Naked Capitalism Goes Full On Ideological Disciplining
You Will Follow The Yves Line Or Be Disappeared And/Or Publicly Disciplined!
Roger Boyd
Feb 17, 2025
The site Naked Capitalism (NC) is a soft bourgeois progressive site run by Susan Webber (Yves Smith is a pen name) an ex McKinsey consultant and banker (Goldman Sachs and Sumitomo Bank) who founded her own finance company and the NC site. As with most such sites, it follows a Progressive Era “US capitalism isn’t bad it just needs to be fixed a bit” ideology, and steers away from more fundamental criticisms that may put it in hot water with hosting sites and state authorities; a self censorship. The site does provide a lot of useful links to other news stories, in a carefully curated fashion, and also carefully curates the comments section in what has been an increasingly aggressive fashion; reminding one of the collapse of the Guardian comments section.
I rarely comment there, as I have very regularly had comments deleted without trace. Sometimes I am driven to comment by the utterly slanted nature of an opinion piece or Yves comment. This occurred recently with the regurgitation of the US narrative of the past two decades plus that “China is in trouble” or “China will be collapsing” or “China must change its political-economic model to remain successful”. Yves had already announced that she was shutting down comments as the comments section was becoming unacceptable to her. She has now reopened comments, but decided to use myself as an example of what will happen to those that do not follow the sites ideology to closely. Here is her direct attack, published without warning or right of reply (my reply comment, the last one I will be making on the site was disappeared).
Below I have detailed the actual comment exchange that took place, including comments of mine that were deleted. In her attack she explicitly deleted comments without advising the reader, a classic manipulatory tactic. My first comment:
Roger BoydFebruary 10, 2025 at 11:32 am
Its the same with the “China failing growth” narrative. China’s population is to all intents stable, while its GDP is growing at 5% a year; so that’s a 5% increase in GDP per capita per year. At its current stage of development and the size of the economy, its natural that China’s GDP growth would slow down.
The Chinese state has very successfully redirected investment from housing to productive industry, increasing the pace of economic upgrading, without causing a financial crash. Western governments would love to have China’s “problems”
A completely innocuous comment I thought, but not to the site proprietor who had to intervene, with this response:
Yves SmithFebruary 10, 2025 at 12:26 pm
No, its GDP is NOT growing at 5% a year. I can tell you here from the sex capital of Southeast Asia that Chinese tourism is way down v. last year, and that was before the actor kidnapping scandal made thing even worse.
The reported China GDP figures have been widely recognized as unreliable forever. That is why analysts looks for proxies like electricity use…and then China started hiding that.
Michael Pettis has debunked that: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-econ ... er-says-us
One specific and large source of difference from how everyone else calculates GDP is bad debt losses are debited from GDP totals. China does not do that
I responded with some facts, and some details on Michael Pettis history of soft anti-China propaganda:
Roger BoydFebruary 10, 2025 at 1:15 pm
So the China Electric Council is just lying then about 7% annual electricity usage growth and the huge expansion in Chinese renewables, while coal electricity generation remains stable, is just feeding nothing? Pettis pushes the “China over-production and under-consumption” narrative that has been used for years, while Chinese consumption actually keeps increasing as real incomes rise.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... s%20report.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-re ... the%20grid
At first, this comment was disappeared but then returned once the proprietor had come up with her answer:
Yves SmithFebruary 10, 2025 at 1:29 pm
I can tell you from direct and indirect reports I am here (where I am has lots of Chinese backing for projects plus an intermarried mafia) that China is not in very good shape right now. These reports are consistent. Yes, anecdata but the sources they tie back to are pretty varied (like princeling children, tour operators, Chinese entrepreneurs and entertainers).
From the Financial Times November 2024. Note it specifically questions consumption data:
China’s official statistics, particularly its annual GDP figures, have long been the subject of scrutiny. In 2007, Li Keqiang, later the premier, remarked that they were unreliable and that he relied on three alternative indicators to evaluate economic performance: railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and bank lending. These metrics came to be known as the “Keqiang Index”.
Many observers suspect that GDP figures in the past few years have been inflated. Local officials tend to view meeting regional targets as necessary not only to keep their jobs but also to secure promotions. This atmosphere of distrust intensified in August 2021 when China’s internet tsar prohibited any social media publications that could “distort” macroeconomic data. Such restrictions have silenced comments from leading economists in China, and several banks and research institutions have become reluctant to publish forecasts which fall below official figures. In some cases, economists have been told to refrain from critiquing official data.
The government’s attempts to suppress negative commentary may stem from concern over the long-term effect of stringent economic controls imposed during the Covid-19 years, which saw investor and consumer confidence decline to what was then an all-time low. This has had a perverse effect: in private conversations, jokes about GDP figures are more widespread than ever.
Publicly available, reliable, up-to-date data allows investors to monitor developments and manage their expectations. If fundamental statistics such as GDP, consumption index and unemployment rates lose their credibility, investors will be forced to prepare for the worst-case scenario. In 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing youth unemployment data after figures reached a record high for several consecutive months. The government later resumed the release but excluded students from the count, claiming that this offered a more accurate representation.
In December 2023, China’s Ministry of State Security warned key commentators on social media to stop criticising the economy and spreading what it alleges to be disinformation. Last month, Zhu Hengpeng, a leading economist at a top government think-tank, reportedly disappeared after making disparaging remarks about the economy in a private WeChat group.
These troubling developments have intensified scepticism about China’s economic reality, creating what could be described as a Tacitus Trap. Named after the Roman historian, this theory posits that when public trust in government erodes, citizens will assume that all information released by government — regardless of its truth — may be false. Some netizens even joke that China owes its recent economic success to the National Bureau of Statistics, the Central Propaganda Department and the Internet Information Office.
https://www.ft.com/content/de9af759-2b9 ... 698900efeb
As for the figures you cited, any GDP estimates or proxies need to cut to reflect debt writedowns.
I then noticed that the Pettis article was from 2019! Then looked more deeply into Pettis, who has been doing the same kind of complaining as a “Western expert” on China for many years, wanting China to basically dismantle its development state financing and move to a Western consumption-focused model. Exactly what Japan did disastrously in the late 1980s / early 1990s. The FT has also very much lost its integrity in the past few years, and the proprietor seems to want to redefine GDP calculations and complain about things that the West has very regularly done. My response (this is updated, as earlier I had only noted the first paragraph by accident):
Roger BoydFebruary 10, 2025 at 3:31 pm
The Pettis article is from 6 years ago, how is that relevant to 2025? He has been going on about Chinese “issues” for a very long time, but China just keeps on growing and upgrading its economy. He wants China to mimic the consumption centric Western nations, while China focuses on investment raising real wages. GDP is a calculation of the output of goods and services, debt is not a part of that calculation – so what is the problem with Chinese GDP per capita? Chinese debt is also predominantly owned by Chinese, much of it the state, while Chinese nominal GDP grows and it has very large foreign exchange reserves.
China is rebalancing quite massively (and successfully) from the housing investment driven economy to one more focused on the development and upgrading of the productive forces. It is managing bad debts in a very controlled fashion, which a Party-state dominated society that owns and significantly controls most of the financial sector can do. The US has regularly played the same games in allowing banks to count actual bad debts as good ones on their balance sheet, so that they can “work off the bad debts”. The Fed also took on massive amounts of devalued debt securities and loans onto its books in the GFC at face value to socialize private losses. As European states and the ECB did in the early 2010s.
The rebalancing will most definitely be felt by the richer and younger Chinese who invested in now much depreciated Tier-1 and Tier-2 city properties, but much much less by the less wealthy and outside those cities. Also, much of the easy money in property and financial speculation has been stopped. So the group that travels abroad and ostentatiously consumes and speaks much better English will be affected. And the groups that you mention would certainly be feeling the pain. There is also a very strong official drive away from the exuberant display of wealth. While luxury goods suffered in 2024, new car sales reached a new record.
As for the FT, it sadly lost its journalistic integrity a few years ago. I say sadly, because before it was a very reliable source. Referring to 2007 when there most definitely were issues with Chinese GDP reporting is pretty irrelevant for 2025, especially after the government made strenuous efforts to clean up its act. Accurate statistics are central to accurate decision making by both the state and private actors, and they understood that. The rest of the story is hardly better than unsourced tittle tattle (well below previous FT standards). Excluding students from the youth unemployment count is actually the general standard, shame on the FT for not stating such. China does not include any meaningful amount for the fictitious “household implied rent” as the US does, so there are definitely swings and roundabouts.
The above comment from me was disappeared. Because China “must be struggling”, because otherwise the Western progressive elites would have to face up to the fact that the Chinese model is hugely more beneficial for the masses of society than the utterly failed Western one; even at higher levels of production and income. Then much later it was reappeared with another response from Yves eight and a half hours later which I never saw (its very hard to keep up with such moves as the NC site does not notify one of comment replies).
Yves SmithFebruary 11, 2025 at 12:10 am
I have contacts who own businesses in other parts of SE Asia and they also report that China has slowed, so this is a completely different set of data points. Chinese investment in projects here is also down, which is again not a function of tourism. I said the reports were coming from all sorts of sources, including princelings, and struck me as admissions against interest.
The underlying Pettis reports on how China’s GDP computation is not comparable to Western methods is here, which I was remiss in not posting. The structural issues on how GDP is computed remain the same: https://carnegieendowment.org/china-fin ... na?lang=en
See also:
Some economists say China’s GDP figures have become less reliable.
“Namely from 2014 to 2019, Chinese GDP growth barely moved at all, just a little over 1.5 percentage points for six years,” Wright said. “We can never find another major economy, particularly one of that size, where GDP had been that stable over time.”
In the meantime, he said, China’s interest rates were going up and down, commodity prices collapsed and credit conditions tightened, yet none of that volatility showed up in China’s GDP.
“In 2023 it’s an even more questionable story that China’s economy is growing at 5% or faster,” Wright said. “It’s hard to know what exactly is accounting for that growth.”
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/07/17/ ... s-economy/
More hearsay, and a Pettis article (the first one) which is replete with “analysts say” kind of statements, no actual details of what Pettis is putting forward. Also, some pretty deft attempts at manipulation. The second article has quotes such as “A lot of people say the economy is slowing down, but it doesn’t feel like it” and “On the streets, China’s economy certainly looks like it is recovering. In Chengdu’s Taikoo Li commercial area, crowds form in front of luxury retailers like Dior and Gucci. Household consumption is growing too — but not fast enough” - hardly supporting her argument. When the author of the second article tries to trash China’s GDP statistics he say “many economists believe” and “not everyone buys that argument”, which are utterly unsourced assertions. The quote from Wright is just another unsubstantiated assertion, by someone who works for a Washington D.C. based research group funded by the US private foundation complex. The article also relies much on the Harvard graduate and ex Hoover Institute research fellow David Li for opinions. His university seat is funded by donations from a rich American and he is a founding dean of a program funded by another rich American. And the article was published by a foundation and corporate sponsored US media non-profit. The second article is actually a fascinating example of how the ingredients of the US propaganda complex are put together to seem to be “independent”, when in fact each element has been funded by US corporations, US foundations and by donations from rich US people.
There seems to be no way that Yves herself could face up to the reality that China’s social market economy can keep growing and innovating better than Western capitalism. So she stoops to the use of Western propaganda outfits and individuals. Michael Pettis is a senior fellow at the US foundation funded Carnegie Endowment and shares Yves background on Wall Street. He is currently a professor at the Guanghua School of Management which is a neoliberal think tank and boats a chunk of Western faculty. So of course he would be against the Chinese development state, it is the opposite of his neoliberal ideology.
I answered with facts and Yves responded with subjective personal experiences, an FT article that was itself full of unsupported hearsay and tittle tattle (it is sad how far the FT has fallen in recent years) and a 6 year-old article from a Pettis who has been repeatedly proven wrong. Then with two other deeply flawed articles full of unsubstantiated assertions from Western-trained and funded economists. This is the state of “discussion” on a major US “alternative” site. It is indicative of how tight the Western censorship, and self-censorship, regime is becoming. And how fake the “left” / “right” discourse is within the West, when much of the underlying messages are the same.
I made the following comment in response to the use of me as a tool of pleb disciplining, but of course that got disappeared, as I assume will be any other comments that do not follow closely enough to the Yves line.
This is truly sad, I used to respect you a lot but this is way beyond the pale. Attacking a commenter without providing any warning or right to respond, and after repeatedly deleting my other comments (including my response to your last comment above). You are utterly disrespecting the people who comment and telling them that only your viewpoint is acceptable. It’s your site so you can do what you want, but you have belittled yourself with this.
Of course, you probably won’t allow this comment to stay up. I will desist from commenting further as you have shown that it is utterly pointless unless the party line is followed.
While this comment was not of course allowed, it seems that Yves then modified her post to include my and her last comments; without acknowledging making any changes.
Actual deep critics of the Empire are being increasingly harassed, de-platformed by web sites and financial institutions, arrested, jailed and even murdered (especially by the Zionist regime). The latest being Richard Medhurst who was harassed by the British police and has now had all his equipment seized by the Austrian police and been accused of being a member of Hamas. The European Union last year passed a law (the “Digital Services Act”) that allows them to force publications to self-censor or risk huge fines and being shut down.
Sites like NC are now the limit of “acceptable speech” in the West, and they themselves are self-censoring. Widespread censorship, combined with widespread spying on citizens (a reality in the US since the early 2000s) is a hallmark of fascism. As is the identification of official enemies that must be hated, an increasingly authoritarian police force, and an undermining and outright banning of oppositional forces such as free trades unions. We are being slow-walked into fascism, a neoliberal fascism.
I have added some of the text from the NC site notification of the reopening of comments. This first excerpt is a stunningly disingenuous attempt to legitimize an agency (USAID) that has been extensively proven to be predominantly a regime change and foreign politics and media manipulation entity, and those that carry out such foreign interference. The same discoursal structure could be used to defend the Mafia, because it probably does provide some good (financially supports widows of made men) and the people who work for it have no other option.
And as for USAID, as Clive pointed out long ago, it’s almost impossible to work in a stable middle class job that does not make one a participant in some sort of unethical or exploitative activity. Think of what has become of the health insurance industry, or most of finance, or the many vendors jacking up prices over what is justified by cost increases (new data suggests that eggs go on that list). And as with the financial crisis, does anyone seriously expect the perps, the policy-makers, or the leaders who designed and implemented the shifts in programs and priorities that took institutions away from their original missions to becoming tools to support the power structure, to be the ones who suffer? It’s the beneficiaries of the value-added services and the non-officer-level employees who will suffer.
And the below is nothing short of group level character assassination, “anyone who disagrees with us have become ‘rancid’”, “overly dogged”, “emotional” etc. Of course, with absolutely no evidence provided to back up these assertions, just “trust me”. The utterly patronizing use of language is also not subtle. The lack of self-knowledge and self-reflection is also very evident.
It has been troubling to see some of our particularly sound and well regarded commenters start to go rancid, as in start to regularly make comments that are much less informative, and also more emotionally charged or otherwise overly-dogged than their old high standard. The most common trigger is when a new topic becomes so important that we report on it regularly, and our take, or the emerging consensus of the readership, is contrary to strongly held beliefs of the commenter in question. As past examples, we’ve lost very valuable contributors over Brexit and the Ukraine conflict. The warning signs include failing to discriminate between solid and tendentious information sources, not recognizing the limits of their knowledge, making unduly emotional comments or rebuttals, and yet expecting the same level of deference as in their established area of expertise.
And the beatings will continue until you fully comply with the ideological blinders of the site. The last sentence below is very illuminating, pointing to the level of self-censorship in the current heavy-duty intellectual disciplining and censorship environment.
We are going to be in zero tolerance mode until readers understand that this site is not the place for mere personal opinion. There are plenty of places for memes, sheepdog-style talking point-driven commentary, singing in chorus, dogpiling, and other forms of thread-jacking: Kos and Reddit come to mind, along with social media generally. We’d rather have 50 thoughtful comments (such as links to articles or topics that weren’t included in Links) than 250 that consist largely of noise. Please keep in mind that we can also be held liable for comments. We have found that this is not merely theoretical.
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/naked- ... deological
I saw said 'China' piece and disagreed, did not re-post. I have been reposting from NC a bit of late but that had already fallen off with the departure of her more interesting pard. There had been some good criticism of capital but that has evaporated of late.
This is quite disappointing, I've developed considerable respect for Boyd. Just goes to show, the shallow left will always disappoint, when they don't betray you outright.
