Tag: censorship

Elon Musk Names Obscure Agency as ‘Worst Offender’ in US Government Censorship

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has pointed to a little-known government agency as the “worst offender” in terms of U.S. government censorship and media manipulation, alleging that it flagged Twitter accounts for suppression based on dubious criteria like promoting the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origins.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Musk named the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) as a “threat to our democracy” and pointed to independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s extensive Jan. 3 thread that delves into the agency’s interactions with Twitter on content censorship.

Taibbi’s thread that Musk pointed to for more details on the GEC’s activity includes internal correspondence among Twitter executives that indicates that even they took a dim view of engagement with the GEC, considering it “political” and “press-happy” and as having a “track record of actively advancing specific ideological agendas.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the GEC with a request for comment but received no response by publication.

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‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Is A Slur Meant To Silence Us

Back in the 1980s, when Bill Casey was director of Central Intelligence, I asked him a direct question related to analysis. In response, he pointed to his temple and said, “Well, you just gotta use your noodle.”

Whatever you may think of Casey, his pithiness here is instructive. It’s good advice for everyone these days, especially as the term “conspiracy theory” continues to mushroom throughout Big Media, here, there, and everywhere. Team Biden seems to have pushed the term into absolute hyperdrive since he took office.

It’s used even when grand plans are out in the open. For example, participants at the recent World Economic Forum congregation in Davos publicly discussed how we should all be censored and surveilled and tracked. The Orwellian life they’d like to shove on us has been preached for decades by WEF founder Klaus Schwab, prior to his 2020 publication of “The Great Reset.”

But if you point this out you’re likely to be smeared as a “conspiracy theorist.” As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and many respected pundits have noted, the WEF goal for an unelected elite to rein in the hoi polloi is no theory. Their activists talk about it constantly.

Sure, there are some people who conjure up far-fetched notions of why and how this or that may have happened. But the term “conspiracy theorist” has become a knee-jerk label intended to discredit thoughtful investigation — or just plain observation — by describing investigators as wacky conjurers. This is one of many ways power elites exploit the natural human fear of ostracism in order to induce us to self-silence.

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WHO releases international pandemic treaty zero draft that targets “misinformation” and “disinformation”

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which will give the unelected global health agency new powers to “tackle” anything that it deems to be “false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation” if passed.

The WHO has been pushing the treaty since December 2021 and those drafting the treaty intend to present a final report to the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body, in May 2024.

If adopted, the treaty will be legally binding under international law and the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) would be required to comply with the treaty’s demands to target misinformation.

The zero draft is similar to previous versions of the treaty and the provisions related to misinformation are described in Article 17 (“Strengthening pandemic and public health literacy”).

This section of the treaty calls for member states to “tackle false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation, including through promotion of international cooperation.”

It also urges member states to manage “infodemics” — a term coined by the WHO that refers to “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.” Specifically, member states are told to manage these so-called infodemics “through effective channels, including social media.”

The scope of this treaty also extends beyond the WHO’s member base. Article 16 (“Whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches at the national level”) urges member states to collaborate with non-state actors and the private sector as part of a “whole-of-society response in decision making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, as well as effective feedback mechanisms.”

We obtained a copy of the zero draft of the WHO’s pandemic treaty for you here.

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Biden’s Controversial FCC Nominee Gigi Sohn to Face Scrutiny over Calls for Censorship, Leftist Advocacy

Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden’s progressive nominee for the FCC, will likely face intense scrutiny over her seemingly endless controversial statements as she hopes to get confirmed to the nation’s leading technology agency.

Biden renominated Sohn in early January after Senate Democrats failed to secure a majority to confirm her as a commissioner due to her far-left sympathies and controversial statements. If Sohn were confirmed to the FCC, it would give the agency a Democrat majority, which could allow them to pursue net neutrality regulations and other leftist priorities.

Most recently, Breitbart News senior technology correspondent Allum Bokhari reported how Sohn was appointed to the board of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) in 2018, two years before the group gave its “pioneer award” to a dominatrix named Mistress Blunt.

Sohn has called Fox News “state-sponsored propaganda” that is “dangerous to democracy” and called on the FCC to investigate if Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative-run network of local TV stations, should have a broadcast license.

Sohn was the cofounder and CEO of the leftist advocacy group Public Knowledge, which called on cable and satellite providers to cancel One America News Network.

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Department of Health and Human Services is sued after ignoring freedom of information request over censorship demands

Activist group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for all records and communications between the Surgeon General’s office and social media companies about COVID-19 vaccines.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the HHS refused to adequately respond to a FOIA request filed in March 2022.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

The request was for: “All records, including, but not limited to, electronic mail, texts, memoranda, and handwritten notes, of, regarding, referring, or relating to any efforts of Alexandria Phillips, Communications Director, Office of the Surgeon General, to contact any employee of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest concerning COVID-19 vaccines.”

