Nigel Farage Warns US Congress: UK Censorship Law Threatens American Free Speech, Encryption, and Tech Innovation

Reclaim the Net | Dan Frieth  

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, British MP Nigel Farage issued a stark warning about Britain’s trajectory on speech regulation, arguing that UK law now poses a direct threat not only to free expression at home, but also to core American liberties abroad.

In testimony submitted to the US Congress during a hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation,” the Reform Party leader detailed how the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (OSA), passed in 2023, is already being used to pressure American platforms into adopting restrictive UK speech codes, many of which would be flatly unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Farage said the OSA “integrates the United Kingdom’s broad, speech-related criminal offenses with sweeping duties imposed on online platforms,” placing enforcement power in the hands of Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator.

That authority, he warned, now includes the right to demand self-incriminating data from platform operators, punish non-compliance with up to two years’ imprisonment, and seek court orders to block access to non-compliant services.

“Ofcom has already threatened four American companies with exactly these penalties,” Farage told lawmakers. “I repeat: regulatory bodies in the United Kingdom are actively threatening to imprison American citizens for exercising their protected Constitutional rights.”

This is not a hypothetical scenario. Just last week, two US-based platforms filed suit in Washington, DC, seeking protection against UK enforcement attempts.

Their case shows the growing tension between the UK’s new speech suppression regime and America’s longstanding protections for political and controversial speech.

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You Won't See Quantum Internet Coming

Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Singularity Hub

The quantum internet is coming sooner than you think—even sooner than quantum computing itself. When things change over, you might not even notice. But when they do, new rules will protect your data against attacks from computers that don’t even exist yet.

Despite the fancy name, the “quantum internet” won’t be some futuristic new way to navigate online. It won’t produce any mind-blowing new content, at least not for decades. The quantum internet will look more or less the same as the internet you’re using now, but scientists and cryptographers hope it could provide protection against not only theoretical threats but also those we haven’t dreamed up yet. 

“The main contribution of a quantum internet is to allow encrypted communication in a perfectly secure fashion that can’t be broken in principle, even if in the future we develop a more fundamental theory of physics,” Ciarán Lee, a researcher at University College, London, explained to Gizmodo. In short, the quantum internet would hopefully protect us from planned new computers, along with every theoretical computer for the foreseeable future. 

So what’s the quantum internet? It’s what happens when you apply the weird rules of quantum mechanics to the way computers communicate with one another. 

Quantum mechanics says that the smallest things, like subatomic particles, are restricted to a list of distinct values for certain properties (their energy, for example). When you’re not looking at them, they might enter a superposition of states, meaning taking on several values simultaneously—both the lowest and the second-lowest energy states, for example. But once they are measured, they assume only one of the values. The value you see is determined based on some innate probability. But you can also entangle these particles’ states, meaning when you repeat the measurements many times, they seem more related than you’d expect from two independent things following the usual rules of probability. 

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The EU’s latest assault on internet freedom

Andrew Tettenborn
spiked.com

Soon online speech will be regulated by Brussels.

As things stand, what you can and cannot say on the internet is largely a matter for national law, decided by national parliaments. This means that every nation in Europe currently has different laws and practices. 

But the EU has quietly been moving to change this. Take last year’s Copyright Directive, which more or less demands the introduction of automated content filters on social-media platforms. And last month, it became clear that an impatient Brussels wants to turbocharge this process by bringing internet regulation to the EU level, where it can pull the necessary strings.

The EU Digital Services Act sounds innocent on the surface. It is ostensibly aimed (in Euro-speak) at enhancing the so-called Digital Single Market by harmonising national laws and removing competitive barriers. Member states have not yet been consulted or made aware of any specific proposals in the Act. But thanks to the leak of an internal briefing to the Digital Single Market steering group, obtained German digital freedom activists Netzpolitik, we can see what Brussels has planned.

