision-making duality, when governments have to, or want to, take decisions that are not popular, they ask the Task Force for advice. However, the TF has been told and knows exactly what they have to advise. That’s a premeditated lie.
—
In the UK and France new lockdown measures have been imposed already for days, Austria and Switzerland announced them a couple of days ago – the EU as an entity – says nothing, does not coordinate, does not want see that these lockdowns are not only destroying the individual nations’ economy, but they bring the entire EU to economic suicide. The EU is hamstrung by Washington and by NATO.
The new lockdowns – and possibly more are planned as more waves of covid are in the making – until everybody is vaxxed – and has his / her electromagnetic gel injected in their bodies with an DNA-altering substance. So now, they are totally controllable over time. And the time horizon set for total digitization of everything is 2030. AI and robot control of humans – making them into transhumans that’s the goal for the UN Agenda 21-30. And the instrument to achieve it is the Bill Gates created Agenda ID2020.
More lockdowns are killing more small businesses, shops, and restaurants. Creating more hardship for small business owners, more bankruptcies, more misery for the people and their families, losing their jobs.
Just imagine – home-teaching, a family of 4, both parents work, the kids have to have each one a reasonably powerful computer to be able to connect to the school teacher – the kids have to have reasonable computer skills to manage home-learning, and the parents, even if they have time, do they all have the reasonable computer skills to help their kids? – Does every family in the already much covid-hardship affected society have the resources to spare for buying the needed electronic gear for the kids?
It is a disaster. Again, a wanton disaster. Because it will result in less or non-educated children in the west – non-educated kids will become easier to manipulate adults – well, they are expected to fall – in lockstep – into their parents Sheep Syndrome. – Or will they? – That’s where dynamics may not meet linear elite thinking and expectations.
Now, this is happening in the Global North. Imagine how it is in the Global South, where increasing poverty, misery and famine is ravaging entire societies, in some cases more than two thirds of a country’s population. How will these kids be distance-taught? – They simply won’t. So, we have a situation where the Global South produces uneducated kids, because they simply don’t go to school. Most of them will remain poor, they will be the perfect laborers for the elite – or cannon fodder for the wars the rich nations have to (or want to) fight to satisfy their greed. Never forget, wars are profitable. But foremost because of their sociopathic thirst for more and more power and money.
—
Listening and talking to people in the street and to small business owners, they are all upset, and many of them say they may not survive, may never reopen, despite the subsidy they receive form governments. In Switzerland, the head of “Gastronomie Suisse” said with another lockdown, up to 50% of restaurants may not survive. A similar figure had been mentioned in Germany and Austria – and surely the situation is likewise devastating elsewhere too.
We are talking predominantly for the west. The situation in the East, Russia and China and their allies in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is different, in as much as they have a people-friendlier approach to covid-eradication.
In the west, in some cases, people’s entire lifesaving, their life achievements, their family businesses, are killed for the sake of a useless and purely oppressive rule. The purpose of this rule is not to stamp out a disease, but covid is a means to instill fear and make us compliant, for worse times to come. Because, let me tell you, whatever you may think that in the summer of 2021, or next year, 2022, we will get back to normal – we will not. Never. If we let them do what they are doing now.
This small Globalist Cabal, via its ultra-rich handlers – billionaires with two and three digits of Silicon Valley – does not only have the power to censor whoever is against the Matrix, but they are all censuring in unison the President of the United States. What does that say about a country, or about the society we live in, a society that calls itself “democratic”?
No matter how much you like or dislike your President, doesn’t it occur to you that this is the embodiment of freedom of speech that is taken away from you? – But again, we do nothing. We watch and complain, but we do nothing. We let it happen. Wouldn’t this be a golden opportunity to block and boycott all social media platforms? Period. – Live without them, for Christ’s sake, some 20, 30 years ago we didn’t even know that they existed, or to what extent we will be hooked on them.
If we can still think independently, it’s now the time to cut yourself loose from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and what all their names are — don’t use them. Get back to regular human-to-human communications, dialogues, meeting each other, calling on the phone, landline if possible. Yes, I’m serious.
Think about the consequences of following this trend of no free speech, but a steady increase in AI-ization by algorithms that are precisely using the data you give them on the social platform to further enslave you; by ever more robotization and digitization – to the point when we don’t even realize that our brains have been wired and “hacked” by DARPA-developed super-computers, and we will believe and follow orders we are directly implanted by such super-computers, managed, guess by whom – by the Globalist Cabal – at which point we have irreversibly become the embodiment of the Sheep Syndrome. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is an advanced research and technology branch of the Pentagon.
Does anyone want that?
I doubt it.
