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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Inside the Submissive Void — Propaganda, Censorship, Power, and Control

Greg Maybury
Pox Americana

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, 1768.

—

Brief: The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies in the West. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever-vigilant overlords in the media, financial, and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914. Along with serving the contemporaneous political objectives of its perpetrators as contrived, such activities often continue to inform our understanding, and cement our interpretation, of history. If as the saying goes, “history repeats itself”, we need look no further as to the main reason why. In this wide-ranging ‘safari’ into the fake news, myth-making, and disinformation wilderness—aka The Big Shill—Greg Maybury concludes that “It’s the narrative, stupid!”

— Controlling the Proles —

The following yarn may be apocryphal, but either way the ‘moral of the fable’ should serve our narrative well. The story goes like this: sometime during the height of the Cold War a group of American journalists were hosting a visit to the U.S. of some of their Soviet counterparts. After allowing their visitors to soak up the media zeitgeist stateside, most of the Americans expected their guests to express unbridled envy at the professional liberties they enjoyed in the Land of the Free Press. 

One of the Russian scribes was indeed compelled to express his unabashed ‘admiration’ to his hosts…in particular, for the “far superior quality” of American “propaganda“. Now it’s fair to say his hosts were taken aback by what was at best a backhanded compliment. After some collegial ‘piss-taking’ about the stereotypes associated with Western “press freedom” versus those of the controlled media in the Soviet system, one of the Americans called on their Russian colleague to explain what he meant. In fractured English, he replied with the following: ‘It’s very simple…In Soviet Union, we don’t believe our propaganda. In America, you actually believe yours!’

As amusing as this anecdote is, the reality of the Russian journo’s jibe doesn’t simply remain true now; that ‘belief’ has become even more delusional, farcical, and above all, dangerous. One suspects that Russian journos today would think much the same. And in few cases has the “delusional”,“farcical”, and “dangerous” nature of this conviction been more evident than with the West’s continued provocations of Russia, with “Skripalgate” in Old Blighty (see here, and here), and “Russia-Gate” stateside (see here, and here) being prime, though far from the only, exemplars we might point to.

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The FBI’s Alleged Conspiracy Theorist-Terrorist Connection Is Anti-American

Andrew Korybko 
Global Research 

The Mainstream Media reported earlier this month on an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May alleging that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and then ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that people who don’t believe the official narrative about various events automatically qualify as potential terrorists.

***

The de-facto criminalization of free speech is an ongoing trend in American society that’s already pressured a lot of people to self-censor their beliefs in public in order to avoid official scrutiny from the authorities or harassment by their political opponents, but an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May and only reported on by the Mainstream Media earlier this month might spread the dragnet even further by de-facto criminalizing the online pursuit of additional information that contradicts the official narrative about various events.

The “secret police” (as they’d be described by the Mainstream Media if any other country’s version of the FBI was being reported on) believe that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that anyone engaged in seeking out all sides of every story (no matter how possibly implausible) automatically qualifies as a potential terrorist.

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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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Next to go - Tony Cartalucci - Banned From Facebook and Twitter

Anthony Cartalucci
Land Destroyer

(LD) -  Facebook and Twitter joined forces to investigate and delete my accounts. This includes my Facebook page, as well as my Land Destroyer Twitter account, my Thai-centric AltThaiNews account, my personal Twitter account @TonyCartalucci and my LocalOrg account discussing solutions and technology.



It even made international news with Reuters in their article, "Facebook removes fake accounts from Thailand, Russia, Ukraine, Honduras," claiming:

The accounts removed in Thailand used “fictitious personas” to promote narratives about Thai politics, U.S.-China relations, protests in Hong Kong, and criticism of democracy activists in Thailand, Gleicher said. 

“We were able to determine conclusively that some of the activities of this network was linked to an individual based in Thailand associated with New Eastern Outlook, a Russian government-funded journal based in Moscow,” Gleicher said.

Tony Cartalucci is my pen name and a form of anonyminity - it is not a "fictitious persona." I write in a country where US-backed political agitators - referred to as "democracy activists" in the Reuters article - regularly use deadly violence against their opponents.

The Reuters article and those citing it and celebrating censorship are engaged in the now familiar tactics of smearing targeted individuals to justify otherwise indefensible censorship.

I am associated with New Eastern Outlook. They regularly publish my articles, as do hundreds of other alternative media websites around the world.