One of the EU’s key concerns, as the briefing makes clear, is the lack of EU-wide rules and regulations covering what people can see and say online. The fight against online hate speech, for example, is said to be ‘expensive and inefficient across the Single Market’. There are also no EU-wide rules on online advertising, nor does the EU have oversight of online services as a whole.

The prescription? EU regulation of the internet. 

 

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Google Trains AI To Make Translations Sound More Like You

Mayukh Saha
Truth Theory

Google’s new AI has been developed to translate one’s speech while keeping the original voice. To put it simply, let’s think back to any other text to speech; most of them give off a glassy monotone after being translated, because the speech is first converted into text, then translated, and resynthesized back into speech. This loses the original voice. 

Google’s AI cuts off all the intermediary steps, as it converts the input audio, into output audio. 
This new innovation has been named the Translatotron, and it has 3 components which are all designed to smoothen any hitches while translating. The first element consists of the neural network which helps in mapping the input audio spectrogram to the output audio spectrogram. The second component helps in synthesizing the spectrogram so it can be played back, and the third put in the original characteristics of the voice back onto the new output.

 It has a two-fold advantage- it not only brings in a nuanced translation, owing to the nonverbal cues that weren’t omitted, it also reduces the errors in translation, due to the fewer number of steps.

Even though it isn’t ready for the market just yet, researchers did use it for a translation to English from Spanish that was based on highly curated and analyzed data. It won’t be wrong to believe that something even more highly developed would be in the market pretty soon. 

You can listen to some of their samples, here.

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EU Looking To Regulate Everything Online, And To Make Sites Proactively Remove Material

Tech Dirt

One of the reasons that Techdirt and many others fought so hard against the worst ideas of the EU Copyright Directive is that it was clearly the thin end of the wedge. If things like upload filters and the imposition of intermediary liability become widely implemented as the result of legal requirements in the field of copyright, it would only be a matter of time before they were extended to other domains. Netzpolitik has obtained a seven-page European Commission paper sketching ideas for a new EU Digital Services Act (pdf) that suggests doing exactly that. The Act's reach is extremely wide:

The scope would cover all digital services, and in particular online platforms. This means the clarification would address all services across the internet stack from mere conduits such as ISPs to cloud hosting services; while a special emphasis in the assessment would be dedicated to updated rules for online platforms such as social media, search engines, or collaborative economy services, as well as for online advertising services.

A core aim is to replace the e-Commerce Directive, passed in 2000. This is presented as "outdated", but the suggestions in the paper are clearly a continuation of attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the open Internet that began with the Copyright Directive.

One of the problems for the EU when pushing through the upload filters of Article 13/17 in the Copyright Directive is that Article 15 of the e-Commerce Directive explicitly states that there is "No general obligation to monitor". Constant surveillance is the only way that upload filters can work -- if you don't monitor all the time, you can't be sure you block everything that the law requires. Furthermore, Article 14 of the e-Commerce Directive emphasizes that "the service provider is not liable for the information stored at the request of a recipient of the service". That's subject to certain conditions, such as being required to remove material that infringes on copyright, but only after being informed of its presence on their servers.

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How American Corporations Are Policing Online Speech Worldwide

Gizmodo

The architects of Silicon Valley’s big social media platforms never imagined they’d someday be the global speech police. And yet, as their market share and global user bases have increased over the years, that’s exactly what they’ve become. Today, the number of people who tweet is nearly the population of the United States. About a quarter of the internet’s total users watch YouTube videos, and nearly one-third of the entire world uses Facebook. Regardless of the intent of their founders, none of these platforms were ever merely a means of connecting people; from their early days, they fulfilled greater needs. They are the newspaper, the marketplace, the television. They are the billboard, the community newsletter, and the town square.

And yet, they are corporations, with their own speech rights and ability to set the rules as they like—rules that more often than not reflect the beliefs, however misguided, of their founders. Mark Zuckerberg has long professed beliefs that representing oneself through more than one identity indicates a lack of integrity, and that conversations held under one’s real name are more civil—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As such, Facebook users are forced to use their “authentic identity”—a name found on some form of written ID—regardless of whether it puts them in danger, or at risk of exposing a piece of themselves that could put them in harm’s way. It prevents youth from exploring their sexuality freely for fear of being outed; people with chronic illnesses from engaging with support groups out of concern that insurance companies or employers might learn of their plight; and activists living under repressive regimes from organizing online.

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FBI agent accidentally reveals own 8chan posts; attempts to redirect white supremacist rage against Russia

Henry Krinkie
Current Events Enquiry

The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal government on 8chan's servers has unintentionally revealed that a federal agent has been trolling the site and attempting to redirect the users' conspiracy theories against the Russian government instead of the CIA or Mossad.

The legal case stems from the April 27th shooting at a California synagogue by white supremacist and 8chan user John Earnest. The day of the shooting, Earnest is believed to have posted to 8chan a link to an anti-Semitic Pastebin manifesto and a not-so-cryptic suggestion that he was about to commit a murderous act of violence to back up his beliefs. In the accompanying affidavit to the search warrant application, FBI Special Agent Michael J. Rod requests the "IP address and metadata information about Earnest's original posting and the postings of all of the individuals who responded to the subject posting and/or commented about it. Additionally, agents seek information about any other posting coming from the IP address used by Earnest to post the subject posting."

In Appendix 1, Rod attaches a serious of screen caps from an 8chan thread that took place the day of the synagogue attack (it is not ultimately clear that Earnest took part in this thread). What is notable is that next to the "Anonymous" user label on some of the posts is a "(You)" marking: 

As it turns out, this text is to let the user know that they are looking at their own posts! This means that Special Agent Rod inadvertently exposed himself as 8chan user ID "8f4812" by including these screenshots as his supporting exhibit. As it turns out, a more complete version of this thread was saved on archive.is before it was deleted. By using Ctrl+F on the page and inputting "8f4812", you can look at all the posts made by the FBI in this thread.  

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The Unholy Alliance Between DNA Sites and Facial Recognition

Dagny Taggert
The Organic Prepper

Technology that was once only seen in dystopian science fiction is rapidly infecting real life. Two means of collecting personal data – DNA databases and facial recognition software – are forming an unholy alliance, and the privacy implications could be devastating.

Privacy concerns surrounding DNA and facial recognition aren’t anything new. As the popularity of DNA genealogy websites like Ancestry DNA and 23andMe increase, so do questions over who has access to that data and how it will be used. The use of facial recognition and other biometric data technology is on the rise, and people are expressing concerns (and outrage) about that technology as well.

Genealogy sites have been making the news of late, mainly for concerns over how our personal data is used – and who has access to that information.

Recently, GEDmatch, which has more than 1 million genetic profiles in its database, decided to stop providing information to police without user permission. Last month, the site faced criticism when it allowed Utah police to use the database while investigating a violent assault. “Prior to the change, GEDmatch had allowed police to use its data only for rapes and homicides,” reports Bloomberg:

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Facebook bans Natural News; Health Ranger responds with message for humanity

Mike Adams
Natural News

In response to a coordinated, heavily-funded smear campaign against Natural News and myself, the Health Ranger, Facebook has now permanently banned Natural News from posting content. The channel name that has been banned is Facebook.com/healthranger, which was our primary channel reaching over 2.5 million people.

This is on top of the permanent bans of Natural News content from Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google News, Apple and other techno-fascists that now represent the greatest threat to human freedom the world has ever seen.

The techno-fascists, including Wikipedia, have decided that no speech that questions any official narrative will be allowed on any platform. Anyone who questions the safety of toxic vaccines, 5G cell towers, geoengineering, chemotherapy or glyphosate weed killer chemicals is now maliciously attacked, smeared and de-platformed. You’re not even allowed now to talk about nutrition, anti-cancer foods or nutritional supplements without being labeled a “vitamin” website accused of pushing fake cures. (That’s right: The left-wing authoritarian tyrants are now anti-nutrition on top of everything else.)

