Tag: censorship

YouTube censors New York Post interview

YouTube removed a video of the New York Post’s interview of Aaron Mostofsky, one of President Trump’s supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. YouTube claimed the video was removed over election misinformation.

“We realize this may be disappointing news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all,” YouTube said in the removal notice. The removed video was posted on the personal channel of the reporter who conducted the interview just before the riot began.

“Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the US 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube,” the platform added.

Mostofsky, the son of Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Steven Mostofsky, was one of the first rioters to storm the Capitol. He was clad in a fur costume, a police vest, and a police shield when he was interviewed by the Post. He said he had found the police gear.

During his trial, where he was sentenced to eight months in prison, it was revealed that he wore fur to show that “even a caveman knows the election was stolen.”

“Can you tell me what you’re doing here today?” the interview started.

“Well, to express my opinion as a free American, my belief that this election was stolen. We were cheated. I don’t think 75 million people voted for Trump, I think it was close to 85 million. I think certain states that had been blue for a long time had been red and were stolen like New York,” Mostofsky said.

“And where did you travel from?” the Post’s reporter asked.

“Brooklyn,” Mostofsky said.

“Can you tell me anything about the shield here?” the interviewer pressed.

“The shield? Found it on the floor. I found a cap and I gave it to the cops because it may be someone’s personal thing. This [shield], I have no idea. There’s no name. They probably just grab it. Looks like it’s been used a lot,” Mostofsky said.

“Should senators be afraid? Should House members be afraid?” the interviewer asked.

“They shouldn’t be afraid,” he replied. “They should find their courage to do their duty … to examine the fraud, maybe delay the election. I don’t know what to do. But we have a Constitution. You don’t rewrite the law because of COVID. It’s not ‘Give me liberty or give me death, but COVID.’”

The Post says YouTube’s election misinformation policy, like many other policies, is enforced arbitrarily.

Keep reading

Politif*cked: An Office Manager from Florida and a Gates-Funded Professor Are Censoring Studies Linking Mask Usage to Increased Deaths.

APolitiFact “fact checker” who has attempting to discredit National Pulse reporting on mask mandates and recent medical journal papers has almost zero experience in real news reporting, medical reporting, COVID-19 reporting, or even national news, The National Pulse can reveal.

The information is the latest in a slew of “fact checker” stories which reveal dubiously credentialed individuals working to remove anti-Big Pharma content from the internet at the behest of big tech companies and their sponsors in the pharmaceutical industry.

Floridian liberal Gabrielle Settles appears to have begun working for Politifact in March 2021, bylining at least 70 stories for the corporate-backed censor.

Settles, however, has no experience in dealing with any of this kind of information, having performed the majority of her “fact checks” simply by copying and pasting from the Centers for Disease Control website, and even veering off into “fact checking” pictures of Christmas cards and photos of singer Rihanna.

Prior to Politifact, Settles worked at a small, St. Petersburg outfit called “The Weekly Challenger”, and prior to that, as an “Office Administrator” at “Moody Radio” and a “contributing writer” at a blog called “The Power Broker Magazine.” The sites receive almost zero web traffic.

In fact, Settles’s journalistic contributions are extremely limited. But naturally, her contributions to partisan rhetoric are not.

The Politifact “reporter” – a job which includes no actual reporting – has a history of pro-Democrat and anti-Trump tweets. Naturally, she took umbrage with The National Pulse’s story on masks and deaths, derived from two separate stories of May 16th and May 26th.

Keep reading

Reddit warns US Copyright Office internet upload filters would harm memes

Reddit has warned the US Copyright Office against internet upload filters, arguing the technology will harm free expression.

The US has been looking to update the DMCA to keep up with the copyright issues found online. Many proposals have come and gone, but the US Copyright Office is now looking into automated tools that can prevent content from being re-uploaded, aka upload filters.

In a submission to the US Copyright Office, Reddit, a platform known for user-submitted content, warned against Standard Technical Measures (STMs), including upload filters.

We obtained a copy of the submission for you here.

“Filtering technologies and STMs ill-suited to the variety of content on Reddit would limit the vitality of some of our platform’s most active communities,” Reddit said.

In its subreddits users post copyrighted content, taking advantage of the fair use principles to create memes and more. An upload filter would substantially harm the free flow of thought.

“Filtering technologies have difficulty merely identifying copyrighted material, let alone assessing the specific context the content was found. They cannot make nuanced judgments about fair use or transformative works,” the platform said.

The automated filters and the false positives they would bring will significantly harm free speech, Reddit argues.