What I perhaps noticed most were all the so-called "democracy activists" in Thailand - taking time from complaining about Bangkok "censoring" them - to celebrate Facebook and Twitter's censorship - including Thailand's Human Rights Watch senior researcher, Sunai Phasuk who gloated on Twitter that my "information operation" was finally "ended."
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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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Newspeak at the Media Freedom Conference

Kit Knightly  
Off Guardian

Joint UK-Canada Event Littered With Insidious Undertones

 

OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article Hypocrisy Taints UK’s Media Freedom Conference, was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually…creepy.

Let’s just look back at one of the four “main themes” of this conference:

"building trust in media and countering disinformation"

“Countering disinformation”? Well,that’s just another word for censorship.
This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT accreditation. They claim RT “spreads disinformation” and they “countered” that by barring them from attending. 

“Building trust”? In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, “building trust” is just another way of saying “making people believe us” (the word usage is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust).

The whole conference is shot through with this language that just feels…off.
Here is CNN’s Christiane Amanpour:

Our job is to be truthful, not neutral…we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence.”

Being “truthful not neutral” is one of Amanpour’s personal sayings, she obviously thinks it’s clever. 

Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for “bias”. 

Refusing to cover evidence of The White Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally claim to only publish “the truth”, to get around impartiality…and then set about making up whatever “truth” is convenient. 

Oh, and if you don’t know what “creating a false moral quivalence is”, here I’ll demonstrate:

MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical media. OffG: But you’re supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That’s not the same. OffG: It seems the same. BBC: It’s not. You’re creating a false moral equivalence.
Understand now? You “create a false moral equivalence” by pointing out mainstream media’s double standards.

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London police official warns journalists not to publish gov. leaks with threats of imprisonment

Boing Boing

After a leak revealed that the British Ambassador to the USA had called Trump "inept, insecure and incompetent" (leading to the ambassador’s resignation and a round of Twitter insults between Trump and senior Tory officials), London’s Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu publicly warned journalists not to publish government leaks, threatening to imprison them if they do: "The publication of leaked communications, knowing the damage they have caused or are likely to cause may also be a criminal matter. I would advise all owners, editors and publishers of social and mainstream media not to publish leaked government documents that may already be in their possession, or which may be offered to them, and to turn them over to the police or give them back to their rightful owner, Her Majesty’s Government."

The comments drew sharp criticism from the British press. The Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman called it a "sinister, absurd, anti-democratic statement" and tweeted, "Do you have any comprehension of a free society? This isn’t Russia." The US managing editor of the Financial Times, Peter Spiegel, called the remarks "rather chilling from a major police force in a western democracy."

The Tory leaders jockeying to be Prime Minister staked out opposing positions. Boris Johnson demanded that the leaker be "hunted down and prosecuted" (while not calling for any journalists to be targeted by police) while his rival Jeremy Hunt said he defended publishing leaks "in the public interest...to the hilt."

Labour leader and PM-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn defended the right of journalists to publish leaks, calling it "vital" and applauding the law’s "considerable protections" for a free press.

However, former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the leak was a clear breach of the Official Secrets Act and the police were entitled to try to prevent further disclosures.
"If they [the press] are receiving stolen material they should give it back to their rightful owner," he told the Today programme.
"They should also be aware of the huge damage that has already been done, and the potentially even greater damage to be done by further breaches of the Official Secrets Act."

Ambassador row: Met Police criticised for warning off press [BBC]

‘Assange extradition should be warning to liberals who believe in American democracy’ – Zizek

   “What really worries me is the inertia of the wider public; they are aware and yet they don’t really care about it.”

RT

The UK’s decision to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US should be taken as a warning to all liberals who still have any faith in ‘American liberal democracy,’ says cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek. 

The Slovenian sociologist told RT that signing of the extradition order is just one of two recent events that really worry him. The other “ominous” event was the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to US authorities to take possession of Assange’s property from its London embassy when he was taken to prison, including book manuscripts, computers and other personal possessions.

“The nightmare is that the accuser was directly invited to take possession of all these documents. This breaks even the elementary the norms of legality,” Zizek explained.

“The message is, ‘Yes, we will be brutal beyond measure.’”

Zizek drew particular attention to the sheer brutality of the coordinated effort against the whistleblower after he exposed the US government and military’s gross misdeeds.

“It’s always an ominous signal when measures against a threatened individual are done in such a directly brutal way that this very brutality means something,” he said.