Every website or individual who expresses any view of dissent against the corrupt scientific establishment is immediately labeled “fake news,” even as the left-wing media routinely pushed total fabrications about President Trump and anyone who supports Trump.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the tech giants and their CEOs are truly enemies of humanity.

Remember: As all this censorship is taking place, the tech giants somehow claim they aren’t censoring anyone at all. They claim to have a monopoly on “facts” or “truth” and proclaim themselves to have the King’s unique right to decide who gets to speak and who must be silenced. These criminals like Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Cook are un-elected, subject to zero transparency and offer no mechanism for due process whereby channels who are banned might defend themselves against unfair, dishonest smears or fake news attacks run by left-wing journo-terrorism hacks.

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See also:

Glenn Greenwald Rips Liberals Begging For Censorship After YouTube 'Adpocalypse'

Against Big Tech Viewpoint Discrimination 

YouTube to delete thousands of accounts after it bans supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other ‘harmful’ users

Here's A List Of Ideas & Statements YouTube Will Ban You For Expressing Under Their New 'Hate Speech Policy'

5G danger: Hundreds of respected scientists sound alarm about health effects of 5G networks going up nationwide

Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream

Even though many in the scientific community are loudly warning about the potential health effects that 5G technology could have on the general population, Verizon and AT&T are starting to put up their 5G networks in major cities all across the nation. Today, the total number of cell phones exceeds the entire population of the world, and the big cell phone companies are making a crazy amount of money providing service to all of those phones. And now that the next generation of cell phone technology has arrived, millions of cell phone users are looking forward to better connections and faster speeds than ever before. In fact, President Trump says that 5G networks will be up to 100 times faster than the current 4G networks that we are using right now...

5G will be as much as 100 times faster than the current 4G cellular networks. It will transform the way our citizens work, learn, communicate, and travel. It will make American farms more productive, American manufacturing more competitive, and American healthcare better and more accessible. Basically, it covers almost everything, when you get right down to it. Pretty amazing.

And just as 4G networks paved the way for smartphones and all of the exciting breakthroughs - they made possible so many things - this will be more secure and resilient. 5G networks will also create astonishing and really thrilling new opportunities for our people - opportunities that we've never even thought we had a possibility of looking at.

Sounds great, right?

But in order to achieve such vastly superior performance, 5G networks will use technology that is completely different from 4G networks.

5G waves are "ultra high frequency" and "ultra high intensity", but they are also easily absorbed by objects such as buildings and trees. So although cell towers will be much, much smaller, but they will also have to be much, much closer together than before. According to CBS News, it is estimated that the big cell phone companies will be putting up at least 300,000 of these small towers, and it has been projected that it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fully set up the 5G network nationwide.

Needless to say, there is a tremendous amount of money at stake, and the big cell phone companies are trying very hard to assure everyone that 5G technology is completely safe.

But is it? 

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No to Christchurch Call: Put aside your hate of Trump for a day – he may have just saved free speech

RT

Even adversaries of the US president should admit that he is the only one who has stood up to the disturbing anti-free speech proposal concocted by illiberal globalist world leaders and compliant tech companies. 

 

Ironically, by becoming the sole leader of a major Western power to reject the ‘Christchurch Call’ – the cross-border plan to restrict “terrorist and extremist” content online – Donald Trump has consolidated support for the document, sparing it deserved scrutiny.

After all, who doesn’t want to stop violence being spread through social media, particularly in the wake of the double mosque shooting in New Zealand in March? Well – judging by the commentary in mainstream media outlets – only that exceptionalist US president, and that band of white supremacists on whom he is relying to win in 2020.

But I would urge those of all political persuasions to study the text of the document, presented by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Emmanuel Macron in Paris this week, and endorsed by every major US online giant – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter.

