Tag: censorship

Tulsi Gabbard suggests Obama behind ‘Ministry of Truth,’ says Biden just ‘front man’

Former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard suggested that former President Barack Obama is behind the effort to establish a Disinformation Governance Board, which she likened to George Orwell’s famed “Ministry of Truth.”

“Biden is just a front man,” Gabbard said on Twitter Sunday. “Obama, April 21: social media censors ‘don’t go far enough,’ so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (aka Disinformation Governance Board).”

Gabbard, a Democrat, was referencing Obama’s speech at Stanford University last week, where he argued tech companies have a hard time moderating content on their own and called for more oversight.

“Now the good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms, and they’re investing in large team of people to monitor it,” Obama said during the speech. “Given the sheer volume of content, this strategy can feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole.”

Obama said he believes employees at the companies “are sincere” in trying to moderate violent content and hate speech, but argued more needs to be done to help the companies limit such posts.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

‘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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading