Tag: censorship

The Intercept that funded Government/Big Tech Censorship begs for Donations after FTX Grants are put on hold

The Intercept begged its readers for donations after the publication revealed that a multimillion-dollar grant from disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried would be placed “on hold” due to FTX filing for bankruptcy.

The Intercept is one of several media outlets that received a hefty donation from Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation. However, as Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai discovered in 2020, eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar is the founder and funder of The Intercept and also funds the Government and Big Tech censorship infrastructure.

Bankman-Fried pledged $4 million to The Intercept over two years. So far, the outlet has received $500,000 out of the $4 million to support their reporting “on biosafety and pandemic prevention.”  However, The Intercept’s Acting Editor-in-Chief, Roger Hodge, announced on Friday that future grant payments are “on hold,” and used the announcement to ask readers for donations.

Bankman-Fried moved billions of dollars from FTX to sister company Alameda Research through a bespoke software “backdoor.” Similarly, the US and UK governments use backdoors, bespoke purpose-built portals, for Facebook and Twitter to directly access, monitor and censor users.  And The Intercept funds this deep collusion between Big Tech and government entities.

At the end of October, The Intercept published an “investigation” into the Department of Homeland Security’s (“DHS”) efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous. “Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents – obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents – illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.,” The Intercept wrote.

However, two years ago Dr. Shiva exposed the deep collusion between the United States government and social media companies – specifically Twitter but also YouTube and Google – in his historic Federal lawsuit.   Dr. Shiva has accused The Intercept of manipulating and hijacking his work to intentionally conceal Intercept boss Pierre Omidyar’s role in creating the Government and Big Tech censorship infrastructure.

According to Dr. Shiva, the entire operation appears to be a “limited hangout” – disclosing a self-contained and sensational but relatively benign story to overshadow something more damaging.  To deceive people into thinking they got the “truth” while the real truth is buried.

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Study Identifies variety of Tactics used to Silence Doctors and Scientists

A defrocked philosopher and bon viveur, Giordano Bruno committed a heinous crime: his philosophy did not agree with the official science embodied by the Catholic Church. Bruno thought the earth rotated around other planets and the universe was infinite: real heresy. After eight years of detention, unlike Galileo, he refused to recant and was burned at the stake in AD 1600.

Bruno’s end was extreme. Although it would not happen nowadays, the persecution principle is alive and kicking. It has been energised but also brought to the surface by the Covid pandemic.

In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.Shir-Raz, Y., Elisha, E., Martin, B. et al. Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics. Minerva (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4

The above is taken from a study that explored the experiences and responses of doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements about Covid-19 that challenged official views.   Trust the Evidence reviewed this recent study and summarised its findings.

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Massive ‘CitizenFreePress’ News Site Suspended from Musk’s Twitter for Sharing Video of Obama Admitting Election Machine Exploits.

The heavily-trafficked news aggregation site CitizenFreePress.com has been suspended from Twitter for sharing a clip of former President Barack Obama, campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2008, discussing potential problems with American voting machines and demanding paper trails for ballots.

CitizenFressPress.com (CFP) was not the only account to have shared the clip, though appears to be the only one that has received a suspension for doing so. Though the video can still be viewed on Elon Musk’s platform, it now carries a warning label which claims the video is “misleading,” as well as noting that the clip can no longer be replied to, shared, or liked.

The video is still shareable from other accounts, and still available on CSPAN. But someone at Twitter appears to be trying to nuke it, at least from CFP’s account.

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Techno-Authoritarianism Is Here to Stay: China and the Deep State Have Joined Forces

“If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church

The votes are in.

No matter who runs for office, no matter who controls the White House, Senate or the House of Representatives now or in the future, “we the people” have already lost.

We have lost because the future of this nation is being forged beyond the reach of our laws, elections and borders by techno-authoritarian powers with no regard for individuality, privacy or freedom.

The fate of America is being made in China, our role model for all things dystopian.

An economic and political powerhouse that owns more of America’s debt than any other country and is buying up American businesses across the spectrum, China is a vicious totalitarian regime that routinely employs censorship, surveillance, and brutal police state tactics to intimidate its populace, maintain its power, and expand the largesse of its corporate elite.

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows. This way lies outright tyranny.

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Facebook Censors Posts on Vaccine Harms Because They “Make People Feel Unsafe”

This morning, a friend published a short post on Facebook, drawing attention to how it seemed to him the company was not even bothering any more to refer to the so-called ‘independent fact-checkers’ to justify their censorship. He had re-posted a clip where Fox reporter Tucker Carlson discussed the negative effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines, referring to peer-reviewed studies. The clip is available here.

How on earth can peer-reviewed results constitute “misinformation”? The peer review process isn’t perfect, far from it, but after all it is the accepted standard. A first conclusion therefore is that the word ‘misinformation’ does not refer to misinformation any more, it simply refers to any information the censor wants suppressed. The word has become meaningless.

The action, then, is suppression of a certain kind of information, but what about the reason? The reason for suppressing uncomfortable information about COVID-19 vaccines is that seeing this information may “make some people feel unsafe”. What does this mean precisely?

There are at least two possibilities, and here I’m talking only about those who believe in the narrative. The first is that people may feel unsafe seeing evidence that contradicts what they’ve been told by the authorities, the mainstream media and the social media giants; the ‘safe and effective’ mantra. Watching Tucker Carlson’s review of the evidence might make people feel unsafe, uncertain, sceptical towards the propaganda, relentlessly pushed towards them; this is what happens when you discover you’ve been deceived by someone you trusted. You feel unsafe for you don’t know who to trust any more.

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The left’s newest stealth attack on free speech

America’s two most important rights are free speech and the right to bear arms. Without the first, no people are free; and without the second, there is no first. Totalitarians always go after both; that is, they silence and disarm them. For decades, the left has been open in its war on the Second Amendment. They’ve struggled more with the war on speech, but they may finally have come up with a new approach that will sneak around constitutional muster.

When it comes to speech that incites violence or is otherwise imminently threatening, the law has always been clear: The threat must be very explicit and imminent for the speech to lose its First Amendment protections. At the most simplistic level, saying, “I wish so-and-so were dead” is not an actionable opinion. However, saying, “I’m going to kill so-and-so this week” or “You all need to kill so-and-so; I’ve got a plan” is criminally actionable speech. (The standard is more sensitive when speech is directed at the president, of course.)

This constitutional limitation on making (conservatives’) political speech criminally actionable has long vexed the left. They’ve trained their young acolytes that speech is violence (so much say that almost half of college students say “hate speech” should get the death penalty) but, so far, courts haven’t fallen for that gambit. Unless speech creates an imminent threat, it gets a pass.

Lately, though, the left has come up with a new concept that seeks to say that any speech that opposes leftist policies is actual and imminent “terrorism.” Or as leftist academia calls it, “stochastic terrorism.”

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Free Speech Dies Because We Stop Speaking Freely, Not The Other Way Around

Newly elected House Republicans have every political reason to hold investigative hearings into government abuse of power during Covid. While these hearings should have happened long ago, they will no doubt vindicate many Americans who suffered under the capricious reign of public health officials. Central to this investigation will be an inquiry into government attempts to manipulate public opinion.

We already know that officials misrepresented opinion as fact and covertly suppressed contrary information. The pronouncements of bureaucrats, who cared more for their own celebrity and power than the truth, went largely unchallenged. This represents a failure of constitutional guarantees to free speech — a failure Republicans will be happy to broadcast as yet more evidence of an out-of-control bureaucracy.

It’s tempting to think a tyrannical bureaucracy is to blame for our embarrassing foray into censorship. But if we accept this explanation, assign blame, and move on, we ignore a cultural rot that is far more dangerous than any government overreach. It is ordinary Americans, not bureaucrats, who are most to blame for censorship, because citizens are the ultimate defense against the suppression of speech, not the government.  

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Group for those affected by pandemic response appeal to Elon Musk after account was banned this week

Twitter has suspended Law or Fiction, a group dedicated to those who have been impacted by the UK government’s response to Covid-19. The group advocates for citizens, lawyers, and medical professionals.

The Law or Fiction account was maintained by British Lawyer Stephen Jackson who, in an open video, addressed new Twitter CEO Elon Musk and said that Twitter gave no reason for the ban that happened this week.

“I don’t know the reasons for it. There was no strike system warning me of the closure,” Jackson said in the video.

“All I can tell you is that I had linked to the authorization of the bivalent Covid-19 vaccine, so-called, for children aged 12 and upwards. I put the words ‘vaccine’ in inverted commas. I referred to ‘experimental’ – and that seems fair enough given that this has not been trialed on humans and if we give new technology to animals we call it experimental…We don’t know the long-term effects of the technology – that’s something with Pfizer itself admits,” Jackson explained.

“So quite what the misinformation was I don’t know,” Jackson added. “What this seems to be is an attack on comment, on debate.”

Jackson called out Elon Musk specifically, saying, he “understood” Musk to be keen on comment and debate and on “free speech,” saying he’s not going to get to Mars by suppressing “debate about the science.”

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DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events

Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.

What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.

The size, scale and speed of DHS’s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:

  • 22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
  • 859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
  • 120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
  • 15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;
  • <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
  • Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
  • Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.

The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network’s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.

While The Intercept rightly noted that DHS’s “truth cops“ now take on a range of other topics – such as Covid-19 and geopolitical opinions – it all started from, and grew out of, DHS’s speech control infrastructure set up to censor speech about elections.

That started with the 2020 election. But it continues, importantly, with the 2022 midterm elections, which are ongoing this week.

At Foundation for Freedom Online, for more than six months, we have been publishing and sharing research findings about a wide span of shocking components to DHS’s speech control operations. Our investigation has spurred multiple members of Congress to vow aggressive probes into DHS’s “government censorship by proxy.”

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