Tag: censorship

Big Tech banned claims vaccinated could spread Covid. Now the government admits it was “hope” not “science”

The problems with Big Tech platforms censoring for so-called “misinformation” was highlighted again in the last week when, while testifying before Congress, former White House COVID response coordinator Deborah Birx said that claims of Covid vaccines efficacy were based on “hope,” not actual science.

Yet it was this supposed “science” that Big Tech platforms used to censor claims about the vaccine.

For example, Facebook, in the early days of the Covid vaccine, banned claims that the Covid vaccine wouldn’t stop people from actually being infected with Covid, meaning claims that the vaccinated could still spread Covid became an offense on the platform.

Birx supported her claim by citing cases of re-infection by late 2020.

“There was evidence from the global pandemic that natural reinfection was occurring,” said Dr. Birx in her testimony.

“And since the vaccine was based on natural immunity, you cannot make the conclusion that the vaccine will do better than natural infection.”

Regardless of the evidence, public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, continued promoting the idea that vaccines are 90% effective in preventing infections and transmissions, and contradicting this was banned on some social platforms.

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Facebook blocks links to website detailing how users can get class action settlement payout from Facebook

Facebook is blocking links to the official class action claims page for a lawsuit settlement for users affected by privacy concerns. The page helps users receive their payout from Facebook and Facebook is marketing the page as “spam” or “abusive,” which prevents people from learning about how to claim.

“If you are a person who, between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, inclusive, were a Facebook User in the United States who visited non-Facebook websites that displayed the Facebook Like button, you may be eligible for a payment from a Class Action Settlement,” the website reads.

Reclaim The Net was alerted to the censorship by a reader and was able to confirm with David Strait, a partner at the DiCello Levitt Gutzler law firm, a party litigating the case, that fbinternettrackingsettlement.com is the official page for users to see if they’re eligible for a claim.

When users on Facebook Messenger try to share the link with someone, they’re greeted with a message saying, “(#368) The action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed,” hindering the sharing of the claim information.

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Fact-checkers demand YouTube censor more content, boost “credible information”

Despite Big Tech censorship being at an all-time high, at GlobalFact 9, a fact-checking conference organized by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), YouTube was blasted for its failure to address “mis- and disinformation.”

IFCN had previously published an open letter to YouTube, asking the platform to do more to address the spread of misinformation.

“As an international network of fact-checking organizations, we monitor how lies spread online — and every day, we see that YouTube is one of the major conduits of online disinformation and misinformation worldwide. This is a significant concern among our global fact-checking community,” the IFCN wrote in the letter signed by over 100 fact-checking organizations.

During the fact-checking conference, several fact-checking organizations expressed similar sentiments.

“YouTube does not seem to raise accurate, credible information in its algorithms. We have had a lot of experience with YouTube making videos of fact-checking content. It doesn’t seem to do very well,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact. “I think most news organizations are extremely frustrated with your platform.”

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Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements

All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.

Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world.

Mental narrative plays a hugely prominent role in human experience; if you’ve ever tried to still your mind in meditation you know exactly what I’m talking about. Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality. It makes sense then that if you can influence those stories, you’re effectively influencing someone’s experience of reality.

The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in approximately five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. Like the fingers on a hand they are distinct from each other and each play their own role, but they’re all part of the same thing and work together toward the same goal. They’re all just different aspects of the US-centralized empire’s narrative control system.

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Twitter bans epidemiologist Dr. Andrew Bostom who linked to vaccine-sperm study

Dr. Andrew Bostom, an epidemiologist who had over 47,000 followers and who was a significant dissenting figure during the coronavirus pandemic, has been permanently banned from Twitter after posting a peer-reviewed study on Covid vaccination effects.

According to a screenshot posted by free-market policy analyst and political organizer Phil Kerpen, Dr. Bostom was locked out for linking to an Israeli study titled “COVID-19 vaccination BNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors.”

Dr. Bostom made several appearances in the media and qualified as an expert witness in epidemiology in a lawsuit filed by parents against an executive order in Rhode Island requiring children to wear masks in schools.

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MSN Quietly Deleted a Story Revealing That Severe COVID-19 is Rarely Found in the Unvaccinated.

A research paper found that people who did not receive a COVID-19 vaccine had a lower rate of suffering a severe case of the virus amidst the pandemic.

The article, which has been uploaded to the preprint server ResearchGate, relied on data from over 18,500 respondents across 175 countries. Analysis revealed that individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 reported fewer instances of hospitalization in comparison to their vaccinated counterparts.

MSN – a news website launched by vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates’s Microsoft in 1995 –  covered the study, titling its article “Severe COVID-19 ‘Rare’ In Unvaccinated People,” but appears to have taken down the story since its publication. Archived versions of the article are still available, however.

The survey – “Self-reported outcomes, choices and discrimination among a global COVID-19 unvaccinated cohort“– was conducted from September 2021 through February 2022. Data collected for the survey was analyzed by an independent, international team of scientists led by Robert Verkerk, Ph.D., the founder and executive and scientific director of Alliance for Natural Health International.

“It is important to recognize that because the cohort represents a self-selected, as opposed to randomly selected, sample, the findings cannot be directly compared with other observational studies based on self-reported data based on randomly selected subjects,” emphasized the study.

Many of the unvaccinated individuals included in the analysis opted for natural treatments such as vitamin D, zinc, quercetin, and drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

The study also found that people unvaccinated against COVID-19 faced discrimination for their decisions, with between 20 to 60 percent of people per country reporting being personal targets of “hate or victimization.”

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Vice President Harris launches task force to shut down “online harassment”

The government, on both the federal and state level, is increasingly trying to police online speech – despite several lawsuits and complaints of First Amendment violations.

The White House has now created a task force that is set to combat “online harassment,” with a particular angle of addressing what it calls “gender-based” violence. The group met today.

The task force was launched by Vice President Harris and is co-chaired by the Gender Policy Council and the National Security Council.

The task force was established following the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas where there were allegations that the incidents were exacerbated by social media.

The Buffalo shooting in particular was used by New York City Governor Kathy Hochul to usher in social media legislation that will likely be ruled unconstitutional.

The shootings highlight the connection between online “harassment” and extremism, an administration official alleged, as reported by The Hill.

Within the next six months, the new task force will come up with recommendations about how government and the private sector (likely tech platforms) can tackle online harassment.

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Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok and more just signed the EU’s “anti-disinformation” code

Big Tech companies have signed a new version of the European Union’s “anti-disinformation” code. Some of the companies that signed include Google, Twitter, Meta, TikTok, and Twitch – but also smaller players such as Vimeo and Clubhouse.

There are 34 signatories in total:

Apple declined to sign.

The “code of practice on disinformation,” will require online platforms to show how they are tackling “harmful content.”

It will also require platforms to fight “harmful misinformation” by forming partnerships with fact-checkers and developing tools. They will be forced to include “indicators of trustworthiness” on information verified independently on hot-button issues like COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Perhaps the most notable requirement is providing their efforts to tackle harmful content and disinformation on a country-by-country basis. The move was opposed by online platforms, but national regulators demanded that they need more specific data to better address the spread of disinformation.

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Biden Advisor Says Social Media Should Silence Anyone Who Criticises Green Energy “Transition”

One of Joe Biden’s senior advisors told a reporter this week that social media companies should be cracking down on and censoring anyone who speeds information critical of the administration’s so called ‘green energy transition’.

National climate advisor Gina McCarthy made the comments in an interview with a reporter for Axios, stating “Now it’s not so much denying the problem. What the [fossil fuel] industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”

She continued, “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” on “disinformation,” noting that criticising a green energy transition upheaval is “equally dangerous to denial,” and adding “we have to move fast.”

The Axios interviewer just nodded in agreement without any pushback.

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PayPal and Etsy ban evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright

Dr. Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, has been banned from PayPal and Etsy. The online financial service and e-commerce platform did not specify why he was banned.

At the end of May, Dr. Wright provided an expert declaration for the Women’s Liberation Front, which is working to protect single-sex prisons.

“The only factual, objective meaning of the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are as references to adult human females, and adult human males, respectively,” Wright wrote in the declaration.

“From an objective standpoint, a person’s subjective feelings do not define or change their sex, which is factually and statically either male or female, determined before birth, and defined by objective reproductive anatomy.”

Dr. Wright announced the PayPal ban on Twitter, saying that he used the service to receive both recurring and one-time donations from his supporters.

PayPal wrote to Dr. Wright that, “after a review, we have decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

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