Are these really the powers you want to give away to officials and Silicon Valley execs? Or should we at least ask some clarifying questions first?

Orwell’s bingo

 

Here are some notable and representative excerpts:

We, the governments commit to counter the drivers of terrorism and violent extremism by strengthening the resilience and inclusiveness of our societies to enable them to resist terrorist and violent extremist ideologies, including through education, building media literacy to help counter distorted terrorist and violent extremist narratives, and the fight against inequality.

This is the first bullet point, and we are already onto loaded political terminology rife with assumptions. Why must societies become more “inclusive” – a byword for multiculturalism – to stop terrorism? Why is the “fight against inequality” – a predominantly leftist agenda – a pre-condition for preventing it? Osama bin Laden wasn’t a pauper, and neither was gym trainer Brenton Tarrant for that matter.

More important are the treacherously vague definitions that almost invite abuse. Who decides what is a “distorted narrative”? How do you “build media literacy” – is it, as always, by using NewsGuard to tell people not to click on RT.com instead of the New York Times? What is even “violent extremist ideology”? Support for mass murder in mosques is. But what about those who want mosques shut down because they believe Islam is a scourge on Western society? Or those who ride out in militias to protect the US-Mexican border from illegal migrants? Are they advocating a “violent extremist ideology”? How about Black Lives Matter – they often engage in violence, and demand radical social change? Antifa? The Venezuelan opposition, who plan to overthrow their elected president and want the army to defect? 

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Facebook's 'Please Regulate Us' Tour Heads To France

Mike Masnick
Techdirt

On Friday, Mark Zuckerberg went to France, just in time for the French government to release a vague and broad proposal to regulate social media networks. Similar to Zuckerberg's pleas to Congress to ramp up its regulation of the company (and because he knows that any pushback on regulations will likely be slammed by the world of Facebook-haters), Zuckerberg tried to embrace the plans.

"It's going to be hard for us, there are going to be things in there we disagree with, that's natural," Zuckerberg said. "But in order for people to trust the internet overall and over time, there needs to be the right regulation put in place."

He also said that he was "encouraged and optimistic about the regulatory framework that will be put in place." 

What is that regulatory framework? Well, it's pretty vague. It also has PowerPoint artwork that looks like it was designed decades ago by someone who has no business being anywhere near PowerPoint:

To its credit, the plan does recognize that "freedom of expression" is a key value that needs to be protected, as well as freedom for innovation, but then also says those need to be balanced with a protection from harm. The key issue, as we've seen in other such plans is that it creates what people are referring to as a "duty of care" for social media -- requiring the company to "protect" users and allows regulators to somehow step in if they feel the company isn't succeeding (as if that won't be abused).

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Paul Joseph Watson on Social Media Censorship

Paul Joseph Watson

What must happen next. It's crucial that you sign up at http://summit.news/newsletter 

KEY ARTICLE: Platform Access is a Civil Right - https://humanevents.com/2019/05/03/pl...

Media Bias/Fact Check: Part of a Larger Operation to Destroy Alternative Media

Kurt Nimmo

While doing research for a Newsbud video, I came across the Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) website. This is one of a growing number of “fact checking” websites designed to discredit news websites not following official narratives closely enough. 

Here’s what the site has to say about Newsbud and my participation:

Newsbud (NB) is a right wing, conspiracy and anti-government site founded by, among others, Kurt Nimmo, the former lead editor and writer for Infowars. What sets NB apart from other sites of this type is that the stories are, for the most part, well written and contain numerous sources. The bias of the writing is also more subtle than sites such as Infowars, but just as prevalent. Both as an overtone to all the stories as well as the sometimes questionable sources and / or the conclusions drawn from the source material. Additionally, many of their sources are other NB stories, or work the author and editors have done elsewhere.