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has previously called for censorship of Covid misinformation. In 2021, he published a report titled “Confronting Health Misinformation,” which aimed to “slow the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”

The report encouraged platforms to censor vaccine misinformation and other misinformation related to the pandemic.

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Twitter Moderators Knew the ‘Russian Bots’ List Was Fake: Twitter Files

Twitter content moderators knew that a “Russian bots list” used by mainstream media to discredit unwelcome political viewpoints was fake, but ultimately remained silent on it due to fears of bad press, according to newly unveiled internal email exchanges.

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday released the latest installment of revelations dubbed the “Twitter Files.” This new batch of internal communications involved the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a nonprofit organization that studies strategies to counter campaigns to “undermine democratic processes” across the world.

ASD also created and maintains “Hamilton 68,” a dashboard that tracks, among other things, 600 Twitter accounts alleged to be Russian government-controlled bots. This online tool received positive mainstream media coverage, including from Politico, The Washington Post, and CNN.

In screenshots of emails shared by Taibbi, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth appeared to have dismissed Hamilton 68’s list of Russian bots as untrustworthy.

In a January 2018 email, Roth lamented Hamilton 68’s accusing an organically trending political hashtag of being driven by Russian bots. He also talked about potentially calling out such behavior.

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YouTube censors and punishes Project Veritas over undercover Pfizer video

YouTube has deleted an undercover video by Project Veritas that showed a Pfizer director of research and development make comments about an idea he calls “directed evolution.”

YouTube has also punished the entire Project Veritas by issuing a “strike.”

“YouTube has taken down our Pfizer DirectedEvolution bombshell. It had 800K views,” O’Keefe announced on Twitter. “Pfizer is scrambling today per sources inside.”

“Project Veritas channel has been given a ‘strike’ and ability to upload ANY new videos is ‘restricted’ for a week with threats of future ‘permanent removal’ Project Veritas announced.

The subject of the video, Jordan Trishton Walker, Pfizer’s director of research and development strategic operations, was later approached by O’Keefe and his team in a New York restaurant and asked about the comments he made in the undercover video.

The later video showed the Pfizer employee becoming angry after being confronted by O’Keefe.

“You work for Pfizer,” O’Keefe said to Walker in the video. “My question for you is, why does Pfizer wanna hide from the public the fact that they’re mutating the COVID viruses?”

O’Keefe was referring to an undercover video, that YouTube has now deleted, where Walker said, “One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [the COVID virus] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right?”

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Meta Global Affairs Pres: We’re Not ‘Truth Police,’ But We’ll Restrict Trump’s Account if He Casts Doubt on Elections

During a portion of an interview with NBC News Senior Washington Correspondent Hallie Jackson released on Thursday, Meta President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg stated that if former President Donald Trump uses “Facebook and Instagram to cast doubt on and delegitimize the upcoming election,” they will limit the reach of his posts and possibly could keep his posts from being reshared and restrict his ability to run political ads on the platforms, but maintained Meta is not the “truth police, never have been, and we’ll never seek to be.”

Clegg stated, “[I]f he kind of sails…close to the wind and tries to use Facebook and Instagram to cast doubt on and delegitimize the upcoming election, we’ll also take measures like letting him post, but not necessarily having that post appear in people’s feeds, possibly removing the reshare button so people can’t reshare his posts, and if he keeps doing that, possibly also restricting his ability to run political ads on Facebook and Instagram.”

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Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”

The mask is slipping (pun fully intended), all over the place – regarding the Big Tech/Big Government collusion. Now it’s time to pay close attention to the role played by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We’ve already been awed – just by the magnitude of the whole thing – if not exactly “shocked” by the Twitter Files.

After all, while it was happening, a whole lot of observers surmised that something of the sort had to be behind the unprecedented and, seemingly inexplicable levels of censorship on the platform.

But – what in the world was happening at Facebook, around the same time? After all, Facebook is an almost orders of magnitude bigger and more influential social network than Twitter.

For the time being, we don’t have the same “direct line” to internal documents as is the case with Twitter, which was made possible by the dedication to transparency by the new owner himself.

However, what could be dubbed as the “Facebook Files” are based on credible sources, too – Reason is coming out with a story based on confidential emails that emerged thanks to a court case – the state of Missouri suing the Biden administration.

The emails show that Facebook (and by extension Instagram) representatives and the CDC not only kept in touch at all times, but that the tech giant also “routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.”

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