Censorship, fake news, perception management

Questions, Comments, Concerns etc about The Bell
User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 09, 2025 3:53 pm

NYT Rejects Quakers’ Ad Calling Gaza a ‘Genocide’
January 8, 2025

“An outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth” — that’s how an American Friends Service Committee spokesperson responded to the paper’s refusal to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Image
The New York Times Building in Manhattan. (Adam Jones on Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

By Eloise Goldsmith
Common Dreams

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, announced Wednesday that it has cancelled planned advertising with The New York Times after the outlet rejected one of the group’s proposed ads that read:

“Tell Congress to stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza now! As a Quaker organization, we work for peace. Join us. Tell the President and Congress to stop the killing and starvation in Gaza.”

AFSC alleges that after receiving the text of the ad, the Times suggested they swap the word “genocide” for the word “war.” The word war has “an entirely different meaning both colloquially and under international law,” the Quaker group wrote.

AFSC said they rejected this proposed approach and then received an email from the outlet’s “Ad Acceptability Team” which read, in part, according to AFSC:

“Various international bodies, human rights organizations, and governments have differing views on the situation. In line with our commitment to factual accuracy and adherence to legal standards, we must ensure that all advertising content complies with these widely applied definitions.”

“New York Times Advertising works with parties submitting proposed ads to ensure they are in compliance with our acceptability guidelines. This instance was no different, and is entirely in line with the standards we apply to all ad submissions,” a spokesperson for the Times said in an email to Common Dreams.

Image
Arch Street Friends Meeting House in Old City, Philadelphia, November 2022. (Billy Wilson, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

AFSC counters that a number of entities and individuals, such as the international human rights organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have determined that Israel is committing genocide or acts of genocide in Gaza.

“The New York Times advertises a wide variety of products and advocacy messages on which there are differing views. Why is it not acceptable to publicize the meticulously documented atrocities committed by Israel and paid for by the United States?” said Layne Mullett, director of media relations for AFSC, in a statement.

Joyce Ajlouny, general secretary of AFSC, said that “the refusal of The New York Times to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth. Palestinians and allies have been silenced and marginalized in the media for decades as these institutions choose silence over accountability.”

The AFSC has been a loud voice calling for a cease-fire and ending U.S. military support for Israel. For example, in April, the group announced a Tax Day campaign, a day of action where people held events and met with their members of Congress to demand they stop voting to spend U.S. tax dollars on military assistance to Israel.

AFSC staff in Gaza have also provided 1.5 million meals, hygiene kits, and other units of humanitarian aid to internally displaced people since October 2023, according to the Wednesday statement.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/08/n ... -genocide/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 12, 2025 3:30 pm

The structure of the US "industrial-censorship complex"
January 10, 14:04

Image

The structure of the US "industrial-censorship complex" - a censorship system that seemingly does not exist.

In January 2017, Obama’s outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Jehovah Johnson made protecting election infrastructure part of his agency’s mandate.

And right after that:

DHS created a Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to focus on “disinformation about election infrastructure.”

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center expanded its interagency mandate to counter foreign influence operations.

The FBI created a Foreign Influence Task Force to “identify and counter malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States,” with a particular focus on voting and elections —

key components of what has come to be known as the censorship industrial complex.

In 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee requested a “Study on Russian Interference in Social Media” — studies that served as the rationale for pressuring social media companies to end their faltering on content moderation.

The committee also tasked Graphika, a social media analytics firm, with co-authoring a report on Russian interference in social media. Interestingly, Graphika lists DARPA and the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative, which funds “basic social science research,” as key partners. And Graphika’s report “on Russian interference in social media” became the rationale for the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, led by the Stanford Internet Observatory — a key element of the government’s censorship policing during and after the 2020 election.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab is an organization that joined the Stanford-led quartet. Funded in part by the State Department — including through the Center for Global Engagement — and the Department of Energy, the think tank counts among its directors the heads of the CIA and the secretaries of defense. The lab’s senior director is Graham Bookey, President Obama’s former top aide for cybersecurity, counterterrorism, intelligence, and homeland security.

The third of the four organizations to join the Election Integrity Partnership was the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, launched in 2019. Stanford alumna and visiting professor Kate Starbird co-founded the center. The National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research have provided funding for Dr. Starbird’s work on social media. The observatory is a program of Stanford’s Cyber ​​Policy Center, whose members include former Obama National Security Council official and Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul, as well as other prominent figures with security backgrounds or ties to the field.

Ahead of the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has taken on the task of protecting election infrastructure, expanded its scope to include combating disinformation perceived as a threat to election security. Eventually, this came to encompass any American political speech, including speculation and even satire to the extent that it questions or undermines state-sanctioned narratives about unprecedented mass mail-in elections.

https://t.me/budni_manipulyatora/3574 - zinc

On the question of whether censorship on social networks will disappear after the recent "relaxations".
It is worth noting that the current censorship system was developed and implemented under Trump.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9602851.html

Telegram on request

January 9, 23:08

Image

Telegram on request

Telegram shared 2,253 user data with US law enforcement in response to 900 government requests after changing its policy in September 2024.

According to Telegram's transparency report, the messenger's administration has complied with 900 requests from the US government since January 1, 2024, handing over data on 2,253 users. Previously, the platform only provided information (IP addresses and phone numbers) in cases of terrorism, having complied with only 14 requests by September 30, 2024, affecting 108 users. Following the policy change, Telegram will also provide data to law enforcement in other cases related to criminal activity, including cybercrime, sale of illegal goods, and online fraud.

Statistics for the US will be updated in April 2025. Information on Russia has not yet been updated, but according to Telegram, not a single request was satisfied from January 1 to September 30, 2024.

The privacy policy changes were made due to government pressure, particularly following the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov in France in late August. Durov was charged with cybercrime, organized fraud, distribution of illegal material, and failure to cooperate with an investigative agency.

While the policy change has caused a number of cybercrime groups to leave Telegram, according to KELA, the cybercrime landscape has not changed. Hackers and fraudsters continue to actively use Telegram as a communications platform, to sell illegal services, conduct cyberattacks, sell stolen data, or as a command and control server for their malware.

In 2017, a law came into force in Russia requiring telecom operators to store records of customers’ phone messages and internet traffic for six months, as well as decryption keys, and provide them to the FSB upon request. That same year, the FSB made a similar request to Telegram, demanding that it provide keys to decrypt messages from six people accused of the terrorist attack in St. Petersburg, but the messenger developers refused to do so.

https://www.computerra.ru/306545/telegr ... zovatelej/ - zinc

Because Pasha was "deactivated" in the US, not in Russia. Whoever "deactivated" Pasha is the one who is dancing with him.
Pasha's brother stayed in Russia. It's clear that he won't leave anywhere from where he came from.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9602139.html

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 19, 2025 5:46 pm

Kit Klarenberg: Collapsing Empire: RIP CIA Front’s ‘Overt Operations’
January 18, 2025 Leave
By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 1/5/25

In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web. Until recently, a searchable interface allowed visitors to view detailed records of Washington-funded NGOs, civil society groups, and media projects in particular countries – covering most of the world – the sums involved, and entities responsible for delivering these initiatives. This resource has now inexplicably vanished, and with it, enormous amounts of incontrovertible, self-incriminating evidence of destructive US skullduggery abroad.

Take for example NED grant records for Georgia, the site of recent repeated colour revolution efforts, at the forefront of which were Endowment-bankrolled organisations. While still accessible via internet archives, they were deleted during the summer. Today, visitors to associated URLs are redirected to a brief entry simply titled “Eurasia”. The accompanying text describes in very broad terms the Endowment’s aims regionally and the total being spent, but the crucial questions of where and on what aren’t clarified. In a comic hypocrisy too, the blurb boldly states:

“The heart of NED’s work in the region is the need to maintain access to objective information for local populations. Across the region, government actors are attempting to limit the space for citizens to distribute information and communicate freely online.”

Resultantly, independent academics, activists, researchers, and journalists have been deprived of an invaluable resource for tracking and exposing the Empire’s machinations. Yet, the Endowment incinerating its public paper trail can only be considered a significant victory for these same actors. NED’s explicit and avowed raison d’être was to do publicly what US intelligence did – and in many cases still does – covertly. Now, after 40 years of wreaking havoc worldwide in service of the Empire, the CIA front has been forced underground, defeating its entire purpose. How long can it now survive?

Image

NED’s ‘Eurasia’ entry
‘Spyless Coups’

NED was founded in November 1983, after the CIA became embroiled in a series of embarrassing public scandals. Then-Agency director William Casey was central to its construction. His objective was to create a public mechanism to conduct traditional CIA meddling overseas, except out in the open. Ever since, the Endowment has financed countless opposition groups, activist movements, media outlets, and trade unions to the tune of untold millions to engage in propaganda and political activism, to disrupt, destabilize, and displace ‘enemy’ regimes the world over.

The NED’s true nature was openly acknowledged by the mainstream media for many years. In June 1986, longtime Endowment president Carl Gershman told the New York Times, “it would be terrible for democratic groups around the world” to be subsidized by the CIA. Past exposure of such connivances meant they had been “discontinued”, and farmed out to NED. Several high-ranking interviewees strenuously denied there was any connection between NED and the Agency, although the outlet acknowledged many Endowment programs seemed “superficially similar” to past CIA operations.

At this time, NED was hard at work killing off Communism in the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia. This included for instance enormous investment in Poland’s famous Solidarity trade union, which became a global emblem of anti-Communist resistance. In September 1991, the Washington Post published a highly laudatory appraisal of these efforts, stating the “political miracles” the Endowment achieved in the former Soviet sphere had ushered in a “new world of spyless coups” and “innocence abroad”:

“The old era of covert action is dead. The world doesn’t run in secret anymore. We are now living in the age of Overt Action…When such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection. Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death, if discovered. Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life.”

NED proceeded to take down a number of governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s, very overtly. In many cases, mainstream outlets published highly revealing accounts detailing precisely how. In Ukraine in November 2004, Endowment-trained and bankrolled activists forced a rerun of that year’s presidential election to install a pro-Western puppet. As The Guardian jubilantly reported, the entire effort was “an American creation” and “sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing,” which had been repeatedly deployed in the new millennium to “topple unsavoury regimes”:

“Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations…the operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.”

‘Kiss of Death’

The next year, USAID published glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, bragging extensively about how it and NED were fundamental to a wave of insurrectionary upheaval in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere during the first years of the 21st century. Fast forward to February 2014, and Ukraine’s government once again fell victim to an Endowment-orchestrated coup, in the form of the Maidan ‘revolution’. Yet, the media either ignored the irrefutable US role in fomenting the upheaval, or dismissed the proposition as “Russian disinformation” or conspiracy theory.



Democracy Rising

4.12MB ∙ PDF file

Download https://www.kitklarenberg.com/api/v1/fi ... ZiMdj9mg9g

This is despite; contemporary polls never showing majority Ukrainian support for the Maidan protests; ousted President Viktor Yanukovych remaining the most popular politician in the country until his last day in office; every actor at Maidan’s forefront, including the individuals who started the demonstrations, receiving NED or USAID funding; leaders of Washington-financed organizations in the country openly advertising their desire to overthrow Yanukovych in the years prior; and the Endowment pumping around $20 million into the country in 2013 alone.

Image
A Maidan crowd

This mass omertà, which has intensified since, may be attributable to ever-rising hostility towards NED by foreign governments and populations, and associated efforts to restrict or outright proscribe the organization. The reality of the Endowment’s raison d’être and modus operandi has thus not only become unsayable, but must be vehemently denied by Western journalists. Representatively, a July 2015 Guardian report on Russia banning NED quite unbelievably relied on a brief quote from the Endowment’s own website to describe its operations.

Image

While the mainstream media may have remained silent on the NED’s mephitic influence overseas over the past decade, the same is not true of dissident academics, activists, researchers, and journalists. The Endowment grant database served as an invaluable tool for keeping a close eye on Washington’s international intrigues, and mapping the personal and organisational connections of NED-sponsorsed agents and entities of influence. Meanwhile, the Enowment’s status as a CIA front could be simply proven, via multiple public admissions of its own leaders.

Whenever protests erupted somewhere in the world and received widespread Western news coverage, concerned citizens could consult the NED grant database and find in the overwhelming majority of cases, most if not all individuals and groups quoted in media reports were in receipt of Endowment funding. While impossible to quantify, it would be unsurprising if dissident voices calling attention to this fact have helped avert colour revolution efforts, disrupted meddling campaigns, protected popular governments and political figures, and more.

Of course, despite NED brazenly purging evidence of its vast operations from the web, that conniving continues apace regardless – now, covertly. One might even argue the Endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous resultantly, given individuals and organizations can conceal their funding sources. But the move amply shows NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates that “overt operations” with open US funding are now the very “kiss of death” the Endowment was meant to replace. The Empire is on the run.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/01/kit ... perations/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 20, 2025 3:48 pm

Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East Editor Exposed as CIA, Mossad Collaborator
January 18, 2025

Image
Compilation image showing Raffi Berg with Benjamin Netanyahu behind him. Photo: MintPress News.

By Alan MacLeod – Jan 3, 2025

A senior BBC editor at the center of an ongoing scandal into the network’s systematic pro-Israel bias is, in fact, a former member of a CIA propaganda outfit, MintPress News can reveal. Raffi Berg, an Englishman who heads the BBC’s Middle East desk, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit that, by his own admission, was a CIA front group.

Berg is currently the subject of considerable scrutiny after thirteen BBC employees spoke out, claiming, among other things, that his “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel” and that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.

OUR MAN IN LONDON
Berg came to public attention in December after Drop Site News published an investigation based on interviews with 13 BBC staffers who present him as a domineering figure, systematically blocking coverage critical of Israel and manipulating stories to suit pro-Israel narratives.

The 9000-word report, written by popular journalist Owen Jones, is extensive and well-researched. However, one aspect of the story it almost completely avoids is Berg’s connections to the U.S. national security state, which MintPress News can now reveal.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Berg was an employee of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) three years before joining the BBC. The FBIS is understood the world over to be a CIA front group known for gathering intelligence for the agency.

Image
A screenshot of the LinkedIn profile of Raffi Berg

As the first two lines of its Wikipedia entry read:

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States.

In 2005, the FBIS was subsumed into the CIA’s new Open Source Enterprise.

Berg does not dispute that he was, in fact, a CIA man. In fact, according to a 2020 interview with The Jewish Telegraph, he was “absolutely thrilled” to be secretly working for the agency. Berg said, “One day, I was taken to one side and told, ‘you may or may not know that we are part of CIA, but don’t go telling people.’” He was unsurprised by this news, as the application process was extremely long and rigorous. “They went through my character and background with a fine tooth comb, asking if I had ever visited communist countries and, if I had, did I form any relationships while I was there,” he said.

MOSSAD COLLABORATOR
The CIA, however, is not the only clandestine spy organization with which Berg has a long history of collaborating. He also has a rich professional relationship with Mossad, Israel’s premier intelligence agency.

In 2020, for instance, Berg published “Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,” a book that tells the story of the Israeli operation to clandestinely smuggle Ethiopian Jews into Israel. That the 320-page account lionizes Israel and its spies is perhaps unsurprising, considering how much input Mossad had in its creation. Berg said that he wrote the book “in collaboration” with Mossad commander Dani Limor, whom he relied on extensively, as he, in his own words, knew “next to nothing” about the story and its background before writing it. Limor opened numerous doors and was able to secure “over 100 hours of interviews” with Israeli military and intelligence officials, including with the head of Mossad.

Limor and Berg became extremely close friends. In 2020, he posted a picture of himself with his arm around the ex-Mossad commander. The first page of “Red Sea Spies” is simply a glowing recommendation from Efraim Halevy, former director of Mossad, a group Berg describes as “the world’s greatest intelligence service.”

Berg has aggressively promoted his book and has, on multiple occasions, expressed his delight that Benjamin Netanyahu has shown interest in it. In August 2020, for example, he shared a picture of Netanyahu at his desk in front of a copy of his book. “First time I’ve been on a prime minister’s bookshelf” I know I’ve got one of Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s on mine – but wow!” he exclaimed, tagging Mossad, the Israeli Likud Party, and the Israeli Embassies in the United Kingdom and United States.

The following year, he messaged Netanyahu’s son, Yair, stating, “Your dad has my book, ‘Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,’ and sent me a lovely letter about it.” That letter can be seen on the wall of Berg’s office in his many public posts and videos, framed and placed beside pictures of him meeting a Mossad commander and meeting Mark Regev, the former spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

That a BBC Middle East editor would not only frame these images and documents and put them pride of place in his office but also choose to display them while talking publicly and in an official role is telling. The BBC sells itself as an impartial distributor of news on the Middle East and beyond. And yet, Berg, who, by most accounts, calls the shots when it comes to the network’s Israel-Palestine coverage, clearly believes that this is acceptable and unremarkable behavior.

If the opposite were true – that even a low-level BBC employee was openly sharing pictures of themselves embracing Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar or displaying a glowing letter from Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei – it is clear that there would be serious repercussions. The BBC suspended six of its reporters for simply liking pro-Palestine tweets. And yet, in Berg’s case, his overt pro-Israel advocacy has been treated as entirely unproblematic.

RELENTLESSLY PRO-ISRAEL
Of course, it is entirely possible that a pro-Israel stance would help one climb the ladder at the BBC, an organization long known to display a strong bias in favor of the country and its interests.

Born and raised in England, Berg always took a keen interest in Israel, moving there to study Jewish and Israel Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked at the FBIS between 1997 and 1998 and joined the BBC in 2001, starting as a world news writer and producer.

One of his first BBC articles profiled the Israeli military and its recruits, presenting the IDF as brave protectors of their homeland and as a “source of national pride” and framed women serving as a win for sexual equality.

In 2009, at the height of Operation Cast Lead – the Israeli attack on Gaza that killed more than 1,000 people – Berg attended a pro-Israel demonstration in central London. Moreover, he even chastised the Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, for noting that only 5,000 people showed up to the event. In Berg’s opinion, there were three times as many in attendance. The BBC would later change its guidelines to prevent its newsroom employees from attending controversial demonstrations.

During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military was found to have indiscriminately targeted and killed civilians, used Palestinians as human shields, and used banned chemical weapons, such as white phosphorous, on civilian areas.

Three years later, in November 2012, Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense, a high-profile, bloody assault on Gaza that made worldwide headlines. As Israel bombarded the densely-populated civilian area, Berg went on his own internal offensive, telling his BBC colleagues to word their stories in a way that does not blame or “put undue emphasis” on Israel. Instead, leaked emails show, he encouraged journalists to present the attack as an operation “aimed at ending rocket fire from Gaza,” thereby framing Hamas as the aggressor.

Another Berg email instructed his coworkers to “Please remember, Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt controls the southern border” – a highly contestable opinion not shared by the United Nations, which declared that Israel was the occupying power besieging the strip.



EXTRAORDINARY REVELATIONS
Shortly after Operation Pillar of Defense, Berg was promoted, becoming head of the BBC’s Middle East desk. This position gives him enormous influence in shaping the platform’s presentation of Israel’s current war on Gaza. In this role, he has helped turn the network into “systematic Israeli propaganda,” according to one journalist quoted by Jones in his Drop Site investigation. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” said another.

The BBC staff Jones talked to painted a picture of a pro-Israel zealot systematically suppressing any content or information that would paint Tel Aviv in a negative light. A micromanager, numerous journalists reportedly attempted to notify management of their issues with Berg, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. “Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one staffer stated. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but [management] just ignore it.”

“How much power he has is wild,” another journalist told Jones, who explained that essentially every story or segment featuring Israel would have to be signed off by Berg first, even leaving other editors in “extreme fear” of commissioning anything without his approval.

Berg is alleged to have made extensive pre-publication edits to others’ stories, changing the framing of news events to shield Israel from blame. One example of this is the whitewashing of the Israeli attack on the funeral of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. In May 2022, Israeli snipers shot the Al Jazeera anchor in the head and proceeded to lie about their culpability. Israeli forces subsequently attacked the public funeral, beating mourners and firing tear gas. The BBC’s text, allegedly penned by Berg himself, read:

Violence broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank.

Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.


Thus, Abu Akleh’s murder by Israeli forces was downgraded to a mere death during an operation (with no perpetrator mentioned), while a police attack on a funeral procession was presented as a “clash” between rival factions, presumably of roughly equal responsibility.

A more recent example of this, Jones claims, comes from a July story about IDF soldiers setting an attack dog on Muhammed Bhar, a severely disabled Gazan man, and letting him bleed to death. Under Berg’s supervision, the original headline ran: “The Lonely Death of Gaza Man with Down’s Syndrome.” Only after a gigantic worldwide outcry did the BBC change its framing to note anything about how Bhar met his end. “There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?” one BBC journalist said, commenting on the affair.

Since the investigation was published, Berg has remained silent, although he has hired defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, the former director of U.K. Lawyers for Israel.

The BBC, meanwhile, has offered unequivocal support for him and his work, rejected any suggestion of a lenient stance towards Israel, and alleges that the Drop Site article “fundamentally misdescribe[s] Berg’s power, influence, and how the network works.


A WORLDWIDE NETWORK
Whatever the veracity of the Drop Site allegations, the undisputed fact that a former U.S. State Department and CIA operative is calling the shots at the BBC for its Middle East coverage is undoubtedly of public interest.

It also bears a striking resemblance to the accusations of journalist Tareq Haddad. In 2019, Haddad resigned in frustration from Newsweek, claiming that the outlet systematically stymied him from covering important Middle East news stories that did not align with Western objectives. Perhaps most strikingly, though, he claimed that Newsweek employed a senior editor whose only job was seemingly to vet and suppress “controversial” stories, in the same vein as Berg. This editor also had a similar background with state power. As Haddad concluded:

The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the [sic] profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked.”

When contacted by MintPress News for comment, Haddad said he found the BBC, State Department and CIA links to be “staggering,” adding:

When I resigned from Newsweek, I did so because all reporting on foreign affairs went through a particular editor, who, in my case, turned out to be connected to the European Council on Foreign Relations. That prevented me from writing truthfully when it came to a number of sensitive issues.”

CIA-AFFILIATED MEDIA
The implications of former U.S. national security state operatives dictating global media output are profound. This is not least because the State Department and CIA are among the world’s most notoriously dishonest and perfidious institutions, regularly injecting lies and false information into public discourse to further Washington’s ambitions. As Mike Pompeo, former Director of the CIA and then-Secretary of State, said in 2019:

When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on] it!”

Furthermore, both organizations have a long history of organizing invasions of and coups against foreign countries, drugs and weapons smuggling and operating a worldwide network of “black sites,” where thousands are tortured.

The CIA, in particular, has an extensive record of penetrating media outlets. As far back as the 1970s, the Church Committee unearthed the existence of Operation Mockingbird, a secret project to infiltrate newsrooms across America with secret agents masquerading as journalists. Investigative reporter Carl Bernstein’s work found that the agency had cultivated a network of over 400 individuals it considered assets, including the owner of The New York Times.

John Stockwell, former head of a CIA task force, explained on camera how his organization infiltrated media departments across the planet, establishing fake outlets and news agencies that worked to control global public opinion and spread false information demonizing Washington’s enemies. “I had propagandists all over the world,” he admitted, adding:

We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”

This process continues to this day, as the CIA continues to promote dubious stories about so-called “Havana Syndrome” and Russia putting bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Cable networks routinely employ a wide range of former State Department or CIA officials as personalities and trusted experts. Former CIA director John Brennan is employed by NBC News and MSNBC, while his predecessor, Michael Hayden, can be seen on CNN. Top anchors such as Anderson Cooper and Tucker Carlson have their own connections to the agency.

Meanwhile, in 2015, Dawn Scalici, a 33-year CIA veteran, left her job as national intelligence manager for the Western hemisphere at the Director of National Intelligence to become the global business director of the international news conglomerate Reuters. That this was a political hire was barely hidden; in Scalici’s official announcement, the company declared her primary responsibility would be “advancing Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”

Social media, too, is full of former U.S. national security state agents. A previous MintPress News investigation uncovered a network of dozens of ex-CIA officials working at Google. Most of these individuals work in highly politically sensitive roles such as security and, trust and safety, effectively giving them control over the algorithms that decide what content gets seen and what is suppressed worldwide. Some were even directly recruited from the CIA, leaving the agency to join the Silicon Valley giant.

Competing with Google for the crown of employing most former CIA agents is Facebook. The company’s senior product policy manager for misinformation, Aaron Berman, the man most responsible for deciding what the world sees (and does not see) in its news feeds, was directly parachuted in from Langley, Virginia. Berman was one of the agency’s highest-ranking officers, writing the president’s daily brief for both Obama and Trump until July 2019, when he made the switch from big government to big tech.

And since it became a target of Washington’s ire, TikTok has been on a hiring spree, recruiting large numbers of U.S. State Department officials to run its internal affairs. The company’s head of data public policy for Europe, for example, is Jade Nester, who was previously the State Department’s director of internet public policy. These connections were explored in a MintPress investigationentitled, “TikTok: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run by State Department Officials.”

CHEERING ON A GENOCIDE
In recent years, Washington has shown considerable interest in influencing the British press. The National Endowment for Democracy—another unofficial branch of the CIA—has spent millions of dollars funding a wide range of media outlets in the U.K. The NED’s sister organization, USAID, is the third-largest funder of BBC Media Action, the company’s charitable arm, donating over $2 million annually.

The BBC itself has faced repeated accusations of pro-Israel bias, not only from the public but also internally. Their headquarters are a common start or end point for numerous pro-Palestine marches, including an upcoming national rally in London on January 18. In November, over 100 BBC staff signed an open letter to the corporation’s director-general, Tim Davie and Chief Executive Officer Deborah Turness. The letter admonishes the company for consistently providing “favorable coverage to Israel,” failing to uphold even “basic journalistic tenet[s]” when covering its war on Gaza, and aiding in “systematically dehumanizing Palestinians.”

Haddad agreed that much of the network’s coverage had been subpar, telling MintPress:

The BBC, of course, like many institutions, has fallen way short of their coverage in documenting what Israel has done in a densely populated strip of land we know as Gaza over the last 14 months and prior.”

Partially as a result, public confidence in the broadcaster has fallen to an all-time low. By July 2023, just 38% of Britons said they trusted the BBC to tell the truth – down from 81% 20 years previously. Since October 7, its biases have been put under even more scrutiny.

Israel’s actions, Haddad said, are “growing harder to ignore.” Officially, the death toll from the Israeli attack on Gaza stands at almost 50,000, although credible estimates put the likely figure at many times that. International organizations, such as the United Nations and Amnesty International, have described the onslaught as “genocidal.”

Israel could not sustain its attack without vital military, logistical, economic, and political support from Western powers. It is, therefore, vital for Washington, London and the E.U. that public opinion does not turn too far in favor of Palestine to the point where widespread public rebellion forces a change in policy. The BBC, with its deeply misleading and one-sided coverage of the events, therefore, plays an important role in the perpetuation of crimes against humanity. That this is being driven from the top down by overtly pro-Israel editors, including one with a history in both the State Department and CIA, is perhaps unsurprising but no less shocking, nonetheless.

To be clear, this article does not claim that Berg or anyone at the BBC is a plant. Nor is it accusing him of any specific wrongdoing beyond working at a distinctly biased network. What it is stating is that it is telling that the person in charge of its Middle East reporting has framed pictures and letters of Mossad commanders and high Israeli officials on the wall, as if they are rock stars and he is a teenage fan. That someone such as this rose the ranks is a clear indication of the kind of culture that exists at the BBC – one that has systematically demonized Palestinians and manufactured consent for genocide.

https://orinocotribune.com/raffi-berg-b ... laborator/

Leaked Emails Expose ‘Collaborative Efforts’ Between ‘Israeli’ Govt and Center for Countering Digital Hate
January 18, 2025

Image
Compilation image featuring the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Photo: The GrayZone.

By Max Blumenthal – Jan 6, 2025

Emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal how leading “anti-hate” campaigner Imran Ahmed collaborated with Israeli embassy officials to censor pro-Palestine social media accounts — and courted them for donations to his censorship-obsessed Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Since emerging in America from seemingly out of the blue in 2020, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has become one of the trans-Atlantic establishment’s most effective tools for censoring online speech. Its founder, Imran Ahmed, has nurtured close ties with the Biden White House since moving to Washington DC, targeting its political enemies with calls for their removal from social media. Back in his hometown of London, Ahmed was an influential advisor to the neoliberal wing of UK Labour, helping sabotage the leftist insurgency of Jeremy Corbyn and place his ally, Keir Starmer, in charge of the party.

Ahmed has been embroiled in controversy since journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi published internal CCDH documents showing he held private meetings with influential Democratic lawmakers throughout 2024 to advance a plan to “kill Elon Musk’s Twitter.” The billionaire Twitter/X owner and his allies in president-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle retaliated by accusing the British operative of violating laws against foreign interference in American politics.

Ahmed, for his part, has dismissed the charge that he colludes with foreign governments as a kooky conspiracy. “The Center for Countering Digital Hate researches conspiracy theories. We don’t engage with them,” he said.

However, internal CCDH emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal that while Ahmed nurtures ties to the Labour government in Britain, the self-styled “anti-hate” campaigner also enjoys a secret, “collaborative” relationship with a rogue foreign government whose leadership currently stands accused of genocide by the International Court of Justice, and is wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

Provided by a CCDH insider who requested to remain anonymous out of fear that Ahmed and his allies would retaliate against him, the emails reveal that top officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC helped introduce Ahmed to potential funders, and were even invited to review a CCDH report before its publication. The report urged Meta to remove pro-Palestine Facebook groups on the grounds that they promoted “anti-Jewish hate.”

Ahmed seemed agitated when The Grayzone reached him by phone and asked him to confirm his email exchanges with the Israeli officials. “I have no idea which emails you’re talking about,” he stated. “You’ll have to send them through to us and have a look at them and come back to you.”

When asked if he had collaborated with the Israeli government, Ahmed did not deny the relationship. “We work with all governments,” he claimed.

Asked a second time about whether he had colluded with Israeli officials, he responded, “In what respect?”

After The Grayzone provided Ahmed with a copy of one of the correspondences, CCDH’s head of communications, Jonathan Freed, replied with the following statement: “The Center for Countering Digital Hate works to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation through innovative research and policy advocacy. Our mission is to protect human rights and civil liberties online and we take pride in publicly working with a range of partners who support our efforts, particularly those with a vested interest in curbing the spread and harmful impact of antisemitism. As a matter of policy, we will not comment directly on proprietary information that may, or may not, have been disclosed without authorization.”

Freed’s statement included a link to an October 21, 2020 State Department “Conference on Internet Antisemitism” that featured Ahmed’s participation alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and an array of Israel lobbyists.

Ahmed’s responses all but confirm the authenticity of the emails. The contents of the exchanges suggest that his relationship with the Israeli government is longstanding, and has played an important role in shaping his organization’s agenda.

Israeli officials pledge “continued support of [CCHD’s] work”
In an email dated June 12, 2024, Ahmed thanked Efrat Hochstetler, the Public Diplomacy Counselor of the Israeli Embassy in the US, for his “continued support of [CCHD’s] work.” He then introduced himself to Marco Sermoneta, Israel’s consul general in San Francisco, to “emphasize the importance of our collaborative efforts in combating hate and lies online.”

Image

Email exchanges earlier that month demonstrate that Ahmed met with top Israeli officials to discuss funding for his censorship operation. Following a June 3 meeting with Ahmed, Israeli Embassy Minister of Public Diplomacy Sawsan Hasson wrote the CCDH director to connect him with Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Daniel Meron, and to introduce him to “some of the philanthropists that might be interested in your work.”

Image

“Thanks you for the connection to Geneva,” Ahmed replied a day later. “I hope to meet them later this week. I would of course be delighted to be connected to any philanthropists who might support our strategic, proven and impactful solutions. Similarly, meetings with your Hill team and your California teams working on social media company relations would be helpful.”

Image

On June 6, Hochstetler emailed Ahmed to introduce him to Marco Sermoneta, the Israeli consul general in San Francisco, describing him as “best suited to answer any questions regarding efforts vis-a-vis the social media companies out west.” Hochstetler informed Sermoneta that he and Hasson had met with Ahmed three days prior, “and are trying to offer our assistance with connecting him to relevant parties as best as we can, as the work that the CCDH does is extremely important.”

Image

Asked about his email to Sermoneta, Ahmed told The Grayzone, “You’re asking me about a theoretical email from seven months ago. Send it through to us and we will come back to you.”

The Grayzone also reached Sawsan Hasson on her mobile phone. She refused to respond to questions related to her relationship with Ahmed. “I can’t answer without any coordination with the embassy spokesperson,” the Israeli diplomat stated.

When questioned on whether the Israeli embassy spokesperson would have information about her collaboration with Ahmed and CCDH, Hasson replied, “I don’t know who you are and I just told you how it should work. Any communication with journalism or media should go through our spokesperson.” She then hung up.

The anti-Corbyn connection
It is unclear which “relevant parties” were furnished to Ahmed by the Israeli Embassy in DC. However, the emails obtained by The Grayzone indicate that Israel’s government planned to assist CCDH through wealthy cut-outs masquerading as altruistic “philanthropists.”

Ahmed appears to enjoy a working relationship with at least one figure who fits this mold. He is Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire British auto industry baron who is a top funder of Israel lobby activities in the UK.

Image
Imran Ahmed’s ally, Trevor Chinn (left) at an event he co-hosted in 2018 with Israeli ambassador Mark Regev (second to left). Also in the picture is Tony Blair (second to right) and Israeli President Isaac Herzog (right).

As Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi revealed, Ahmed emailed Chinn on June 4, 2024 – one day after he met with the Israeli embassy’s Hasson and Hochstetler – to set up a rendezvous. Copied on the email was Louise Jacobs, a British Zionist activist who serves on the Board of Governors of the Israeli government-controlled Jewish Agency for Israel.

Both Chinn and Ahmed had worked to drive Jeremy Corbyn out as leader of the Labour Party. While Chinn donated heavily to Corbyn’s conservative opponents within the party, Ahmed helped launch an outfit called Stop Funding Fake News which claimed to combat “left-wing antisemitism,” but which was, in fact, dedicated to muzzling Corbyn’s allies in the media.

Posing as a grassroots “social movement” composed of anonymous citizens concerned with misinformation, Ahmed’s group successfully knee-capped one of the most popular pro-Corbyn, antiwar outlets, The Canary UK, by organizing a boycott of its advertisers.

On August 2, 2019, Stop Funding Fake News tweeted, “The Canary has announced that, thanks to our campaign, its business model ‘no longer works’ & they’re downsizing. We want to spend more time and resources on this campaign & target new sites.”

Following Corbyn’s resignation as Labour leader in 2020, Ahmed pivoted from Stop Funding Fake News to the more boldly themed Center for Countering Digital Hate. CCDH’s office shared space with Labour Together, a neoliberal, Trevor Chinn-funded political group which crusaded for online censorship of Labour’s political enemies. The group’s director, Morgan McSweeney, went on to serve as chief-of-staff to Keir Starmer.

In 2021, CCDH registered as a non-profit in the US, and its founder settled down just a few blocks from the US Capitol in Washington DC with his new American wife. He quickly homed in on the enemies of the Biden White House, branding influential critics of its Covid restrictions as “The Disinformation Dozen,” and earning a shout-out from then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki as she successfully clamored for Facebook to ban their accounts.

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, and the resultant panic within the Zionist movement over a supposed surge in antisemitism in the US, brought Ahmed a wealth of new and apparently lucrative opportunities.

Israel-vetted CCDH report aims to crush pro-Palestine Facebook accounts
In June 2024, as he apparently shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic to plot with Israeli officials, the CCDH director shared a forthcoming report with Sawsan Hasson, the Minister of Public Diplomacy at the Israeli Embassy in DC.

“Please do not distribute it outside the [Israeli] Government, as this is embargoed for public consumption until Wednesday,” Ahmed urged, appearing to invite the Israeli officials to vet the report before its publication.

Image

Entitled “Antisemitic Admins,” the Israeli government-approved CCDH report demanded that Facebook impose a sweeping crackdown on pro-Palestine community groups, accusing their admins of “camouflaging their antisemitism by cynically adopting pro-Palestinian or human rights language and themes to inculcate hatred against Jewish people.” According to CCDH, Facebook groups that accused Israel of seeking to “control the American media,” or which edited an image of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make him resemble Adolph Hitler, were guilty of “anti-Jewish hate.”

CCDH’s report relied on the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA)’s notoriously expansive definition of antisemitism, which equates condemnation of Israel’s discriminatory system of apartheid with hatred of Jews. Among the examples of antisemitism listed by the IHRA is, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” The definition has been exploited so rampantly by the Israel lobby, that its author, Ken Stern, complained that “right-wing Jews are weaponizing” his work.

Ahmed’s “five year plan” is underway
Ahmed has made no secret of his far-reaching censorship objectives. He has disclosed to journalists his “five-year plan” to demonetize any content creator who engages in what CCDH defines as “hate speech.” As his report attacking pro-Palestine Facebook groups makes clear, he sees little distinction between expressions of “hate” and advocacy for the rights of Palestinians living under siege and bombardment.

What Ahmed has failed to tell the public is that his crusade to censor and punish online Palestine solidarity activism is an outcome of his secret collaboration with the state of Israel – and that it may have been financially incentivized by the Israeli government as well.

Asked if his collaboration with the Israeli government to promote political censorship in the US could be considered an act of foreign interference, Ahmed grumbled, “This conversation is just becoming circular. Send [the emails] through, we’ll come back to you.” And with that, he hung up the phone.
(The GrayZone)

https://orinocotribune.com/leaked-email ... ital-hate/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 23, 2025 3:51 pm

Rob Urie: On Being Censored for the Last Four Years
Posted on January 23, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This important post fills out the picture of how extensive censorship became under the Biden Administration. I hope you’ll circulate his piece widely, since it demonstrates the campaign went well beyond social media and included disappearing disfavored content from Internet searches. What is remarkable is Urie’s evidence of a dramatic shift in search results after the dissolution of the Biden State Department censorship program. This indirectly confirms that Google’s change in its algos to prefer mainstream sites and the quick reversal was the result of government intervention, and not Google acting out of its own profit motives.

If that isn’t troubling enough, be sure to read to the end of the post about the threats made personally to Rob.

By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

In December, 2024, a Federal entity called the Global Engagement Center (GEC)— an offshoot of the US State Department tasked with censoring legal political speech on the internet, was closed after Congress stopped funding it. Within a day or two of this occurring, the internet as I haven’t seen it in four years suddenly reappeared. Hundreds of my articles that couldn’t be found under any arrangement of search terms over the prior four years have since reappeared.

Within hours of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, a decade of my writing on politics and economics was erased from the internet. Articles that had been distributed around the globe could no longer be found under any arrangement of search terms. To the alleged purpose of the GEC of ‘combatting disinformation,’ no one has ever accused me of spreading disinformation. Much of what I have written provided evidence of duplicity from official sources.

The timing is important here. The US State Department was run by Secretary of State Antony Blinken for all four years of the Biden administration. Upon entering office, Biden immediately began making preparations for war with Russia, including shutting down Russian-language news outlets in Ukraine— just as the CIA’s army in Ukraine was launching another round of ethnic cleansing against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine.

I had written about energy geopolitics from the time that the US assumed control of the Ukrainian state in a US-led coup there in 2014. Readers are invited to listen to the linked phone call (above) from 2014 between US Undersecretary for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador to the UK, Geoffrey Pyatt, and decide for yourselves. The political yeas and nays that they discuss in the call all became official policy in Ukraine in subsequent years.

Biden & Co. can dispute these characterizations, but not the facts that underly them. The intercepted phone call between Nuland and Pyatt hasn’t been denied by the US. The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) maps linked to above illustrate the ethnic cleansing that was underway— by the US and Ukraine, when Russia launched its SMO (Special Military Operation) in 2022. The OSCE is allied with NATO, not Russia.

For those who missed it, this (paragraph above) is what I wrote about the genesis of the conflict in real time in 2022— after covering the back-and-forth since 2014. While the American left spent the war years repeating the CIA talking point that ‘Russia has already lost,’ I covered the international state of play. If you don’t know about this, it may be because I couldn’t get published in the left press, and through state censorship, no longer had a readership outside of it.

That I was censored wasn’t a surprise to me. I had written about the internal logic of state control over the prior decade. While the (classical) liberal view of censorship is that it impedes the free exchange of ideas, thereby reducing the aggregate wellbeing of society, Biden & Co. relied on the opposite logic. They argued that the exchange of ideas is only ‘free’ when views that are politically inconvenient for it are kept from public view.

Within hours of Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, 99% of the 200+ essays that I had written over the prior decade disappeared from the internet, along with 99% of the digital evidence that I ever existed. Little of what I had written, and none of what I was then writing, could be found via searches no matter how precise and / or detailed the search terms. For what I imagine were political reasons, after a decade of writing near-weekly essays, I had been disappeared.

The alleged rationale for this censorship was ‘to combat disinformation.’ Having followed Joe Biden’s political career since the early 1980s, the man was never known for having a firm grasp on the reality that most of the rest of us share. Much of what Biden said regarding the Covid-19 pandemic was not only untrue, but deeply harmful. Telling people that the mRNA vaccines prevented both illness and transmission— both untrue, put millions of lives at risk.

More to the point, the US had only recently been lied into a military catastrophe in Iraq by agencies of the Federal government. Biden had been the Democrats’ point person in selling the war to Congressional Democrats. He did so by claiming that Iraq possessed WMDs. This was a lie. I told anyone within earshot that this was a lie at the time. The press accounts of the ‘evidence’ were either wanting or implausible. Subsequent history supports my view.

With respect to ‘spreading disinformation,’ I have had my facts challenged (to my knowledge) a total of four times in fourteen years of public writing. The first was over the civilian death count of the Iraq war. The Lancet’s account— the one that I put forward, is the only honest effort to count the war dead. No ‘raw count’— the count being claimed to be true, has ever ended up being accurate. Despite their intuitive appeal, raw counts are by definition the lowest possible count of war dead, not the most likely count.

(I used high level statistics professionally for two-point-five decades and wrote a book placing the theories that support it in historical and philosophical context).