MBFC imparts misinformation in the first sentence. If it had done appropriate research, its ideologically driven checkers would have discovered Newsbud was established by Sibel Edmonds. I was invited to participate after the website was established and I am not a founder, as MBFC claims. 

This error—more accurately described as shoddy and careless research—reveals the liberal bias of the site and its proprietor, Dave Van Zandt. 

MBFC’s methodology is admittedly “subjective,” but this is not an issue for those working to destroy alternative media. In fact, it appears such subjectivity and bias are considered a plus in the effort the block sites deemed “dangerous,” as the performance artist Alex Jones and his website Infowars (which I indeed edited for eight years, almost exclusively focusing on geopolitics, neocon wars, and the surveillance-police state). 

From Wikipedia, which MBFC has elevated as a fount of truth and unbiased information (see Wikipedia Is More Biased Than Britannica, but Don’t Blame the Crowd), we discover Dave Van Zandt’s project serves as a touchstone for AI “solutions” to “disinformation,” that is information that does not conform to the various mythologies and half-truths put out by the propaganda media at the behest of a corporate state.

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Mark Zuckerberg turned American classrooms into nonconsensual laboratories for his pet educational theories, and now they're rebelling

Boing Boing 

Summit Learning is a nonprofit, high-tech "customized learning" group funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's family charity; under the program, students are equipped with high-surveillance Chromebooks and work on their own "at their own pace" and call on teachers to act as "mentors" when they get stuck.

It's a high-tech version of student-led education, where a high teacher-to-pupil ratio allows students to pursue self-directed education based on their own proclivities and interests, and mentor one another. But in the Zuck version, students work alone in front of screens, in social isolation, taking automated quizzes to assess their progress.

Many students and parents find this incredibly invasive and frustrating. Students with special needs -- exactly the group that you'd expect to benefit most from "customized learning" -- find the systems especially troublesome, and for students with screen-triggered epilepsy, the systems are pure torture.

The result is rebellion, with parents withdrawing students from school altogether, or demanding that alternative accommodations be made for them; students in Brooklyn have staged mass walkouts to protest the systems; other districts have canceled the program in the face of student protests, and one University of Pennsylvania study found that 70% of students opposed the program. 

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Big Brother and Big Pharma Collude to Choke Vaccine Skeptics Off Crowdsourcing Platforms

Big League politics

After successfully targeting Trump supporters with a repressive crackdown, Big Brother is heading onto their next target: so-called antivaxxers. GoFundMe is booting all vaccine skeptics from being able to raise funds on their platform, as they bend their knee to the digital lynch mob.

“Campaigns raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe’s terms of service and will be removed from the platform,” GoFundMe spokesman Bobby Whithorne said of his company’s Big Brother push.

“We are conducting a thorough review and will remove any campaigns currently on the platform,” Whithorne added, making it clear that the Orwellian censorship crackdown is far from over.

Larry Cook, who runs a website arguing against mandatory vaccines, was one of the activists who was targeted by this campaign against Big Pharma’s critics. He has been hit by many different media reports in an obviously coordinated harassment campaign designed to de-platform him and destroy his credibility.

This is Cook’s message that Big Pharma and their operatives do not want the public to see:

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Report: 26 States Now Ban or Restrict Community Broadband

Motherboard | Vice 

 

A new report has found that 26 states now either restrict or outright prohibit towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Quite often the laws are directly written by the telecom sector, and in some instances ban towns and cities from building their own broadband networks—even if the local ISP refuses to provide service.

The full report by BroadbandNow, a consumer-focused company that tracks US broadband availability, indicates the total number of state restrictions on community broadband has jumped from 20 such restrictions since the group’s last report in 2018.

Frustrated by slow speeds, limited availability, high prices and terrible customer service, more than 750 communitiesacross the country have built their own broadband ISPs or cooperatives. Studies have shown these locally owned and operated networks tend to offer lower prices, faster speeds, and better customer service than their private-sector counterparts.