We have to find a way to act now. I don’t have the solution. But maybe collectively connecting with each other spiritually, we will find a solution – or we will make a solution emerge.
That would be the noble way – changing an utterly abusive environment with conscientiousness and with spiritual thinking; emitting high-vibrating vibes that influence our collective destiny. But we have to believe in it and in ourselves as a solid collective with solidarity.
If we fail as humans to claim back our human and civil rights and preserve them, eventually Mother Earth will clean herself. She will clean out the inhuman swamp. Maybe it needs one or two huge and lasting cataclysms; a massive earthquake with a disastrous tsunami, a gigantic eruption of one or several volcanos, darkening the sky for weeks, or a monster hurricane or ice storm that destroys and paralyzes parts of civilization, or a huge solar explosion, knocking out the world’s electric and electronic grid – ending digitization of everything on the spot. – All this might be much worse than what covid, or its inventors, ever did.
After such a cataclysm, much of humanity might have to start from scratch – from near-to-zero, and certainly without digitization – but with the now lost freedom, to start afresh and develop freely and sovereignly according to our needs.
For decades the Global Cabal has showered us with self-aggrandizing lies, with promises of comfort, of well-being, but with the notion that competition rather than cooperation will be the salvation. These well-thought-out lies led to a society of egocentric psychopaths – not only, but enough to influence the trend of society, of our dystopian lives. We have gradually acquiesced in LOCKSTEP to a move of societal, even civilizational destruction, from where there is no return.
Let’s work ourselves out of the Sheep Syndrome – NOW.
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Trump’s been deleted from internet, and any one of us could be next
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | January 14, 2021
Donald Trump has been deleted from the internet. He hasn’t been put behind a warning or had his followers reduced, or been forced to switch platforms. He’s gone.
Snapchat. Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. Google. Amazon. Instagram. Shopify. Twitch. Tiktok. Gone.
And he’s the President of the United States. If they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone.
Indeed, that’s the message being sent. It’s an intimidation move, designed to frighten people into policing themselves.
Many people have picked up on this already.
But unfortunately, many more are still lost in what they falsely believe to be the heady scent of victory. They’ll realise their mistake eventually, but it may be too late for us all by then.
It didn’t even stop at Trump, either. Tens of thousands of other people were banned in the following days.
For years the refrain from people defending censorship on social media – ironically, people who would usually identify as “socialists” – has been that private companies have the right to police their platforms as they see fit, and if you don’t like it you can switch to another social network.
… but now those other social networks are being shut down too.
It started with Gab a few years ago, but the recent assault on Parler was even stronger. Gab survived, Parler has not. The tech giants got together and stamped the life out of a smaller competitor. (Pretty sure antitrust laws are there to prevent exactly that scenario, but nevermind.)
The whole week since the “Capitol Hill Riot” has been one long display of dominance. A peacock fanning its tail or a silverback banging on tree trunks.
They are telling us who’s in charge, but some people are refusing to listen.
A common meme doing the rounds among “liberal” voices – who are these days well-schooled in missing the point – goes something like this: “If he’s too dangerous to have a twitter account, why does he have the nuclear codes?”
But, of course, the real question is – if they don’t even let him have a Twitter account, do you honestly think they let him anywhere near the nuclear codes?
Do you really think he has, or had, any power at all? Do you think Joe Biden does?
Do you think the same architecture that just publically castrated the “most powerful man on Earth” and the “leader of the free world” will suddenly start doing what it’s told when a “progressive” voice is in charge?
If they don’t bow to the will of the people now, why should they ever?
They won’t. They never have.
We’ve been told, in very clear terms, who has the power. And it is certainly not us, nor is it our elected representatives.
In fact, it’s not anyone with either democratic mandate or legal accountability, but rather a series of nameless executives, faceless bureaucrats and a succession of tech-billionaires forming a new breed of royalty.
Deleting Donald Trump wasn’t just a “panic response” to the “violence” on Capitol Hill, and it wasn’t a punishment for the man himself – It was a calculated display of honesty. A declaration of intent.
A notification of the limitations we’re all going to face as the increasingly dystopian new normal shapes a different kind of society.
It’s all been clearly co-ordinated. The Deep State and big business and the media working together. Police are instructed to create unrest on Capitol Hill, allow “rioters” into the building. The media report it as an “attempted coup”, while the social networks remove all of Trump’s denunciations so he can be blamed for “inciting violence”.
They created the lie. They spread the lie. They silenced anyone who would gainsay the lie. They have, as Karl Rove would put it, “created reality”, and now we’re here analysing it.
It was a big lie, this time, because it had to be. Because the man – or rather the office – was big. But for Joe Bloggs it can be a small lie. “he posted child porn” or “he was spreading hate” or “he was denying the pandemic”.