Censorship, fake news, perception management
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
The World’s Richest People Look Out for Each Other:
Jeff Bezos's WaPo won't run ad critical of Elon Musk
Pete Tucker
In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
To sustain his sprawling empire, Bezos relies on government contracts worth billions of dollars, even as he stiff-arms regulators and irksome antitrust enforcers. This nifty maneuver is only possible if those in power play ball, but Trump didn’t during his first term (CNN, 12/9/19).
To ensure Trump II will be more amenable, Bezos has gone to lengths to grease the wheels, lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family. He joined Musk and other tech billionaires in flanking Trump at his inauguration. (Bezos’s presence signaled “anything but independence for the Washington Post,” said Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor.)
Meanwhile, with Musk’s hand now on the public money spigot—thanks to Trump ceding much of the US government to him—Bezos is also busy doing favors for Musk (FAIR.org, 2/14/25), the richest person alive.
From a business perspective—the only perspective that really matters to Bezos—pissing the temperamental Musk off at a moment when he commands unprecedented power in the public and private spheres is a bad idea. So Bezos is being careful not to—as is his paper. Which brings us back to that rejected ad.
‘You can’t do the wrap’
The civic groups Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund were behind the ad wrap, which was to be accompanied by a full-page ad inside the paper.
But even though the groups had signed a $115,000 contract with the Post, the paper canceled the wrap at the 11th hour, even as it said it could run the inside ad, which hit on the same themes.
“They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper, but you can’t do the wrap,’” Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón told The Hill (2/16/25). “We said ‘Thanks, no thanks,’ because we had a lot of questions.”
Among them: Was the ad killed
because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president, or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?
Kase Solomón asked the Post to explain its willingness to run the inside ad, but not the wrap. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason,” she told the New York Times (2/17/25).
Tellingly, in providing guidance to Common Cause on how to comply with the Post’s ad standards, Kase Solomón said the paper sent a sample ad paid for by a Big Oil group. “It was a ‘thank you Donald Trump’ piece of art,” Kase Solomón told The Hill.
The pulled ad directed readers to FireMusk.org, which states:
Musk, an unaccountable and unelected billionaire, is pushing to control public spending, dismantle the safety net and reshape our way of life to suit his interests. It’s clear what’s happening here: Musk and Trump aim to replace qualified civil servants with political allies whose loyalty lies solely with them.
‘Unacceptable business practices’
Meanwhile, Musk Watch noted, “Ads that were supportive of Musk and Trump were not impacted by similar errors.”
Still, one Ekō ad remains banished, with Meta citing “unacceptable business practices” as the reason.
That explanation makes a certain kind of sense. After all, alongside Bezos and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, was the world’s second richest person, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And as Bezos’s Post has made clear, pissing off your fellow billionaires is indeed an unacceptable business practice.
https://fair.org/home/the-worlds-riches ... ach-other/
Jeff Bezos's WaPo won't run ad critical of Elon Musk
Pete Tucker
The Washington Post won’t say why it cancelled a six-figure ad buy calling for Elon Musk to be fired, but it’s likely the same reason the Post insisted Musk wasn’t Nazi-saluting on Inauguration Day, and why the paper killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris: because that’s what Jeff Bezos wants.
The wrap WaPo rejected.
In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
To sustain his sprawling empire, Bezos relies on government contracts worth billions of dollars, even as he stiff-arms regulators and irksome antitrust enforcers. This nifty maneuver is only possible if those in power play ball, but Trump didn’t during his first term (CNN, 12/9/19).
To ensure Trump II will be more amenable, Bezos has gone to lengths to grease the wheels, lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family. He joined Musk and other tech billionaires in flanking Trump at his inauguration. (Bezos’s presence signaled “anything but independence for the Washington Post,” said Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor.)
Meanwhile, with Musk’s hand now on the public money spigot—thanks to Trump ceding much of the US government to him—Bezos is also busy doing favors for Musk (FAIR.org, 2/14/25), the richest person alive.
From a business perspective—the only perspective that really matters to Bezos—pissing the temperamental Musk off at a moment when he commands unprecedented power in the public and private spheres is a bad idea. So Bezos is being careful not to—as is his paper. Which brings us back to that rejected ad.
‘You can’t do the wrap’
The bright red ad was to wrap around the front and back pages of some print editions of the Post, including those going to subscribers on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the White House, ensuring top officials would lay eyes on it. Featuring a laughing Musk hovering over the White House, the ad asks, “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”
The flipside of the Common Cause/SPLCAF ad.
The civic groups Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund were behind the ad wrap, which was to be accompanied by a full-page ad inside the paper.
But even though the groups had signed a $115,000 contract with the Post, the paper canceled the wrap at the 11th hour, even as it said it could run the inside ad, which hit on the same themes.
“They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper, but you can’t do the wrap,’” Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón told The Hill (2/16/25). “We said ‘Thanks, no thanks,’ because we had a lot of questions.”
Among them: Was the ad killed
because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president, or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?
Kase Solomón asked the Post to explain its willingness to run the inside ad, but not the wrap. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason,” she told the New York Times (2/17/25).
Tellingly, in providing guidance to Common Cause on how to comply with the Post’s ad standards, Kase Solomón said the paper sent a sample ad paid for by a Big Oil group. “It was a ‘thank you Donald Trump’ piece of art,” Kase Solomón told The Hill.
The pulled ad directed readers to FireMusk.org, which states:
Musk, an unaccountable and unelected billionaire, is pushing to control public spending, dismantle the safety net and reshape our way of life to suit his interests. It’s clear what’s happening here: Musk and Trump aim to replace qualified civil servants with political allies whose loyalty lies solely with them.
‘Unacceptable business practices’
The Post’s ad cancellation comes on the heels of Meta pulling an ad critical of Musk earlier this month. The yanked Facebook ad was purchased by the watchdog group Ekō, which had two other anti-Musk ads taken down by Meta—at least until the outlet Musk Watch made inquiries. The two other ads “were removed in error and have now been restored,” Meta told Musk Watch (2/18/25).
An ad from Ekō rejected by Facebook for “unacceptable business practices.”
Meanwhile, Musk Watch noted, “Ads that were supportive of Musk and Trump were not impacted by similar errors.”
Still, one Ekō ad remains banished, with Meta citing “unacceptable business practices” as the reason.
That explanation makes a certain kind of sense. After all, alongside Bezos and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, was the world’s second richest person, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And as Bezos’s Post has made clear, pissing off your fellow billionaires is indeed an unacceptable business practice.
https://fair.org/home/the-worlds-riches ... ach-other/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
The World’s Richest People Look Out for Each Other:
Jeff Bezos's WaPo won't run ad critical of Elon Musk
Pete Tucker
In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
To sustain his sprawling empire, Bezos relies on government contracts worth billions of dollars, even as he stiff-arms regulators and irksome antitrust enforcers. This nifty maneuver is only possible if those in power play ball, but Trump didn’t during his first term (CNN, 12/9/19).
To ensure Trump II will be more amenable, Bezos has gone to lengths to grease the wheels, lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family. He joined Musk and other tech billionaires in flanking Trump at his inauguration. (Bezos’s presence signaled “anything but independence for the Washington Post,” said Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor.)
Meanwhile, with Musk’s hand now on the public money spigot—thanks to Trump ceding much of the US government to him—Bezos is also busy doing favors for Musk (FAIR.org, 2/14/25), the richest person alive.
From a business perspective—the only perspective that really matters to Bezos—pissing the temperamental Musk off at a moment when he commands unprecedented power in the public and private spheres is a bad idea. So Bezos is being careful not to—as is his paper. Which brings us back to that rejected ad.
‘You can’t do the wrap’
The civic groups Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund were behind the ad wrap, which was to be accompanied by a full-page ad inside the paper.
But even though the groups had signed a $115,000 contract with the Post, the paper canceled the wrap at the 11th hour, even as it said it could run the inside ad, which hit on the same themes.
“They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper, but you can’t do the wrap,’” Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón told The Hill (2/16/25). “We said ‘Thanks, no thanks,’ because we had a lot of questions.”
Among them: Was the ad killed
because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president, or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?
Kase Solomón asked the Post to explain its willingness to run the inside ad, but not the wrap. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason,” she told the New York Times (2/17/25).
Tellingly, in providing guidance to Common Cause on how to comply with the Post’s ad standards, Kase Solomón said the paper sent a sample ad paid for by a Big Oil group. “It was a ‘thank you Donald Trump’ piece of art,” Kase Solomón told The Hill.
The pulled ad directed readers to FireMusk.org, which states:
Musk, an unaccountable and unelected billionaire, is pushing to control public spending, dismantle the safety net and reshape our way of life to suit his interests. It’s clear what’s happening here: Musk and Trump aim to replace qualified civil servants with political allies whose loyalty lies solely with them.
‘Unacceptable business practices’
Meanwhile, Musk Watch noted, “Ads that were supportive of Musk and Trump were not impacted by similar errors.”
Still, one Ekō ad remains banished, with Meta citing “unacceptable business practices” as the reason.
That explanation makes a certain kind of sense. After all, alongside Bezos and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, was the world’s second richest person, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And as Bezos’s Post has made clear, pissing off your fellow billionaires is indeed an unacceptable business practice.
https://fair.org/home/the-worlds-riches ... ach-other/
Jeff Bezos's WaPo won't run ad critical of Elon Musk
Pete Tucker
The Washington Post won’t say why it cancelled a six-figure ad buy calling for Elon Musk to be fired, but it’s likely the same reason the Post insisted Musk wasn’t Nazi-saluting on Inauguration Day, and why the paper killed its endorsement of Kamala Harris: because that’s what Jeff Bezos wants.
The wrap WaPo rejected.
In addition to owning the Post, Bezos is the founder of Amazon and currently the world’s third-richest human. At best, the Post is a side-hustle for Bezos, while Amazon and his other business pursuits are what truly animate him. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
To sustain his sprawling empire, Bezos relies on government contracts worth billions of dollars, even as he stiff-arms regulators and irksome antitrust enforcers. This nifty maneuver is only possible if those in power play ball, but Trump didn’t during his first term (CNN, 12/9/19).
To ensure Trump II will be more amenable, Bezos has gone to lengths to grease the wheels, lavishing praise and millions of dollars on Trump and his family. He joined Musk and other tech billionaires in flanking Trump at his inauguration. (Bezos’s presence signaled “anything but independence for the Washington Post,” said Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor.)
Meanwhile, with Musk’s hand now on the public money spigot—thanks to Trump ceding much of the US government to him—Bezos is also busy doing favors for Musk (FAIR.org, 2/14/25), the richest person alive.
From a business perspective—the only perspective that really matters to Bezos—pissing the temperamental Musk off at a moment when he commands unprecedented power in the public and private spheres is a bad idea. So Bezos is being careful not to—as is his paper. Which brings us back to that rejected ad.
‘You can’t do the wrap’
The bright red ad was to wrap around the front and back pages of some print editions of the Post, including those going to subscribers on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the White House, ensuring top officials would lay eyes on it. Featuring a laughing Musk hovering over the White House, the ad asks, “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”
The flipside of the Common Cause/SPLCAF ad.
The civic groups Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund were behind the ad wrap, which was to be accompanied by a full-page ad inside the paper.
But even though the groups had signed a $115,000 contract with the Post, the paper canceled the wrap at the 11th hour, even as it said it could run the inside ad, which hit on the same themes.
“They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper, but you can’t do the wrap,’” Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón told The Hill (2/16/25). “We said ‘Thanks, no thanks,’ because we had a lot of questions.”
Among them: Was the ad killed
because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk? Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president, or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?
Kase Solomón asked the Post to explain its willingness to run the inside ad, but not the wrap. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason,” she told the New York Times (2/17/25).
Tellingly, in providing guidance to Common Cause on how to comply with the Post’s ad standards, Kase Solomón said the paper sent a sample ad paid for by a Big Oil group. “It was a ‘thank you Donald Trump’ piece of art,” Kase Solomón told The Hill.
The pulled ad directed readers to FireMusk.org, which states:
Musk, an unaccountable and unelected billionaire, is pushing to control public spending, dismantle the safety net and reshape our way of life to suit his interests. It’s clear what’s happening here: Musk and Trump aim to replace qualified civil servants with political allies whose loyalty lies solely with them.
‘Unacceptable business practices’
The Post’s ad cancellation comes on the heels of Meta pulling an ad critical of Musk earlier this month. The yanked Facebook ad was purchased by the watchdog group Ekō, which had two other anti-Musk ads taken down by Meta—at least until the outlet Musk Watch made inquiries. The two other ads “were removed in error and have now been restored,” Meta told Musk Watch (2/18/25).
An ad from Ekō rejected by Facebook for “unacceptable business practices.”
Meanwhile, Musk Watch noted, “Ads that were supportive of Musk and Trump were not impacted by similar errors.”
Still, one Ekō ad remains banished, with Meta citing “unacceptable business practices” as the reason.
That explanation makes a certain kind of sense. After all, alongside Bezos and Musk at Trump’s inauguration, was the world’s second richest person, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And as Bezos’s Post has made clear, pissing off your fellow billionaires is indeed an unacceptable business practice.
https://fair.org/home/the-worlds-riches ... ach-other/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
To Cozy Up to Trump, Bezos Banishes Dissent From WaPo
Pete Tucker
Elon Musk: Bravo, @JeffBezos!
That was the congratulatory message Elon Musk posted on X, the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 and subsequently turned into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Musk’s “bravo” was in response to Bezos’ shocking announcement that he was taking his media outlet, the Washington Post, in a Trumpian direction as well.
The Post’s opinion section will now advance Bezos’ “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Anyone not on board with this “significant shift” can take a hike, Bezos seemed to tell Post employees, in a note he also shared on X (2/26/25).
That was Wednesday morning. By evening, Bezos was dining with President Trump.
‘Those who think as he does’
“When billionaires talk about ‘personal liberties,’” media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25) noted, “they’re usually thinking about their personal liberty to avoid taxation and regulation.”
Meanwhile, as Bezos professes his love of personal liberties, “his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” said former Post executive editor Marty Baron (American Crisis, 2/27/25):
It was only weeks ago that the Post described itself as providing coverage for “all of America.” Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does.
Such limitations may not be limited to the opinion pages. Post media critic Erik Wemple penned a column about Bezos’ directive—and, according to former Post editor Gene Weingarten (Gene Pool, 2/27/25), “It was spiked. Killed, in newspeak.”
‘A wingman in the fight’
And somehow Bezos, the world’s third richest person, believes his so-called free market “viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” But as Politico columnist Michael Schaffer (2/26/25) noted:
Between the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the Economist, there’s no shortage of outlets that are organized around a generally pro-market editorial line. For that matter, there’s the Washington Post. Do you recall the publication editorializing against the free market? Me neither.
Yet Bezos is now committed to turning his paper into a second Wall Street Journal—a project already under way, as Bezos’ handpicked Post publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, comes from the Journal, as does executive editor Matt Murray.
Naturally, the Journal’s editorial page (2/26/25) welcomed Bezos’ “free markets” pivot, writing, “It will be good to have a wingman in the fight.”
Despite Bezos’ claim that his views are underserved, it’s actually the lefty end of the spectrum for which that’s the case (FAIR.org, 10/9/20). But those wanting anything left of authoritarian capitalism will have to look elsewhere. “Viewpoints opposing [my] pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos wrote, adding, “the internet does that job.”
It’s unclear if Bezos was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he wrote these words, but it’s unmistakable that he’s aligning his paper with Trump’s so-called “America First” agenda. “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Bezos wrote.
The answer wasn’t ‘hell yes’
Bezos and Amazon have thrown millions of dollars at the billionaire duo running our country. At the same time, the Post has been kind to both men, most noticeably when Bezos killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the election (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). For Musk, the Post not only spiked an ad critical of him, but also dismissed his Nazi salute on Inauguration Day as merely an “awkward gesture” (FAIR.org, 2/19/25, 1/23/25).
With Bezos’ new directive, the Post is all but formalizing its lapdog arrangement with Trump and Musk. How this will impact the Post, which Bezos purchased from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013, remains to be seen. But the fallout has been swift, and it comes on the heels of a mass exodus of both readers and top talent since the election.
Now joining the exodus is Post opinions editor David Shipley. Bezos wanted Shipley to lead the Post’s rightward turn, but only if he was all in. “If the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos told him. But Bezos’ directive was too much even for Shipley, who had previously proven his loyalty by spiking a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech executives groveling before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25).
‘More like a death knell’
Bezos’ “massive encroachment” into the opinion section “makes clear dissenting views will not be published,” wrote the Post’s Jeff Stein, who only days earlier had been promoted to chief economics correspondent:
I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side, I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.
Former Posties were also quick to weigh in. “Bezos’ move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization,” wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25):
Bezos no longer wants to own a credible news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.
Those commercial interests extend from earth into space.
“Amazon has a big cloud computing business. [Bezos’ space company] Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government,” Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25). “Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is [Bezos] going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.”
“It’s craven,” said Baron, who led the Post for eight years, nearly all of them under Bezos:
He’s basically fearful of Trump. He has decided that, as timid and tepid as the editorials have been, they’ve been too tough on Trump. He’s saying they’re going to have an opinion page with one point of view.
‘Contrary to the conspiracy theory’
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a hair’s breadth away from securing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, questioned whether his critiques of billionaires (like Bezos) and low-wage behemoths (like Amazon) might be contributing to the Post’s blistering coverage of him (FAIR.org, 8/15/19).
“Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor,” Baron said in response, “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”
Fast-forward six years, and the mask is off, so much so that Baron now sounds like Sanders (to whom Baron owes a belated apology).
That the Post’s hard-right turn comes at a time when other corporate and billionaire-owned outlets are also cozying up to Trump, only makes this moment all the more fraught.
This alarming state of affairs highlights the importance of independent media watchdogs. “We launched FAIR nearly 40 years ago with warnings about the influence of media owners on news content,” FAIR founder Jeff Cohen said in an email:
The first issue of our publication featured a cover story on the corporate takeover of news written by legendary journalist and Media Monopoly author Ben Bagdikian. The recent antics of Bezos show that the need to scrutinize and expose corporate media owners is even greater today.
https://fair.org/home/to-cozy-up-to-tru ... from-wapo/
Pete Tucker
Elon Musk: Bravo, @JeffBezos!
“Bravo, Jeff Bezos!”
Elon Musk (X, 2/26/25) gives his seal of approval to the new univocal Washington Post.
That was the congratulatory message Elon Musk posted on X, the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 and subsequently turned into a pro-Trump bullhorn. Musk’s “bravo” was in response to Bezos’ shocking announcement that he was taking his media outlet, the Washington Post, in a Trumpian direction as well.
The Post’s opinion section will now advance Bezos’ “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Anyone not on board with this “significant shift” can take a hike, Bezos seemed to tell Post employees, in a note he also shared on X (2/26/25).
That was Wednesday morning. By evening, Bezos was dining with President Trump.
‘Those who think as he does’
Bezos doesn’t give any detail on what he means by “personal liberties,” but in the context of the billionaire appearing behind Trump at the inauguration, and Amazon contributing $1 million to the inaugural festivities—on top of paying Melania Trump $40 million for her biopic—it’s doubtful that his paper will be talking much about the myriad liberties under attack by the Trump administration.
Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25): “The audacity of claiming that free market ideas are ‘underserved’ in American media is staggering. Has Bezos somehow missed the existence of the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC and countless other outlets that have spent decades championing free-market capitalism?”
“When billionaires talk about ‘personal liberties,’” media critic Parker Molloy (Present Age, 2/26/25) noted, “they’re usually thinking about their personal liberty to avoid taxation and regulation.”
Meanwhile, as Bezos professes his love of personal liberties, “his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” said former Post executive editor Marty Baron (American Crisis, 2/27/25):
It was only weeks ago that the Post described itself as providing coverage for “all of America.” Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does.
Such limitations may not be limited to the opinion pages. Post media critic Erik Wemple penned a column about Bezos’ directive—and, according to former Post editor Gene Weingarten (Gene Pool, 2/27/25), “It was spiked. Killed, in newspeak.”
‘A wingman in the fight’
Bezos’ fidelity to his other pillar, “free markets,” is no less questionable, considering his companies hoover up billions of dollars in government contracts, are massively subsidized, and Amazon, which Bezos founded, is an egregious antitrust violator.
Michael Schaffer (Politico, 2/26/25): Bezos’ “latest edict effectively rebrands the publication away from the interests of Washington and toward the politics of Silicon Valley—and looks likely to cost it a chunk of the remaining audience.”
And somehow Bezos, the world’s third richest person, believes his so-called free market “viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” But as Politico columnist Michael Schaffer (2/26/25) noted:
Between the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the Economist, there’s no shortage of outlets that are organized around a generally pro-market editorial line. For that matter, there’s the Washington Post. Do you recall the publication editorializing against the free market? Me neither.
Yet Bezos is now committed to turning his paper into a second Wall Street Journal—a project already under way, as Bezos’ handpicked Post publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, comes from the Journal, as does executive editor Matt Murray.
Naturally, the Journal’s editorial page (2/26/25) welcomed Bezos’ “free markets” pivot, writing, “It will be good to have a wingman in the fight.”
Despite Bezos’ claim that his views are underserved, it’s actually the lefty end of the spectrum for which that’s the case (FAIR.org, 10/9/20). But those wanting anything left of authoritarian capitalism will have to look elsewhere. “Viewpoints opposing [my] pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos wrote, adding, “the internet does that job.”
It’s unclear if Bezos was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he wrote these words, but it’s unmistakable that he’s aligning his paper with Trump’s so-called “America First” agenda. “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Bezos wrote.
The answer wasn’t ‘hell yes’
As shocking as Bezos’ groveling is, it’s just the latest in a string of extraordinary favors he’s done for Trump and the man Trump has turned much of the US government over to, Elon Musk.
Sara Fischer (Axios, 2/26/25): ” Efforts by the Trump administration to scrutinize media have forced media, entertainment and tech companies to make difficult decisions about how far they will go to defend their editorial values.”
Bezos and Amazon have thrown millions of dollars at the billionaire duo running our country. At the same time, the Post has been kind to both men, most noticeably when Bezos killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the election (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). For Musk, the Post not only spiked an ad critical of him, but also dismissed his Nazi salute on Inauguration Day as merely an “awkward gesture” (FAIR.org, 2/19/25, 1/23/25).
With Bezos’ new directive, the Post is all but formalizing its lapdog arrangement with Trump and Musk. How this will impact the Post, which Bezos purchased from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013, remains to be seen. But the fallout has been swift, and it comes on the heels of a mass exodus of both readers and top talent since the election.
Now joining the exodus is Post opinions editor David Shipley. Bezos wanted Shipley to lead the Post’s rightward turn, but only if he was all in. “If the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos told him. But Bezos’ directive was too much even for Shipley, who had previously proven his loyalty by spiking a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech executives groveling before Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25).
‘More like a death knell’
For those who remain at the Post, they do so warily.
Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25): “I foresee a mass subscriber defection from an outlet already deep in red ink; that must be something businessman Bezos is willing to live with.”
Bezos’ “massive encroachment” into the opinion section “makes clear dissenting views will not be published,” wrote the Post’s Jeff Stein, who only days earlier had been promoted to chief economics correspondent:
I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side, I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.
Former Posties were also quick to weigh in. “Bezos’ move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization,” wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Guardian, 2/26/25):
Bezos no longer wants to own a credible news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.
Those commercial interests extend from earth into space.
“Amazon has a big cloud computing business. [Bezos’ space company] Blue Origin is wholly dependent on the US government,” Marty Baron told Zeteo (2/26/25). “Trump can just decide that they’re not going to get any contracts. Is [Bezos] going to put that at risk? Obviously, he’s not going to put that at risk.”
“It’s craven,” said Baron, who led the Post for eight years, nearly all of them under Bezos:
He’s basically fearful of Trump. He has decided that, as timid and tepid as the editorials have been, they’ve been too tough on Trump. He’s saying they’re going to have an opinion page with one point of view.
‘Contrary to the conspiracy theory’
There’s an irony in Baron calling out his former boss, when he spent years attacking others for doing so.
Back when the Washington Post had “full independence” from Bezos, it was running twisted columns denying that the billionaire had a lot of money (FAIR.org, 10/3/17).
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a hair’s breadth away from securing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, questioned whether his critiques of billionaires (like Bezos) and low-wage behemoths (like Amazon) might be contributing to the Post’s blistering coverage of him (FAIR.org, 8/15/19).
“Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor,” Baron said in response, “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest.”
Fast-forward six years, and the mask is off, so much so that Baron now sounds like Sanders (to whom Baron owes a belated apology).
That the Post’s hard-right turn comes at a time when other corporate and billionaire-owned outlets are also cozying up to Trump, only makes this moment all the more fraught.
This alarming state of affairs highlights the importance of independent media watchdogs. “We launched FAIR nearly 40 years ago with warnings about the influence of media owners on news content,” FAIR founder Jeff Cohen said in an email:
The first issue of our publication featured a cover story on the corporate takeover of news written by legendary journalist and Media Monopoly author Ben Bagdikian. The recent antics of Bezos show that the need to scrutinize and expose corporate media owners is even greater today.
https://fair.org/home/to-cozy-up-to-tru ... from-wapo/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Digital imperialism: How US Social Media Firms Are Using American Law to Challenge Global Tech Regulation
Posted on March 22, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Oddly, this post skips over the original sin of the relationship of social media “platforms” with “free speech” which is their Section 230 exemption. That makes them not liable for content posted on their sites on based on the patently bogus premise that they are ginormous but neutral chatboards. But as we know, these players not on censor content, but amplify and muffle it depending on owner and advertiser preferences. By contrast, small publishers are liable for comments if they moderate them, which is a necessity in this world of wide-spread trolling and bots.
By Yasmin Curzi de Mendonça, Research associate, University of Virginia and Camille Grenier, Associated Expert at the Technology and Global Affairs Innovation Hub, Sciences Po.
Originally published at The Conversation
Social media platforms tend not to be that bothered by national boundaries.
Take X, for example. Users of what was once called Twitter span the globe, with its 600 millions-plus active accountsdotted across nearly every country. And each of those jurisdictions has its own laws.
But the interests of national regulatory efforts and that of predominantly U.S.-based technology companies often don’t align. While many governments have sought to impose oversight mechanisms to address problems such as disinformation, online extremism and manipulation, these initiatives have been met with corporate resistance, political interference and legal challenges invoking free speech as a shield against regulation.
What is brewing is a global struggle over digital platform governance. And in this battle, U.S. platforms are increasingly leaning on American laws to challenge other nation’s regulations. It is, we believe as experts on digital law– one an executive director of a forum monitoring how countries implement democratic principles – a form of digital imperialism.
A Rumble in the Tech Jungle
The latest manifestation of this phenomenon occurred in February 2025, when new tensions emerged between Brazil’s judiciary and U.S.-based social media platforms.
Trump Media & Technology Group and Rumble filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, challenging his orders to suspend accounts on the two platforms linked to disinformation campaigns in Brazil.
The case follows earlier unsuccessful efforts by Elon Musk’s X to resist similar Brazilian rulings.
Together, the cases exemplify a growing trend in which U.S. political and corporate actors attempt to undermine foreign regulatory authority by pressing the case that domestic U.S. law and corporate protections should take precedence over sovereign policies globally.
From Corporate Lobbying to Lawfare
At the core of the dispute is Allan dos Santos, a right-wing Brazilian influencer and fugitive from justice who fled to the U.S. in 2021 after De Moraes ordered his preventive arrest for allegedly coordinating disinformation networks and inciting violence.
Dos Santos has continued his online activities abroad. Brazil’s extradition requests have gone unanswered due to claimsby U.S. authorities that the case involves issues of free speech rather than criminal offenses.
Trump Media and Rumble’s lawsuit attempts to do two things. First, it seeks to frame Brazil’s judicial actions as censorship rather than oversight. And second, it seeks to portray the Brazilian court action as territorial overreach.
Their position is that as the target of the action was in the U.S., they are subject to U.S. free speech protections under the First Amendment. The fact that the subject of the ban was Brazilian and is accused of spreading disinformation and hate in Brazil should not, they argue, matter.
For now, U.S. courts agree. In late February, a Florida-based judge ruled that Rumble and Trump Media need not comply with the Brazilian order.
Big Tech Pushback to Regulation
The case signals an important shift in the contest over platform accountability – a move from corporate lobbying and political pressure to direct legal intervention in foreign jurisdictions. U.S. courts are now being used to challenge overseas decisions regarding platform accountability.
The outcome and the broader legal strategy behind the lawsuit could have far-reaching implications not only for Brazil but for any country or region – such as the European Union – attempting to regulate online spaces.
The resistance against digital regulation predates the Trump administration.
In Brazil, efforts to regulate social media platforms have long faced substantial opposition. Big Tech companies – including Google, Meta and X – have used their economic and political influence to lobby against tighter regulation, often framing such policies as a threat to free expression.
In 2020, the Brazilian “Fake News Bill,” which sought to hold platforms accountable for the spread of disinformation, was met with strong opposition from these companies.
Google and Meta launched high-profile campaigns to oppose the bill, warning it would “threaten free speech” and “harm small businesses.” Google placed banners on its Brazilian homepage urging users to reject the legislation, while Meta ran advertisements questioning its implications for the digital economy.
These efforts, alongside lobbying and political resistance, were successful in helping to delay and weaken the regulatory framework.
Mixing Corporate and Political Power
The difference now is that challenges are blurring the line between the corporate and the political.
Trump Media was 53% owned by the U.S. president before he moved his stake into a revocable trust in December 2024. Elon Musk, the free speech fundamentalist owner of X, is a de facto member of the Trump administration.
Their ascent to power has coincided with the First Amendment being wielded as a shield against foreign regulations on digital platforms.
Free speech protections in the U.S. have been applied unequally, allowing authorities to suppress dissent in some caseswhile shielding hateful speech in others.
This imbalance extends to corporate power, with decades of legal precedent expanding protections for private interests. The case law cemented corporate speech protections, a logic later extended to digital platforms.
U.S. free speech advocates in Big Tech and the U.S. government are seemingly escalating this trend to an even more extreme interpretation: that American free speech arguments can be deployed to resist the regulation of other jurisdictions and challenge foreign legal frameworks.
For instance, in response to the European Union’s Digital Services Act, U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, expressed concerns that the act could threaten American free speech principles.
Such an argument may have been fine if the same interpretation of free speech – and its appropriate protections – were universally accepted. But they are not.
The concept of free speech varies significantly across nations and regions.
Countries such as Brazil, Germany, France and others adopt what legal experts refer to as a proportionality-based approach to free speech, balancing it against other fundamental rights such as human dignity, democratic integrity and public order.
Sovereign countries using this approach recognize freedom of expression as a fundamental and preferential right. But they also acknowledge that certain restrictions are necessary to protect democratic institutions, marginalized communities, public health and the informational ecosystem from harms.
While the U.S. imposes some limits on speech – such as defamation laws and protection against incitement to imminent lawless action – the First Amendment is generally far more expansive than in other democracies.
The Future of Digital Governance
The legal battle over platform regulation is not confined to the current battle between U.S.-based platforms and Brazil. The EU’s Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom are other examples of governments trying to assert control over platforms operating within their borders.
As such, the lawsuit by Trump Media and Rumble against the Brazilian Supreme Court signals a critical moment in global geopolitics.
U.S. tech giants, such as Meta, are bending to the free speech winds coming out of the Trump administration. Musk, the owner of X, has given support to far-right groups overseas.
And this overlap in the policy priorities of social media platforms and the political interests of the U.S. administration opens a new era in the deregulation debate in which U.S. free speech absolutists are seeking to establish legal precedents that might challenge the future of other nations’ regulatory efforts.
As countries continue to develop regulatory frameworks for digital governance – for instance, AI regulation imposing stricter governance rules in Brazil and in the EU – the legal, economic and political strategies platforms employ to challenge oversight mechanisms will play a crucial role in determining the future balance between corporate influence and the rule of law.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03 ... ation.html
Posted on March 22, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Oddly, this post skips over the original sin of the relationship of social media “platforms” with “free speech” which is their Section 230 exemption. That makes them not liable for content posted on their sites on based on the patently bogus premise that they are ginormous but neutral chatboards. But as we know, these players not on censor content, but amplify and muffle it depending on owner and advertiser preferences. By contrast, small publishers are liable for comments if they moderate them, which is a necessity in this world of wide-spread trolling and bots.
By Yasmin Curzi de Mendonça, Research associate, University of Virginia and Camille Grenier, Associated Expert at the Technology and Global Affairs Innovation Hub, Sciences Po.
Originally published at The Conversation
Social media platforms tend not to be that bothered by national boundaries.
Take X, for example. Users of what was once called Twitter span the globe, with its 600 millions-plus active accountsdotted across nearly every country. And each of those jurisdictions has its own laws.