Instead of competing by offering better service—private sector telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T have routinely turned to a cheaper alternative: easily corrupted state lawmakers. In exchange for campaign contributions, lawmakers frequently and uncritically pass on model legislation written by industry and distributed by organizations like ALEC.

Often the restrictions are buried in other, unrelated legislation to try and avoid public scrutiny. For example in 2016, AT&T lobbyists attempted to include community broadband restrictions in a bill intended to address regional traffic issues.

BroadbandNow’s report looks at each state’s restrictions individually, and found that while some states simply banned community broadband outright (a notable assault on voters’ democratic rights), others impose clever but onerous restrictions on precisely how a local network can be funded, who they can partner with, or how quickly (and where) they’re allowed to grow.

In Tennessee, for example, state laws allow publicly-owned electric utilities to provide broadband, “but limits that service provision to within their electric service areas.” Such restrictions have made it hard for EPB—the highest rated ISP in America last year according to Consumer Reports—to expand service into new areas.

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The Problem with Wikipedia and the Digital Revolution

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts 
Global Research

esterday (April 10, 2019) a reader alerted me to the fact that I am being smeared on Wikipedia as a “vocal supporter of the current Russian government and its policies.” The reader also reports that an article in the Daily Beast calls me a “Putin worshiper.” The reader says that he tried to edit the Wikipedia entry without success, and he urged me to give it my attention.
 
I do not know whether the person who wrote my Wikipedia entry intended to smear me or is merely uninformed. However, dissenting voices do get smeared on Wikipedia. It is an ongoing problem for many of us. For years readers and people who know me would make corrections to my Wikipedia biography, but as soon as the corrections were made, they would be erased and the smears reinstalled.

The problem with Wikipedia is that it is an idealistic approach based on the belief that truth is more likely to emerge when everyone has a voice than when explanations are provided by a select group of experts or peers. This idealistic approach is not without merit. Moreover, it might work very well with subjects and people who do not have ideological opponents or are of no threat to those intent on controlling explanations.

The problem arises when a subject or a person is controversial and is especially the case if the person’s arguments disprove or dissent from official explanations. In The Matrix in which we live, truth-tellers are unwelcome to those who control the explanations in order to advance their agendas. Until truth-tellers can be silenced or completely censured, the practice is to discredit them with smears. Thus, I and many others have been described as “conspiracy theorists” for reporting factual information that contradicts the official and unproven explanation of 9/11, anti-semites for criticizing Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians and influence over U.S. foreign policy, and as “Russian agents” or “Putin stooges” for keeping the record straight about Ukraine, Syria, and Putin’s effort to avoid military conflict with the West.

In the pre-Internet age it was difficult to smear people. Newspaper editors would allow letters to the editor to correct factual mistakes or to provide a different interpretation of a collection of facts, but shied away from smears. This doesn’t mean that smears never happened, but not with the abandon of the Internet era.

Open works in process like Wikipedia, Internet comment sections and social media are ideally suited for smearing people and broadcasting the smears worldwide prior to any correction of them. Thus, the digital revolution has been a godsend to government agencies such as the CIA, State Department, Mossad, the Israel Lobby, corporations and other private interest groups, ideological movements such as neoconservatism and Identity Politics, and politicians, all of whom have agendas that are furthered by controlling the explanations.

As money is the highest value for many people, there is an unlimited supply of people who can be hired to smear those who challenge official explanations. A smear can start in a comment section, move to social media, and from there to a website and on to Wikipedia.

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Facebook Teams up With Mainstream Media to Directly Censor News Websites

Joe Quinn
Sott.net

Several days ago I received a Facebook notification that content shared on the French Sott.net website Facebook page (Les Signes des Temps) had been "rated false by an independent fact-checker."

Clicking on the notification produced this pop-up window...

