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The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic

By Glenn Greenwald | March 17, 2022

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s validly despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation.”

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that the laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger’s book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA’s now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger’s book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA’s pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop’s archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger’s book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post‘s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook’s promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a “fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because, if one had been conducted, that no fact-check was even published because, if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it ) and authenticity (disinformation! ) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film’s Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today’s admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in them were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country’s most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , | 1 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

Twitter Says It Will Consider Censoring “Emerging Narratives” About Ukraine War

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | February 25, 2022

Twitter announced that it was monitoring “emerging narratives” about the Ukraine war that will be censored if they represent a violation of the company’s policies.

The announcement was made in response to Twitter deleting tweets and suspending accounts that had posted videos of Russian tank divisions and helicopters heading to Ukraine.

After users complained, Twitter acknowledged that it had targeted the accounts in “error” and they were later restored.

However, a statement by a Twitter spokesperson is likely to cause alarm amongst free speech advocates.

“We took enforcement action on a number of accounts in error,” the statement said, adding, “We’ve been proactively monitoring for emerging narratives that are violative of our policies.”

The use of the term “emerging narratives” suggests that Twitter will begin censoring certain perspectives on the conflict in the context of their policy on “misinformation.”

These problematic “narratives” are almost certainly likely to be ones that question narratives being put out by the Biden White House and NATO sources.

Similar rules were applied to skepticism expressed towards COVID vaccines as well as the lab leak theory, which was once deemed to be ‘harmful misinformation’ but is now widely accepted as the most likely explanation for the pandemic.

The potential for the Russian attack on Ukraine to be exploited to push for further censorship and blacklisting of free speech in the west is a clear danger.

For weeks, leftists have been trying to smear Tucker Carlson as being guilty of “treason” over him accusing the Biden administration of exploiting tensions between Russia and Ukraine to distract from the president’s dreadful handling of domestic issues.

The word “traitor” also trended on Twitter yesterday in response to Nigel Farage suggesting that NATO should share some blame for Putin’s actions.

In a related story, the official Twitter Ukrainian government also lobbied Twitter to ban the official Russian government Twitter account.

February 25, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 4 Comments

Social Media Skewed Lockdown Debate According To Data Expert

By Richie Allen | February 16, 2022

Experts who spoke out against lockdowns were labelled as pseudo-scientists who possessed fringe ideas, because pro-lockdown scientists had more followers on social media, particularly Twitter.

Data Science expert Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University, has compared the expertise of the experts who signed The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) with those who signed The John Snow Memorandum.

The GBD argued that vulnerable people should be shielded and that everyone else be allowed to get on with their lives in order to build natural immunity against the virus. They warned lockdowns would be devastating for public health and the economy.

The signatories of the Snow Memorandum argued that it would be unethical to let the virus rip, therefore lockdown was essential.

According to The Telegraph :

In an article published in BMJ Open Research, he (Professor Ioannidis) found that both letters were authored by very influential experts, but that the John Snow Memorandum authors had a far greater reach on social media, which made it appear that their view had more support.

By November 2021, just four key signatories of the GBD had more than 50,000 Twitter followers, compared with 13 of the key authors of the JSM.

Prof Ioannidis concluded: “Both the Great Barrington Declaration and John Snow Memorandum include many stellar scientists, but JSM has far more powerful social media presence and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative.

“GBD is clearly not a fringe minority report compared with JSM, as many social media and media allude.

“If knowledgeable scientists can have a strong social media presence, massively communicating accurate information to followers, the effect may be highly beneficial.

“Conversely, if scientists themselves are affected by the same problems (misinformation, animosity, loss of decorum and disinhibition, among others) when they communicate in social media, the consequences may be negative.”

Prof Ioannidis also said signatories of the JSM had contributed to the vilification of authors of the GBD through their tweets and op-eds.