The second charge (of having a fact wrong) involved the automaker bailouts (2008 – 2009). The press framing had suggested that the bailouts were limited. But the details of how the bailout money had been distributed told a different story. The press accounts were put to me as fact. I sent back the actual distribution of the bailout money, which proved my case. The critic apologized and put it to me that I was correct.

While I don’t recall the specifics of the third challenge, it was quickly resolved without requiring any correction from me. The fourth incident was recent. I knowingly took a public source at face value in order to broaden the information set that I was drawing from, and their information was incorrect. When I was made aware that the information was incorrect, I educated myself as to what the correct information was, wrote it up, and distributed the correction.

Had anyone from the Biden administration or the GEC (see above) challenged me on facts, I would have responded with evidence. But without being made aware of the charge of disinformation, there is no way to respond. In fact, what is frightening about the ‘censorship workers’ (of whom I am aware) is that unless they heard something on CNN or read it in the New York Times, it is considered disinformation. This, even after the CNN / Times’ Iraq WMD and Russiagate frauds.

The PMC (professional-managerial class) press only began admitting holes in the Iraq WMD and Russiagate stories after journalists accused of having their facts wrong had ‘the facts’ accumulate in their corner to the point where they could no longer be denied. It was the establishment press that spread disinformation and the independent press that corrected it— usually after spending lifetimes in the journalistic wilderness being accused of representing the interests of nefarious foreign actors.

When former US president Woodrow Wilson ran into public resistance to US involvement in WWI, he created a department of official lies to lie Americans in to supporting the effort. Plausible consequences of WWI include the Russian Revolution and WWII. And unless Donald Trump makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East, WWIII can be added to the list. The point: the US and the world would have been far better off if WWI had been stopped before it was started.

The US war in Vietnam was posed in the Cold War terms of ‘communism versus freedom,’ when it was in fact a nationalist struggle to oust Western imperial invaders, first the French, and then the US, from Vietnam. In a now disappeared quote, LBJ stated in the mid-1960s that ‘he couldn’t end the war (Vietnam) because his friends were making too much money from it.’ Much as the German conglomerate IG Farben produced the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi extermination camps, Dow Chemical manufactured the Agent Orange used to poison Vietnam. Just business?

In 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration wanted a war against former US ally and CIA asset Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The administration hired a DC public relations firm to craft the fraudulent testimony that was then presented by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. The weeping child lied that she had seen the Iraqis ‘toss babies out of incubators’ to die on the floor. Bush subsequently slaughtered upwards of 200,000 Iraqi conscripts (‘highway of death’) after they had surrendered.

George W. Bush followed his father to craft the Iraq WMD fraud by which American propagandists sold the Bush administration’s fabrication that Iraq possessed WMDs. As I wrote at the time, there existed a reasonable predicate for this lie. As Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President, George H.W. Bush had given American WMDs to Iraq. As the war was winding down, some of Poppy Bush’s weapons were found. Fox News dutifully spent months with fraudulent ‘WMDs found’ headlines glaring to craft the dueling realities that fuel American party politics.

Before he launched the current war against Russia, Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s point person in Ukraine during the US-led coup there in 2014. Following the coup, Biden brought his family there to loot the place, much as the Clintonites had looted Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Democrats (and ‘the left’) chose to demonize Trump rather than addressing the charges against Biden. With Trump’s re-inauguration taking place as I write this, the strategy didn’t serve the Democrats well.

Having done quite a bit of mathematical programming over the years, I sensed quickly that I was being censored as the GEC was firing up. What surprised me, but shouldn’t have, is that the American and world history that I had linked to as source material was also being systematically disappeared from the internet. At one point in 2021 – 2022, the only way that I could re-find relevant history was to already have the links. Using the same search terms as used before never yielded the same, or even useful, results no matter how many times I tried.

The seemingly benign practice of ‘ranking’ internet search results by the credibility of the sources left the same establishment press that had mis, dis, or mal defined it when given the opportunity to define truth. Even the ‘coming clean’ events like the New York Times’ article on the CIA in Ukraine admitted only known facts and even then, ‘explained’ them through imagined motives rather than actual history. The Times piece is stunningly awful.

The Times reporter/disinformation censor worldview that only what they believe is true is widely prevalent amongst the American PMC. The logic of this view was put to me by a friend. My friend gets his news from CNN, NPR, and the New York Times. In discussing events in Ukraine, his standard response was ‘I never heard of that.’ The obvious reply: if I got my information from those sources alone, I wouldn’t know much that is true about the world either.

This ‘incredible sunshine of the spotless mind’ view, whereby the less that someone knows, the more power they are given to determine public policy, is the corporate model applied to government. CEOs fancy themselves as managers and deal makers, not content experts. Marketing ‘truth’ is a constrained optimization problem around what will best sell a product. American political discourse follows this corporate model as low-quality rhetoric.

The politics of my friend are clear from his conception of journalistic truth. The sources that he trusts have lost their audiences due to serial fabrications about Iraq’s WMDs and Russiagate. My friend is a member of the bourgeois cult that still does not understand that it has lost its legitimacy. Where this gets interesting is that this bourgeois (PMC) cult is a reasonable proxy for the interests of the oligarchs.

It was another two years until the Twitter Files were made public. Initially treated as a culture war phenomenon, what they revealed was a widespread and deeply intrusive censorship regime by agents and agencies of the Federal government. With all of the talk about ‘defending democracy,’ the Biden administration crushed pluralism when and where it could. Logically, censorship can only be imposed by those with the power to impose it.

As one who was called a communist for opposing the US war in Vietnam, a Saddam sympathizer (and a terrorist) for opposing two US wars in Iraq, a Putin puppet for opposing the current US war against Russia in Ukraine, and an antisemite for opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the trail of official lies points to the US government being the most prolific purveyor of lies related to US foreign policy. This would seem fertile territory for actual inquiry into ‘disinformation.’

While ‘enshittification’ is a good general descriptor for what doesn’t work in the modern world, intention to enshittify hasn’t tended to be the explanation for it. Prior to 2016 or thereabouts, the internet yielded results that, taken together, provided reasonable approximations of the facts. Particularly after 2021, the internet search results that I got seemed increasingly intended to mislead.

By defaulting to the establishment press in search results— the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, misleading ‘official’ accounts represent a preponderance of what I now see in internet searches. Question: how likely are these outfits to correct their serial and copious lies? And how could these same entities that had been played for fools by the Bushies regarding WMDs in Iraq be so easily rolled only a few years later with Russiagate? (Answer: they are de facto state media).

The common factor that ties Iraq WMD lies to Russiagate is US foreign policy. The PMC press earned credibility over the last century by having reporters in far flung locations that reported from the field. Starting in the 1980s, and picking up steam with the shift to the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, large news organization used cost-cutting to reduce their overseas presence.

One result has been the elevation of ‘access journalism.’ In the run-up to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, reporter Judith Miller, of the New York Times, was played by Bush’s Vice-President, Dick Cheney. Cheney was Miller’s source for a major story that she dutifully reported in the Times. Cheney then went on Meet the Press to cite the Times story, meaning himself, as independent evidence in support of the Bush administrations’ lies related to Iraq WMDs.

By retreating from overseas reporting while increasing reliance on domestic sources for information regarding US foreign policy, the American press shifted from reporting foreign policy from a variety of perspectives to reporting it from the perspective of powerful Americans with geopolitical agendas. This isn’t to overstate the case. The New York Times was considered a tool of the CIA and the US foreign policy establishment when I was protesting the Vietnam war as a child in 1969.

It was the sudden reappearance of the internet a few weeks ago that prompted this recollection. It rendered apparent what I had sensed, but could not provide proof of— that the Federal government had not only censored me while denying that it was doing so, but had rendered my ability to conduct basic research on the internet unviable. I can still enter searches. But the results seem intended to mislead.

Once the internet began to reappear, I wasn’t sure what was I was seeing (still not). All of a sudden, essays that I had written a decade before appeared during routine searches. Essays that— based on the information that was available to me, had only been read by a few dozen people, had in fact been distributed outside of the US, sometimes to substantial audiences. But all that I saw was / is a few dozen readers.

Not only was I being censored, but I was also being gaslit as to the reach of my essays. (The reach is tiny, but it isn’t the conspicuous waste of time that the evidence available to me was suggesting). As best I can tell, I had made it through the Trump years without being censored. The censorship that I encountered was conducted by the Biden administration.

Following Biden’s 2020 victory, I STFU for two years to allow him time to fail without help from me. Biden failed in the manner, and to the extent, that I predicted before the 2020 election. The bet here is that history will judge the man quite harshly. Few of my Democrat friends know his actual legacy. If the path to solving problems is to first understand them, the Democrats are in for a hard reckoning.

I started writing about events in Ukraine in 2014, having, to my own view, captured the economic nature of the emerging US conflict with Russia. Without relitigating it here, there is little that I have written about the conflict recently that is different in tenor and tone from what I wrote then. It is the details that have been updated. And I didn’t create the details. I just wrote about them.

Nevertheless, and I will not reveal details here due to the ongoing nature of the threat, around mid-2022 it was made clear to me that I would either cease and desist my political activities or onerous consequences would follow. The nature of the threat was the delivery of information that only Federal agencies or contractors could reasonably have had regarding actions that they had already taken. It wasn’t my wellbeing that was threatened. The threat was to harm people I care about.

Image
Graph: part of what is surprising here is the symmetry between Democrats and Republicans regarding the viability of the American political system. With 60% of adults proclaiming that the American political system has been broken for decades, welcome to my world. This result makes my work absolutely ordinary, not radical. Source: nytimes.com.

What made the threat particularly creepy was that a list of the people who are important to me accompanied it. Being a former volunteer firefighter, the decision to put my own life at risk to save others has already been put to the test. It is a risk that I have been willing to take. So, imagine the current conundrum. This is being put forth as information, not a complaint.

I have no idea if the changes that I am seeing are visible to others. The tech ‘model’ of customization has produced a dystopian hellscape whereby critical comparison is impossible because there is no common basis by which to compare. This is reification of the individualist ontology of Western commerce. Good luck fixing the effect without first addressing the cause.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... years.html

The American political system isn't broken, it functions as designed with little modification. It's just that the props and scenery are worse for wear.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 24, 2025 3:03 pm

Social Media and the War of Positions
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 21, 2025
Carlos L. Garrido

Image
Marx and Engels in a Parisian Cafe

Historical Materialist View of Ideas

The collections of ideas we hold are historically conditioned by the mode of life we exist in. They reflect, in the realm of ideas, the limitations and possibilities of the mode of social life that dominates the era – of the forms of social intercourse which pervade our everyday lives. A feudal peasant cannot concern themselves with their social media profiles – with the likes their posts get, the shares it receives, and the subscribers or followers they have accumulated. These are, however, central concerns for most people today. We live in the era of profilicity as the dominant identity technology. As is evident, all the collections of ideas, concerns, aesthetic experiences, desires, beliefs, etc. which are tied to the profile-based mode of identity curation are dependent and grounded in the technological developments our era has achieved. In Marxist terms, these developments at the level of how we think (about ourselves and others) presuppose developments in the forces of production. Likewise, in most of the Western world, no youngsters would concern themselves with who their families will arrange them in marriage with. These preoccupations belong to an era that has passed – to a mode of social intercourse humanity has overcome.