But the interests of national regulatory efforts and that of predominantly U.S.-based technology companies often don’t align. While many governments have sought to impose oversight mechanisms to address problems such as disinformation, online extremism and manipulation, these initiatives have been met with corporate resistance, political interference and legal challenges invoking free speech as a shield against regulation.
What is brewing is a global struggle over digital platform governance. And in this battle, U.S. platforms are increasingly leaning on American laws to challenge other nation’s regulations. It is, we believe as experts on digital law– one an executive director of a forum monitoring how countries implement democratic principles – a form of digital imperialism.
A Rumble in the Tech Jungle
The latest manifestation of this phenomenon occurred in February 2025, when new tensions emerged between Brazil’s judiciary and U.S.-based social media platforms.
Trump Media & Technology Group and Rumble filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, challenging his orders to suspend accounts on the two platforms linked to disinformation campaigns in Brazil.
The case follows earlier unsuccessful efforts by Elon Musk’s X to resist similar Brazilian rulings.
Together, the cases exemplify a growing trend in which U.S. political and corporate actors attempt to undermine foreign regulatory authority by pressing the case that domestic U.S. law and corporate protections should take precedence over sovereign policies globally.
From Corporate Lobbying to Lawfare
At the core of the dispute is Allan dos Santos, a right-wing Brazilian influencer and fugitive from justice who fled to the U.S. in 2021 after De Moraes ordered his preventive arrest for allegedly coordinating disinformation networks and inciting violence.
Dos Santos has continued his online activities abroad. Brazil’s extradition requests have gone unanswered due to claimsby U.S. authorities that the case involves issues of free speech rather than criminal offenses.
Trump Media and Rumble’s lawsuit attempts to do two things. First, it seeks to frame Brazil’s judicial actions as censorship rather than oversight. And second, it seeks to portray the Brazilian court action as territorial overreach.
Their position is that as the target of the action was in the U.S., they are subject to U.S. free speech protections under the First Amendment. The fact that the subject of the ban was Brazilian and is accused of spreading disinformation and hate in Brazil should not, they argue, matter.
For now, U.S. courts agree. In late February, a Florida-based judge ruled that Rumble and Trump Media need not comply with the Brazilian order.
Big Tech Pushback to Regulation
The case signals an important shift in the contest over platform accountability – a move from corporate lobbying and political pressure to direct legal intervention in foreign jurisdictions. U.S. courts are now being used to challenge overseas decisions regarding platform accountability.
The outcome and the broader legal strategy behind the lawsuit could have far-reaching implications not only for Brazil but for any country or region – such as the European Union – attempting to regulate online spaces.
The resistance against digital regulation predates the Trump administration.
In Brazil, efforts to regulate social media platforms have long faced substantial opposition. Big Tech companies – including Google, Meta and X – have used their economic and political influence to lobby against tighter regulation, often framing such policies as a threat to free expression.
In 2020, the Brazilian “Fake News Bill,” which sought to hold platforms accountable for the spread of disinformation, was met with strong opposition from these companies.
Google and Meta launched high-profile campaigns to oppose the bill, warning it would “threaten free speech” and “harm small businesses.” Google placed banners on its Brazilian homepage urging users to reject the legislation, while Meta ran advertisements questioning its implications for the digital economy.
These efforts, alongside lobbying and political resistance, were successful in helping to delay and weaken the regulatory framework.
Mixing Corporate and Political Power
The difference now is that challenges are blurring the line between the corporate and the political.
Trump Media was 53% owned by the U.S. president before he moved his stake into a revocable trust in December 2024. Elon Musk, the free speech fundamentalist owner of X, is a de facto member of the Trump administration.
Their ascent to power has coincided with the First Amendment being wielded as a shield against foreign regulations on digital platforms.
Free speech protections in the U.S. have been applied unequally, allowing authorities to suppress dissent in some caseswhile shielding hateful speech in others.
This imbalance extends to corporate power, with decades of legal precedent expanding protections for private interests. The case law cemented corporate speech protections, a logic later extended to digital platforms.
U.S. free speech advocates in Big Tech and the U.S. government are seemingly escalating this trend to an even more extreme interpretation: that American free speech arguments can be deployed to resist the regulation of other jurisdictions and challenge foreign legal frameworks.
For instance, in response to the European Union’s Digital Services Act, U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, expressed concerns that the act could threaten American free speech principles.
Such an argument may have been fine if the same interpretation of free speech – and its appropriate protections – were universally accepted. But they are not.
The concept of free speech varies significantly across nations and regions.
Countries such as Brazil, Germany, France and others adopt what legal experts refer to as a proportionality-based approach to free speech, balancing it against other fundamental rights such as human dignity, democratic integrity and public order.
Sovereign countries using this approach recognize freedom of expression as a fundamental and preferential right. But they also acknowledge that certain restrictions are necessary to protect democratic institutions, marginalized communities, public health and the informational ecosystem from harms.
While the U.S. imposes some limits on speech – such as defamation laws and protection against incitement to imminent lawless action – the First Amendment is generally far more expansive than in other democracies.
The Future of Digital Governance
The legal battle over platform regulation is not confined to the current battle between U.S.-based platforms and Brazil. The EU’s Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom are other examples of governments trying to assert control over platforms operating within their borders.
As such, the lawsuit by Trump Media and Rumble against the Brazilian Supreme Court signals a critical moment in global geopolitics.
U.S. tech giants, such as Meta, are bending to the free speech winds coming out of the Trump administration. Musk, the owner of X, has given support to far-right groups overseas.
And this overlap in the policy priorities of social media platforms and the political interests of the U.S. administration opens a new era in the deregulation debate in which U.S. free speech absolutists are seeking to establish legal precedents that might challenge the future of other nations’ regulatory efforts.
As countries continue to develop regulatory frameworks for digital governance – for instance, AI regulation imposing stricter governance rules in Brazil and in the EU – the legal, economic and political strategies platforms employ to challenge oversight mechanisms will play a crucial role in determining the future balance between corporate influence and the rule of law.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03 ... ation.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Decades of Media Myths Made Social Security Vulnerable to Political Attack
Paul Hedreen
Decades of Media Myths Ma[/img]de Social Security Vulnerable to Political Attack
As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”
Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.
‘If nothing changes’
Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.
These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.
It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.
As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.
In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.
Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:
There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.
The easy and popular option is not an option
But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.
In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.
To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”
Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.
Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-owned Post.
Useful misinformation
Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):
Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.
Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.
Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.
https://fair.org/home/decades-of-media- ... al-attack/
Paul Hedreen
Decades of Media Myths Ma[/img]de Social Security Vulnerable to Political Attack
As the hack-and-slash crusade of the “Department of Government Efficiency” picked up steam in early February, the Washington Post editorial board (2/7/25) gave President Donald Trump a tip on how to most effectively harness Elon Musk’s experience in “relentlessly innovating and constantly cutting costs”: Don’t just cut “low-hanging fruit,” but “reform entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare before they become insolvent.”
Repeating the “flat Earth–type lie” of looming Social Security insolvency (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) has been a longtime hobby horse of corporate media, as has been reported at FAIR (e.g., 1/88, 6/25/19, 6/15/23) and elsewhere (Column, 8/4/23). While many leading newspapers have rightly called out Musk’s interventions into Social Security and the rest of the administrative state, they still push the pernicious myth that the widely popular social program is struggling and nearing insolvency, with few viable options for its rescue.
‘If nothing changes’
An AP report (2/27/25) on Musk’s staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, published in and then later taken down from the Washington Post (2/27/25), mentioned that “the program faces a looming bankruptcy date if it is not addressed by Congress.” It claimed that Social Security “will be unable to pay full benefits beginning in 2035.” The New York Times (3/5/25) concurred that the program is “in such dire financial trouble that benefit cuts could come within a decade if nothing changes.”
The Washington Post (5/6/24) last year depicted Social Security as literally throwing money down a hole.
Such sky-is-falling reporting didn’t start with DOGE’s entry on the scene (e.g., New York Times, 1/26/86, 12/2/06; Washington Post, 11/8/80, 5/12/09). Indeed, the Post was beating this drum loudly after the 2024 Report of the Social Security Trustees was released last May. “Financial reality, though, is that if the programs aren’t reformed, and run out of money to pay required benefits, cuts could become unavoidable,” the Post editorial board (5/6/24) lamented.
These arguments misrepresent the structure of Social Security. In general, Social Security operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, where taxes on today’s workers fund benefits for today’s retirees. While this system is more resilient to financial downturn, it “can run into problems when demographic fluctuations raise the ratio of beneficiaries to covered workers” (Economic Policy Institute, 8/6/10). During the 1980s, to head off the glut of Baby Boomer retirements, the Social Security program raised revenues and cut benefits to build up a trust fund for surplus revenues.
It’s worth noting that by setting up this fund, President Ronald Reagan helped to finance massive reductions in tax rates for the wealthy. By building up huge surpluses that the SSA was then required by law to pour into Treasury bonds, Reagan could defer the need to raise revenues into the future, when the SSA would begin tapping into the trust fund.
As US demographics have shifted, with Boomers comfortably into their retirement years, the program no longer runs a surplus. Instead, the SSA makes up the difference between tax receipts and Social Security payments by dipping into the trust fund, as was designed. What would hypothetically go bankrupt in 2035 is not the Social Security program itself, but the trust fund. If this were to happen, the SSA would still operate the program, paying out entitlements at a prorated level of 83%, all from tax receipts.
In other words, a non-original part of the Social Security program may sunset in 2035. While this could present funding challenges, it is not the same as the entire program collapsing, or becoming insolvent.
Furthermore, the idea that a crisis is looming rests on nothing changing in Social Security’s funding structure. Luckily, Congress has ten years to come up with a solution to the Social Security shortfall. We aren’t fretting today about how to fund the Forest Service’s army of seasonal trail workers for the summer of 2035. There’s no need to lose sleep over Social Security funding, either. As economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/8/24) put it:
There is no economic reason that we can’t pay benefits into the indefinite future, as long as we don’t face some sort of economic collapse from something like nuclear war or a climate disaster.
The easy and popular option is not an option
There are three main solutions that can be found in stories about Social Security’s woes. In the wake of last year’s Trustees’ Report, the Washington Post (5/6/24) listed “the politically treacherous choices of raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits…or taking on more public debt to prop up the system.” The first two options increase the burden on workers, either by raising their taxes, or cutting benefits that they are entitled to, and have already begun paying into. The third option, taking on more public debt, is no doubt a nonstarter for the deficit hawks at the Post.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll (4/24/24) of swing state voters found 77% in favor of raising taxes on billionaires to aid Social Security.
But this explainer-style news piece, titled “The US Has Updated Its Social Security Estimates. Here’s What You Need to Know,” neglected to mention the easiest and most popular option: raising the cap on income from which Social Security taxes are withheld.
In 2025, income up to $176,100 is taxed for Social Security purposes. Anything beyond that is not. In other words, the architect making close to 200 grand a year pays the same amount into Social Security as the chief executive who takes home seven figures. One simple, and popular, way to increase funding for Social Security is to raise that regressive cap.
To be fair to the Post, the cap increase has been mentioned elsewhere in its pages, including in an opinion piece (5/6/24) by the editorial board published that same day. However, despite acknowledging that “many Americans support the idea” of raising the limit, the editorial board lumps this idea in with “raising the retirement age for younger generations and slowing benefit growth for the top half of earners,” before concluding that “these [solutions] won’t be popular or painless.”
Raising the cap on income is, in fact, popular (as the Post editorial board itself acknowledged), and the only pain it would cause is for the top 6% of income-earners who take home more than $176,100. The New York Times (3/5/25) also mentions a cap increase as an idea to “stabilize” the program, only to say that “no one on Capitol Hill is talking seriously about raising that cap any time soon.” Why that is the case is left unsaid.
Even more popular than raising the cap on wages was President Joe Biden’s proposed billionaires tax, which “would place a 25% levy on households worth more than $100 million. The plan taxes accumulated wealth, so it ends up hitting money that often goes untaxed under current laws” (Bloomberg, 4/24/24). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of solution was not explored in the Times, nor in the billionaire-owned Post.
Useful misinformation
Reports of Social Security’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated. As economist Paul Van De Water wrote for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (7/24/24):
Those who claim that Social Security won’t be around at all when today’s young adults retire and that young workers will receive no benefits either misunderstand or misrepresent the trustees’ projections.
Social Security’s imminent demise may not be true, but it’s very useful to those who want to rob all the workers who have dutifully paid their Social Security taxes, by misleading them into thinking it’s simply not possible to pay them back what they’re owed when they retire.
Compared to the retirement programs of global peers, the United States forces its workers to retire later, gives retirees fewer benefits and taxes its citizens more regressively (Washington Post, 7/19/24). Despite this, Americans still love Social Security, and want the government to spend money on it. Far from cuts called for by anxious columnists, the only overhaul Social Security needs is better benefits and a fairer tax system.
https://fair.org/home/decades-of-media- ... al-attack/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Controlled Opposition: The fake "left" and fake "MAGA"
Roger Boyd
Mar 26, 2025
The recent revelations about all of the USAID funding of fascist news outlets and influencers in Ukraine, regime change operators in Georgia, anti-China and anti-Russia propagandists, and the fake “left” in the West have hopefully woken up some people to the dominance of state and capitalist oligarchy largesse in the creation of societal narratives. And now it seems to be the turn of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to have a light shone upon its funding of widespread disinformation, propaganda and regime change operations and individuals. Most probably the CIA’s much more clandestine funding of societal-wide propaganda and regime change operations will stay within the shadows. These state-funded efforts to shut down oppositional voices through an overwhelming level of counter narratives (some intentionally “crazy” to discredit critical voices) and attacks are not new in US history. They are in fact a rerun of the CIA “Mighty Wurlitzer” campaign in the 1950s and 1960s that corrupted wide swathes of the “left” wing movements, the media and the academy. In parallel to the FBI COINTELPRO that widely operated to spy on and subvert legal oppositional groups.
Another avenue of disabling alternative voices and discourses is to shut down the funding for those voices through payments platforms such as Paypal and the banking system, de-platforming and demonetizing them, continuously harassing them as is currently being done to Richard Medhurst, and outright jailing them as with Julian Assange, or forcing them into banishment as with Edward Snowden. Or even pass laws that allow the state through a secretive process to directly manipulate online content, as the EU recently did. Or do this illegally, as the US state has been doing for years; with platforms that didn’t toe the line threatened with restrictions or outright de-platforming - for example RT and TikTok. And of course the alternative voices can simply be killed, as the Zionist fascist regime has repeatedly done in the past year.
Youtube practising its usual soft-censorship age restriction on a simple news report from Breaking Points that the Zionist regime would not like:
Between these modes of attack sit a dwindling set of critical outlets, groups and individuals together with a much larger group of tamed controlled opposition which deliver some items critical of the bourgeois oligarchic regimes but are very careful where they tread and in many cases support establishment discourses. In the UK, the Guardian was tamed by direct intervention from the UK security forces and transformed from a somewhat bourgeois progressive critical newspaper into an establishment tool. Less obvious are such players as Owen Jones and Novara Media in the UK, which regularly grandstand purely performative acts of “opposition” while being faithful establishment tools. Their role in the anti-Corbyn campaign, from 37 minutes and thirty seconds onwards below.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/jApE7TUfFlU
This piece by Phil Bevin delves into the background of a founder of Novara Media and how it acts to legitimize establishment talking points from a supposed “left” position. That Owen Jones is a columnist for the UK security state disciplined Guardian should immediately alert anyone to the reality of a fake “alternative” journalist. In his 2020 book The Land: The Story Of The Movement he fully endorsed Zionist propaganda as detailed in this article. He supported the Palestinian cause as long as it was a lost one and then immediately turned on it when a Labour leader that supported it was on the brink of power.
In one viral clip from a 2012 BBC talk show, Jones criticized Israel for breaking a ceasefire with Palestinian fighters and attacking Gaza. But during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Jones changed his tune.
He sabotaged the popular mov[/youtube]ement that brought the veteran Palestine solidarity campaigner to the brink of power by claiming the Labour Party had an anti-Semitism problem, insisted Corbyn apologize for anti-Semitism that he had not even been guilty of and happily played the role of the Israel lobby’s useful idiot.
Jones relentlessly called for Corbyn’s most high-profile supporters to be thrown out of the party based on confected anti-Semitism allegations – including Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson.
Last year Jones continued this trend, backing Labour’s banning of a left-wing group supported by veteran socialist filmmaker Ken Loach. The ban, supported by Jones, led to Loach’s expulsion. For good measure, Jones even denied and justified the Zionist movement’s well-documented record of collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. For years, Jones opposed BDS, the Palestinian-led movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
He acts as a classic sheep dog, guiding criticism of Israel into areas of “soft criticism” whilst constantly undermining the social movements that work to bring the Zionist regime within even basic legal norms. He also pushes the Western propagandist lies about the mythical Uyghur “genocide”. Here he is very openly endorsing the establishment-tool Starmer in 2020.
In the US we of course also have the “tribe” of fake “leftists” such as AOC (well known for her fake and performative acts) and the sheep dog Bernie Saunders, all tasked with redirecting the anger of the population away from the oligarchy. Bernie and AOC are currently on an utterly performative “Fighting Oligarchy“ tour designed to redirect populist anger into areas that create absolutely no threat to the US capitalist oligarchy, and keep the angry citizenry safely within the confines of the capitalist oligarch controlled Democratic Party. The sheer irony and hutzpah of such oligarch tools saying that they are working to “fight oligarchy” shows the great success of such fake leftists and their importance to their oligarch bosses in creating a fake differentiation between the Democrats and Republicans.
One of the most accomplished fake progressive media celebrities is Jon Stewart, who acts as a very effective sheep dog to redirect people’s anger and concerns toward surface level phenomena such as individual politicians and parties and away from the US capitalist oligarchy. His humour does not challenge underlying power structures, it reinforces them.
The Make America Great Again right-wing crowd mirrors the very “woke” that they deride, using identitarian discourses to divide their supporters from other groups that they may share anti-oligarch interests with (“white Americans”, “traditional Americans”, “god-fearing Americans”), while also redirecting their supporter’s anger toward non-oligarch scapegoats (“immigrants”, “DEI”, “degenerates”, “communists”, “atheists”). With Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson below showing the “rough” and “smooth” versions of this narrative management with respect to the genocidal Zionist regime and its Western accomplices.
Then of course, there is my own run in with the Naked Capitalism site that I have covered elsewhere. As the narrative management is being ramped up to yet an even greater level, we have to work harder and harder to sift some version of the truth from the utterly poisoned Western media universe. The fate of USAID and NED are just small glimmers of light in an increasingly dark media universe, with the US State Department in some cases taking up the work of those organizations. As long as the oligarchy own the state and the media and intensify their rate of exploitation, and their ability to rule through manufactured consent is at risk, the media will be increasingly disciplined and accepted discourse ever more restricted.
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/contro ... -fake-left
Roger Boyd
Mar 26, 2025
The recent revelations about all of the USAID funding of fascist news outlets and influencers in Ukraine, regime change operators in Georgia, anti-China and anti-Russia propagandists, and the fake “left” in the West have hopefully woken up some people to the dominance of state and capitalist oligarchy largesse in the creation of societal narratives. And now it seems to be the turn of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to have a light shone upon its funding of widespread disinformation, propaganda and regime change operations and individuals. Most probably the CIA’s much more clandestine funding of societal-wide propaganda and regime change operations will stay within the shadows. These state-funded efforts to shut down oppositional voices through an overwhelming level of counter narratives (some intentionally “crazy” to discredit critical voices) and attacks are not new in US history. They are in fact a rerun of the CIA “Mighty Wurlitzer” campaign in the 1950s and 1960s that corrupted wide swathes of the “left” wing movements, the media and the academy. In parallel to the FBI COINTELPRO that widely operated to spy on and subvert legal oppositional groups.
Another avenue of disabling alternative voices and discourses is to shut down the funding for those voices through payments platforms such as Paypal and the banking system, de-platforming and demonetizing them, continuously harassing them as is currently being done to Richard Medhurst, and outright jailing them as with Julian Assange, or forcing them into banishment as with Edward Snowden. Or even pass laws that allow the state through a secretive process to directly manipulate online content, as the EU recently did. Or do this illegally, as the US state has been doing for years; with platforms that didn’t toe the line threatened with restrictions or outright de-platforming - for example RT and TikTok. And of course the alternative voices can simply be killed, as the Zionist fascist regime has repeatedly done in the past year.
Youtube practising its usual soft-censorship age restriction on a simple news report from Breaking Points that the Zionist regime would not like:
Between these modes of attack sit a dwindling set of critical outlets, groups and individuals together with a much larger group of tamed controlled opposition which deliver some items critical of the bourgeois oligarchic regimes but are very careful where they tread and in many cases support establishment discourses. In the UK, the Guardian was tamed by direct intervention from the UK security forces and transformed from a somewhat bourgeois progressive critical newspaper into an establishment tool. Less obvious are such players as Owen Jones and Novara Media in the UK, which regularly grandstand purely performative acts of “opposition” while being faithful establishment tools. Their role in the anti-Corbyn campaign, from 37 minutes and thirty seconds onwards below.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/jApE7TUfFlU
This piece by Phil Bevin delves into the background of a founder of Novara Media and how it acts to legitimize establishment talking points from a supposed “left” position. That Owen Jones is a columnist for the UK security state disciplined Guardian should immediately alert anyone to the reality of a fake “alternative” journalist. In his 2020 book The Land: The Story Of The Movement he fully endorsed Zionist propaganda as detailed in this article. He supported the Palestinian cause as long as it was a lost one and then immediately turned on it when a Labour leader that supported it was on the brink of power.
In one viral clip from a 2012 BBC talk show, Jones criticized Israel for breaking a ceasefire with Palestinian fighters and attacking Gaza. But during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Jones changed his tune.
He sabotaged the popular mov[/youtube]ement that brought the veteran Palestine solidarity campaigner to the brink of power by claiming the Labour Party had an anti-Semitism problem, insisted Corbyn apologize for anti-Semitism that he had not even been guilty of and happily played the role of the Israel lobby’s useful idiot.
Jones relentlessly called for Corbyn’s most high-profile supporters to be thrown out of the party based on confected anti-Semitism allegations – including Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson.
Last year Jones continued this trend, backing Labour’s banning of a left-wing group supported by veteran socialist filmmaker Ken Loach. The ban, supported by Jones, led to Loach’s expulsion. For good measure, Jones even denied and justified the Zionist movement’s well-documented record of collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. For years, Jones opposed BDS, the Palestinian-led movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
He acts as a classic sheep dog, guiding criticism of Israel into areas of “soft criticism” whilst constantly undermining the social movements that work to bring the Zionist regime within even basic legal norms. He also pushes the Western propagandist lies about the mythical Uyghur “genocide”. Here he is very openly endorsing the establishment-tool Starmer in 2020.
In the US we of course also have the “tribe” of fake “leftists” such as AOC (well known for her fake and performative acts) and the sheep dog Bernie Saunders, all tasked with redirecting the anger of the population away from the oligarchy. Bernie and AOC are currently on an utterly performative “Fighting Oligarchy“ tour designed to redirect populist anger into areas that create absolutely no threat to the US capitalist oligarchy, and keep the angry citizenry safely within the confines of the capitalist oligarch controlled Democratic Party. The sheer irony and hutzpah of such oligarch tools saying that they are working to “fight oligarchy” shows the great success of such fake leftists and their importance to their oligarch bosses in creating a fake differentiation between the Democrats and Republicans.
One of the most accomplished fake progressive media celebrities is Jon Stewart, who acts as a very effective sheep dog to redirect people’s anger and concerns toward surface level phenomena such as individual politicians and parties and away from the US capitalist oligarchy. His humour does not challenge underlying power structures, it reinforces them.
The Make America Great Again right-wing crowd mirrors the very “woke” that they deride, using identitarian discourses to divide their supporters from other groups that they may share anti-oligarch interests with (“white Americans”, “traditional Americans”, “god-fearing Americans”), while also redirecting their supporter’s anger toward non-oligarch scapegoats (“immigrants”, “DEI”, “degenerates”, “communists”, “atheists”). With Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson below showing the “rough” and “smooth” versions of this narrative management with respect to the genocidal Zionist regime and its Western accomplices.
Then of course, there is my own run in with the Naked Capitalism site that I have covered elsewhere. As the narrative management is being ramped up to yet an even greater level, we have to work harder and harder to sift some version of the truth from the utterly poisoned Western media universe. The fate of USAID and NED are just small glimmers of light in an increasingly dark media universe, with the US State Department in some cases taking up the work of those organizations. As long as the oligarchy own the state and the media and intensify their rate of exploitation, and their ability to rule through manufactured consent is at risk, the media will be increasingly disciplined and accepted discourse ever more restricted.
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/contro ... -fake-left
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Trump Killed Public War Research. Stargate Will Make It Secret—and Far More Dangerous
Posted by Internationalist 360° on March 26, 2025
Kit Klarenberg
Days after a Pentagon spokesperson celebrated the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Minerva Initiative—a little-known but influential research program—was killed without fanfare. No mainstream outlet covered it. But the reasons behind its demise reveal the next frontier of American war planning: AI, surveillance, and full-spectrum social control.
On March 4, chief Department of Defence spokesperson Sean Parnell took to ‘X’ to announce that Elon Musk’s notorious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was hard at work identifying tens of millions of dollars in savings to make the U.S. military “more lethal.” In addition to various DEI programs, several grants provided to universities to investigate climate change-related issues were listed for the chop. Unstated by Parnell, these efforts were funded by Minerva Initiative, a little-known Pentagon project founded in 2008.
Under its auspices, the Department of Defense gave grants to researchers at U.S. universities to investigate particular topics, emphasizing social and behavioral sciences. In addition to helping D.C. military apparatchiks better understand foreign cultures and societies in their crosshairs, recent topics of interest have included climate change and “disinformation.” Minerva Initiative was launched with much initial fanfare as a public mechanism for connecting academia and government, but despite operating in the open, its activities typically generated little mainstream interest.
Accordingly, no major news outlet reported when, mere days later, the Minerva Initiative was permanently axed in its entirety. It fell to the academic journal Science to break the news, its report quoting several academics—including recipients of Minerva grants—harshly condemning the move as “harmful to U.S. national security.” One warned, “Any savings will be outweighed by new gaps and blind spots in our knowledge about current and emerging threats.”
Minerva Initiative’s budget was modest by Pentagon standards – in August 2024, under its last funding round, $46.8 million was granted to 19 research projects. Yet, its impact was evidently seismic. “The initiative has helped build up a generation of social science researchers engaged with national security,” Science previously reported, with “many” academics in the field having “cut [their] teeth” with Minerva support. While beneficiaries may mourn its passing, Aaron Goode, host of the political podcast “American Exception” and a critic of U.S. foreign policy, offers MintPress News a less glowing appraisal:
Minerva Initiative was yet another example of the U.S. national security state corrupting civil society and academia in order to maintain U.S. global dominance. It was a way to weaponize social science to evolve US battlefield tactics – all in service of the grand imperial strategy of ‘full-spectrum dominance.’ This strategy has created the wealthiest and most powerful set of oligarchs in human history, killing untold millions around the world in the process.”
‘Precarious Moments’
Goode’s view is echoed by Patrick Henningsen, editor of 21st Century Wire and a longtime analyst of military and intelligence operations. Henningsen notes the Minera Initiative’s chilling parallels with Cold War-era U.S. military research and intelligence effort Project Camelot, the codename of a lavishly-financed clandestine academic connivance launched in 1964. It gathered a diverse mix of anthropologists, economists, geographers, psychologists and sociologists to enhance the Pentagon’s ability to predict and influence social developments in foreign countries, particularly regarding counterinsurgency and intelligence operations. Henningsen explains:
These types of programs are meant to provide an external academia-based, social sciences research arm for the Department of Defense, a kind of civilian bridge between government, military and academia. Minerva Initiative was just the latest attempt to outsource and steer specific types of granular research and intelligence gathering, along the lines of the type of anthropological, ethnographic and demography-based research, an approach pioneered by CIA forerunner the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II.”
Project Camelot’s public exposure elicited significant concerns its research yield may have assisted U.S. covert and overt actions, including coups and invasions, corrupting purportedly independent academics in the process. It was shut down in 1965 ahead of a formal Congressional inquiry into its operations. Evidently, the Pentagon’s appetite for harnessing academic expertise for nefarious purposes was undimmed. Minerva Initiative represented a fresh opportunity to recreate Project Camelot on a grander scale, with openness serving as protection from embarrassing disclosures of covert sponsorship.
Alongside benign-sounding grants for “understanding individual and team cognition in support of future space missions” and investigating “social impacts of climate change,” much of Minerva Initiative’s focused on counterinsurgency. This was both in terms of managing potential future military occupations of foreign countries in the manner of Afghanistan and Iraq, but also attempting to win the hearts and minds of target populations during and after conflicts or U.S.-fomented political upheaval.
Take, for instance, a 2021 Minerva Initiative grant provided to a team of academics at the Universities of Arizona, California, Florida and Pennsylvania, managed by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It sought “to understand how to stabilize those precarious moments when the state needs to (re)establish itself as the accepted authority, particularly on the emergence of post-conflict security structures, state reforms, alternative security structures, and citizen buy-in.”
Eerily, one context in which the U.S. state itself urgently needed to “establish itself as the accepted authority” and secure “citizen buy-in” for “alternative security structures” was the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, Graphika, a social media analytics firm that has reaped millions in grants from the Pentagon and Minerva Initiative, published a report on “The COVID-19 Infodemic”. It tracked online “disinformation” and dissent around lockdowns, mask mandates, and the virus’ origins.
The report noted that Graphika began collating data for the project on December 16, 2019, just four days after COVID-19 symptoms were first detected in patients at a Wuhan hospital. It was not until December 31 that year that the outbreak of this unknown and as yet unnamed ailment was first reported to the World Health Organization. This begs the obvious question of how and why the company began investigating public opposition to pandemic prevention measures widely implemented months later at such an early date.
‘Algorithmic Personalization’
A February 7 MintPress News investigation delved into the little-acknowledged profusion of individuals and organizations in intimate proximity to the President, including members of his cabinet, with extensive financial, ideological and political interests in artificial intelligence. The Trump administration’s AI fixation is manifested publicly in Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to construct 20 large AI data centers across the U.S. by 2029, managed by a consortium of major tech firms and financial institutions.
Oddly, the project dropped off the radar entirely after an initial surge of media and tech sector excitement about Stargate. Details on its progress are stubbornly unforthcoming, and the purposes for which the vast forecast investment will be put remain sketchy. Nonetheless, in a January press release hailing Stargate’s launch, consortium member OpenAI boasted the endeavor would “provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
Notably, the Minerva Initiative awarded sizable grants to study AI and its applications. On their surface, some of these efforts seem mundane. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was given $2.1 million to develop AI tools to bolster the Pentagon’s “role as a science funder.” Meanwhile, Utah State received $1.49 million to assess the impact of AI surveillance technology on governance systems.
Other Minerva-financed AI research appears considerably more sinister. In July 2020, the University of Iowa’s Initiative for Artificial Intelligence was granted an undisclosed sum over three years to investigate “the relationship between algorithmic personalization and online radicalization” and “uncover the technological, psychological, and cultural factors” that can lead individuals to adopt “extremist ideologies.” If the effort concerned public safety, this would be all well and good – but its proposal document points to a far darker set of objectives.
Iowa researchers surveyed politically engaged U.S. adults for a year, tracking their views on social, cultural, and political topics—and their susceptibility to conspiracy theories. This was intended to determine “psychological factors that make an individual more or less vulnerable to radicalization” and whether “algorithmic personalization” could play a role either way. “Communities vulnerable to future exposure to extremist ideologies” would also be identified.
The proposal’s reference to “conspiracy theories” is ominous. The term is nebulous and highly contested – so too are “extremist” and “radical.” Critics reasonably charge that these phrases are routinely employed in the mainstream to delegitimize dissenting opinions, inconvenient truths, awkward questions, and those voicing them. The U.S. government has long sought to infiltrate and subvert online spaces in the name of battling “conspiracy theories” and “extremists,” replicating historic covert state attacks on civil society and independent activists such as COINTELPRO in the process.
“Minerva Initiative research projects studying the phenomenon of ‘extremism’ in and around conflict zones is ironic,” Patrick Hennigsen believes.
The source of that extremism is, in most cases, more than likely the result of covert operations conceived and managed by either the U.S., U.K. or Israel governments, through the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. You can be sure the ‘fat-trimmers’ from DOGE won’t be snooping around the clandestine offices of Langley, Virginia.”
‘Sock Puppets’
Even more troublingly, the Iowa researchers sought to “predict how people use social media” by “[seeding] online personas” – “[building] automated profiles that approximate actual user behavior.” The activities of these “sock puppets” would be informed by “algorithms [incorporating] public interactions of online communities on social media platforms” and “collecting browsing data from actual members of these communities.” In other words, industrial-scale spying on sensitive private user information to create realistic online personas.
