Tag: censorship

Grants Reveal Federal Government’s Horrific Plans To Censor All Americans’ Speech

Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced.

While the “Twitter Files” offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare. Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover “problematic” speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

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Censorship Masquerades and Disinformation Control

Twitter Files #19 have dropped. I am happy to have assisted Matt Taibbi and team to put that release together, along with release #18.

The Files show widespread censorship masquerading as “anti-disinformation,” and intense collusion between government agencies, NGOs, academia, Big Tech, media, philanthropy, the intelligence community, and more.

Tinfoil hat stuff? The Twitter Files show it is real.

They uncover a level of corruption that is hard to grasp, much of it among the “anti-disinformation” and digital-rights fields where I have worked for almost 20 years.

To say this is disappointing would be an incredible understatement. A 180 on what I understood to be our values.

Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort led by Stanford and bringing together elite academia, NGOs, government, and experts in AI and social-media monitoring, with six of the biggest social-media companies on the planet. They went far beyond their “misinformation” remit. Twitter Files show the Virality Project pushed platforms to censor “stories of true vaccine side effects.”

Partnered in the effort were Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Medium, and Twitter.

Reporting side effects of the now-pulled Johnson & Johnson vaccine would have been labelled “misinformation” under Virality Project decrees. Had Kerryn Phelps (the first female president of the Australian Medical Association) taken to Twitter to describe her and her wife’s vaccine injuries, these too would have been labelled misinformation. German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach would have also been censored last week for admitting that as a result of the vaccines “there are severe disabilities, and some of them will be permanent”.

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Stanford partnered with Twitter, Biden admin to censor ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’: Twitter Files

Matt Taibbi has unearthed still more evidence of collusion and censorship at Twitter, all done by people and institutions who believed that they were righteous in their efforts to ban and block Americans from telling the truth about their own personal experiences with the Covid vaccine. This time, it’s Stanford University and their Virality Project that told officials what information should be banned.

Taibbi reports that Stanford’s Virality Project took issue with accounts that used factual information to question the “expert guidance” of Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the NIAID. He notes that accounts that questioned the “Wuhan wet market” origin story of Covid, instead suggesting that the virus could have leaked from a Wuhan Virology Lab, were suspect per Stanford. That “lab leak” theory is now the primary Covid-origin theory per officials.

Accounts that purported that natural immunity was as good a protection against Covid as the vaccines, if not better, were also suspect, as well as what the Virality Project called “worrisome jokes.” Over the past few years, jokes have gotten many accounts in trouble with Twitter censors, and some mainstream media outlets questioned whether or not satire itself was an actionable offense.

All of these, Taibbi reports, were “characterized as ‘potential violations’ or disinformation ‘events’ by the Virality Project, a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billions of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs.”

The Virality Project had targeted “stories of true vaccine side effects” as actionable content, and in 2021, they “worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content. At least six major Internet platforms were ‘onboarded’ to the same JIRA ticketing system, daily sending millions of items for review.”

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Jacinda Ardern is tipped for top internet censorship role

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern may have recently stepped down from that office, but her “internet censorship” days don’t seem to be over at all – in fact, she is likely to “move” her experience relevant to this activity to an international role.

Having most recently made a name for herself outside her own country as one of the most ardent supporters of extremely strict Covid restrictions, Ardern was previously known as the co-sponsor of the so-called Christchurch initiative (along with another politician of a similar and particular ideological background, Emmanuel Macron.)

The initiative (“Christchurch Call“), which critics say is too heavy-handed in censoring social media, with the Christchurch shooting of 2019 taken as its justification, should now apparently be implemented worldwide, and with Macron still serving as France‘s president – who better than Ardern to do it.

The former New Zealand PM has the support for this from the new head of New Zealand’s government, Chris Hipkins. The Christchurch initiative managed to get some 120 countries and Big Tech to agree on how to best deal with, and get rid of what is perceived as online misinformation, disinformation, and extremism.

According to Hipkins, “the Call” is one of New Zealand’s international priorities, and he sees it as a success so far – but one that should be “seen through.”

“There’s potential for Jacinda Ardern to continue to be involved in that work, and in due course we’ll explore what that might look like,” Hipkins shared. The opposition is on board too, it seems – the National Party leader said they would back Ardern “in whatever she chose to do on the world stage.”

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The CDC funded groups tackling vaccine “misinformation”

Since 2021, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in grants focused on promoting flu and COVID-19 vaccines and tackling what it calls vaccine “misinformation” in minority communities all across the country.

To receive the funding, the grantees have to commit to helping the CDC in enforcing “federal orders related to quarantine and isolation.” They also have to commit to collecting community-level data on behalf of the CDC, Defender reported.

“The recipient is expected to provide to CDC copies of and/or access to COVID-19 data collected with these funds, including but not limited to data related to COVID-19 testing. CDC will specify in further guidance and directives what is encompassed by this requirement,” the grant requirement stated.

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Senator Mark Kelly inquired about social media censorship to curb bank runs

On Sunday, while discussing the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in an emergency conference call led by Senate President Chuck Schumer, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) reportedly inquired about the possibility of censoring social media posts to avoid a bank run.

This information was reported by Republican House members who were also present on the call and heard by representatives of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

“Just got off of a zoom meeting with Fed, Treasury, FDIC, House, and Senate,” Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie tweeted. “A Democrat Senator essentially asked whether there was a program in place to censor information on social media that could lead to a run on the banks.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert also tweeted, “On a briefing with Biden Under Secretary of the Treasury Nellie Liang regarding the SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] BAILOUT they are working towards and a member asked if they were reaching out to Facebook and Twitter to monitor misinformation and ‘bad actors.’”

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NewsGuard denies being government funded after Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files expose

Matt Taibbi appeared before the new congressional Weaponization of Government Committee on Thursday and said the for-profit organization NewsGuard, an organization aimed at “combating misinformation,” according to their website, was “US government funded.”

According to the Washington Examiner, “In a lengthy email to @mtaibbi on Friday morning, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz refuted that the purported disinformation tracker is ‘U.S. government funded.’ In 2021, the Department of Defense awarded $749,387 to Newsguard.”

Taibbi also tweeted out another round of the Twitter files on Thursday, detailing what he dubbed a “Censorship-Industrial Complex” moving within Twitter, government agencies, establishment media, and mostly non-profit organizations all of whom ideologically align in censorship efforts and named NewsGuard as funded by the Department of Defense.

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YouTube CEO: Our monetization policies are oriented towards making advertisers feel “safe,” “comfortable”

New YouTube CEO Neal Mohan discussed how advertisers are the focus of its monetization policies during an interview with tech and travel creator iJustine and said the intention of monetization policy changes is to make advertisers feel “safe” and “more comfortable.”

Mohan discussed “putting yourself in the shoes of the advertisers” and said, “you have to make it so that it feels to the advertiser not just safe but relatively clear in terms of where their advertising is going to run.”

He continued: “They don’t want to inadvertently damage their brand in any particular way and so our policies are really oriented towards that when I say…one of the best ways to increase creator monetization is to make advertisers more comfortable with the content and that is the goal of our policy changes.”

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Locked-Away In ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Camps: The Orwellian Dystopia Of The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex”

I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war on dissent for the better part of the last six years.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.”

(Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

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