Zizek also railed against so-called liberals back across the pond in the UK arguing that “those in the UK who are most fervent advocates of Assange’s extradition, are not conservatives but more centrist Blairite wing of the Labour Party.” 

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Jordan Peterson Announces Free Speech Platform ‘Thinkspot’

Alexander Hall
NewsBusters

An upcoming free speech platform promises to provide users the best features of other social media, but without the censorship.

The subscription based “anti-censorship” platform “Thinkspot” is being created by popular psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. It’s being marketed as a free speech alternative to payment processors like Patreon in that it will “monetize creators” and as provide a social media alternative to platforms like Facebook and YouTube. 

Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the “central” aspect saying, “once you're on our platform we won't take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law.”

That will be a profound contrast to platforms that ban users for “misgendering” people who identify as trans, or for tweeting “learn to code” at fired journalists. 

The only other major rule on comments he mentioned was that they need to be thoughtful. Rather than suggesting that some opinions are “off limits,” Peterson said they will have a minimum required length so one has to put thought into what they write. 

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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'

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

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation

Google-owned YouTube on Wednesday released a list of generic ideas and statements they will ban you for expressing under their rapidly expanding new "hate speech policy."

Even though America has no laws prohibiting "hate speech" and courts have ruled repeatedly that "hate speech" is free speech, that hasn't stopped Big Tech monopolies from censoring people for their political views under their own made-up definitions.  

[...]

While reading this list, you should know that it's completely arbitrary whether or not they choose to ban you, and as many people learned on Wednesday, you don't even need to have one strike, nor actually violate any of their policies to get banned. Merely triggering their ADL-approved AI system is enough to get your entire channel closed, even if you're a journalist or an historian.

Here's YouTube's new list: 

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Fighting back: Google discrimination case first brought by James Damore allowed to proceed

Levi Sumagaysay
The Mercury News

A judge on Friday rejected Google's motions to throw out a lawsuit brought by fired engineer James Damore accusing the internet company of discrimination against conservatives, men and white people.

The ruling by Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Brian Walsh means the case, which Damore exited late last year in favor of arbitration, can move forward into the discovery phase.

"This ruling is a significant step forward for all California workers, and sends notice to Silicon Valley that discrimination of any kind will not be escape legal scrutiny," lead plaintiffs' attorney Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement.

Google fired Damore in 2017 after an internal memo he wrote came to light. In the memo, Damore criticized the company's push for gender and racial diversity in its workforce, and suggested that the scarcity of women in tech could be explained by biological differences. Damore sued Google in January 2018 but opted to go into arbitration last October. He is still in arbitration talks with the company, a spokesman for the Dhillon Law Group said Friday.

Google did not immediately return a request for comment.
Damore's firing thrust Google into the nation's political wars, made him a hero among conservatives and inspired a planned far-right employee protest that didn't happen. Since then, accusations that Google and other tech companies are biased against conservatives have grown.

Four other men had joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs, but only two remain, the law firm's spokesman said.
The court denied three different Google motions to dismiss the lawsuit. Now the plaintiffs can request access to internal Google documents to try to support their allegations, which also include some people being "denied employment because of their actual and perceived conservative political activities and affiliations, and their status as actual or perceived Asian or Caucasian male job applicants," according to the lawsuit. 

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Police raids escalate as the war on journalism goes worldwide

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium

The Australian Federal Police have conducted two raids on journalists and seized documents in purportedly unrelated incidents in the span of just two days.

Yesterday the AFP raided the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst, seeking information related to her investigative report last year which exposed the fact that the Australian government has been discussing the possibility of giving itself unprecedented powers to spy on its own citizens. Today they raided the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp, seizing information related to a 2017 investigative report on possible war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

In a third, also ostensibly unrelated incident, another Australian reporter disclosed yesterday that the Department of Home Affairs has initiated an investigation of his reporting on a story about asylum seeker boats which could lead to an AFP criminal case, saying he's being pressured to disclose his source. 


"Why has AFP suddenly decided to carry out these two raids after the election?" tweeted Australian Sky News political editor David Speers during the Sydney raid. "Did new evidence really just emerge in both the Annika Smethurst and ABC stories?!"

Why indeed?

"If these raids unconnected, as AFP reportedly said, it's an extraordinary coincidence," tweeted The Conversation chief political correspondent Michelle Grattan. "AFP needs to explain ASAP the timing so long after the stories. It can't be that inefficient! Must be some explanation - which makes the 'unconnected' claim even more odd."