It seems hardly coincidental that right around the time Iowa University’s Minerva Initiative grant was greenlit, the Pentagon began conducting wide-ranging “clandestine psychological operations” on social media, targeting the Arab and Muslim world. These efforts were highly sophisticated, employing expansive armies of bots and trolls with realistic AI-generated profile photos and accompanying ‘characters.’ In Iran, for instance, Pentagon sock puppets deployed varying narrative approaches to engender engagement and influence perceptions locally. Certain accounts accrued thousands of real-life followers.
Some Pentagon-run Iranian bots took hardline positions, accusing the government of being too soft on foreign policy and too liberal at home. Others posed as women opposed to compulsory hijab-wearing and promoted anti-government protests. These accounts dabbled in non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Iranian food and memes, to boost their authenticity. They also regularly engaged with Iranian users in Farsi, joking and making cultural references.
It is an obvious question whether Iowa University’s Minerva efforts were ultimately concerned with assisting the Pentagon to identify ideal means of encouraging “extremist ideologies” and “radicalization” among individuals and groups in target countries to the detriment of their own governments. The researchers needn’t have been conscious confederates in this scheme. Under the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA program, unwitting academics routinely carried out seemingly innocuous research that would covertly be put to “psychological warfare purposes” – markedly, often “on cultures and countries of interest to the CIA.”
Reinforcing this interpretation, the online Pentagon operation, unceremoniously busted very publicly in August 2022, had all the makings of a classic “cognitive” counterinsurgency effort to win hearts and minds in target countries – precisely Minerva Initiative’s preponderant beat. For decades, U.S. officials have openly spoken of war with Tehran as an inevitability and engaged in full-spectrum meddling efforts to foment insurrectionary upheaval locally. Notably, in October 2020, there was an Anglo-American coup in Kyrgyzstan, another country in the bot and troll operation’s crosshairs.
The U.S. national security state’s obsessive interest in AI – specifically in counterinsurgency – has been clear for many years. In 2019, the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting published an academic paper on “Artificial Intelligence enhanced systems to augment High Value Target (HVT) location” when conducting such operations. Israel’s deployment of artificial intelligence during the Gaza genocide gruesomely demonstrates the technology’s mass-killing potential, which experts believe marks the beginning of a new phase of warfare entirely.
Was the Minerva Initiative shut down to push Pentagon AI research further into secrecy—and profitability—via Stargate? That’s one theory. Another is that the administration wanted to remove external oversight completely. Jeffrey Kaye, an investigative journalist who has extensively documented U.S. psychological warfare operations, tells MintPress News the Initiative’s closure does not spell the end of the abuse of academia by the Department of Defense or other U.S. government agencies:
Last I heard, DARPA and RAND Corporation were not shuttered. And CIA and Fort Detrick certainly still engage U.S. universities and professors for a multitude of research projects for the war industry. Minerva’s closure may send a chill through the social science portion of the academic community that supports Washington’s war drive in China and elsewhere, but I expect long-term, there will be very little change in relations between the U.S. national security state and academic world.”
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/03/ ... dangerous/
Posted by Internationalist 360° on March 26, 2025
Kit Klarenberg
Days after a Pentagon spokesperson celebrated the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Minerva Initiative—a little-known but influential research program—was killed without fanfare. No mainstream outlet covered it. But the reasons behind its demise reveal the next frontier of American war planning: AI, surveillance, and full-spectrum social control.
On March 4, chief Department of Defence spokesperson Sean Parnell took to ‘X’ to announce that Elon Musk’s notorious Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was hard at work identifying tens of millions of dollars in savings to make the U.S. military “more lethal.” In addition to various DEI programs, several grants provided to universities to investigate climate change-related issues were listed for the chop. Unstated by Parnell, these efforts were funded by Minerva Initiative, a little-known Pentagon project founded in 2008.
Under its auspices, the Department of Defense gave grants to researchers at U.S. universities to investigate particular topics, emphasizing social and behavioral sciences. In addition to helping D.C. military apparatchiks better understand foreign cultures and societies in their crosshairs, recent topics of interest have included climate change and “disinformation.” Minerva Initiative was launched with much initial fanfare as a public mechanism for connecting academia and government, but despite operating in the open, its activities typically generated little mainstream interest.
Accordingly, no major news outlet reported when, mere days later, the Minerva Initiative was permanently axed in its entirety. It fell to the academic journal Science to break the news, its report quoting several academics—including recipients of Minerva grants—harshly condemning the move as “harmful to U.S. national security.” One warned, “Any savings will be outweighed by new gaps and blind spots in our knowledge about current and emerging threats.”
Minerva Initiative’s budget was modest by Pentagon standards – in August 2024, under its last funding round, $46.8 million was granted to 19 research projects. Yet, its impact was evidently seismic. “The initiative has helped build up a generation of social science researchers engaged with national security,” Science previously reported, with “many” academics in the field having “cut [their] teeth” with Minerva support. While beneficiaries may mourn its passing, Aaron Goode, host of the political podcast “American Exception” and a critic of U.S. foreign policy, offers MintPress News a less glowing appraisal:
Minerva Initiative was yet another example of the U.S. national security state corrupting civil society and academia in order to maintain U.S. global dominance. It was a way to weaponize social science to evolve US battlefield tactics – all in service of the grand imperial strategy of ‘full-spectrum dominance.’ This strategy has created the wealthiest and most powerful set of oligarchs in human history, killing untold millions around the world in the process.”
‘Precarious Moments’
Goode’s view is echoed by Patrick Henningsen, editor of 21st Century Wire and a longtime analyst of military and intelligence operations. Henningsen notes the Minera Initiative’s chilling parallels with Cold War-era U.S. military research and intelligence effort Project Camelot, the codename of a lavishly-financed clandestine academic connivance launched in 1964. It gathered a diverse mix of anthropologists, economists, geographers, psychologists and sociologists to enhance the Pentagon’s ability to predict and influence social developments in foreign countries, particularly regarding counterinsurgency and intelligence operations. Henningsen explains:
These types of programs are meant to provide an external academia-based, social sciences research arm for the Department of Defense, a kind of civilian bridge between government, military and academia. Minerva Initiative was just the latest attempt to outsource and steer specific types of granular research and intelligence gathering, along the lines of the type of anthropological, ethnographic and demography-based research, an approach pioneered by CIA forerunner the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II.”
Project Camelot’s public exposure elicited significant concerns its research yield may have assisted U.S. covert and overt actions, including coups and invasions, corrupting purportedly independent academics in the process. It was shut down in 1965 ahead of a formal Congressional inquiry into its operations. Evidently, the Pentagon’s appetite for harnessing academic expertise for nefarious purposes was undimmed. Minerva Initiative represented a fresh opportunity to recreate Project Camelot on a grander scale, with openness serving as protection from embarrassing disclosures of covert sponsorship.
Alongside benign-sounding grants for “understanding individual and team cognition in support of future space missions” and investigating “social impacts of climate change,” much of Minerva Initiative’s focused on counterinsurgency. This was both in terms of managing potential future military occupations of foreign countries in the manner of Afghanistan and Iraq, but also attempting to win the hearts and minds of target populations during and after conflicts or U.S.-fomented political upheaval.
Take, for instance, a 2021 Minerva Initiative grant provided to a team of academics at the Universities of Arizona, California, Florida and Pennsylvania, managed by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It sought “to understand how to stabilize those precarious moments when the state needs to (re)establish itself as the accepted authority, particularly on the emergence of post-conflict security structures, state reforms, alternative security structures, and citizen buy-in.”
Eerily, one context in which the U.S. state itself urgently needed to “establish itself as the accepted authority” and secure “citizen buy-in” for “alternative security structures” was the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, Graphika, a social media analytics firm that has reaped millions in grants from the Pentagon and Minerva Initiative, published a report on “The COVID-19 Infodemic”. It tracked online “disinformation” and dissent around lockdowns, mask mandates, and the virus’ origins.
The report noted that Graphika began collating data for the project on December 16, 2019, just four days after COVID-19 symptoms were first detected in patients at a Wuhan hospital. It was not until December 31 that year that the outbreak of this unknown and as yet unnamed ailment was first reported to the World Health Organization. This begs the obvious question of how and why the company began investigating public opposition to pandemic prevention measures widely implemented months later at such an early date.
‘Algorithmic Personalization’
A February 7 MintPress News investigation delved into the little-acknowledged profusion of individuals and organizations in intimate proximity to the President, including members of his cabinet, with extensive financial, ideological and political interests in artificial intelligence. The Trump administration’s AI fixation is manifested publicly in Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to construct 20 large AI data centers across the U.S. by 2029, managed by a consortium of major tech firms and financial institutions.
Oddly, the project dropped off the radar entirely after an initial surge of media and tech sector excitement about Stargate. Details on its progress are stubbornly unforthcoming, and the purposes for which the vast forecast investment will be put remain sketchy. Nonetheless, in a January press release hailing Stargate’s launch, consortium member OpenAI boasted the endeavor would “provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
Notably, the Minerva Initiative awarded sizable grants to study AI and its applications. On their surface, some of these efforts seem mundane. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was given $2.1 million to develop AI tools to bolster the Pentagon’s “role as a science funder.” Meanwhile, Utah State received $1.49 million to assess the impact of AI surveillance technology on governance systems.
Other Minerva-financed AI research appears considerably more sinister. In July 2020, the University of Iowa’s Initiative for Artificial Intelligence was granted an undisclosed sum over three years to investigate “the relationship between algorithmic personalization and online radicalization” and “uncover the technological, psychological, and cultural factors” that can lead individuals to adopt “extremist ideologies.” If the effort concerned public safety, this would be all well and good – but its proposal document points to a far darker set of objectives.
Iowa researchers surveyed politically engaged U.S. adults for a year, tracking their views on social, cultural, and political topics—and their susceptibility to conspiracy theories. This was intended to determine “psychological factors that make an individual more or less vulnerable to radicalization” and whether “algorithmic personalization” could play a role either way. “Communities vulnerable to future exposure to extremist ideologies” would also be identified.
The proposal’s reference to “conspiracy theories” is ominous. The term is nebulous and highly contested – so too are “extremist” and “radical.” Critics reasonably charge that these phrases are routinely employed in the mainstream to delegitimize dissenting opinions, inconvenient truths, awkward questions, and those voicing them. The U.S. government has long sought to infiltrate and subvert online spaces in the name of battling “conspiracy theories” and “extremists,” replicating historic covert state attacks on civil society and independent activists such as COINTELPRO in the process.
“Minerva Initiative research projects studying the phenomenon of ‘extremism’ in and around conflict zones is ironic,” Patrick Hennigsen believes.
The source of that extremism is, in most cases, more than likely the result of covert operations conceived and managed by either the U.S., U.K. or Israel governments, through the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. You can be sure the ‘fat-trimmers’ from DOGE won’t be snooping around the clandestine offices of Langley, Virginia.”
‘Sock Puppets’
Even more troublingly, the Iowa researchers sought to “predict how people use social media” by “[seeding] online personas” – “[building] automated profiles that approximate actual user behavior.” The activities of these “sock puppets” would be informed by “algorithms [incorporating] public interactions of online communities on social media platforms” and “collecting browsing data from actual members of these communities.” In other words, industrial-scale spying on sensitive private user information to create realistic online personas.
It seems hardly coincidental that right around the time Iowa University’s Minerva Initiative grant was greenlit, the Pentagon began conducting wide-ranging “clandestine psychological operations” on social media, targeting the Arab and Muslim world. These efforts were highly sophisticated, employing expansive armies of bots and trolls with realistic AI-generated profile photos and accompanying ‘characters.’ In Iran, for instance, Pentagon sock puppets deployed varying narrative approaches to engender engagement and influence perceptions locally. Certain accounts accrued thousands of real-life followers.
Some Pentagon-run Iranian bots took hardline positions, accusing the government of being too soft on foreign policy and too liberal at home. Others posed as women opposed to compulsory hijab-wearing and promoted anti-government protests. These accounts dabbled in non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Iranian food and memes, to boost their authenticity. They also regularly engaged with Iranian users in Farsi, joking and making cultural references.
It is an obvious question whether Iowa University’s Minerva efforts were ultimately concerned with assisting the Pentagon to identify ideal means of encouraging “extremist ideologies” and “radicalization” among individuals and groups in target countries to the detriment of their own governments. The researchers needn’t have been conscious confederates in this scheme. Under the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA program, unwitting academics routinely carried out seemingly innocuous research that would covertly be put to “psychological warfare purposes” – markedly, often “on cultures and countries of interest to the CIA.”
Reinforcing this interpretation, the online Pentagon operation, unceremoniously busted very publicly in August 2022, had all the makings of a classic “cognitive” counterinsurgency effort to win hearts and minds in target countries – precisely Minerva Initiative’s preponderant beat. For decades, U.S. officials have openly spoken of war with Tehran as an inevitability and engaged in full-spectrum meddling efforts to foment insurrectionary upheaval locally. Notably, in October 2020, there was an Anglo-American coup in Kyrgyzstan, another country in the bot and troll operation’s crosshairs.
The U.S. national security state’s obsessive interest in AI – specifically in counterinsurgency – has been clear for many years. In 2019, the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting published an academic paper on “Artificial Intelligence enhanced systems to augment High Value Target (HVT) location” when conducting such operations. Israel’s deployment of artificial intelligence during the Gaza genocide gruesomely demonstrates the technology’s mass-killing potential, which experts believe marks the beginning of a new phase of warfare entirely.
Was the Minerva Initiative shut down to push Pentagon AI research further into secrecy—and profitability—via Stargate? That’s one theory. Another is that the administration wanted to remove external oversight completely. Jeffrey Kaye, an investigative journalist who has extensively documented U.S. psychological warfare operations, tells MintPress News the Initiative’s closure does not spell the end of the abuse of academia by the Department of Defense or other U.S. government agencies:
Last I heard, DARPA and RAND Corporation were not shuttered. And CIA and Fort Detrick certainly still engage U.S. universities and professors for a multitude of research projects for the war industry. Minerva’s closure may send a chill through the social science portion of the academic community that supports Washington’s war drive in China and elsewhere, but I expect long-term, there will be very little change in relations between the U.S. national security state and academic world.”
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/03/ ... dangerous/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Explosive New Book Argues Facebook Is a Global Engine of Harm and Corruption. Is Reform Possible?
Posted on March 28, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The tone of this post, which likely reflects that of the book it discusses, is overwrought. But that does not make it inaccurate. What caught my attention was the inclusion of Myanmar as an example of Facebook’s malign influence. The human cost of that civil war, which does have the US and China both stoking it, is ignored in the Western press. For instance, Myanmar is now on the verge of famine. The UN fingers the conflict as playing a major role.
One of the problem with books like this is that, in order to sell, they have to give considerable weight to the personality of the founder/CEO. That often leads to undue emphasis on scandalous-seeming details and muddles the message of how the broligarch lack of respect for rules, laws, and boundaries leads to misuse of power. The EU was ploddingly on the path of using its strict competition rules to curb the ambit and even conceivably the size of tech titans like Facebook and Google. But their process is slow. This horse has left the barn and is already in the next county.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Early in her chilling account of life as a Facebook executive, Sara Wynn-Williams drops an intriguing detail: Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite president. The young founder – still in his twenties at the time — picks Andrew Jackson, because he “got stuff done.”
“What about Lincoln or Roosevelt” the author asks the boss. Didn’t they get stuff done, too? Zuckerberg insists: “It’s Jackson. It’s not even close.”
Zuckerberg’s admiration for Jackson, known for his ruthless, authoritarian style—despite the bloodiness of his territorial expansion and role in the Trail of Tears—sheds light on much of what follows. Jackson made decisions unilaterally, and if you didn’t like it, you’d be steamrolled. He moved fast and broke things.
And that’s just what Zuckerberg does at Facebook, Wynn-Williams contends: creating “an autocracy of one.”
Fresh from her role as a New Zealand diplomat at the United Nations, Wynn-Williams joined Facebook fueled by a starry-eyed belief in its mission to connect and improve the world. As an advisor to Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, she helped shape the company’s strategy with governments globally. But over time, she was horrified to witness Zuckerberg’s inner circle cozy up to authoritarian regimes like China, help ignite deadly chaos in Myanmar, and meddle catastrophically in U.S. elections: “I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House [in 2016], and came to his own dark conclusions from that.”
All the while, she alleges, Zuckerberg and his top brass deceived the public, hid their actions, and lied to Congress. In Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Wynn-Williams illustrates how Zuckerberg aimed to expand Facebook by hook or by crook—and she insists that there has been no shortage of crook.