John Ioannidis is right on when he says that social media skewed the debate in favour of the lockdown evangelicals, but he has missed one very important point. He seems to have overlooked shadow banning.

It shouldn’t have really mattered that pro-lockdown scientists had more followers on Twitter than their Great Barrington Declaration counterparts.

Twitter and Facebook worked in tandem from the outset of the scamdemic to amplify the posts of academics who supported lockdowns while at the same time limiting the reach of experts who opposed the tyrannical measures.

This meant that users were many times more likely to read pro-lockdown propaganda than they were to read the opinions of sceptics. The social media firms use not very sophisticated algorithms to ensure that their users read what they want them to read.

It’s happening today. The Welsh government has announced plans to give covid jabs to children over five years-old. England will announce later this week.

There are tens of thousands of doctors and scientists who are horrified at the prospect of jabbing young children with an unproven medicine that they do not need.

You and I know who they are, but the majority of people do not. This is because they will never see these experts in their news feeds. Free speech has no greater enemy than social media.

February 16, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Twitter bans Project Veritas Chief of Staff Eric Spracklen

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 11, 2022

Twitter has permanently banned Eric Spracklen, the Chief of Staff for investigative reporting outlet Project Veritas, from its platform for violating its rules on “ban evasion,” less than 24 hours after Project Veritas released a bombshell report on Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Before his ban, Spracklen had been promoting the Project Veritas report which focuses on documents that appear to contradict testimony that Fauci gave under oath on gain of function research.

The report quickly gained traction on Twitter and an associated “#exposefauci” hashtag became the number one trend for several hours.

Spracklen’s final tweets before being banned revealed that the video of this Project Veritas report had racked up 2.8 million views.

The timing is also notable because Fauci was testifying at a Senate hearing on COVID variants as this Project Veritas report was going viral on Twitter.

Spracklen had over 200,000 followers at the time he was banned and was Project Veritas’ last remaining large account on the platform. Its main account (which had more than 735,000 followers) and the account of its founder James O’Keefe (which had over 926,000 followers) were booted earlier this year.

As with the banning of Spracklen, O’Keefe was banned on the same day that one of Project Veritas’ explosive reports was trending on Twitter.

“Twitter has PERMANENTLY SUSPENDED my account for journalism,” Spracklen said. “Twitter knows Veritas is over the target.”

Spracklen is the latest of several high-profile accounts to be banned by Twitter recently. In the last two weeks alone, the tech giant has booted Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, American immunologist and virologist Dr. Robert Malone, and @Unity4J, a popular support account for journalist Julian Assange.

In addition to the bans, Twitter has locked several users out of their accounts and introduced new censorship rules during the last 30 days.

The growing levels of censorship on Twitter and other Big Tech platforms have inspired an exodus to alternative platforms that vow to not censor their users. Free speech social network Gab, Twitter alternative GETTR, and video sharing platform Rumble have all attracted big names this year.

January 11, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Twitter Suspends mRNA Inventor Dr. Robert Malone

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 29, 2021

After months of providing valuable Covid-19 information that runs counter to the official narrative, Twitter has finally banned Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA technology.

Malone, who will appear on the Joe Rogan show Thursday according to associate Ed Dowd (one of four contributors to the Malone doctrine), had more than 520,000 followers. He has been an outspoken critic of both mRNA vaccines, as well as the abysmal failures of policymakers worldwide in responding to the pandemic.

He was not warned or provided an opportunity to delete any offending tweets – instead he was “just suspended,” Dowd continued.

Here’s Malone’s last tweet – sharing an article which claims that the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine does ‘more harm than good.’

Malone can still be followed via his substack page.

December 29, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced

Twitter censors trial coverage as FBI connections broached

By Moneycircus | OffGuardian | December 17, 2021

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, former partner of Jeffrey Epstein, looks like it is being set up to fail. Prosecutors rested their case after nine days in which victims seemed barely prepared for cross-examination and co-conspirators were notable by their absence.