This is a central component of historical materialism – the “law of development of human history” which Engels’s eulogy tells us Marx discovers. It is pithily formulated in the famous 1859 preface to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that:

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.[1]

Ideological Institutions and False Consciousness

The ideas that come to dominate a form of life do not exist in a transcendental realm. They are, instead, embodied materially through institutions and people. The influence these institutions hold varies. Their purpose, however, is the same: to sustain the consent of the masses (the subaltern) for the dominant order. They are tasked with ensuring the smooth reproduction of the current mode of life. In being the dominant institutions that pervade people’s everyday lives, they don’t simply get us to consent (which implies a conscious act of acceptance) but shape our spontaneous and common-sense worldviews to such an extent that we are unable to recognize, with the exception of those grand moments of rupture called ‘events’ in the history of philosophy, the conditioned and implanted character of our thoughts.

Like the slaves in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we are deeply unaware of the structures which contain the horizon of how we view reality. Plato could not have been more correct in emphasizing the painful character of the hypothetical cave’s escapee. It is not easy to have our notions of reality so easily overturned – to have our desires, beliefs, aesthetic experiences, etc. demolished. Like the escaped slave, who painfully needs to readjust their eyes, the overcoming of bourgeois ideology is a painful process – not a spontaneous and immediate ‘moment’. When our conditions of life are so systematically pervaded by lies and manipulations, all aimed at preventing us from rocking the boat, truth is painful. Truth is dangerous. The quest for truth has always had, as W. E. B. Dubois notes, “an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent, [but] nevertheless, men strive to know.” From the killing of Socrates to the killing of King, class society has shown its proclivity to fight back viciously when threatened by the truth tellers. This was, once again, already prophetically described by Plato’s allegory.

As I have written before:

It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself… Reality [needs to be] turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

“If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”


Capitalist ideology is as capable of accepting truth as vampires are of consuming garlic. Truth, which almost always stands on the side of the masses, is its Achilles heel.

Shift in the Dominant Ideological Apparatuses

The institutions that disseminate and enculturate us into bourgeois ideology, however, don’t all play an equal role. Some are far more influential than others. In the medieval world the church was, without a doubt, the “dominant Ideological State Apparatus” (ISA). In the transition to the modern world, as Louis Althusser notes, “the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.” Schools would come to replace the church as the institutional cornerstone of bourgeois ideology – the most dominant force for the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony.

In some ways this is still the case. It is in the universities, for instance, where the ideas trafficked by popular culture are first developed in their utmost coherence. It is impossible to conceive of ‘wokeism’, today’s dominant form of liberal cultural intercourse, without the laying of its ideological foundations decades ago in the academy with the CIA manufactured compatible left. The ‘identity politics’ and ‘cancel culture’ so popularly debated in TV late-night roundtable discussions is far from being rooted in the communist tradition. Quite the opposite, that which today is called communism by the rightist pundits was explicitly produced to challenge Marxism. They were tasked with the role of being ‘radical recuperators,’ as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. Their job was (and is) to recuperate dissenting attitudes in the masses, especially young people, into the pro-imperialist anti-communist fold. As Michael Parenti correctly observed, these ABC (Anything But Class) theorists are tasked with developing “conceptual schemas that mute Marxism’s class analysis.”

However, in the last decade a new ideological terrain has obtained the dominant position within bourgeois hegemony: social media. The average American today spends around two to three hours on social media. While for a select few it might just be filled with innocent pictures of cute cats, for the vast majority of people social media plays a role akin to a technological polis – a place where the battle of ideas, or better yet, the dissemination of the dominant ideas, occurs.

While schools might still create the ideological foundation people are enculturated into, they often find themselves unable to comment on pressing issues of the day (with the exception, of course, of universities). Through social media, on the other hand, one encounters nonstop active manipulation on on-going events, with its scope and consistency far outweighing the influence university discussions on political affairs might have. Its impact, however, cannot simply be understood through quantitative metrics. Qualitatively, these social medias have revolutionized how we create our identities. As I have previously written,

We live in a time of profiles. Who we are, our identity, is deeply embedded in the curation of our profiles for general peers, those ‘users’ who validate our content through various interactive means (likes, shares, retweets, etc.). Our future posts are influenced by the reaction of previous posts. Those which tend to do good are repeated, those which don’t are not (often these are deleted outright). The dialectical interdependency of the individual and the social obtains a new form in the age of profilicity. Through these ‘social validation feedback loops’ (termed as such by Facebook president Sean Parker) we adjust our content to the reception of the general peer. Our identity is crafted with an eye to how we are ‘seen as being seen’. Second order observation becomes the norm; all judgement is subject to some degree of mediation by how the thing judged is seen by the general peer. These are some of the central insights of Hans Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio’s book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. While it does have some blind spots (which I have hoped to bring light to in my work), it is without a doubt an essential text for understanding the dominant mode of identity technology in our day.

Social Media, Profilicity, and Ideological Manipulation

The potential for ideological manipulation brought about by the emergence of profilicity is, in some ways, far more potent than ever before. Following the 2019 coup in Bolivia, when 68 thousand bot accounts were used to make the imperialist narrative viral on twitter, I did a case study of how social media manipulation was used to legitimize the coup. I wrote:

The imperialist usage of bots and fake accounts engender an artificial general peer which functions as the condition for the possibility of imperialism’s control of a real one. This is because, at a certain nodal point, when the fake accounts and booster bots make something trend, the artificiality of the general peer’s reaction loses its artificial character, a real-people composed general peer picks up the baton from there and glazes the reaction with an ‘organic’ and ‘spontaneous’ vestment. In the age of profilicity, imperialism’s ability to control general peers is an indispensable tool for the attainment of its ends.

Regardless of how powerful the armed forces of an empire are, if it is not able to hegemonize the discourse on historical and contemporary events, its legitimacy – both nationally and internationally – will totter and make it susceptible to being overthrown. Firms like CLS Strategies, along with the complicit Silicon Valley social media monopolies, function as indispensable tools of capitalist-imperialism in the age of profilicity. At a time when identity is constructed through the curation of profiles mediated by second-order observation and general peer powered social validation feedback loops, the ability to manipulate general peers amounts to the unprecedented capacity of capital and the state to control what people think.

Additionally, the abstract character of this general peer conceals the manipulation itself. People construct their profile identities on the basis of how they would like to be seen as being seen, but the general peer doing the seeing has its eyes filtered through parental control imperialist glasses. How an event will be seen is determined by them – fake accounts will be made and boosted, dissenting accounts will be censored. This condition is depicted well in an old Soviet joke where a Russian and an American diplomat meet: the American asks “what are you here for,” the Russian replies “to learn about American propaganda techniques,” the American says, “what propaganda,” and the Russian replies “exactly.”

Censorship is an integral component working in conjunction with controlling what is seen through the usage of bots and other forms of boosting pro-establishment narratives. On all major social media platforms (yes, even on Elon Musk’s so-called free speech loving ‘X’), those accounts with substantial following that challenge the imperialist narrative on key issues are often outright banned.[2] It is a very interestingly functioning tech-polis, where certain speakers are given a microphone to speak over others, others are muted or lowered to a virtually inaudible volume, while others are poof, disappeared completely.

The Institute I work for is not unacquainted with these censorship tactics. Seven of our tiktok accounts, the platform we received hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views in, have been outright banned. As Edward Smith, Noah Khrachvik, and myself have previously noted,

Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech—a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher…

[In the capitalist-imperialist mode of life], the freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth.


The power to control the flow of ideas through these various means makes social media, as the dominant (or, at least, one of the dominant) ideological terrains of our day, virtually (pun intended) unmatched.

What Should Communists Do?

Image

Some on the communist left often denigrate the role of social media work. ‘It’s just online, it has no bearing in reality,’ is a frequently expressed sentiment. Sometimes online ideological work is contrasted dis-favorably to protesting in the streets. Those in the streets are said to be actually doing something, while those who are online are not.

There is a rational kernel to this overall incorrect sentiment. It is true that the anti-social characteristics of the ‘identity socialists’ (as I call them in The Purity Fetish), those which spend all their days online starting twitter beefs and splits, calls for a spiritual rekindling with reality. They must ‘touch grass,’ as the expression goes.

But it is incorrect, on this basis, to denigrate online work as a whole, or to consider it ‘unreal’ in relationship to protests. Social media has, as I argued previously, developed itself into one of the most important ideological terrains of our day. It is a field where, as Gramsci would say, the war of position must be waged. No matter how much censorship, shadow banning, and manipulation occurs in this ideological field, it is still one of the most important places communists must participate in, waging the fight for the hearts and minds of the people. To ignore online work today is the equivalent of the French revolutionaries ignoring the institution of the church in their struggles against feudal absolutism. There is a key difference here, of course. Whereas the church in its heyday as the dominant ideological apparatus had to be fought from without, today social media, as the dominant ideological terrain, presents an internal field of struggle.

The war of position on social media, necessary though it might be, is, of course, not sufficient. If every twitter (excuse me, ‘X’) account followed the Midwestern Marx Institute, or any other organization on the communist left, that does not mean we are anywhere near to grabbing power. Real, in-life organizing cannot be avoided. Organizing in your workplaces and communities continues to be the most important thing one can do. It is that baseline work that Silicon Valley cannot ‘ban’ you from.

To wage a successful war of positions on social media requires mediums through which the people convinced to our side online can get involved in organizing in their communities. People must be ‘shuffled’ from simply agreeing with these ideas online to helping build organizations on the ground – to building working class, counterhegemonic institutions. The war of positions online must be conjoined with preparing the material and institutional foundations (i.e., parties and mass organizations) for the war of maneuver on the ground. Of course, just because these organizations would be ‘on the ground’ does not permit them to avoid the war of positions online.