“As a result, standardized measures are likely to remove non-infringing content and suffer from false positives. Worse, these over-removals would strike at the heart of the transformative user-generated content that makes Reddit communities unique,” Reddit explained.

“That is a severe, unnecessary, and unacceptable cost to the free expression of our users and the communities they build.”

Google has implemented such a measure through YouTube’s Content ID system, which is notorious. According to Reddit, Content ID cannot work for every type of platform or site.

Keep reading

Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

Lauria compiles a mountain of evidence in refutation of NewsGuard’s claim that Consortium News published “false content” about the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine, copiously citing outlets which NewsGuard itself has labeled accurate sources of information with its “green check” designation system. It becomes clear as you read the article that NewsGuard’s real function is, as John Kiriakou put it, “guarding the country from the news.”

Keep reading

Fauci’s Animal Testing Shielded by Censorship and Disinformation

One might assume that an organization like White Coat Waste Project (WCW)—which unites Republicans and Democrats to stop the federal government from abusing puppies and kittens in wasteful, taxpayer-funded experiments—would be immune as a target of censorship and disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, one would be wrong. For the past two years, government animal testing has been at the center of the free speech debate that’s reached a boiling point in the United States.

Big Tech and Big Media companies have weaponized “fact checks,” sensitive content warnings, and advertising bans to muzzle us and cast doubt on our findings—even when our investigations are demonstrably and self-evidently true. The common theme in all the censored content: daring to criticize Anthony Fauci, which constitutes a Silicon Valley thought-crime.

Several months ago, WCW released an exposé on the monkeys of Morgan Island, South Carolina, also known as “Monkey Island.” Thousands of primates roam the island, but this is no tropical paradise: the monkeys are property of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci’s division of the National Institutes of Health. Documents we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that every year, hundreds of victims are snatched from the island, then shipped to government animal labs and infected with Ebola, COVID, HIV, and then killed.

So gruesome are Fauci’s primate experiments (paid for with your tax dollars) that Twitter doesn’t want you to see them. Journalist and filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse recently discovered Twitter slapped a “content warning” on links to an article about the island, thereby reducing its reach and discoverability. 

Not to be outdone, after we posted a short video on Facebook, its “trusted” (by whom?) partner PolitiFact jumped in the fray. In the comments of WCW’s post, it declared with blue-check authority that “Dr. Anthony Fauci was not involved in the research on monkeys described here, which was conducted in a different division of the National Institutes of Health from the one in which Fauci works, Associated Press fact-checkers found.”

The problem was this AP “fact check,” put forth by PolitiFact as exculpatory evidence exonerating Fauci, was about a totally different set of monkey experiments, at a different NIH division—and we never claimed that Fauci was involved with them. PolitiFact’s “fact check” was flat-out wrong, completely irrelevant, and intentionally misleading. 

Fauci himself has admitted that NIAID owns the Morgan Island primates and experiments on them. A February 2022 letter to U.S. Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) confirms, in heartbreaking detail, that NIAID performs huge numbers of “Category E” experiments on primates—experiments for which pain relief and anesthesia is deliberately withheld. Fauci himself signed this letter of confession, which also confirms the staggering cost of NIAID’s “monkey business”: $658 million spent on primate experiments alone in 2020 and 2021. 

Keep reading

Canada’s broadcasting regulator confirms proposed online censorship bill will apply to user-generated content

During a hearing on Canada’s attempt to regulate what users can say on the internet, Bill C-11 (The Online Streaming Act), the head of Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator again confirmed that the far-reaching regulations will apply to user-generated content.

Ever since the bill was announced, critics have been warning that it empowers the Canadian government to censor the content users post to social media platforms by forcing these platforms to abide by content rules set by Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator – the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

These fears were confirmed by CRTC Chairman Ian Scott earlier this month when he acknowledged that Bill C-11 would apply to user-generated content. And in an appearance at Tuesday’s Canadian Heritage committee hearing, Scott reaffirmed that Bill C-11 allows the CRTC to regulate “user uploaded content.”

CRTC General Counsel and Deputy Executive Director Rachelle Frenette subsequently attempted to downplay the CRTC powers under Bill C-11 by insisting that the regulations apply to platforms, not users. However, she admitted that the CRTC could “issue rules with respect to discoverability.”

Dr. Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, noted (link) that Frenette’s admission is “entirely consistent with the concerns of digital creators, namely that platforms will be required to develop outcomes that result in some content being prioritized in the name of discoverability.”