Even this threadbare reckoning was too much information for Twitter, which banned a popular account reporting daily from Manhattan Federal Court. The new Twitter CEO has previously said the company is not bound by the First Amendment, and blocked posts that were drawing 500,000 views.

The touchy revelation seems to have been that hard drives removed from Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in 2019 already had FBI tags on them, suggesting they’d previously been seized and returned to the predator.

The state-corporatist media, like the federal prosecutors, have ignored the clear implication of surveillance and even blackmail. The court case is limited to six counts relating to sex trafficking and Maxwell’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen women.

Not only does it seem U.S. agencies may have been complicit in compromising individuals — Twitter tries to stop us from knowing. Kudos to The Free Press Report for its daily summary of the trial.

AUX ARMES

It is said that Catherine de’ Medici maintained a unit of female spies. These women, multi-talented in languages and the arts, also formed the escadron volant or flying squadron, so named after the queen introduced ballet to the French court.

The military overtones come from their duties in the field of state security in which they applied all their skills, including those of the boudoir. The way in which Catherine deployed her agents resounds down the years.

The tense political climes demanded tough measures. Henry II (reigned 1547–59) had died in a jousting tournament and his son Francis II, married to Mary Queen of Scots, lived only a year. That left Catherine as regent to Henry’s second son Charles IX (1560–74).

The inference remains that these young women were pressed into service. Catherine was also from a dominant family in her own right as daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino. The squadron dispersed her rivals, presumably using blackmail alongside manipulative techniques of jealousy, rivalry or distraction.

The term blackmail dates from this time. Originally called simply “mail” it referred to rent. When paid in silver it was white, or reditus albi but when paid in labour, produce or livestock it was black — reditus nigri.

Whether it originally had negative connotations is moot. By the sixteenth century however, it was used on the Scottish borders to refer to protection money extracted by raiders. By the 19th it described extortion by officials or journalists.

The Medicis used those around them and leveraged their skills to gain information, and this extended to the arts. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Reubens (1577–1640) was fluent in six languages — daubed with talent by the brushful — and no mean spy.

His father had lived in Antwerp when it was was centre of the trading world, moving in the circles of William of Orange. He would reach the loftier orbit of Marie de’ Medici, second wife of Henri IV of France — a fateful choice for Henri, who would die by an assassin’s knife the day after her coronation.

Reubens would frequent the courts of Philip IV, mixing with his favourite the Count-Duke of Olivares, and that of Charles I and the Duke of Buckingham. Reubens was loyal to the Spanish power during the Dutch revolt, and he seems to have counseled against war with the English and French.

ALL’S FAIR

Though tastes in art have tumbled since Reubens’ day it remains a tool of cultural exchange and power, while celebrity and bodily beauty are employed more ruthlessly than ever.

The CIA used modern art — the more abstract the better — in the 1960s to overshadow the Soviets in a display of superior creativity and intellectual freedom. Along with compliant authors, journalists, think-tankers and activists it promoted the careers of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

So when we read of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell partying with what may soon again be called the Jet Set, it is easy to miss the underlying power relations. Likewise the grasping seeking out of influence of the museum crowd, amid the contrived and the affected, the grey suits of the moneyed world trying to escape their conventional selves into an orbit where the word eclectic long ago became cliché.

Their connections targeted those in the scientific sphere, leveraging Maxwell’s father’s ownership of Pergamon Press, a publisher of scientific journals. Epstein had his own connections through universities like MIT and Harvard and John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, where futurists and transhumanists discussed how to manipulate hierarchies of need to create new models of cybernetic governance.

This should ring bells for those who have watched how Event Covid rolled out, with the use of behavioural psychology taking primacy in the government response, even ahead of medical treatment.

ITERATING AT SCALE

Hobnobbing is the perfect opportunity, for those of ill will, to try to compromise others but the famous blackmails of the past were, like kidnappings, individual. It takes a spy agency to do it en masse.

So who leveraged Epstein and Maxwell’s performance art? Who, in the jargon of Silicon Valley, Mountain View and venture capitalists helped them achieve “iteration at scale”?

Much that we have heard about the duo points to this objective: the townhouse with cameras in every room and a video-editing suite to record them. Flight lists of politicians and business executives: we likely know only a fraction of the roll call but they don’t seem to be the sort you’d invite to your private island for laughs.

Tabloid stories in the 1990s had already linked Epstein and Prince Andrew, quoting the gossip of the time that Epstein “worked for CIA.” The connection with intelligence goes deeper than braggadocio.

Robert Maxwell and his daughters are prominent in the evolution of information technology, including Christine Maxwell’s Chiliad Inc, which claimed as clients for its data analysis software the FBI, Treasury and NSA, and may have included the CIA — an echo of the PROMIS monitoring software that Robert Maxwell helped to sell to intelligence agencies.

Just before the Maxwell trial we got another connection, a declassified CIA inspector general report into child abuse by CIA staffers, obtained by BuzzFeed News through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. This showed that at least 10 employees and contractors had committed sex crimes against minors and were not prosecuted. Of the news services only CBS seems to have given the story much prominence.

The revelations are ominously reminiscent of the accusations by Human Rights Watch that the State Department contractor DynCorp trafficked women and girls in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Documents submitted to a Florida court in 2008 suggest one of Epstein’s helicopters shared the tail number N474AW with a State Department plane leased to DynCorp.

At the very least the CIA failed to act. It is a small step that connects human trafficking, the drug operations chronicled over 50 years by the academic Alfred McCoy, and the money laundering that U.S. financial authorities have ignored and exposed in equal measure.

The historical provenance goes back to Barings Bank and the opium trade, African slavery, and trafficking in Chinese labourers who dug the trenches for the First World War — and stayed on to bury the dead.

COAT OF MANY COLOURS

The Medici coat of arms was five red spheres on a gold shield, under one ball of blue. Jokes aside, given the power of the Medici matriarchy, we can imagine that bouncing balls are to be dispatched to the four corners, with one to spare.

If you send your descendants to penetrate countries, whether you are a banker or monarch, like French kings who sent their sons to Albion, the first thing they will establish is an intelligence operation. In the same way Walsingham, spymaster to the Tudors; or the Cecils and Sackvilles who as Treasurers profited from managing finances for the crown.

Practically the first act of Pope Francis in 2014 was to fire the heads of the Vatican bank. The route to big money is to latch on to monarchs and governments, or the don, or whoever lords it over the manor and to help him fleece it.

It begs the question: if Epstein was a solo operator running an extortion ring his operation would not have lasted one year, let alone 30. For he trod on the toes of the powerful, the architects of the Forever Wars from Helmand to the coca fields of Colombia.

This suggests his connections were more than tangential with intelligence agencies of several countries which are, after all, the footsoldiers of those who established them: Wall Street, the old East India Company money, The Investors, the bankers — slice and dice, pin to a cocktail stick and label to your liking.

Who, then, was kept in check by the rustle and crack of closeted skeletons? Even Donald Trump who gave Epstein the cold shoulder in later years and was unfairly traduced by the Russiagate saga, was an associate of Roy Cohn and managed Resorts International, the casino inheritance of Meyer Lansky. Far from a royal court but princelings still.

Seen from this aspect, the Maxwell trial is the iceberg tip of the oldest, most powerful, still-active syndicate. It sheds light — or would, if fully prosecuted — upon the techniques and trades of the ancient professions, those timeless merchants of weapons, drugs and trafficking.

Twitter is keen that we should not make the connection for The Wretched of the Earth, as Frantz Fanon wrote, might recognize the common enemy and become conscious of a target, and possessed of the will to resist.

COVERT COVID

Without excusing those who accepted Epstein’s invitation, those who were captured in the web were captured still.