Superpowers for Juveniles – What Could Go Wrong?
It’s not too surprising that what unfolded during Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook, from 2011 to 2017, wasn’t so much a Machiavellian plot as it was, in her words, ‘like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.”
Zuckerberg comes off as a petty tyrant, combative and often surly, who throws fits if he loses board games and lives in a bubble where no one dares contradict him. Sandberg is revealed as a self-aggrandizing hypocrite, brutally demeaning and even sexually harassing female employees as she burnishes her “Lean In” image as a defender of women – and uses that deceptive image to curry favor for Facebook. Her real stance with female employees, writes the author, is “Lean in and lie back.”
When Wynn-Williams is brought onto the Facebook team by Marne Levine, a former Larry Summers protégé, her first exposure to the company’s culture is receiving a “Little Red Book,” which proclaims, “What we’re doing is more than capitalism; it’s social justice. Facebook is social change, humanitarian change. And we are a family. The Facebook Family.”
Family duties here mean being on call 24/7, and doing whatever it takes to keep Zuckerberg and the higher-ups satisfied. Sandberg herself insists that employees should be overloaded with work because “spare time” is where “trouble starts.” It’s a culture of exhaustion and control, where the staff is expected to comply without question, overlooking ethical concerns—like manipulating politicians with Facebook’s algorithms, publicly preaching privacy while secretly working to provide the Chinese government access to user data, and more. It’s a place where they’re expected to risk arrest or physical harm, stay silent when superiors make sexual advances, and hire only those loyal to the inner circle. All in the name of keeping the machine running.
Wynn-Williams pulls no punches when exposing Facebook’s darker side, with one key villain in the story being Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush aide and Sandberg’s ex-boyfriend. Kaplan – currently enjoying the title of Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta – is hired to handle Facebook’s relations with Republicans. His mission is to get politicians hooked on the platform so they’ll use it to win elections, and in return, Facebook gets to run wild, free from regulation. He’s all in on the strategy of buying off politicians, so oblivious to the law that he doesn’t even realize bribery is, you know, illegal. His specialty is selling political ads. Money-driven politics? A-ok with Kaplan.
Perhaps only a New Zealander like Wynn-Williams could have written the line, “I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US … on every issue from guns to abortion to much else.” Getting politicians to view the platform as their ticket to winning elections is, she argues, Facebook’s “ace”—the surefire way to avoid taxes and regulations. And once they got the U.S. game down, she contends, Facebook took this playbook global, with Sandberg pushing Kaplan to hire teams in Asia, Latin America, and Europe to teach politicians how to target voters with tailored ads, making them depend on Facebook for political power.
Now, Zuckerberg’s affinity for shenanigans like tax dodging probably won’t surprise anyone – how he teamed up with the Irish government on shady schemes like the “double Irish,” designed to skirt taxes. But it may raise eyebrows to read how Zuckerberg and his cronies apparently saw terrorism as a golden opportunity to get governments—eager to catch terrorists—to relax privacy laws. Wynn-Williams recounts how, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, Sandberg, attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, gleefully sent an email to the leadership team, “Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is ‘basically dead’ as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security.” In other words, tragedy = opportunity. If it strengthens your stranglehold on global politics, why not seize it?
Zuckerberg’s so-called “humanitarian” initiatives also come under fire. Internet.org, marketed as a way to bring the internet to the world’s poor, turns out to be nothing more than a cynical bait-and-switch. Instead of providing open, free internet access, it traps the poorest people in Zuckerberg’s ecosystem, forcing them into a Facebook-centric platform. The result? Governments have more control over what users see, and those users are more vulnerable to hate speech, fraud, and censorship.
The situation became deadly in Myanmar, where Facebook became the de facto gateway to the internet through Internet.org. Instead of promoting peace and understanding, Facebook became a tool for hate. Wynn-Williams describes how in 2014, hate speech targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority went viral on the platform, triggered by a false post accusing a Muslim man of raping a Buddhist woman. The violence that followed was horrific, but Facebook’s content moderation team claimed there was nothing they could do. When the UN later debunked their story, Facebook’s response was silence.
As Wynn-Williams puts it, “Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things… an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other.”
Meanwhile, Wynn-Williams considers Facebook’s role in the 2016 U.S. election as undeniable, holding that Zuckerberg and his team knew exactly what they were doing when they profited from Trump’s campaign, which was driven by misinformation and trolling. She alleges that Joel Kaplan saw outsider candidates like Trump as good for business—after all, inflammatory content generates engagement. Facebook insiders were so sure of their influence that they referred to 2016 as “the Facebook election.” Staff even embedded with Trump’s team to craft a targeted ad strategy using tools like “Custom Audiences” and “Lookalike Audiences,” helping Trump outspend Clinton on Facebook ads, making the platform his largest source of campaign funds.
Wynn-Williams’ account of Facebook’s dealings with the Chinese government is seriously alarming, and she claims Meta is right now actively blocking her from addressing Congress on the matter.
She alleges that under Zuckerberg’s direction, Facebook developed censorship tools for the Chinese Communist Party, including systems to monitor user posts. Despite publicly refusing to store user data in countries like Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil, Facebook agreed to store Chinese user data in China. Wynn-Williams writes that internally, the company feared exposing its hypocrisy—handing over data to China while resisting U.S. government requests, even concocting a scheme (which didn’t come to fruition) to justify its presence in China with a New York Times column by Nicolas Kristof. When Congress began asking questions, Zuckerberg was instructed to downplay the situation, claiming only Chinese data would be stored in China, even though non-Chinese data could also be temporarily stored on Chinese servers.
Then, there’s the horrific exploitation of teenagers that readers may recall from news reports. Wynn-Williams tells of the 2017 leaked documents revealing that Facebook targeted vulnerable teens for ads when they were feeling emotionally distressed, like when they felt “worthless” or “anxious.” Facebook tracked their interactions and body image concerns to drive engagement, even working with beauty companies to target girls right after they deleted selfies. All this while Zuckerberg and the company publicly claimed to have moral integrity. Behind the scenes, they knowingly designed addictive features to exploit young users, maximizing engagement at any cost.
Oligarchs in Ascendancy — How Can Anything Go Right?
It’s a bad sign when the author admits her ultimate hope amid all the malfeasance was that Facebook’s powerful algorithms—those same ones causing so much chaos—might be slowed down, not because they’re harming society, but because they could hurt Facebook’s bottom line. She thought this would happen with the explosion of chaos in Myanmar, but despite knowing how its platform fueled tensions that resulted in genocide, Facebook did nothing. The company’s response? Silence.
A key underlying problem, Wynn-Williams observes, it that Facebook’s top tiers are populated by a bunch of out-of-touch Harvard grads, far more interested in protecting their own interests than making the world a better place. By the end of her memoir, she concludes that Facebook is, in her words, a company that has become “an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other and monitor people at a scale that was never possible before.” For authoritarian regimes, it’s a dream tool. As Wynn-Williams succinctly puts it, “It gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.”
Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook came to a head in 2017 when she was fired, allegedly in retaliation for her complaints about Joel Kaplan’s sexual harassment—a fitting exclamation point on a story of idealistic dreams twisted into a corporate nightmare.
What about the nightmare for the rest of us? Regulating Meta obviously requires stronger legal frameworks, transparency, and accountability to ensure it serves the public good and curbs harmful practices.
It’s not hard to figure out that Facebook’s dominance and acquisitions of competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp should be subject to stricter antitrust laws. Breaking up Facebook or imposing limits on its acquisitions could foster competition and curb its unchecked power. (Despite Zuckerberg pouring $1 million into Trump’s inauguration, axing diversity programs, and scaling back social media content moderation to appease the president, the Trump administration is still using antitrust law to pursue anti-monopoly action against Meta—at least for now).
It’s also clear that governments could regulate political ads on Facebook, ensuring transparency on ad spending and sources, helping prevent foreign interference, misinformation, and unethical targeting tactics.
There’s a powerful argument that companies like Facebook should be treated as public utilities because they’ve become essential to communication and information, much like water or electricity. With billions relying on them for everything from socializing to business and news, these platforms hold massive societal power. Treating them as utilities would make them more accountable and regulated, ensuring they serve the public good instead of just chasing profit. This could help tackle problems like misinformation, privacy breaches, and monopolies while boosting transparency and fairness.
However, by most accounts, Mark Zuckerberg, rather than learning from past mistakes, is wholeheartedly embracing his role as a 21st-century oligarch. Recently, Meta announced it had terminated 20 employees for leaking confidential information to the media, amid growing scrutiny over Zuckerberg’s recent political shift toward aligning with President Trump. He also sat down with Joe Rogan, the podcast king, delivering a bold message: American business culture needs more masculine energy. If Meta was a noxious bro-fest before, we can only imagine the chaos that’s coming.
It’s not a pretty picture. But ultimately, if we want a fairer and more transparent digital landscape, the task is clear: level the playing field, restore trust, and ensure that the digital spaces we rely on serve us, not just their bottom line. Perhaps a tell-all from a former female employee can get the ball rolling. Stranger things have happened.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03 ... sible.html
Money is power. Corruption is inevitable in an exchange economy. Expecting corporation to put customers before profit is pure Pollyanna idealism. Expecting them not to spy on us is utter naivete. Facebook, like Trump and climate change, are symptoms of capitalism.
Posted on March 28, 2025 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The tone of this post, which likely reflects that of the book it discusses, is overwrought. But that does not make it inaccurate. What caught my attention was the inclusion of Myanmar as an example of Facebook’s malign influence. The human cost of that civil war, which does have the US and China both stoking it, is ignored in the Western press. For instance, Myanmar is now on the verge of famine. The UN fingers the conflict as playing a major role.
One of the problem with books like this is that, in order to sell, they have to give considerable weight to the personality of the founder/CEO. That often leads to undue emphasis on scandalous-seeming details and muddles the message of how the broligarch lack of respect for rules, laws, and boundaries leads to misuse of power. The EU was ploddingly on the path of using its strict competition rules to curb the ambit and even conceivably the size of tech titans like Facebook and Google. But their process is slow. This horse has left the barn and is already in the next county.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Early in her chilling account of life as a Facebook executive, Sara Wynn-Williams drops an intriguing detail: Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite president. The young founder – still in his twenties at the time — picks Andrew Jackson, because he “got stuff done.”
“What about Lincoln or Roosevelt” the author asks the boss. Didn’t they get stuff done, too? Zuckerberg insists: “It’s Jackson. It’s not even close.”
Zuckerberg’s admiration for Jackson, known for his ruthless, authoritarian style—despite the bloodiness of his territorial expansion and role in the Trail of Tears—sheds light on much of what follows. Jackson made decisions unilaterally, and if you didn’t like it, you’d be steamrolled. He moved fast and broke things.
And that’s just what Zuckerberg does at Facebook, Wynn-Williams contends: creating “an autocracy of one.”
Fresh from her role as a New Zealand diplomat at the United Nations, Wynn-Williams joined Facebook fueled by a starry-eyed belief in its mission to connect and improve the world. As an advisor to Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, she helped shape the company’s strategy with governments globally. But over time, she was horrified to witness Zuckerberg’s inner circle cozy up to authoritarian regimes like China, help ignite deadly chaos in Myanmar, and meddle catastrophically in U.S. elections: “I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House [in 2016], and came to his own dark conclusions from that.”
All the while, she alleges, Zuckerberg and his top brass deceived the public, hid their actions, and lied to Congress. In Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Wynn-Williams illustrates how Zuckerberg aimed to expand Facebook by hook or by crook—and she insists that there has been no shortage of crook.
Superpowers for Juveniles – What Could Go Wrong?
It’s not too surprising that what unfolded during Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook, from 2011 to 2017, wasn’t so much a Machiavellian plot as it was, in her words, ‘like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.”
Zuckerberg comes off as a petty tyrant, combative and often surly, who throws fits if he loses board games and lives in a bubble where no one dares contradict him. Sandberg is revealed as a self-aggrandizing hypocrite, brutally demeaning and even sexually harassing female employees as she burnishes her “Lean In” image as a defender of women – and uses that deceptive image to curry favor for Facebook. Her real stance with female employees, writes the author, is “Lean in and lie back.”
When Wynn-Williams is brought onto the Facebook team by Marne Levine, a former Larry Summers protégé, her first exposure to the company’s culture is receiving a “Little Red Book,” which proclaims, “What we’re doing is more than capitalism; it’s social justice. Facebook is social change, humanitarian change. And we are a family. The Facebook Family.”
Family duties here mean being on call 24/7, and doing whatever it takes to keep Zuckerberg and the higher-ups satisfied. Sandberg herself insists that employees should be overloaded with work because “spare time” is where “trouble starts.” It’s a culture of exhaustion and control, where the staff is expected to comply without question, overlooking ethical concerns—like manipulating politicians with Facebook’s algorithms, publicly preaching privacy while secretly working to provide the Chinese government access to user data, and more. It’s a place where they’re expected to risk arrest or physical harm, stay silent when superiors make sexual advances, and hire only those loyal to the inner circle. All in the name of keeping the machine running.
Wynn-Williams pulls no punches when exposing Facebook’s darker side, with one key villain in the story being Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush aide and Sandberg’s ex-boyfriend. Kaplan – currently enjoying the title of Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta – is hired to handle Facebook’s relations with Republicans. His mission is to get politicians hooked on the platform so they’ll use it to win elections, and in return, Facebook gets to run wild, free from regulation. He’s all in on the strategy of buying off politicians, so oblivious to the law that he doesn’t even realize bribery is, you know, illegal. His specialty is selling political ads. Money-driven politics? A-ok with Kaplan.
Perhaps only a New Zealander like Wynn-Williams could have written the line, “I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US … on every issue from guns to abortion to much else.” Getting politicians to view the platform as their ticket to winning elections is, she argues, Facebook’s “ace”—the surefire way to avoid taxes and regulations. And once they got the U.S. game down, she contends, Facebook took this playbook global, with Sandberg pushing Kaplan to hire teams in Asia, Latin America, and Europe to teach politicians how to target voters with tailored ads, making them depend on Facebook for political power.
Now, Zuckerberg’s affinity for shenanigans like tax dodging probably won’t surprise anyone – how he teamed up with the Irish government on shady schemes like the “double Irish,” designed to skirt taxes. But it may raise eyebrows to read how Zuckerberg and his cronies apparently saw terrorism as a golden opportunity to get governments—eager to catch terrorists—to relax privacy laws. Wynn-Williams recounts how, after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, Sandberg, attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, gleefully sent an email to the leadership team, “Terrorism means the conversation on privacy is ‘basically dead’ as policymakers are more concerned about intelligence/security.” In other words, tragedy = opportunity. If it strengthens your stranglehold on global politics, why not seize it?
Zuckerberg’s so-called “humanitarian” initiatives also come under fire. Internet.org, marketed as a way to bring the internet to the world’s poor, turns out to be nothing more than a cynical bait-and-switch. Instead of providing open, free internet access, it traps the poorest people in Zuckerberg’s ecosystem, forcing them into a Facebook-centric platform. The result? Governments have more control over what users see, and those users are more vulnerable to hate speech, fraud, and censorship.
The situation became deadly in Myanmar, where Facebook became the de facto gateway to the internet through Internet.org. Instead of promoting peace and understanding, Facebook became a tool for hate. Wynn-Williams describes how in 2014, hate speech targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority went viral on the platform, triggered by a false post accusing a Muslim man of raping a Buddhist woman. The violence that followed was horrific, but Facebook’s content moderation team claimed there was nothing they could do. When the UN later debunked their story, Facebook’s response was silence.
As Wynn-Williams puts it, “Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things… an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other.”
Meanwhile, Wynn-Williams considers Facebook’s role in the 2016 U.S. election as undeniable, holding that Zuckerberg and his team knew exactly what they were doing when they profited from Trump’s campaign, which was driven by misinformation and trolling. She alleges that Joel Kaplan saw outsider candidates like Trump as good for business—after all, inflammatory content generates engagement. Facebook insiders were so sure of their influence that they referred to 2016 as “the Facebook election.” Staff even embedded with Trump’s team to craft a targeted ad strategy using tools like “Custom Audiences” and “Lookalike Audiences,” helping Trump outspend Clinton on Facebook ads, making the platform his largest source of campaign funds.
Wynn-Williams’ account of Facebook’s dealings with the Chinese government is seriously alarming, and she claims Meta is right now actively blocking her from addressing Congress on the matter.