Online War of Positions

What is the best way to wage the war of positions online? Is condemning everyone we don’t perfectly agree with as being whatever buzzword is popular the way to go? Clearly, this purity fetish mode of engagement, as I have argued before, leaves you surrounded only by those whom you already agree with. You reduce the pedagogic and recruiting tasks of the communist to someone who just sings to the choir. The battle of ideas, the war of positions, is fundamentally rooted in convincing. You cannot shame someone into agreeing with you. Talking down to working people with middle class patronizing attitudes is quite literally the opposite of what a successful war of positions looks like. You do not want the HR or DEI managerial departments to be the first thing someone thinks of when they speak to you. Quite the opposite.
We live under a moribund capitalist mode of life. That will be reflected in some of the spontaneous common-sense worldviews of the people this mode of life produces. We must be patient and flexible, not snappy and rigid. Our goal is to convince. To win the hearts and minds of people. The first thing which must be recognized, then, is that any ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will fail. The starting point (i.e., the spontaneous worldview) people have differs – often more or less depending on certain regional, generational, and other differences. We must take these into account in all conversations.

But how should we start? What should we look for?

Well, Gramsci is here perhaps our most important teacher. If I want to get from A to B, I cannot simply teleport directly from A to B. Maybe the technology will come around one day that allows me to do so. For now, if I want to get from A to B, I need to find a point of contact, a road, or series of roads, that when connected in my passage allows me to arrive to my destination. The process of convincing is no different. If there is no point of contact, there can be no ‘winning over’ of someone to our side. The process of ‘winning over,’ like the process of getting from A to B, is a voyage, an undertaking, or, in short, a process. It does not happen instantaneously. It takes time.

In order for this process to begin, the point of contact must be found. Every spontaneous worldview the masses hold, deeply though they might be entrenched in various forms of bourgeois ideology, must nonetheless contain some rational kernels, ‘points of contact’ we can locate and start the voyage through. This is, for Gramsci, the essence of the war of positions. The task for communists, for the intellectual leadership of the working class movement, is finding, in the incoherent, ambiguous and spontaneous common-sense understandings and feelings of the masses, those rational kernels which can be disarticulated from their current worldview, and rearticulated towards Marxism. (See my chapter with J.P. Reed in the Elgars anthology on Gramsci for more).

Concretely, how does this look?

Well, for instance, in the U.S., the vast majority of people agree with the values of the Declaration of Independence. However, the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, etc., have been unrealized for the mass of people under the dominant order. How can these egalitarian and emancipatory values be actualized under a system that produces, on the one hand, enormous wealth controlled by the few, and on the other, immense misery, debt, and oppression for the many? It is impossible. The universal ideals of the capitalist class have always been limited to their class – it has never been, from the start, anything more than the liberty of capital to exploit, and the sham ‘democracy’ of the capitalists to pick the political puppets that rule over the mass of people. This is why, as I have noted before,

In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, [in the 1820s and 30s] thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the Jeffersonian ideals of the Declaration of Independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion…

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the Declaration of Independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit [can only] be carried forth today by socialists and communists.


So, here we have an example of a point of contact, a rational kernel, within our people’s common sense that can, and has historically been attempted to be, disarticulated from its bourgeois worldview origins, and rearticulated towards various socialist ones.

This is an example that has been used since the 1820s. But, how, in the age of profilicity, can we specifically do this through social media?

The essential elements remain the same. Find the individuals and institutions which play the most influential roles in shaping the common sense of various sections of the American masses. Within the worldviews they craft, find the rational kernels, the points of contact, you can establish a common ground with in discussions with working class viewers and readers of these ideologues. Always start the discussions with those points of contact – the ideas within their worldviews that can be dislocated from the worldview itself and used as a pathway for the new outlook. These rational kernels, of course, will differ with different sources.

For instance, some weeks ago I commented on a video from Andrew Tate, the man that was once the most viral person on the internet. This is someone which holds great ideological influence in our societies, specifically in the youth, which embodies the future of any revolutionary project. The video I comment on is one where Tate describes wage labor as a form of wage slavery. This is, for Marxists, clearly a point of contact, a ‘rational kernel’ within the Tateian worldview.

On the basis of this point of contact, I develop upon the often politically ambiguous history of the critique of wage slavery (for instance, while being a pillar of the socialist critique of capitalism, it was also a central component of the southern planter’s defense of chattel slavery, which they held was less evil and nefarious than wage slavery). Then, on the basis of the agreement with Tate of the slavish character of wage labor, I develop a critique of how this understanding is stifled by the Tateian worldview that had just formulated it. For Tate, the critique of wage slavery and the ‘matrix’ is not the basis for a collective emancipatory project. It is not rooted in a scientific, Marxist understanding of capitalist political economy. Hence, it is completely unaware of the internal laws of motion and contradictions which push the system towards its own destruction. He is unaware of the proletariat’s role as the gravedigger of the mode of life that produced them as a class.

Image

Perhaps it is less of a question of ignorance on Tate’s part, and more one of an awareness of his class interests as a part of the (often mocked) new bourgeoisie. Either way, the result is the same, a stifled understanding of that phenomenon we have gravitated to as a ‘point of contact,’ and an individualized formulation of ‘escaping the matrix’ through getting rich yourself (a gig that through ‘Hustlers University’ he greatly profits from). Tate did not create this form of radical recuperation, and neither is he the only one that preaches it today. It is central to what Dubois called the American Assumption, the notion that through hard work one can lift themselves up and become rich. The difference is that in the 19th and 20th century this ideology occurred within the confines of a direct apologetics of US capitalism. Post-1848 capitalism enters a distinctly reactionary stage, where even the veneer of progressivism that dominated the previous period is undone. In this post-1848 world, As Georg Lukács long ago noted, the defense of capitalism has to, in one form or another, present itself as an “ indirect apologetics”. The superficial and culturalist critique of an often misidentified ‘capitalism’ (or matrix) has become an essential component for acquiescence to the system the critique takes as its object of critique.

What has occurred in the Tate commentary is precisely what Gramsci expects of us in the war of positions. We located the rational kernel and, on the basis of a superior understanding of the phenomenon, dislocated it from the Tateian worldview and towards a Marxist one. In the process we showed the role Tate plays as a radical recuperador for the ‘matrix’ he, in a very sophist-like manner, charges people to help ‘escape’.

After this video came out hordes of the liberals who think a hammer and sickle in their social media bios makes them communists came after us for ‘platforming’ Tate and lending credence to his ideas. This criticism, of course, is devoid of any semblance of the Marxist understanding of the war of positions. Neither the convincing of Tate himself, nor the sharing of his ideas, were the purpose of the video. What the video achieves (or at least attempts to), is quite literally the opposite – to be as efficient as possible in bringing people away from Tate and towards Marxism. One can argue that I failed in this enterprise, that a better job could have been done. But not deny, however, that this is the best route for combatting ideological opponents. It produces a double whammy, a removal of a follower to your opponent and an addition of a follower to your revolutionary project. This is the same double effect the black proletariat’s general strike during the Civil War had (removing the productive base of the Southern economy while adding soldiered, spies, and workers to the Northern forces), allowing them to win the battle for the forces of human liberation.

Tate is far from being the only individual we ought to be doing this with. At the Institute, every major pundit of the bourgeoisie, even those who present themselves as ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-Deep state’, receive this treatment. We have commented in like manner on figures all across the American bourgeois political spectrum, from David Packman to Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson. In each case we attempt, again, to find the point of contact (rational kernels) that can be dislocated from these worldviews and rearticulated towards Marxism. Engaging with these figures is also an excellent source for overcoming the algorithmic insularity that structures online spaces. People who wouldn’t encounter Marxist positions in their algorithms are opened to the possibility of this encounter when we discuss the ideologues that denizen their algorithms.

People naturally want to make sense of the world around them. “All men by nature,” as Aristotle long ago noted, “desire to know.” No worldview is better capable of understanding the world, of helping people make sense of it, than Marxism. This is a task, therefore, which is often quite fruitful. That doesn’t mean, of course, that one doesn’t encounter zealots who religiously buy into these worldviews in dogmatic ways. But they are often the exception, especially amongst the youth. Most people are willing, if approached correctly, to accept the transition towards an outlook that helps them understand their surroundings a lot better – an outlook that, as the great Henry Winston teaches us, gives us vision even when our sight is lost.

To succeed in this task requires getting our hands dirty; having the willingness to engage with some of the scummiest of the bourgeois ideologues in hopes, not of convincing them, but their working class listeners, that an alternative is not only possible, but necessary. This is the task at hand for communists willing to wage the war of positions on social media – one of the most important and influential ideological fields in the contemporary world.

[1] My article on how this relationship of determination is not fatalistic: ‘Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor’.

[2] One of the ways to work around it is through mass reporting, such as we have seen over the last few months from the anti-genocide, pro-Palestine movement. Without a doubt these forces have won the information war – largely thanks to the flood of stomach-twisting videos telling the truth about the Israeli genocidal campaign against Gaza. Like the banks we were told were ‘too big to fail,’ these imperialist narrative-challenging images were too popular and widespread to censor. While Silicon Valley has definitely censored the leading voices speaking out for Palestine, they have not succeeded in censoring the millions of relatively smaller accounts who have taken it upon themselves to document the truth and expose the elite’s lies.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... positions/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 25, 2025 3:08 pm

Using AI to Control Financial Flows
January 24, 21:06

Image

US Pushes for AI-Based Global Financial Control


On December 18, 2024, DARPA published a notice of the launch of the A3ML (Anticipatory and Adaptive Anti-Money Laundering) program, and on February 20 ( https://t.me/darpaandcia/468?comment=2277 ), 2025, they plan to hold a presentation day for potential project participants.

According to them, the goal of the program is "to completely eliminate the ability to launder money on a global scale."

DARPA plans to achieve this by replacing existing manual analysis methods with next-generation algorithmic solutions. The agency openly admits the ineffectiveness of current anti-money laundering methods, despite all the efforts being made.

The documents say that half of the North Korean nuclear program is funded through money laundering schemes, and Chinese underground banking structures are closely linked to the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.

Technically, the program involves creating complex algorithms that will:

1. Track all money transfers worldwide

2. Automatically find strange money transfer patterns, such as when they "go in circles" or unexpectedly split into small parts

3. Predict new ways of laundering money

4. Create "digital dossiers" on suspicious transactions in a format that other computer systems can quickly understand and use

The program must learn to work without direct exchange of confidential data between participants, which indicates plans to create a distributed system of global financial monitoring.

The program will have both open and closed parts. Only US citizens with the highest level of clearance to classified information (TS/SCI) are allowed to the closed session, which indicates the use of particularly sensitive intelligence.

https://t.me/darpaandcia/468 - zinc


Of course, this is not about "fighting money laundering", but about establishing a new global system for monitoring and controlling financial flows, with the option of influencing them.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9630353.html

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 29, 2025 6:09 pm

Halt Of USAID Exposes Malign Foreign Influence

A few days ago the Trump administration put a 90 day stop on foreign aid:

Friday’s memo shocked the humanitarian groups and communities conducting development aid across the globe. While the scope of the directive appears far-reaching, uncertainties linger over how it will be carried out.
The memo on Saturday offered only partial clarity.