A report by the Frazer Institute points out that the United States in particular has a history of the state misusing surveillance to commit blackmail, intended to silence dissent, as revealed by the Church Committee of 1976.

Following its report, Congress established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to consider requests for secret warrants. Russiagate showed how that went.

The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the US government was using the Internet to conduct mass indiscriminate surveillance. Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, said in a 2009 interview:

if you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place.”

Yet Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, expressed the human necessity of privacy in Olmstead v. U.S (1928):

The makers of our Constitution… knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

When the U.S. government acts as the accomplice of blackmailers, and social media companies like Twitter scurry to provide cover, the rights of us all stand on quicksand.

Whatever your view on Event Covid the accent on state security is grave: the military figures prominently, with unprecedented censorship and unbending discipline by politicians in lockstep, if not goose step. There is more than a whiff of compulsion. If you let slip there’s a blackmail operation, don’t you reveal who is behind it?

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Free Press Report
[2] Gina Dimuro, 2018 – Catherine De Medici And Her “Flying Squadron” Of Female Spies
[3] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Independent, 1995 — Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’
[4] Emma North-Best, Muckrack, 2017 — Sir Robert Maxwell’s FBI file is getting more classified by the minute
[5] Leopold, Cormier, Buzzfeed, Dec 1, 2021 — Secret CIA Files Say Staffers Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children
[6] Wikipedia — Sex trafficking of children in Bosnia
[7] Ben Woodfinden, 2016 — Mass Surveillance and the Threat to Personal Privacy (PDF)

Moneycircus is written by a former executive producer in network news who lives in Tbilisi, Georgia. You can subscribe and support his work here.

December 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter bans popular account highlighting Nancy Pelosi stock trades, @NancyTracker

Twitter purges another account that scrutinizes powerful figures

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2021

Twitter has booted @NancyTracker, a popular account that documented Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades and drew attention to the millions of dollars she and her husband have generated through trading.

The account had over 200,000 followers when it was banned. Some of its most popular tweets highlighted that Pelosi’s role as a government official gives her access to “insider information” and noted that Pelosi’s returns have significantly outpaced both the market and some of the world’s best investors.

@NancyTracker was created by The Free Press Report which also created the largest Ghislaine Maxwell trial tracker account, @TrackerTrial.

Twitter suspended both accounts earlier today and claimed that The Free Press Foundation had broken its rules against “platform manipulation and spam.” It also referenced rules that prohibit artificially amplifying or suppressing information.

However, The Free Press Foundation pushed back against Twitter by saying that all of the @TrackerTrial’s engagement was “organic” and that “there was not outside amplification.”

In October, less than two months before the accounts were suspended, @NancyTracker said it had received “a cease and desist order from a lawyer representing someone high up in the [Political] office.”

“I will not name names. And I will also not cease or desist,” @NancyTracker added at the time.

The Free Press Report is urging fans of the @NancyTracker account to follow it on free speech social network Gab and has already built an audience of tens of thousands of followers on the platform.

Filmmaker Daniel Bostic described the censorship of the @NancyTracker account as a “full on authoritarian crackdown just days after Dorsey leaves.”

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down on November 29 and was replaced by Parag Agrawal. Since being appointed CEO, Agrawal has faced scrutiny for his past comments that Twitter’s role is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and that he wished Twitter had censored some content sooner.

Investor and Bitcoin commentator Anthony Pompliano also suggested that the censorship was linked to Agrawal by highlighting that the accounts had been suspended and tweeting: “New Twitter CEO seems to be having a busy week.”

The censorship of these popular accounts is the latest in a wave of Twitter censorship that has occurred since Agrawal took the reigns. A link to the American Heart Association website was recently flagged as “unsafe” and numerous accounts have been suspended after Twitter announced new rules that ban the sharing of photos or videos of people without their permission.

December 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 1 Comment

Twitter bans largest Ghislaine Maxwell trial tracker account, @TrackerTrial

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2021

@TrackerTrial, an account with over 525,000 followers that provided regular updates on the Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking trial, has been banned from Twitter, just 10 days after the trial began.