The precedent has been created. They can ban anyone they want and make up the reasons later.
Frank Zappa famously said:
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
Well, we’ve been shown the wall, and we’re being encouraged to cheer because the first person to run into it was Donald Trump. Rather predictably, millions have fallen for it.
Poland slams social media deplatforming of Trump as government readies anti-censorship law
RT | January 14, 2021
The Polish government has decried social media platforms’ (mis)handling of US President Donald Trump’s accounts as Warsaw prepares to pass its own legislation to stop ideological censorship.
Facebook’s decision to remove Trump’s account was politically motivated, hypocritical, and “amounts to censorship,” Deputy Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta told local media.
Under the country’s new anti-censorship law, “removing lawful content would directly violate the law, and this will have to be respected by the platforms that operate in Poland,” he explained to Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita.
PM Mateusz Morawiecki made similar comments earlier this week, though he did not mention the US president by name. “Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” he wrote on Facebook. “There can be no consent to censorship.”
“Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently,” Morawiecki continued.
The new anti-censorship law, first unveiled last month, will allow users whose content is taken down by the Big Tech companies to petition a special court if they believe the content did not violate Polish law and should be restored. The user may first file a complaint to the platform, which has 24 hours to restore the ‘offending’ content if they agree it does not violate Polish law.
If the platform refuses, however, the user has 48 hours to petition a court newly created for this purpose. Should the court find in favor of the censored user over a seven-day consideration period, the censoring platform can be fined up to €1.8 million.
Polish government figures, especially those on the right wing of the political spectrum, have had their own struggles with Facebook censorship in the past. The platform kicked Konfederacja party MP Janusz Korwin-Mikke off the site in November despite some 780,000 followers, alleging he had repeatedly violated “community standards.”
Morawiecki has called for the EU to adopt similar rules for governing social media, though the multinational group’s current trajectory seems to lean toward punishing platforms for not removing ‘offensive’ content quickly enough.
However, individual countries such as France are starting to push back against the dominance of Big Tech. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire recently referred to the tech titans as a “digital oligarchy” and “one of the threats” to democracy.
As when Poland first announced the new rule, social media users tired of being tread on by Facebook and Twitter expressed their approval.
In “Staggering” Lack Of Self-Awareness, Twitter Lectures Uganda On Principles Of ‘Open Internet’
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 13, 2021
Twitter decided that now would be a good time to weigh in on how things are going in Uganda of all places, where Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has taken the drastic action of temporarily banning Facebook and Twitter in the final hours leading up to Thursday’s general elections for the presidency and parliament.
Museveni argued that the US-based social media platforms are engaged in censorship that unfairly targets his campaign while propping up opposition frontrunner candidate Bobi Wine. After being on a days-long massive purge of pro-Trump accounts in the US which began when the president himself was permanently banned, Twitter had this to say, and without irony:
“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns…
Billionaire co-founder of AQR Capital Management Cliff Asness immediately said exactly what was on everyone’s mind: “The lack of self-awareness is staggering.”
It is indeed yet another example of Twitter being completely blinded by the hypocrisy as to the way it exercises its immense power in its own backyard (or worse, the major Silicon Valley moguls are quite aware and simply don’t care).
This also after Amazon, Apple and Google agreed in unison to destroy Parlor as it was politically expedient, apparently. And now Twitter is actually lecturing the head of a foreign state on not violating the “principles of the Open Internet”.
So much for that “open” internet…
As for Uganda a long list of online platforms are currently down alongside Twitter and Facebook ahead of the election, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat, Viber, Google Play and others.
Facebook actually admitted to the AP that it indeed took down many users promoting Museveni as it alleged his campaign “used fake and duplicate accounts to manage pages, comment on other people’s content, impersonate users, re-share posts in groups to make them appear more popular than they were. Given the impending election in Uganda, we moved quickly to investigate and take down this network.”
Museveni responded by vowing “there is no way anybody should come and decide for our country” – in reference to the US tech oligarchs during a national address over the crisis.
Again, Twitter is now oh-so-worried about principles of free speech and #OpenInternet – as it stated in its official message – in far away foreign countries like Uganda, but is not batting an eye while simultaneously shutting down thousands of conservative accounts.
How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
By Glenn Greenwald | January 12, 2021
Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.
The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.
Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.
As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.
It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.
But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.
If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
The united Silicon Valley attack began on January 8, when Apple emailed Parler and gave them 24 hours to prove they had changed their moderation practices or else face removal from their App Store. The letter claimed: “We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property.” It ended with this warning:
To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update and the requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and the requested moderation improvement plan in writing within 24 hours, your app will be removed from the App Store.
