Tag: censorship

Governments Worldwide are Working in Lockstep to bring in Digital I.D. & Social Credit System as EU agrees to Expand Online Censorship with ‘Digital Services Act’

Under pressure applied by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the European Union is working to expand online censorship to an extreme Orwellian level, as well as strictly regulate speech during what authorities deem to be times of crisis (we always seem to be in the middle of a “crisis”), and remove online anonymity by forcing the public to have a digital identity.

But these plans aren’t unique to the EU. They are also currently being rolled out in the UK and Africa, proving Governments worldwide are working in lockstep to bring in a digital identity and social credit system right under your nose.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both lobbied for the EU to back the censorship bill known as the ‘Digital Services Act‘ on Thursday, April 21st, 2022.

From France 24, “EU agrees on new legislation to tame internet ‘Wild West’ “:

The Digital Services Act (DSA) — the second part of a massive project to regulate tech companies — aims to ensure tougher consequences for platforms and websites that host a long list of banned content ranging from hate speech to disinformation and child sexual abuse images.

[…] Tech giants have been repeatedly called out for failing to police their platforms — a New Zealand terrorist attack that was live-streamed on Facebook in 2019 caused global outrage, and the chaotic insurrection in the US last year was promoted online.

The dark side of the internet also includes e-commerce platforms filled with counterfeit or defective products.

[…] The regulation will require platforms to swiftly remove illegal content as soon as they are aware of its existence. Social networks would have to suspend users who frequently breach the law.

The DSA will force e-commerce sites to verify the identity of suppliers before proposing their products.

[…] The European Commission will oversee yearly audits [of Big Tech firms] and be able to impose fines of up to six percent of their annual sales for repeated infringements.

Looking over the outline of the new agreement it’s striking how they seamlessly conflate child sexual abuse material with “illegal hate speech.”

Both are jumbled together as “illegal content.”

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‘Misinformation Fingerprints:’ The Pentagon Awarded ‘Fact-Checking’ Org NewsGuard a $750K Contract Last Year

In yet more evidence of the federal government/Deep State’s vested interest in advancing internet censorship (or, as they call it, tackling “misinformation”), the Department of Defense awarded NewsGuard Technologies a $750,000 contract in September of 2021 for the organization’s “misinformation fingerprints” project.

NewsGuard, which has been the subject of extensive Breitbart News reporting, is an establishment-backed project that aims to “rate” news outlets, policing the internet by telling users which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot.

According to USASpending.gov, the contract was awarded for NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” project, which it describes as a “a catalogue of known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”

It is unclear if hoaxes embraced by the establishment, such as the notion that material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” are in NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” database.

NewsGuard’s own co-founder, Steve Brill, spread that false claim, as did advisory board member and notorious political partisan Michael Hayden.

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Ministry of Truth: Joe Biden’s New ‘Disinformation Board’ Director is a Ukrainian Govt Advisor Who Was ‘Pleased’ By The Censorship Of Hunter Biden’s Hard Drive.

The Executive Director of the Biden White House’s newly launched Disinformation Governance Board celebrated the censorship of news reports regarding Hunter Biden’s hard drive, appearing to describe the story as “Russian disinformation.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created the board to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security” focusing “on irregular migration and Russia,” according to POLITICO. The report also revealed that Nina Jankowicz – whose career has focused on partisan operations and advising foreign governments, rather than news reporting – will serve as its executive director.

Partisanship & Foreign Influence.

While participating in U.S. Congressional hearings, Jankowicz dismissed documented links between Ukrainian energy company Burisma and the Biden family, while calling for an increase in federally-funded media outlets and an “oversight” agency of social media platforms.

She described the well-documented business ties between the first son and Burisma as “perhaps the most well-known example of information laundering” and “unsubstantiated and misleading.”

Jankowicz is a former “disinformation fellow” at the partly government-funded Wilson Center, and even advised the Ukrainian government as recently as 2016.

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PayPal Blocks Multiple Alternative Media Figures Critical Of US Empire Narratives

In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin, and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.

Just the other day MintPress published an excellent article by MacLeod titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” documenting the many ways skepticism of the US government’s version of events in this war is being suppressed by Silicon Valley megacorporations, including financial censorship via the demonetization of YouTube videos that don’t regurgitate the imperial line on Ukraine.

Today, both MintPress and MacLeod have been banned from using the payment service that many online content creators have come to rely on to help crowdfund their work.

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Is Federal Censorship Coming? Biden Admin Creating ‘Disinformation Governance Board’

After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, independent journalist Glenn Greenwald predicted that Democrats would use the force of the government to crack down on conservative reporting under the guise of combatting “national security” threats.

Now President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is reportedly working to create a “disinformation governance board” to counter what they determine to be false information relating to national security.

On Wednesday, Politico reported that DHS is creating the board “to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”

Nina Jankowicz will now reportedly head the new DHS board as executive director. Jankowicz was one of the prominent liberals who appeared to believe that the device was Russian disinformation.

While Russia has certainly been guilty of putting out disinformation around the globe, American intelligence officials have also labeled factual information — like Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell”— as Russian propaganda as well. Even the mainstream media now admits that the contents of that laptop were real.

In March 2021, Jankowicz tweeted that the intelligence community “has a high degree of confidence that the Kremlin used proxies to push influence narratives, including misleading or unsubstantiated claims about President Biden, to US media, officials, and influencers, some close to President Trump.”

“A clear nod to the alleged Hunter laptop,” she posited.

It is unclear what she was suggesting was misleading or unsubstantiated — with regard to the laptop — when she sent that tweet. Various media outlets at that time had not dug into the veracity of its contents. The media and Jankowicz, appeared to accept at face value the intelligence community’s false report that it was Russian disinformation. Twitter also infamously blocked the story from its site based on information from intelligence community members.

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Twitter Lawyer Who Cried in Musk Meeting Was Instrumental in Banning Trump

The Twitter lawyer who broke down crying during a meeting about the ramifications of Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media company was previously instrumental in banning President Trump as well as censoring information about the COVID lab leak theory.

Yesterday, it was revealed that Twitter’s top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, was reduced to tears during a virtual meeting with the company’s policy and legal teams following Musk’s successful purchase of the platform.

According to Politico, “Gadde cried during the meeting as she expressed concerns about how the company could change,” and “acknowledged that there are significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk’s leadership.”

Gadde was presumably upset by the fact that her power to censor individuals and content may now be restricted under Musk’s leadership.

As head of Trust and Safety, Gadde was hugely influential in defining the company’s view of “hate speech” and was also instrumental in crafting the “healthy conversations” narrative that Twitter has used an excuse to censor blatantly factual information, such as the assertion that ‘trans women’ are not biological men.

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The Biden administration wants private companies to censor online speech

The White House continued pressuring the tech giants to censor content that it deems to be “misinformation” yesterday by throwing its support behind the use of Section 230 and antitrust reforms to combat misinformation.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki shared the Biden administration’s support for these reforms when a reporter asked whether the White House would be interested in working with Twitter, “like it has in the past,” to continue to combat COVID misinformation and disinformation.

The reporter didn’t point to a specific past partnership between the White House and Twitter when asking his question but Twitter has previously facilitated a White House Q&A as part of its “work on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” and reportedly partnered with the White House to promote COVID vaccines. The White House has also admitted that it regularly contacts social media platforms about misinformation and even flags content for Facebook to censor.

Psaki responded to the question by confirming that Biden’s White House is still “engaging regularly with all social media platforms about steps that can be taken.”

She continued by suggesting that Congress should impose reforms on Big Tech platforms. Specifically, Psaki said the White House would support reforms of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) (which currently gives large tech platforms immunity from civil liability if they act in “good faith” to moderate content), antitrust reforms, and “requiring more transparency” from tech platforms.

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Left-Wing Group Demands Apple Preemptively Nuke Truth Social

A left-wing government watchdog group with a dubious history is demanding Apple engage in mass preemptive censorship with the removal of a free-speech-branded alternative to Twitter from its app store.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a four-page letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday urging the American tech executive to nuke former President Donald Trump’s new platform, Truth Social, from its digital marketplace despite no violations of company guidelines.

“The events of January 6, 2021 highlighted not only democracy’s vulnerabilities, but also the risks associated with the current ecosystem of online speech,” wrote CREW President Noah Bookbinder in the letter. “Every company that now enters into business with Trump must recognize that it is essentially endorsing this dangerous and anti-democratic conduct.”

With not a single post from the entire platform cited or a single company policy violated to justify the app’s removal, Bookbinder argued Truth Social’s association with Trump was enough reason alone to ban the product from the Apple marketplace.

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While Banning People for Facts, Twitter Openly Allows Threats of Murder Against The Establishment’s Political Rivals

Throughout the last two years, Twitter has purged countless voices in the name of preventing the spread of “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.” World renowned doctors and scientific experts have found themselves wiped from the face of the platform for simply stating facts or predicting things that would eventually come true.

One of the people who has been censored the most is Robert W Malone MD, MS who is one of the inventors of mRNA & DNA vaccines. Dr. Malone has been outspoken about the way the establishment system handled, or rather mishandled, the covid crisis.

His Twitter account had grown to over a half million followers late last year before the platform decided that his alternative views on the pandemic were a danger to the narrative. So they banned him.

Instead of standing up for the free exchange of ideas by experts — which is how science works  — the left cheered for Malone’s censorship, calling him a kook while celebrating the tools of tyrants.

Before Malone, Alex Berenson, a prominent skeptic of the government’s response to COVID-19, was unceremoniously banned from Twitter for a week. His crime? He cited Pfizer’s own clinical trial data.

“Blocked again, for a week this time,” Berenson said on his Substack. “For this tweet, which is completely accurate and does nothing but quote PFIZER’S OWN CLINICAL TRIAL DATA.”

The list goes on.

There seems to be a common theme among those who are banned and those who are not and it has quickly become obvious. If you toe the establishment line and repeat their narrative, you can bend and even break rules that would otherwise result in bans and censorship.

Just last week, after Washington Post columnist and technology reporter Taylor Lorenz wrapped up an anti-bullying campaign for online journalists — literally coming to tears over it and stating that it is not okay under any circumstances — Lorenz began a campaign of her own. Her target, the woman behind the page Libs of TikTok.

Though the establishment left claimed that Lorenz didn’t actually dox the owner of Libs of TikTok, the first revision of her article (archived in this link) on WaPo contained her actual private home address.

The publishing of private addresses like this is not only against Twitter’s terms of service but it also borders on illegal activity — especially if it is meant to drive intimidation, harassment, or stalking. This intent was unmistakable in the piece published in WaPo.

Nevertheless, their piece flourished on the platform and received widespread and viral distribution. But it gets worse.

After the article was published, calls for murdering the owner of Libs of TikTok began to gain traction on the platform. One tweet in particular, directly called for the assassination of Chaya Raichik and included a video of a person loading an AR-15, clearly establishing their intent.

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