The pause on foreign aid spending means “a complete halt,” it said. The only exceptions are for emergency humanitarian food assistance and for government officials returning to their duty stations. Waivers allowing delivery of emergency food during the review period will require “detailed information and justification.”
...
USAID began sending a notice to contractors ordering them to “immediately issue stop-work orders” and to “amend, or suspend existing awards.”


USAID and other U.S. government entities provide money for a wide range of causes. Some are arguably humanitarian and should continue:

Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries as part of aid freeze, sources say - NY Post, Jan 28 2025

Others though are not so.

In many cases foreign aid is used to transplant U.S. ideological causes into foreign societies and/or to manipulate them into favoring U.S. interests. This is often hidden under the misleading concept of a 'civil society' as the 'third sector' distinct from governments and businesses. The U.S., through USAID and other like entities, are paying foreign 'non-government' organizations (NGOs), as well as foreign media, to pressure foreign governments into following policies in U.S. interests.

Enslaved by Nonprofits: How NGOs Colonize Developing Countries - Mint Press News, Dec 12 2023

In a number of countries the halt of such 'aid' showed immediate effects (machine translation):

Several major Ukrainian media outlets have asked their readers for financial support due to the suspension of American grant programs by the new President, Donald Trump.
In particular, this is directly reported by Hromadske and Bihus.Info.

"Some of the projects that we implement thanks to grants are temporarily stopped. That is why we especially need the support of each and every one of you," writes Hromadske.
...
Ukrayinska Pravda and Detektor Media also asked for donations, but did not directly name the reason for this suspension of USAID projects.


The U.S. practically owns the whole Ukrainian media scene (machine translation):

Approximately 90% of Ukrainian media outlets have become dependent on American grants since the outbreak of a full-scale war.
This was stated by Oksana Romanyuk, head of the Institute of Mass Information, which is also a recipient of foreign grants, to Public Radio.
...
Political analyst Kostya Bondarenko responded to this statement with irony in his Telegram channel, doubting the lack of engagement of the press.

"Almost 90% of Ukrainian media survived thanks to grants," says Oksana Romanyuk, director of the Institute of Mass Information. I translate it into a normal language: 90% of Ukrainian media was controlled by the West through grants. Independence of the media and freedom of speech, you say?" - wrote Bondarenko.


The dozens of 'independent' U.S. financed pro-war media outlets in Ukraine are just some of a total of 112 official USAID projects in Ukraine (machine translation):

There are 112 projects in Ukraine The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), their funding reaches a total of $ 7 billion.
Such data was provided by MP Maryan Zablotsky on his Facebook page.
...
In particular, over three years, $ 297 million was allocated for the following activities::

support in creating a talk show called "Ebout"on YouTube;
support of the TVORCHI music group in creating the song "At Once" and conducting concerts;
Zminy organization (also known as Don't Take Fake, or DTF) hosts an electronic musicians' camp;
creation of a mural and a series of cultural events by CUKR;
producer Tatiana Postavna and singer Vladimir Dantes created a reality show about the restoration of cultural spaces in frontline settlements;
release of the first series of the project "College Check";
release of the second season of the project "Ukrainian Palaces. Golden Day".
"And there are dozens of such projects – Maybe someone needs it. But I don't quite understand why American taxpayers should do this. And why don't we ask for funds for something obviously more necessary?" Zablotsky asked himself.


USAID projects in Ukraine (and elsewhere) include the promotion of Neo-Nazi ideology:

Ivan Katchanovski @I_Katchanovski - 4:47 UTC · Jan 29, 2025
Neo-Nazi linked activist tweets that podcasts with leader of neo-Nazi C14 in Ukraine would also stop because of Trump's suspension of USAID funding.
(pic)


Some are claiming that foreign funds do not influence the content that is produced:

It’s understandable to be wary of foreign money funding Ukrainian journalism, but there’s no hidden agenda behind it. It’s not about controlling the media or pushing specific narratives — that is more common for domestic actors. Organizations providing foreign grants don’t tell the media what to write or order journalists to support or attack particular policies or figures. That’s what local oligarchs do.

The Washington Post recently demonstrated how oligarchic ownership of media is in fact influencing their content through control of its editors. Dependency on foreign aid creates similar ways.

As Alexey Arestoivich, a former advisor to the former president of Ukraine, explains (machine translation):

“Almost 90% of Ukrainian media survived thanks to grants,” says Oksana Romanyuk, director of the Institute of Mass Information.
Actually, this is called "intellectual occupation".
...
Domestic humanities and media were intercepted and put under control back in the 90s, and this is the secret of why, instead of a large, multicultural symphony of Ukraine, “humanitarians” began to build a UPA dugout here the size of the largest European country.

This is one of the main reasons for the start of the war.

Because when the Biden administration needed to buy Ukraine to contain Russia, it didn’t have to try very hard, everything had already been bought long ago.


Ukraine is certainly not the only country that is relevant here:

Balázs Orbán @BalazsOrban_HU - 9:58 UTC · Jan 29, 2025
One of the largest Hungarian opposition media outlets is upset by Trump’s executive order halting U.S. foreign aid for 90 days, as Hungary’s “independent” press stands to lose millions of forints in funding. Makes you wonder how independent one can be when relying on another government’s funding …


The Ukraine government sees the loss of U.S. funds to Ukrainian media as a chance to cheaply obtain control over these (machine translation):

The Office of the President intends to take over the management of grant organizations in Ukraine, whose American funding was frozen by US President Donald Trump.
This follows from yesterday 's address by Vladimir Zelensky .

According to him, the government will start financing those projects and non-governmental organizations that it considers critical. This process will be supervised by Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Alexey Kuleba.


The halt of U.S. finances to foreign NGO operations demonstrates the deep influences these create. It demonstrates the importance of having laws that prohibit foreign (and state) sponsorship of local media and 'civil society' entities.

Posted by b on January 29, 2025 at 15:32 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/h ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 31, 2025 3:18 pm

Image

They Don’t Just Tell Us What To Think, They Train Us HOW To Think

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things.

Caitlin Johnstone
January 31, 2025

It’s not just that they tell us what to think, it’s that they train us how to think.

From grade school on we are fed a framework for thinking about the world whose premises are completely fraudulent. Any analysis which does not take place within that framework is portrayed as ignorant at best and dangerous extremism at worst.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about politics, we are trained to assume as our starting point that elections are real and that the official democratically elected government is the only power structure calling the shots in our country. We are trained to assume that decisions get made in our government based on how people vote in elections between two parties who oppose each other and promote the most organically popular positions on important issues in order to win votes. This is all complete bullshit, but it’s the foundation we’re taught to premise all our ideas and opinions about political matters upon.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about government, we are trained to assume as our starting point that the people running things in our country are known to us and occupy official positions in our capitol. We are trained to assume that if we have a problem with the way things are going, there are official channels through which the powerful can be held to account and real changes can be advanced. The fact that we are actually ruled by unelected plutocrats and empire managers who often have no position in the official government is never seriously entertained.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about the media, we are trained to assume as our starting point that we live in a free country with a free press instead of a dystopian civilization where the news media function as the propaganda services of our rulers. We are trained to assume that while some parts of the media may have obvious biases regarding which mainstream political faction they favor, it’s still possible to get a more or less accurate read on what’s happening in the world by listening to both sides of that ideological divide. None of this is true, but it’s the framework in which all mainstream analysis of the western media occurs.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about foreign policy, we are trained to assume as our starting point that the US and its allies are more or less a force for good in this world, and that all the stories we hear about the governments and groups it works to destroy are more or less true. We are trained to assume that while the western power structure is imperfect and might make mistakes here and there, it must never stop killing and tyrannizing foreigners, because if it does, the bad guys might win. The easily quantifiable fact that the US-centralized empire is by far the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on earth never enters into the discussion.

This is the conceptual framework for thinking about the world that people are trained to espouse, first in school, and then throughout the rest of their lives by the mass media. If they go to university, as the most powerful people in our society typically do, then this framework is hammered home far more aggressively — especially in the most esteemed universities that the so-called “elite” tend to come from.

No thoughts which arise from outside this framework are taken seriously in mainstream politics, media, or academia. They might occasionally be entertained by friends over a bong or between chuckles on a podcast, but they are kept in the margins. This is reinforced by the way people learn that in order to ascend to influence and success they need to adhere to a specific way of thinking about things, thereby ensuring that all the most influential voices align with the authorized framework as well.

Ferocious disagreement is permitted, but before the debate even begins everyone involved needs to adhere to the founding assumptions of the official framework. After that you can argue as passionately as you like with the other side of this manufactured divide, because your ideas cannot pose any serious threat to your rulers.

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Our minds are inundated with propaganda telling us what to think, but more importantly they are shaped and programmed how to think about any new information they might come across.

Most of us are psychologically bent to the will of the powerful before we would ever even be in a position to begin thinking about opposing the status quo. We are herded like livestock away from thoughts of revolution and change, led by tightly controlled minds the way a bull is led by the ring on its nose.

Once you see how pervasive the conditioning is, you understand why getting real revolutionary movements going faces so much inertia. We won’t be able to free ourselves until we find a way to free our minds.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/01 ... -to-think/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 12684
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 01, 2025 3:17 pm

From Cassad's Telegram account:

Colonelcassad
The United States uses its technological dominance in the digital environment to conduct operations to undermine the sovereignty and territorial integrity of foreign states.

The United States continues to carry out destructive cyber actions against foreign countries and their citizens, primarily through leading American corporations (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc.). According to the New York Times, over the past few years, more than 250 high-ranking employees of the CIA, NSA, FBI and Pentagon have joined Google.

Retired US Army General M. Nakasone, who headed the US Cyber ​​Command, the Central Security Service and knows almost everything about surveillance in the virtual space, has become the director of cybersecurity at Open AI. This appointment has caused a great stir in the IT sector, because ordinary users understand that it is not without reason that the general who commanded the leading US organizations in the field of cyber operations moved to a promising company engaged in the development of artificial intelligence.

Such a trend indicates that Western information technology giants have become a tool of the American liberal elites and have effectively merged with the deep state, intelligence agencies and the army.

In addition, American IT companies, under the guise of slogans about ensuring the security of their systems, are systematically pursuing efforts to establish control over the global digital space. This is confirmed by many experts in the field of cybersecurity. Thus, the CEO of the Telegram messenger P. Durov in an interview with the American journalist G. Carlson said that Google and Apple, on orders from the US intelligence services, censor information received by users and introduce spyware into the devices they produce.

Today, the founder of the Telegram messenger P. Durov risks losing his freedom on charges of more than ten fabricated criminal cases.

https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply