Tag: censorship

Would-Be Censors Peddle Yet Another Election Meddle

In early September, the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against two employees of RT (formerly Russia Today), alleging that the state media outlet “orchestrated a massive scheme to influence the American public by secretly planting and financing a content creation company on U.S. soil.”

Separately, DOJ announced its theft (“seizure”) of 32 Internet domains supposedly used to “covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. ”

The victims, per US Attorney Damian Williams? “[T]he American people, who received Russian messaging without knowing it.”

US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland weighed in as well: “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts.”

Oh, really?

Garland, once nominated to serve on the US Supreme Court, surely knows better. There is no “unless the ideas originate with parties I happen to dislike, or include content I disagree with” exception to the First Amendment’s free speech and free press guarantees.

DOJ doesn’t even enjoy the fig leaf of an “in extremis” excuse, such as a state of war existing between the US and Russia or an imminent threat of attack which the indictments and domain thefts might have thwarted.

Does the Russian regime “meddle” in US elections? Of course it does. All powerful regimes meddle in other countries’ elections.

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State Department’s Smear Tactics: Discrediting Reporters Over Media Blacklist

The State Department has pulled off yet another PR stunt that’s sure to land it in the annals of “How Not to Handle Scandal.” Faced with the inconvenient truth that they had their fingers in the cookie jar – namely, funding a “blacklist” that included mainstream media outlets like The New York Post, Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart News – the geniuses over at Foggy Bottom decided the best course of action was to discredit the very journalists exposing their little operation.

Matt Taibbi, one of the masterminds behind the “Twitter Files” revelations, and Gabe Kaminsky, an investigative reporter at the Washington Examiner, have been painting a very uncomfortable picture for the team at the State Department.

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Behind Closed Doors: The UK and US Plot Global Speech Crackdown

America First Legal (AFL) has pulled back the curtain on yet another government meeting that makes “free speech” sound like some quaint idea from the past. AFL has released documents from a 2021 interagency get-together where the UK’s top experts on “disinformation” offered a master class in censorship, all under the guise of “protecting democracy.” And because nothing screams transparency quite like a secret strategy session on silencing opposing voices, the revelations come with just a hint of irony.

On August 10, 2021, the Biden-Harris National Security Council (NSC) hosted a cozy little chat with the United Kingdom’s “Counter Disinformation Unit” (CDU). The occasion? An instructional session on how to manage—read: censor—COVID-related speech in the US. But why stop at the pandemic when there’s so much more to control? This wasn’t just about virus talk; it was a step-by-step guide on how to choke off the flow of any inconvenient truth that might muddy the government’s preferred narrative.

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California Attorney General Bonta Pressures Top Social Media and AI Executives to Address “Misinformation”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has penned a letter to major social media and “AI” companies. And Bonta’s not urging them to “do better” on innovation, competition, and the like.

No – the letter is all about “election misinformation.”

It’s becoming almost pathological at this point, but the entire ruling apparatus in the US (and that includes not only officials but also politically and ideologically affiliated media outlets) is hammering in the message of that being an actual “threat to democracy.”

As if the largest companies in the said industries didn’t hear all this already dozens of times, Bonta goes out of his way to repeat the message to Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Open AI, Reddit, TikTok, X, and YouTube – (wouldn’t that one fall under the Alphabet category? But Bonta lists the video platform separately).

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

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Florida Based ‘International Fact Checking Network’ – a Prominent Censorship Group – Is FUNDED BY STATE DEPARTMENT and Operates in US to Silence Independent Media and American Voices

Investigative reporter “Bad Kitty Unleashed” on X released a BOMBSHELL REPORT on the US State Department funding the international censorship group International Fact Checking Network (IFCN).

IFCN, despite being funded by the State Department, operates in the US.

Bad Kitty Unleashed reported:

This is a massive scandal! The State Department, who legally can’t operate in the US, has been funding US fact checking since 2015! Yes, it’s earliest days!

The news orgs that operate under the IFCN flag, such as the Washington Post, do the leg work. Which then results in posts on Facebook etc being labeled and the algorithms throttling the post.

This official International Fact Checking Network is also partnered with Google. Poynter’s IFCN was funded by the CIA linked, State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy and Omidyar grants.

Recall Google initiated the first ever US censorship program and expanded it globally by using the First Draft Consortium. First Draft also worked hand in hand with the IFCN. Poynters Politifact was in the First Draft network.

Here’s more on the recently discovered US government-funded censorship programs.

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Bill Gates Wants AI-Based Real-Time Censorship for Vaccine “Misinformation”

Microsoft founder Bill Gates continues with his crusade, as part of the mission of the Gates Foundation, to not only proliferate the use of vaccines but find new justifications to in effect, force them onto those skeptical or unwilling.

One of the methods Gates has clearly identified as helpful in achieving this goal is hitching his “vaccine wagon” to the massive, ongoing scaremongering campaign and narrative around “misinformation” and “AI.”

Gates spoke for CNBC to reveal he may be a vaccine absolutist – but not a free-speech one. He also didn’t sound convinced that America’s Constitution and its speech protections are the right way to go when he brought up the need for “boundaries” allowing some new “rules.”

Gates’ argument incorporates all the main talking points against free speech: misinformation, incorrect information (aka, fake news), violence, and online harassment. And, he sneaked in vaccines in there, while making a case for “rules” in the US as well.

“We should have free speech, but if you’re inciting violence, if you’re causing people not to take vaccines, where are those boundaries that even the US should have rules? And then if you have rules, what is it?” Gates is quoted as saying.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres Complains About “Misinformation” and “Hate Speech,” Calls for “Effective Governance”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has managed to work fearmongering over the perceived proliferation of misinformation, hate speech, and deepfakes into his message issued on the occasion of the upcoming International Day of Democracy.

Not only that but as far as the UN is concerned, this year’s Day of Democracy is focused on – of all things – (at this point in time, upcoming at some later point in time) artificial intelligence (AI).

Though the press release might look like a “politically correct word salad,” it does show a purpose – and that’s pressing for global AI regulation.

The way is, perpetuating the fear that AI, such as it is today, is truly a possible threat to “democracy, peace, and stability.”

According to the UN website, Guterres took this opportunity to frame the problem of erosion of free speech, civil liberties, rule of law, and diminishing trust (ostensibly in legacy media and institutions) as the consequence of that “proliferation of harm.”

The Guterres statement starts off reasonably enough: on International Day of Democracy, these now-under-threat values are the ones that need to be promoted.

But then he descends into explaining why that is by parroting what has been heard a myriad times thus far from many governments and global political and business elites.

For example, what makes free speech so fragile these days? Censorship? Government censorship? And by the same token, is that what’s burdening civil rights in general?

Guterres appears to believe – no. It’s all somehow revolving around “AI” and specifically how to control it – as “a tool for good governance.”

The UN, born after the devastation of the Second World War as a forum to make sure that never repeats, has been losing in influence over the past decade in particular.

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Court Blocks Parts of California’s Social Media Law in Free Speech Clash

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has granted a partial preliminary injunction in the X Corp. v. Bonta case, which concerns some provisions from California’s online censorship (“moderation”) law, AB 587.

In explaining the ruling, the court said that X Corp. is “likely to succeed in showing that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment.”

The law, introduced by 10 Democrats and one Republican in the state legislature and later adopted, mandates that large social media companies must report to California’s attorney-general regarding the details of their “moderation” apparatus. These companies are required to submit “Content Category Reports” twice a year.

The reports should include statements regarding whether the companies’ terms of service define hate speech or racism, extremism or radicalization, disinformation or misinformation, harassment, and foreign political interference; if that is the case, the authorities want to know what those definitions are.

The irony of many laws dealing with the same subjects failing to properly define these categories aside, but the court of appeals judges found that this was one of the provisions that likely violated the First Amendment, therefore granting an injunction against it, and several other portions of AB 587 (under section 22677).

Another part of the law that saw the same fate relates to large social media platforms submitting a detailed description of their “moderation policies, and information about flagged content” when it comes to the same categories of speech (hate speech, racism, etc.)

The Ninth Circuit in this way reversed a previous decision by a district court not to grant a preliminary injunction – which is a temporary block until the courts decide on the merits of the case.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

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Tony Blair Calls for Global Agreement on Social Media Speech Restrictions

Fresh off the crackdown on so-called “keyboard warriors” over social media posts connected to the recent anti-mass migration riots, leading leftist politicians in Britain are beginning to demand for new speech restrictions on the internet.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose neo-liberal Labour Party government enacted some of the strictest speech laws in modern British history, has joined the chorus of commentators demanding a new crackdown on social media.

Speaking to LBC Radio this week, Blair said: “The world is going to have to come together and agree on some rules around social media platforms.

“It’s not just how people can provoke hostility and hatred but I think… the impact on young people particularly when they’ve got access to mobile phones very young and they are reading a whole lot of stuff and receiving a whole lot of stuff that I think is really messing with their minds in a big way.

“I’m not sure what the answer is but I’m sure we need to find one.”

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Time To Rebel: We Are Now Entering The Total Censorship Stage Of Global Tyranny

The authoritarian regimes of the past century have all followed a pattern of events that is generally predictable. Almost every totalitarian government has been inspired by the ideologies of the political left. Meaning, increasingly bigger government, socialist control of resources, the melding of bureaucracy and corporate entities, demands for “social justice”, collectivist propaganda, the abandonment of individual merit for the sake of the state and the “greater good,” Marxism not just from an economic standpoint but also a cultural standpoint, and finally, the adoption of Futurism.

Futurism is, in my view, the key to all modern authoritarianism. It’s a philosophy that has been present at the birth of nearly every major despotic government in recent memory and it’s the root of leftist ideology today. Futurists argue that history is, for the most part, dead weight. They believe that every notion of heritage, the lessons of the past, the ideals and principles of our forefathers are all irrelevant.

Futurists think nothing is sacred and all new ideas are superior to all old ideas. Therefore, they claim, any society that clings to (or conserves) the old ways needs to be dismantled because it is holding humanity back from progress. In other words, anyone promoting or defending traditional norms must be silenced in the name of “progress.”

I suspect most people reading this at least intuitively understand the monstrous nature of this belief system. The very structure of futurism is based on a lie – The idea that all change is good and that any oppression committed in the name of change is justified.

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