...where I was informed that fr.sott.net shared content that had been reviewed by someone called 'Les Décodeurs du Monde' and that they found it to be "false". Included was a link to the offending article on the fr.sott.net FB page, a link to and "additional reporting" page at 'Les Décodeurs du Monde', and text telling me that:

"To fight false news, Facebook reduces the distribution of misleading content while also showing additional reporting on the same topic.

Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share misleading content will see their overall distribution reduced, their ability to monetize and advertise removed and their ability to register as a news page removed.

Deleting the misleading content won't affect these outcomes."

Here's a screenshot of the Sott.net article on the fr.sott.net FB page: 

The offending article on French Sott.net is a summary of a Breitbart article, based on an interview with the co-founder of Greenpeace and outspoken critic of man-made global warming, Patrick Moore.

In the offending Breitbart interview, Moore explained how fear and guilt are leveraged by proponents of climate change and noted how "green" companies parasitize taxpayers via favorable regulations and subsidies, ostensibly justified by the aforementioned narrative's claimed threats, all while "enjoying propagandistic protection across news media."

"And so you've got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. You've got the media echo chamber - fake news - repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that they're killing their children. And then you've got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials. And then you've got the green businesses, the rent-seekers, and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this. And then, of course, you've got the scientists who are willingly - they're basically hooked on government grants. When they talk about the 99 percent consensus [among scientists] on climate change, that's a completely ridiculous and false number."

Moore also warned that the narrative of anthropogenic global warming is an existential threat to reason:

"It is the biggest lie since people thought the Earth was at the center of the universe. This is Galileo-type stuff. If you remember, Galileo discovered that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the Earth revolved around it. He was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church, and only because he recanted was he allowed to live in house arrest for the rest of his life.

So this was around the beginning of what we call the Enlightenment, when science became the way in which we gained knowledge instead of using superstition and instead of using invisible demons and whatever else, we started to understand that you have to have observation of actual events and then you have to repeat those observations over and over again, and that is basically the scientific method."

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Christchurch Terror Attack: Mass Censorship, Mystery Shooters, And The Globetrotting Lone Gunman

Niall Bradley
Sott.net

Censorship has been put into effect like never before in the aftermath of the multi-site terror attacks in Christchurch last Friday. There's no other word for what governments and Internet corporations have instituted. New Zealand and Australian Internet Service Providers have been blocking access to video-hosting sites, forums and other websites that mirrored, in part or whole, the 17-minute long video footage 'lone gunman' Brenton Tarrant recorded from a GoPro camera attached to his head-gear, along with footage of the aftermath of the shooting at the Linwood mosque, and copies of Tarrant's 'manifesto'. Media outlets and social media platforms globally have followed suit. The Internet has effectively been 'bleached' of this evidence (though it's not entirely gone, if you're prepared to look hard enough for it).

Tarrant's video in particular has been "classified by the Chief Censor's Office as objectionable," under a 1993 New Zealand law, meaning Kiwis face prison time and a $10,000 fine for 'downloading a copy of it' or 'distributing' it. The government has been leaning heavily on ISPs to block websites until they have removed it while, globally, several million iterations (including just links to it) have been removed by all media outlets and all social media platforms - and not just by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter; it's also gone from BitChute and similar lesser-known video-hosting platforms. New Zealand Police have also been demanding personal data on users who even discuss Tarrant's 'manifesto' or video.

Though ostensibly done out of consideration for the victims of the attacks and their families, to 'protect children and the vulnerable from seeing these images', and to not 'give the attacker the attention he wants', no such 'clean sweeps' have previously been conducted following the many gruesome mass shootings and bombings in terror attacks around the world, particularly those in non-Western countries. All these years 'ISIS' and affiliated terrorists have enjoyed full use of Western social media platforms to share footage of their crimes - footage which is then typically shown by corporate media outlets, complete with running commentary (just search 'Charlie Hebdo massacre' or 'ISIS beheadings' on YouTube) - but now suddenly it's imperative that all "objectionable materials" relating to this event be excised from global consciousness. Why would that be the case? 

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