The high-profile trial of Maxwell, who is accused of facilitating the sexual exploitation of girls for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, isn’t being broadcast so people have turned to social media to get updates on the trial. Twitter’s focus on real-time updates and breaking news has resulted in it being the preferred platform for many independent accounts that are covering the trial.

Twitter claimed that the @TrackerTrial account had violated its rules against “platform manipulation and spam” and cited its rules around artificially amplifying or suppressing information when banning the account.

“This is the first censorship that the account has experienced,” The Free Press Report told Reclaim The Net. “No warnings or anything. I woke up this morning and my account was gone.”

However, the account’s creator, pushed back against Twitter’s claims and said: “The account got insane engagement, which by the way, was all organic. There was not outside amplification.”

“The people wanted to hear the truth about the Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein trial and the engagement numbers showed that,” The Free Press Report added. “There were hundreds of millions in impressions and an account that went from zero to over 525,000 followers in a couple of weeks. All we did was report information from the trial that the mainstream media was failing to do.”

The Free Press Report has appealed the suspension and has vowed to continue reporting on the trial via its Substack. It has also encouraged people to follow its Gab account for “a more informal route of communication.”

Additionally, The Free Press Report warned about the power of Big Tech and how it can use its stranglehold over news distribution to determine which news stories are promoted and which news stories are suppressed.

“Big tech has gotten too powerful, and they can silence us anytime they want,” The Free Press Report wrote. “Local blogs and websites are suppressed by big tech algorithms. If you write one thing out of line Google can institute a site-wide ban, making sure you never show up in search algorithms again. Facebook restricts what is posted on their website. Twitter suppresses any outside links, to keep users on their own site. The year is 2021 and big brother is watching.”

This isn’t the first time Big Tech has censored content related to Maxwell and Epstein with Facebook and YouTube censoring and “fact-checking” commentary and memes on Epstein’s 2019 suicide. A roast of Epstein and Maxwell was also removed from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules around “harassment and bullying.”

Twitter has been approached for comment.

December 8, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | | 2 Comments

Twitter announces more censorship for sake of ‘public interest’

RT | November 30, 2021

Twitter has updated its policy on personal information to cover videos and photos of private individuals shared without their consent, unless that is done by legacy media, in “public interest,” or other context they approve of.

“Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm. The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities,” Twitter’s Safety division said on Tuesday.

The company has thus decided to add “media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted” to the category of “personal information” not allowed on the platform. Addresses, identity documents, phone numbers, emails, and bank information of private individuals have already been banned under Twitter’s doxing policy.

This policy update “will allow us to take action on media that is shared without any explicit abusive content, provided it’s posted without the consent of the person depicted,” Twitter said.

It does not apply to media featuring public figures, or when media are shared “in the public interest or add value to public discourse,” however. A specific carve-out seems to be sharing images or videos of private individuals “in an effort to help someone involved in a crisis situation, such as in the aftermath of a violent event, or as part of a newsworthy event due to public interest value,” which “might outweigh the safety risks to a person.”

Twitter “will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared,” including whether it is being “covered by mainstream/traditional media” or “adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.”

Reactions to the policy update have been mainly negative. “Twitter Implements New Rule So It Can Selectively Ban Memes, Mockery Of Democrats” is how the conservative-leaning Federalist reported the policy change.

Conservative pundit Dana Loesch said this will allow Twitter to “muzzle” independent journalists, let “corporate press” set narratives, and silence undercover reporting from the likes of Project Veritas. Independent journalist Tim Pool tweeted that “journalism is largely banned on twitter basically.”

The new rule seems “poorly thought out,” tweeted digital rights advocate Evan Greer, asking “how long before cops try to abuse this to get videos of brutality taken down?”

As written, the update is “not only vague, but literally unenforceable,” argued BBC’s ‘disinformation’ reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh. “How do you define a private individual across different jurisdictions? What exactly is a public setting and what is in the public interest? What is traditional media? This is a minefield.”

The policy update comes less than a day after co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO, appointing Parag Agrawal as his successor. Agrawal is best known for a November 2020 interview in which he said Twitter’s role is “not to be bound by the First Amendment.”

“So, we focused way less on what’s true and what’s false. We focus way more on potential for harm as a result of certain content being amplified on the platform without appropriate context,” Agrawal also said at the time.

November 30, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer its Power to Censor

By Glenn Greenwald | October 5, 2021

Much is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week’s anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a “whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen’s star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook’s dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.

There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google’s YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden’s business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.

But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party’s ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.

And that is Facebook’s only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress. Haugen herself, now guided by long-time Obama operative Bill Burton, has made explicitly clear that her grievance with her former employer is its refusal to censor more of what she regards as “hate, violence and misinformation.” In a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night, Haugen summarized her complaint about CEO Mark Zuckerberg this way: he “has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.” Haugen, gushed The New York Times’ censorship-desperate tech unit as she testified on Tuesday, is “calling for regulation of the technology and business model that amplifies hate and she’s not shy about comparing Facebook to tobacco.”

Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.

As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO’s of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.

A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls. In the name of “restricting misinformation,” more than 3/4 of Democrats want tech companies “to restrict false info online, even if it limits freedom of information,” and just under 2/3 of Democrats want the U.S. Government to control that flow of information over the internet:

The prevailing pro-censorship mindset of the Democratic Party is reflected not only by that definitive polling data but also by the increasingly brash and explicit statements of their leaders. At the end of 2020, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), newly elected after young leftist activists worked tirelessly on his behalf to fend off a primary challenge from the more centrist Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-MA), told Facebook’s Zuckerberg exactly what the Democratic Party wanted. In sum, they demand more censorship:

This, and this alone, is the sole reason why there is so much adoration being constructed around the cult of this new disgruntled Facebook employee. What she provides, above all else, is a telegenic and seemingly informed “insider” face to tell Americans that Facebook is destroying their country and their world by allowing too much content to go uncensored, by permitting too many conversations among ordinary people that are, in the immortal worlds of the NYT‘s tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, “unfettered.”

When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation’s discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.

This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between. And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands.

In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls “power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin’s brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described. Hyperbolically arguing that “Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the “delete” or “ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation. Yarvin puts it this way:

However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his, but someone else’s. . . .

Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh. He cannot even admit that he is under duress—or his Vietcong guards might just snap, and shoot him like the Western running-dog capitalist he is….

And what grants the press this terrifying power? The pure and beautiful power of the logos? What distinguishes a well-written post, like this one, from an equally well-written Times op-ed? Nothing at all but prestige. In normal times, every sane CEO will comply unhesitatingly with the slightest whim of the legitimate press, just as they will comply unhesitatingly with a court order. That’s just how it is. To not call this power government is—just playing with words.

As I have written before, this problem — whereby the government coerces private actors to censor for them — is not one that Yarvin was the first to recognize. The U.S. Supreme Court has held, since at least 1963, that the First Amendment’s “free speech” clause is violated when state officials issue enough threats and other forms of pressure that essentially leave the private actor with no real choice but to censor in accordance with the demands of state officials. Whether we are legally at the point where that constitutional line has been crossed by the increasingly blunt bullying tactics of Democratic lawmakers and executive branch officials is a question likely to be resolved in the courts. But whatever else is true, this pressure is very real and stark and reveals that the real goal of Democrats is not to weaken Facebook but to capture its vast power for their own nefarious ends.

There is another issue raised by this week’s events that requires ample caution as well. The canonized Facebook whistleblower and her journalist supporters are claiming that what Facebook fears most is repeal or reform of Section 230, the legislative provision that provides immunity to social media companies for defamatory or other harmful material published by their users. That section means that if a Facebook user or YouTube host publishes legally actionable content, the social media companies themselves cannot be held liable. There may be ways to reform Section 230 that can reduce the incentive to impose censorship, such as denying that valuable protection to any platform that censors, instead making it available only to those who truly allow an unmoderated platform to thrive. But such a proposal has little support in Washington. What is far more likely is that Section 230 will be “modified” to impose greater content moderation obligations on all social media companies.

Far from threatening Facebook and Google, such a legal change could be the greatest gift one can give them, which is why their executives are often seen calling on Congress to regulate the social media industry. Any legal scheme that requires every post and comment to be moderated would demand enormous resources — gigantic teams of paid experts and consultants to assess “misinformation” and “hate speech” and veritable armies of employees to carry out their decrees. Only the established giants such as Facebook and Google would be able to comply with such a regimen, while other competitors — including large but still-smaller ones such as Twitter — would drown in those requirements. And still-smaller challengers to the hegemony of Facebook and Google, such as Substack and Rumble, could never survive. In other words, any attempt by Congress to impose greater content moderation obligations — which is exactly what they are threatening — would destroy whatever possibility remains for competitors to arise and would, in particular, destroy any platforms seeking to protect free discourse. That would be the consequence by design, which is why one should be very wary of any attempt to pretend that Facebook and Google fear such legislative adjustments.

There are real dangers posed by allowing companies such as Facebook and Google to amass the power they have now consolidated. But very little of the activism and anger from the media and Washington toward these companies is designed to fracture or limit that power. It is designed, instead, to transfer that power to other authorities who can then wield it for their own interests. The only thing more alarming than Facebook and Google controlling and policing our political discourse is allowing elites from one of the political parties in Washington and their corporate media outlets to assume the role of overseer, as they are absolutely committed to doing. Far from being some noble whistleblower, Frances Haugen is just their latest tool to exploit for their scheme to use the power of social media giants to control political discourse in accordance with their own views and interests.

October 6, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

FEC rules Twitter shadowbanning Congressman Matt Gaetz wasn’t election interference

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 18, 2021

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) unanimously rejected a complaint by Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz against Twitter, alleging the social media company shadowbanned him in 2018. The complaint accused Twitter of election interference.

In 2018, Vice reported that Twitter subjected Republican legislators, including Gaetz, to shadowbans, which limited the visibility of their accounts in search results. Following the report, Gaetz filed a complaint against Twitter with the FEC in July 2018.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

The FEC also recently ruled that Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden corruption story was not election interference.

Last month, all six FEC commissioners agreed that Twitter’s shadowban did not break election interference laws.

Twitter explained that Gaetz’s account was shadowbanned because of being “associated with other accounts that already had high indicia of misuse or abuse.”

In the original complaint, Gaetz said that Twitter’s shadowban amounted to “making an in-kind contribution to [Gaetz’s] political opponents.”

He used a “free billboards” analogy to make his point: “Imagine the following: a billboard company in Florida wants to get involved in the political process, so it offers all candidates running for office… free billboards to promote their campaigns.”

“If the company did not randomly assign locations, but rather, offered large billboards in premium locations within the district to Democratic candidates, but only offered billboards stuck behind dumpsters, outside the district, to Republican candidates, it could not credibly argue that it was not giving an “in-kind” donation to the Democratic candidates.”

The complaint also argued that Twitter was a debate platform, and, therefore, it is supposed to follow FEC’s regulations on political debates.

“Twitter, as a self-identified news organization, and as a recognized debate platform, is a staging organization for candidate debates,” the complaint said.

The FEC rejected the argument, Business Insider reported, referring to a 2019 legal analysis by its general counsel that found out that Twitter could legally limit an account’s activity if it is concerned about “divisive content.” The analysis also concluded that Twitter messages are not “debate within the meaning of the Commission’s regulation,” as its definition of debate means “face-to-face appearances or confrontations.”

September 18, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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