Odd indeed.

It is true that the AFP has formally denied that there was any connection between the two raids, and it is in fact difficult to imagine how the two could be connected apart from their sharing a common theme of exposing malfeasance that the government wanted kept secret. If it is true that they are unconnected, then what changed? What in the world could have changed to spark this sudden escalation of the Australian government's assault on the free press?

Well, if as I suggested recently you don't think in terms of separate, individual nations, it's not hard to think of at least one thing that's changed. "The criminalization and crack down on national security journalism is spreading like a virus," WikiLeaks tweeted today in response to the ABC raid. "The Assange precedent is already having effect. Journalists must unite and remember that courage is also contagious." 

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Academic Study Exposes Google's Left-Leaning Media Bias

Zero Hedge

According to data compiled by researchers from Northwestern University, Google's left-wing bias has been exposed.

Researchers from Northwestern University have used an algorithm to study Google search results - and found an overwhelming left-leaning bias towards news outlets such as CNN and The New York Times, which the search giant repeatedly promoted in November, 2017 according to the Daily Mail.

Of the 6,302 articles that appeared in Google's Top Stories box during November, 2017, 62% were from outlets considered to be left-leaning. CNN constituted 10% of the news promoted, while the New York Times and Washington Post came in at 6.5% and 5.6% respectively. 

Fox News, on the other hand, accounted for just 3% of promoted stories.

Columbia Journalism Review

Nearly all (86 percent) of the stories came from just 20 sources and of them, 62 percent were considered to be left-leaning. 

The research sheds new light on the unprecedented power the search engine has in influencing the external traffic to news sites, a hot topic in the worlds of media and politics given Facebook's recently reduced output. 
For example, the researchers found that CNN got a 24 percent bump in traffic as a result of having its stories featured in the 'Top Stories' box. 

The most featured sources, in order, were CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, BBC, USA Today, LA Times, The Guardian, Politico, ABC News, CBS News, NPR, NBC News, CNBC, Reuters, Huffington Post, The Verge, Al Jazeera, The Hill and People. -Daily Mail

In one example, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was written about in at least 38 sources, however 75% of those promoted by Google came from The New York Times and CNN, according to the study. 

What's more, Google promoted newer articles which were just a few hours old over older ones. 

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Facebook Jail for truth tellers

Gilad Atzmon

 

Once a day the Palestinian poet Nahida Izzat is being thrown into the FB Jail for 30 days for telling the truth about Palestine and the crime that has been committed against her people for almost a century.  Nahida has never promoted violence or written any type of hate speech. The routine is pretty exhausting. She receives a FB notification about her suspension, she then appeals and after a few hours FB lifts her suspension.

The Palestinian poet is subject to a relentless vilification campaign by both Zionists and Anti Zionist Zionists (AZZ). Yesterday, Nahida was suspended again. This time her crime was  posting a clip of a Palestinian man who just lost his home to an Israeli bomb. Nahida provided an English translation of the Gazan victim.

Nahida’s post read:

Do you want to know how people in Gaza feel?

Here it is: “Even if they destroy all our homes,

We are with the Resistance

Even if they kill every single one of us

We are with the Resistance Even if they kill our children

We are with the Resistance”

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The Weaponization of Social Media: What You're Not Being Told

themindunleashed.com

Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Snapchat. Instagram. Reddit. “Social media” as we know it today barely existed fifteen years ago. Although it provides new ways to interact with people and information from all across the planet virtually instantaneously and virtually for free, we are only now beginning to understand the depths of the problems associated with these new platforms. More and more of the original developers of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter admit they no longer use social media themselves and actively keep it away from their children, and now they are finally admitting the reason why: social media was designed specifically to take advantage of your psychological weaknesses and keep you addicted to your screen.

SEAN PARKER: If the thought process that went into building these applications—Facebook being the first of them to really understand it—that thought process was all about “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s gonna get you to contribute more content and that’s gonna get you more likes and comments. So it’s a social validation feedback loop. I mean it’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. And I think that we—the inventors/creators, you know, it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s Kevin Systrom at Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously and we did it anyway.

SOURCE: Sean Parker – Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability

It should be no surprise, then, that in this world of social media addicts and smartphone zombies, the 24/7 newsfeed is taking up a greater and greater share of people’s lives. Our thoughts, our opinions, our knowledge of the world, even our mood are increasingly being influenced or even determined by what we see being posted, tweeted or vlogged. And the process by which these media shape our opinions is being carefully monitored and analyzed, not by the social media companies themselves, but by the US military.

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New Florida Law Bans Release Of Mass Shooting Recordings

wgcu.org

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a bill that prohibits Florida's government agencies from releasing photos, video or audio that record the killing of a person in an act of mass violence.

The new law was signed Thursday and takes effect immediately.

The bill was written after last year's school shooting in Parkland that left 17 people dead. It says the exemption to the public record law is needed to protect victims' families from trauma and to prevent the images or recordings from inspiring others to kill.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Tom Lee of Hillsborough County, has said he is aware that such recordings can help the media keep authorities accountable after a mass shooting but pointed out that news organizations can petition a judge to access the images.

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Russia-obsessed Journalist Plays The Victim Card, Demands More Social Media Censorship

Eino Virtanen
Sott.net

A group of self-identified 'fake news victims' recently published an open letter in Avaaz.org to social media giants and their CEOs: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Susan Wojcicki (Youtube). Their plea goes as follows:

"This week victims of disinformation from across the world have come to Silicon Valley to confront social media companies for the first time. The meetings were highly emotional, bringing social media employees to tears, as they came face-to-face with the human cost of the crisis fueled by their platforms. Following their meetings, these victims have issued an open letter calling for urgent action to stop the spread of disinformation and to recognize the deadly damage it can cause."

One of the 'victims' is Finnish mainstream media journalist, Jessikka Aro, who focuses almost exclusively on bashing Russia and Putin, and 'exposing the trolls in our midst'.

Aro became a visible 'Russia-expert' in Finland after writing an article in 2015 filled with wild speculations about the St. Petersburg 'Troll Factory', i.e the Internet Research Agency (IRA). In reality the IRA was revealed to be not much more than a low-level social media marketing (spamming) company with zero impact on the 2016 elections. Just as the whole Russia-collusion story has been proven to be false, the basis of Aro's journalistic career rests on similar outlandish conspiracy theories. Aro has won international awards for her work, and in March this year was set to travel to Washington and claim a $5,000 grant for winning the International Women of Courage Award issued by the US State Department, until it was rescinded because someone there came across her bashing of Trump as 'Russian agent' on Twitter.

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“Research”: The U.S. Navy Wants To Archive 350 Billion Social Media Posts

Marc Slavo
SHTFplan

The United States Navy wants to archive 350 billion social media posts in order to conduct “research.” What exactly does the military want to study? “Modes of collective expression.”

The Department of the Navy has posted a solicitation asking contractors to bid on a project that would amass a staggering 350 billion social media posts dating from 2014 through 2016. The data will be taken from a single social media platform – but the solicitation does not specify which one. -RT

“We seek to acquire a large-scale global historical archive of social media data, providing the full text of all public social media posts, across all countries and languages covered by the social media platform,” the contract synopsis reads. The Navy said that the archive would be used in “ongoing research efforts” into “the evolution of linguistic communities” and “emerging modes of collective expression, over time and across countries.”

This is simply spying and the research will be used for propaganda purposes, which is blatantly obvious at this point. The intentions are far from benign.

The archive will draw from publicly available social media posts and “no private communications or private user data” will be included in the database. However, all records must include the time and date at which each message was sent and the public user handle associated with the message. Additionally, each record in the archive must include all publicly available meta-data, including country, language, hashtags, location, handle, timestamp, and URLs, that were associated with the original posting. -RT

So basically, most of your information is going to be stored by the U.S. military. The data must be collected from at least 200 million unique users in at least 100 countries, with no single country accounting for more than 30 percent of users, according to the contract.

The U.S. government has previously expressed interest in collecting social media data for more tracking and spying on Americans. Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a notice asking contractors to bid on a database that tracks 290,000 global news sources in over 100 languages. The contract also mentioned the ability to keep tabs on“influencers,” leading some reports to speculate that the proposed database could be used to monitor journalists.

There is no way anyone could say we live in the land of the free anymore. It’s delusional to think we have any power at all. Freedom of speech is almost gone, gun rights are on the chopping block, and journalists will soon be punished by the military for not toeing the line and reporting on the official narrative (some have already been.)  Censorship and manipulation are completely out of control.  We are rapidly heading toward the dystopian nightmare George Orwell warned about.

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