The 24-hour letter was an obvious pretext and purely performative. Removal was a fait accompli no matter what Parler did. To begin with, the letter was immediately leaked to Buzzfeed, which published it in full. A Parler executive detailed the company’s unsuccessful attempts to communicate with Apple. “They basically ghosted us,” he told me. The next day, Apple notified Parler of its removal from App Store. “We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content,” said the world’s richest company, and thus: “We have now rejected your app for the App Store.”
It is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the App Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their devices from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot be used on the iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded Parler will lose the ability to receive updates, which will shortly render the platform both unmanageable and unsafe.
In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it when highlighting the report’s key findings:
Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its 2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.
However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that’s what Epic is suing the company over. . . .
The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership, including former CEO Steve Jobs, “acknowledged that IAP requirement would stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple’s customers.” The report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors’ access to iPhone users.
Shortly thereafter, Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary functionality and security updates.
It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was at issue “when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system (i.e. Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement giant with €4.34 billion for its anti-competitive practices to strengthen its position in various of other markets through its dominance in the app store market.”
The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones but also from the internet.
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone opposing it.
Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way. After the internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler posts that called for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its App Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned was dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded to know: “Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”
The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself “disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is” and added that “it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.” She nonetheless praised these “young tech titans” for using their “dangerous” power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced (Facebook and other platforms have for years banned marginalized people like Palestinians at Israel’s behest, but that is of no concern to U.S. liberals).
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies. They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of the U.S. President. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, various French ministers, and especially Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador all denounced the banning of Trump and other acts of censorship by tech monopolies on the ground that they were anointing themselves “a world media power.” The warnings from López Obrador were particularly eloquent:
Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties organization into a liberal activist group since Trump’s election — found the assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply alarming. One of that organization’s most stalwart defenders of civil liberties, lawyer Ben Wizner, told The New York Times that the destruction of Parler was more “troubling” than the deletion of posts or whole accounts: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.”
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.
Parler was not founded, nor is it run, by pro-Trump, MAGA supporters. The platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech. Most of the key executives are more associated with the politics of Ron Paul and the CATO Institute than Steve Bannon or the Trump family. One is a Never Trump Republican, while another is the former campaign manager of Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Among the few MAGA-affiliated figures is Dan Bongino, an investor. One of the key original investors was Rebekah Mercer.
The platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a particular ideology. They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in order to decide what they should see. And they were principally borne out of a reaction to increasingly restrictive rules on the major Silicon Valley platforms regarding what could and could not be said.
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter.”
And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their leaders, so of course Democrats will cheer them rather than call for punishment or their removal from the internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart, a much easier target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries. This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri:
The nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Parler is associated with the wrong political ideology. It is a small and new enough platform such that it can be made an example of. Its head can be placed on a pike to make clear that no attempt to compete with existing Silicon Valley monopolies is possible. And its destruction preserves the unchallengeable power of a tiny handful of tech oligarchs over the political discourse not just of the United States but democracies worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are raising their voices in protest).
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive. That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor.
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Israeli rabbi says ‘kill everyone in Gaza, including babies’
The Cradle | March 24, 2024
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the Shirat Moshe yeshiva (religious school) in the occupied city of Jaffa, called on the Israeli army to kill everyone in Gaza, including babies.
During a conference on 8 March, Mali said that “according to the halachic principle (a religious-ethical system of legal reasoning in Judaism), all residents of Gaza must be killed.”
When asked during the conference if babies should be killed as well, he said: “The same thing. You can’t be clever with the Torah. Today he’s a baby, tomorrow he’s a fighter. There are no questions here. Today’s terrorists were previously 8-year-old children.”
“Those who create the terrorists” should also be killed, he said in reference to women in Gaza.
The Rabbi went on to explain that Israel’s war on Gaza is a “Mitzvah war,” which is defined as a war of “commandment” in Jewish tradition. According to Jewish law, this kind of war does not require permission from a “Sanhedrin,” also known as a council or assembly, such as the war against Amalek – previously declared in a biblical reference by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the war on Gaza.
“There is a difference between a civilian population in other places and a civilian population in Gaza. In Gaza, according to estimates, 95 to 98 percent want us destroyed.”
“Since this is a sensitive issue, and I was told that it is being uploaded on the Internet, I want to be ahead of the curve and say that the bottom line is that you have to do exactly what is said in the IDF’s order,” Mali added.
The rabbi’s students in the Shirat Moshe yeshiva serve in the Israeli army. The Yeshiva is sponsored by the Israeli government. … Full article
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