The critics of Bill C-11 include politicians, creators, and even pro-censorship Big Tech platforms.

Keep reading

World Economic Forum ‘Press Freedom’ Panel Calls for Algorithmic Suppression of Hate Speech, Rumours

Rumours, falsehoods, division, and hate speech should be suppressed by social media algorithms, according to a “freedom of the press” panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

The WEF panel, which was held in collaboration with Time magazine, featured the head of Soros-backed Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, who argued that social media should not focus on banning or overt censorship but rather on algorithmic manipulation in order to promote content from a “subset of society… journalists” to convey information as “carefully as possible” to the public.

“The algorithms are written to promote engagement because engagement is profitable, engagement is more eyeballs, and what is engaging? The provocative, rumours, falsehoods, hate speech, divisiveness.

“I don’t focus so much on what should be taken down, the overt censorship, but rather what is being promoted. If algorithms are promoting information that in essence is false or divisive because it is profitable, there I think there is accountability that is quite warranted for these companies”, Roth said.

The statements from Roth fall in line with previous arguments from the globalist World Economic Forum, which has previously called for the promotion of “diversity and anti-bias” on social media.

Keep reading

Where Did The Rest Of The Internet Go? Google & Other Search Engines Exposed!

Twenty years ago the internet was a place where you could find countless different perspectives about a wide range of diverse and interesting topics. This unfettered access to information was stimulating, thought-provoking, and a refreshing change from the limited media we had access to up until then. It was truly the wild west of information and anyone was able to propose or discuss new ideas, no matter how outrageous some of these ideas may have sounded. (It’s worth noting that many of the outrageous claims made years ago turned out to be true and is common knowledge to most people today).

Unfortunately, this wild west of information has been essentially tamed in the last decade. Now, information or content creators that do not support the official narrative are deemed “dangerous” and algorithmically expunged by the corporations that now own most of the infrastructure of the internet.

Some people might not like the idea of anyone being able to speak their mind but that is what free speech is, warts and all. You have to take the good with the bad because, without free speech, freedom cannot exist. Voltaire once said,  “the right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.”

The Internet of today is bland and sanitized. Free thought is punished while groupthink is rewarded. Today’s internet is dominated by mega-corporations that control almost every aspect of information we are allowed to see or hear. In my opinion, the early free-speech days of the internet were extremely important in the evolution of the human race and the globalists feared the awakening that was happening.

Keep reading

Nuland-Pyatt Tape Removed From YouTube After 8 Years

The smoking gun proving U.S. involvement in the 2014 coup in Kiev has been removed from YouTube after eight years. 

It was one of the most watched versions of the intercepted and leaked conversation between then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in which the two discuss who will make up the new government weeks before democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a violent coup on Feb. 21, 2014.

The two talk about “midwifing” the unconstitutional change of government and “gluing it together” and of the role then Vice President Joe Biden should play and what meetings to set up with Ukrainian politicians.

The U.S. State Department never denied the authenticity of the video, and even issued an apology to the European Union after Nuland is heard on the tape saying, “Fuck the E.U.” Mainstream media at the time focused almost exclusively on that off-color remark, ignoring the greater significance of U.S. interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs. 

Keep reading

Is Big Tech Bum Rushing The Supreme Court On Censorship?

NetChoice v. Paxton—the lawsuit that may determine the fate of free speech on social media platforms—has taken a dramatic turn. Just short of two weeks ago, the large platforms—including the likes of Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, all acting through their trade group, NetChoice—made an “emergency application” to Justice Samuel Alito.

This sort of application is familiar in cases involving grave harm, such as an execution. But is there really any risk of such harm or other emergency in this case? Or are the platforms trying to bum rush the Supreme Court so as to sidestep the ordinary course of judicial inquiry? The Supreme Court needs to be careful that it is not being manipulated.

The case arises out of the Texas free speech statute that bars the largest social media platforms from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. In response, the platforms claim their censorship of speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Texas counters that they are common carriers, which serve as conduits for other people’s speech, and so can be barred from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. In other words, the platforms are not being restricted in their own speech, but only barred from discriminating against the speech of others that they carry in their conduits.

These are complex questions, and even the slightest hint from the Supreme Court as to its answers will have outsize implications in the courts below. It therefore is disturbing that the platforms, speaking through NetChoice, have asked the court to take a position in a rushed “emergency application.” Such portentous questions should not be decided in a hurry. So why do the platforms want them resolved in proceedings that were briefed on only a few days’ notice?

Keep reading