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USA Censorship Act to Kill Disinformation

by Oui Mon Mar 13th, 2023 at 11:12:36 AM EST

We told you so, America is under attack from hybrid warfare, hacking and digital surveillance.

'Spineless, Corrupt, Amoral F**kwits': Matt Taibbi Rips Mainstream Media Ignoring FTC's Demand For Twitter to Out Journos

The Censorship-Industrial-Complex Must Be Broken  

On Thursday, two of those journalists testified before the subcommittee about what they found. To summarize very briefly the testimony of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, they found that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies were having regular meetings with Twitter and other tech platforms to impose various degrees of control over the content, as well as the accounts, permitted on social media.

They also found that U.S. taxpayers have been funding a long list of non-governmental and academic organizations that monitored social media content and sent the tech companies bulk requests for takedowns and account bans.

And they found that this censorship, funded and coordinated by the U.S. government, sought the removal not only of false information, but also of true facts that were considered unhelpful, including truthful reports of COVID-19 vaccine injuries. You can read their report on what they are calling the "Censorship-Industrial Complex" on Twitter, or find their work on Substack.com.


THREAD🧵: DHS's cyber agency CISA scrubbed its website last week to purge all reference to domestic censorship work, per @FFO_Freedom

Full report: DHS quietly purges CISA "Mis-, Dis- and Mal-information" website to remove Domestic Censorship References

Foreign Influence Operations and Disinformation US Department DHS - CISA

Foreign actors use misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation campaigns to cause chaos, confusion, and division. These malign actors are seeking to interfere with and undermine our democratic institutions and national cohesiveness.

Richard Jackson et al v. Twitter, Inc. et al | 31 Jan. 2023 |

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA

RICHARD JACKSON, JULIE BRIGGS,
and GREGG BUCHWALTER, Individually
And On Behalf Of All Others Similarly
Situated,

Plaintiffs,

v.

TWITTER, INC., a Delaware corporation; GOOGLE, LLC, a limited liability
company; ALPHABET, INC., a Delaware corporation; META PLATFORMS,
INC., a corporation doing business as "META" and "FACEBOOK, INC.";
INSTAGRAM, INC., a Delaware corporation; AMAZON INC. a Delaware
corporation; YOU TUBE, INC., a Delaware corporation; APPLE, INC., a
Delaware corporation; AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS; NATIONAL
EDUCATION ASSOCIATION; NATIONAL SCHOOL BOARD ASSOCIATION;
DNC SERVICES CORPORATION, a corporation doing business nationwide
as "THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE" OR "DNC,"

Defendants.
_________

  1. At all times herein mentioned, Defendant the Democratic National Committee (the "DNC"), the federal government and in particular, the Biden Administration, aided and abetted by the "mainstream media," colluded with and/or coerced social media companies, internet retailers and distributors, public school teacher unions and school board associations, including the private party defendants named and described herein, to suppress and censor disfavored speakers, viewpoints and content on social media platforms and/or barred them from the public square by falsely labeling content "dis-information," "misinformation," and "mal-information" (hereinafter the "Censorship Scheme").

  2. Plaintiffs allege that the DNC and the Biden Administration's "weaponized" federal agencies - including the Department of Justice ("DOJ"), Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), Center for Disease Control ("CDC"), Department of Homeland Security ("DHS"), Department of Health ("DOH"), Department of Education ("DOE"), State Department and Department of Defense ("DOD") - relying on public fear caused by the Covid 19 Pandemic, lockdowns and health concerns - unnecessarily closed public schools, shut down services from essential service providers and other private public businesses and threatened other adverse government action to coerce and direct the private-party defendants herein to do that which the Constitution prohibits the government from doing directly - namely, to censor and suppress lawfully protected speech and communications of disfavored (primarily conservative or Republican Party) speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms.

  3. The vast Censorship Scheme's tentacles have reached as far as the internet retailer defendants, including Apple, Inc. ("Apple") and Amazon, Inc. ("Amazon"), who refused and continue to refuse to distribute books, articles, movies, audios and other communications written or published by conservative or "disfavored" speakers under the direction of the federal government and the Biden Administration's Orwellian guise of "misinformation."

[...]

RussiaGate Laid to Rest by DOJ

US Federal Agencies and Civil Liberties


The BBC and The Censorship Industrial Complex

See my diary about Gary Lineker and BBC Corp. Impartiality demand.

Universal Criticism Asylum Threshold EU Fortress

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'Sapere aude'
by Oui (Oui) on Thu Mar 16th, 2023 at 07:16:06 PM EST
Twitter Files show media, Dems relied on single source alleging 'Russian bot' activity: 'It was a scam'

Taibbi did a deep dive into their source, Hamilton 68, a so-called "dashboard" that purportedly monitored Russian bot activity.

Hamilton 68, which was spearheaded by former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts, was operated by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a "neoliberal think tank" founded in 2017 with an advisory council that includes Clinton ally John Podesta, former Obama-era acting CIA director Michael Morrell, former Obama official Michael McFaul and The Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol.

[...]
"In layman's terms, the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians. In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it's mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British," Taibbi wrote. "It was a scam. Instead of tracking how 'Russia' influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming."

According to a January 2018 email exchange, Roth sounded the alarm of the ethical dilemma Twitter had faced, writing "Real people need to know they've been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse."

"My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do," Roth wrote in January 2018.



'Sapere aude'
by Oui (Oui) on Thu Mar 16th, 2023 at 07:25:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Also covered @MoA



'Sapere aude'
by Oui (Oui) on Thu Mar 16th, 2023 at 07:28:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Tech Journalism, Fake News and the Russia Threat Narrative | Jan. 31, 2018 |

    "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."

    George Orwell, 1945, `The Freedom of the Press'

Outside of the debate on net neutrality, towards the end of Obama's second term, a confluence of factors -- relating predominantly to the 2016 presidential election and to America's foreign policy -- were already creating an environment in which the suppression of free speech and anti-establishment views was not only possible, but was becoming widely accepted and normalized. During the net neutrality tumult, it became apparent that those who expressed their outrage the loudest avoided going against the establishment to decry the concurrent issue of online political dissent being restricted by government and corporations. Today, widespread suppression of oppositional analysis and independent media remains unfettered.

While most of what occurs in regard to recent changes shows up on the radar of tech writers, there is no analysis of the kind that you see with independent anti-establishment sources. Across tech and popular culture platforms, commentators were not actively calling attention to Google's de-ranking of RT and the manipulating of search results to restrict or block access to socialist and left-wing websites. Nor was there outcry over Twitter banning RT and Sputnik from advertising on its service. Senate Judiciary hearings, interrogating Google, Facebook, and Twitter over Russians using their services, did not receive the kind of in-depth analyses that would show a worrying concern for the dystopian nature of the event; instead tech outlets repeated a generic report of the affair as something that was definitely extremely interesting, but not because it might somehow set a sinister precedent.

[...]
Stenography journalism is one thing, but to see Russophobic hysteria really take hold on these platforms then look to the in-depth analyses on Russia's technological capabilities as it wages its sophisticated warfare on unfortunate Westerners. For this there is Wired and MIT Technology Review. This is when the narrative states that 'their' intelligence agencies are dangerous whereas 'our' intelligence agencies are benign; and the focus must be on 'their' war crimes instead of on 'our' war crimes.



'Sapere aude'
by Oui (Oui) on Thu Mar 16th, 2023 at 07:32:56 PM EST


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