She alleges that under Zuckerberg’s direction, Facebook developed censorship tools for the Chinese Communist Party, including systems to monitor user posts. Despite publicly refusing to store user data in countries like Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil, Facebook agreed to store Chinese user data in China. Wynn-Williams writes that internally, the company feared exposing its hypocrisy—handing over data to China while resisting U.S. government requests, even concocting a scheme (which didn’t come to fruition) to justify its presence in China with a New York Times column by Nicolas Kristof. When Congress began asking questions, Zuckerberg was instructed to downplay the situation, claiming only Chinese data would be stored in China, even though non-Chinese data could also be temporarily stored on Chinese servers.
Then, there’s the horrific exploitation of teenagers that readers may recall from news reports. Wynn-Williams tells of the 2017 leaked documents revealing that Facebook targeted vulnerable teens for ads when they were feeling emotionally distressed, like when they felt “worthless” or “anxious.” Facebook tracked their interactions and body image concerns to drive engagement, even working with beauty companies to target girls right after they deleted selfies. All this while Zuckerberg and the company publicly claimed to have moral integrity. Behind the scenes, they knowingly designed addictive features to exploit young users, maximizing engagement at any cost.
Oligarchs in Ascendancy — How Can Anything Go Right?
It’s a bad sign when the author admits her ultimate hope amid all the malfeasance was that Facebook’s powerful algorithms—those same ones causing so much chaos—might be slowed down, not because they’re harming society, but because they could hurt Facebook’s bottom line. She thought this would happen with the explosion of chaos in Myanmar, but despite knowing how its platform fueled tensions that resulted in genocide, Facebook did nothing. The company’s response? Silence.
A key underlying problem, Wynn-Williams observes, it that Facebook’s top tiers are populated by a bunch of out-of-touch Harvard grads, far more interested in protecting their own interests than making the world a better place. By the end of her memoir, she concludes that Facebook is, in her words, a company that has become “an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other and monitor people at a scale that was never possible before.” For authoritarian regimes, it’s a dream tool. As Wynn-Williams succinctly puts it, “It gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top to bottom of society.”
Wynn-Williams’ time at Facebook came to a head in 2017 when she was fired, allegedly in retaliation for her complaints about Joel Kaplan’s sexual harassment—a fitting exclamation point on a story of idealistic dreams twisted into a corporate nightmare.
What about the nightmare for the rest of us? Regulating Meta obviously requires stronger legal frameworks, transparency, and accountability to ensure it serves the public good and curbs harmful practices.
It’s not hard to figure out that Facebook’s dominance and acquisitions of competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp should be subject to stricter antitrust laws. Breaking up Facebook or imposing limits on its acquisitions could foster competition and curb its unchecked power. (Despite Zuckerberg pouring $1 million into Trump’s inauguration, axing diversity programs, and scaling back social media content moderation to appease the president, the Trump administration is still using antitrust law to pursue anti-monopoly action against Meta—at least for now).
It’s also clear that governments could regulate political ads on Facebook, ensuring transparency on ad spending and sources, helping prevent foreign interference, misinformation, and unethical targeting tactics.
There’s a powerful argument that companies like Facebook should be treated as public utilities because they’ve become essential to communication and information, much like water or electricity. With billions relying on them for everything from socializing to business and news, these platforms hold massive societal power. Treating them as utilities would make them more accountable and regulated, ensuring they serve the public good instead of just chasing profit. This could help tackle problems like misinformation, privacy breaches, and monopolies while boosting transparency and fairness.
However, by most accounts, Mark Zuckerberg, rather than learning from past mistakes, is wholeheartedly embracing his role as a 21st-century oligarch. Recently, Meta announced it had terminated 20 employees for leaking confidential information to the media, amid growing scrutiny over Zuckerberg’s recent political shift toward aligning with President Trump. He also sat down with Joe Rogan, the podcast king, delivering a bold message: American business culture needs more masculine energy. If Meta was a noxious bro-fest before, we can only imagine the chaos that’s coming.
It’s not a pretty picture. But ultimately, if we want a fairer and more transparent digital landscape, the task is clear: level the playing field, restore trust, and ensure that the digital spaces we rely on serve us, not just their bottom line. Perhaps a tell-all from a former female employee can get the ball rolling. Stranger things have happened.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03 ... sible.html
Money is power. Corruption is inevitable in an exchange economy. Expecting corporation to put customers before profit is pure Pollyanna idealism. Expecting them not to spy on us is utter naivete. Facebook, like Trump and climate change, are symptoms of capitalism.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
TikTok and the threat to cultural hegemony
What is it about this particular social media platform that has the imperialists so worked up?
Carlos Martinez
Friday 28 March 2025
The real complaint being made by western states is that TikTok is insufficiently anti-China and insufficiently pro-genocide.
Reproduced from Friends of Socialist China, with thanks.
*****
A recent article in the Times, entitled ‘Why TikTok makes people more eager to visit China’, worried that “people who spend hours scrolling on TikTok are more likely to want to visit China – possibly because the platform censors material that portrays the country in a negative light”. The article’s author was particularly concerned that TikTok users might “see an airbrushed view of China and its human rights record”.
Researchers found that, horrifyingly, users searching on TikTok for terms such as ‘Tiananmen’ or ‘Tibet’ were exposed to a significant number of results that failed to denounce the Communist Party of China (CPC). Indeed, it seems that heavy TikTok users typically rate China’s human rights record as “medium”, whereas non-TikTok users rate it as “poor”.
Lee Jussim, a co-author of the research on which the Times article was based, said: “We did the studies because there was ample reason long before our studies to suspect CCP manipulation of TikTok. It’s one thing to suspect, it’s quite another to find it empirically.” He concluded: “Social media companies should be required to publicly disclose how their algorithms determine what content users can access.” (9 February 2025)
It is doubtful whether X would be happy with that!
Imperialist propaganda losing its impact?
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s classic 1988 work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media explored the connection between the economic interests of the ruling class and the ideas that are communicated via mass media:
“The media serve, and propagandise on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
Western media hostility to China has reached fever pitch in recent years. As the crisis of US and British imperialism has intensified, so their need to weaken China by undermining the rule of the CPC has grown ever greater. This is why the USA and British have been ratcheting up their propaganda war against the People’s Republic.
The accusation that China is committing a genocide (or “cultural genocide”) in Xinjiang has been repeated so often as to acquire the force of truth, in spite of the notable absence of any meaningful evidence in its support. Rioters in Hong Kong are presented as saintly defenders of democratic principles. Chinese weather balloons, kettles and smart TVs are all spying on us, and inscrutable Chinese scientists are sending our secrets directly to the People’s Liberation Army.
Fu Manchu is back, and this time he wants to take our freedoms away.
In Britain as in the USA, the bourgeoisie is divided on many issues, but there is a clear consensus when it comes to waging a propaganda war on China. And yet it seems that anti-China propaganda is losing its impact, particularly among young people.
The statistical categories presented by the authors of the research are ‘those who don’t use TikTok’ and ‘those who spent more than three hours a day on the platform’. Age is fairly obviously a confounding variable here: a significant majority of TikTok users are under 30, and only 27 percent are over the age of 45. Young adults (18-24 years) make up over half of TikTok content creators.
So inasmuch as we can derive anything useful from the research, it’s that younger generations are less invested than their grandparents in idiotic cold war narratives. That may be partly a reflection of the fact that TikTok’s algorithms – in flagrant violation of the well-known and universal rules of social media – don’t actively boost anti-China content and suppress pro-China content. But it also speaks to the genuine concerns and interests of young people.
For example, surveys consistently show that young people are more worried about the prospect of climate breakdown and are more likely to consider the environmental crisis as an existential threat to humanity.
As such, they might be expected to welcome the news that China will account for 60 percent of all renewable energy capacity installed worldwide between now and 2030 (according to the International Energy Agency); that China has likely already reached its 2030 goal of peaking carbon emissions; that China is fast phasing out fossil fuel vehicles; that China leads the world in afforestation and biodiversity protection; and that China’s investment in renewables has led to an 80 percent reduction in the cost of solar and wind energy globally.
Furthermore, young people are notorious for having a curious predilection for peace, and perhaps many of them are impressed by the fact that China hasn’t been to war in over four decades; that it has one overseas military base, compared to the USA’s 800; that it has a consistent policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, while the USA has a consistent policy of nuclear bullying; that it has worked diligently towards peace in Gaza and Ukraine, while the USA has been financing, arming and promoting genocide and war.
While TikTok doesn’t actively suppress negative stories about China, what makes it unique among major social media apps is that it also doesn’t suppress positive stories about China. Users are exposed to a variety of voices, including those who highlight China’s extraordinary development, its contributions to climate change solutions, its successes tackling poverty, and its appeal as a travel destination.
Cultural hegemony under threat
The real concern underlying complaints about TikTok isn’t that the app is distorting the truth; rather, that it’s disrupting the west’s long-standing control over historical and political narratives. This becomes even more apparent when we look at how TikTok has influenced global awareness of the genocide in Gaza.
Unlike the mainstream media, where coverage of Gaza is filtered through a lens of racist and pro-imperialist bias, TikTok has become a key platform where young people witness firsthand footage from Gaza, hear perspectives directly from Palestinians, and engage with viewpoints that challenge mainstream narratives. This loss of narrative control is what prompted the Joe Biden regime to attempt to ban TikTok last year. The existence of a popular media space where imperialist propaganda is no longer automatically accepted as truth is simply unacceptable to the ruling class.
TikTok: insufficiently anti-China and insufficiently pro-genocide
A quick online investigation reveals that the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) – the organisation that carried out the research described in the article – is not quite as “neutral and independent” as it claims to be.
Ali Abunimah, writing in the Electronic Intifada last year, noted that “the NCRI is led by individuals closely tied to various Israel lobby groups with a long history of defaming Palestinians and advocates for their rights as ‘antisemites’”. (What’s behind Washington Post hit piece on EI?, 28 January 2024)
It turns out the NCRI has received funding from the ultra-right Charles Koch Foundation, as well as the Israel on Campus Coalition. NCRI affiliate Kelli Holden was formerly chief of operations of CIA Counterintelligence. Former NCRI director of intelligence Alex Goldenberg was a fellow with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
That is, a research body purporting to be ‘independent’ has deep links to the security state and the zionist lobby. Little wonder then that the ‘smoking gun’ it presents is that TikTok is insufficiently anti-China and insufficiently pro-genocide.
Throughout the western world, people are learning to question and reject the crass propaganda pumped out by the mainstream media’s state department stenographers in relation to Palestine, China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, the DPRK and more. This is an entirely welcome development.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/03/28/ne ... ony-china/
What is it about this particular social media platform that has the imperialists so worked up?
Carlos Martinez
Friday 28 March 2025
The real complaint being made by western states is that TikTok is insufficiently anti-China and insufficiently pro-genocide.
Reproduced from Friends of Socialist China, with thanks.
*****
A recent article in the Times, entitled ‘Why TikTok makes people more eager to visit China’, worried that “people who spend hours scrolling on TikTok are more likely to want to visit China – possibly because the platform censors material that portrays the country in a negative light”. The article’s author was particularly concerned that TikTok users might “see an airbrushed view of China and its human rights record”.
Researchers found that, horrifyingly, users searching on TikTok for terms such as ‘Tiananmen’ or ‘Tibet’ were exposed to a significant number of results that failed to denounce the Communist Party of China (CPC). Indeed, it seems that heavy TikTok users typically rate China’s human rights record as “medium”, whereas non-TikTok users rate it as “poor”.
Lee Jussim, a co-author of the research on which the Times article was based, said: “We did the studies because there was ample reason long before our studies to suspect CCP manipulation of TikTok. It’s one thing to suspect, it’s quite another to find it empirically.” He concluded: “Social media companies should be required to publicly disclose how their algorithms determine what content users can access.” (9 February 2025)
It is doubtful whether X would be happy with that!
Imperialist propaganda losing its impact?
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s classic 1988 work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media explored the connection between the economic interests of the ruling class and the ideas that are communicated via mass media:
“The media serve, and propagandise on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
Western media hostility to China has reached fever pitch in recent years. As the crisis of US and British imperialism has intensified, so their need to weaken China by undermining the rule of the CPC has grown ever greater. This is why the USA and British have been ratcheting up their propaganda war against the People’s Republic.
The accusation that China is committing a genocide (or “cultural genocide”) in Xinjiang has been repeated so often as to acquire the force of truth, in spite of the notable absence of any meaningful evidence in its support. Rioters in Hong Kong are presented as saintly defenders of democratic principles. Chinese weather balloons, kettles and smart TVs are all spying on us, and inscrutable Chinese scientists are sending our secrets directly to the People’s Liberation Army.
Fu Manchu is back, and this time he wants to take our freedoms away.
In Britain as in the USA, the bourgeoisie is divided on many issues, but there is a clear consensus when it comes to waging a propaganda war on China. And yet it seems that anti-China propaganda is losing its impact, particularly among young people.
The statistical categories presented by the authors of the research are ‘those who don’t use TikTok’ and ‘those who spent more than three hours a day on the platform’. Age is fairly obviously a confounding variable here: a significant majority of TikTok users are under 30, and only 27 percent are over the age of 45. Young adults (18-24 years) make up over half of TikTok content creators.
So inasmuch as we can derive anything useful from the research, it’s that younger generations are less invested than their grandparents in idiotic cold war narratives. That may be partly a reflection of the fact that TikTok’s algorithms – in flagrant violation of the well-known and universal rules of social media – don’t actively boost anti-China content and suppress pro-China content. But it also speaks to the genuine concerns and interests of young people.
For example, surveys consistently show that young people are more worried about the prospect of climate breakdown and are more likely to consider the environmental crisis as an existential threat to humanity.
As such, they might be expected to welcome the news that China will account for 60 percent of all renewable energy capacity installed worldwide between now and 2030 (according to the International Energy Agency); that China has likely already reached its 2030 goal of peaking carbon emissions; that China is fast phasing out fossil fuel vehicles; that China leads the world in afforestation and biodiversity protection; and that China’s investment in renewables has led to an 80 percent reduction in the cost of solar and wind energy globally.
Furthermore, young people are notorious for having a curious predilection for peace, and perhaps many of them are impressed by the fact that China hasn’t been to war in over four decades; that it has one overseas military base, compared to the USA’s 800; that it has a consistent policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, while the USA has a consistent policy of nuclear bullying; that it has worked diligently towards peace in Gaza and Ukraine, while the USA has been financing, arming and promoting genocide and war.
While TikTok doesn’t actively suppress negative stories about China, what makes it unique among major social media apps is that it also doesn’t suppress positive stories about China. Users are exposed to a variety of voices, including those who highlight China’s extraordinary development, its contributions to climate change solutions, its successes tackling poverty, and its appeal as a travel destination.
Cultural hegemony under threat
The real concern underlying complaints about TikTok isn’t that the app is distorting the truth; rather, that it’s disrupting the west’s long-standing control over historical and political narratives. This becomes even more apparent when we look at how TikTok has influenced global awareness of the genocide in Gaza.
Unlike the mainstream media, where coverage of Gaza is filtered through a lens of racist and pro-imperialist bias, TikTok has become a key platform where young people witness firsthand footage from Gaza, hear perspectives directly from Palestinians, and engage with viewpoints that challenge mainstream narratives. This loss of narrative control is what prompted the Joe Biden regime to attempt to ban TikTok last year. The existence of a popular media space where imperialist propaganda is no longer automatically accepted as truth is simply unacceptable to the ruling class.
TikTok: insufficiently anti-China and insufficiently pro-genocide
A quick online investigation reveals that the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) – the organisation that carried out the research described in the article – is not quite as “neutral and independent” as it claims to be.
Ali Abunimah, writing in the Electronic Intifada last year, noted that “the NCRI is led by individuals closely tied to various Israel lobby groups with a long history of defaming Palestinians and advocates for their rights as ‘antisemites’”. (What’s behind Washington Post hit piece on EI?, 28 January 2024)
It turns out the NCRI has received funding from the ultra-right Charles Koch Foundation, as well as the Israel on Campus Coalition. NCRI affiliate Kelli Holden was formerly chief of operations of CIA Counterintelligence. Former NCRI director of intelligence Alex Goldenberg was a fellow with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
That is, a research body purporting to be ‘independent’ has deep links to the security state and the zionist lobby. Little wonder then that the ‘smoking gun’ it presents is that TikTok is insufficiently anti-China and insufficiently pro-genocide.
Throughout the western world, people are learning to question and reject the crass propaganda pumped out by the mainstream media’s state department stenographers in relation to Palestine, China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, the DPRK and more. This is an entirely welcome development.
https://thecommunists.org/2025/03/28/ne ... ony-china/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."