Censorship, fake news, perception management

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blindpig
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 11, 2022 2:40 pm

NPR Distorts History of US Invasion of Afghanistan
BRYCE GREENE

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NPR (8/5/22) revises Afghan history.
In the first part of a series of reports on Afghanistan, NPR host Steve Inskeep (Morning Edition, 8/5/22) interviewed current Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid. In introducing Yaqoob on air, Inskeep referenced Yaqoob’s father, the former head of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar: “He was the leader who refused to turn over Osama bin Laden in 2001, a refusal that led to the US attack.”

In the online version of the article, NPR wrote: “Omar also sheltered Osama bin Laden, and refused to turn over the Al Qaeda leader when the United States demanded him after 9/11.”

This line that the Taliban “refused to turn over Osama bin Laden,” and that this “led to the US attack,” though part of the commonly accepted chronology of the war, is a gross distortion of history. The truth is almost the exact opposite: The Taliban repeatedly offered to give up Bin Laden, only rejecting George W. Bush’s demands for immediate and unconditional acquiescence without discussion.

‘There are no negotiations’

The series of events leading up to the US Afghanistan invasion were laid out recently in a Current Affairs essay by Nathan Robinson and Noam Chomsky (8/3/22), titled “What Do We Owe Afghanistan?”

Even before 9/11, the Taliban—who already had a “deeply contentious” relationship with Al Qaeda—repeatedly signaled their willingness to work with the US in bringing Bin Laden to justice. Former Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil told Al Jazeera (9/11/11) that for years, they had used unofficial channels to present ways to “resolve the Osama issue.” “One such proposal,” Muttawakil said, “was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organization of the Islamic Conference [OIC].”

Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief in Pakistan, confirmed US receipt of these proposals to Al Jazeera, but dismissed them as a “ploy” to be ignored. According to Grenier, the US “did not trust the Taliban and their ability to conduct a proper trial.”

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US demanded that the Taliban immediately hand over Bin Laden. The Taliban responded by offering to put Bin Laden on trial if they were shown evidence of his involvement in the attacks. The US refused to share proof, rejecting any diplomatic option.

Bush announced, “There are no negotiations,” then proceeded to bomb Afghanistan, despite numerous warnings from both humanitarian organizations and anti-Taliban forces in the country that their actions would only hurt the Afghanistani people. Even after the bombs began to fall, the Taliban repeated their offers to give up Bin Laden—even dropping the requirement for actual evidence. The US continued its onslaught, initiating the 20-year odyssey of occupation that unraveled last year.

‘Preponderance on the Eurasian continent’
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Zbigniew Brzezinski’s vision of the “Grand Chessboard” included a prospective pipeline across Afghanistan.
It’s abundantly clear that US aims in the country transcended capturing Bin Laden and obtaining justice for 9/11 victims. Some, like Chomsky and Robinson, attributed the hasty invasion to Bush’s personal bloodlust.

Others trace US policy in Afghanistan to longstanding geopolitical imperatives for military influence and control of the world’s natural resources. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of the “Afghan Trap,” wrote in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard that “America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” The book even contained a map of a proposed pipeline through Afghanistan.

The Bush administration’s ranks were pulled in large part from the neoconservative think tank, the Project for a New American Century. In PNAC’s now infamous 2000 document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the overtly imperial organization called for the establishment of “forward-facing bases” in Central Asia, calling these “an essential element in US security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region.”

Of PNAC’s 25 founding members, ten went on to staff the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The day before 9/11, the Bush administration had already made a decision to eventually attack Afghanistan, using Bin Laden as a pretext. On September 12, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were trying to initiate a wider war by attacking Iraq, despite nothing linking Iraq to the attacks.

‘An illegal war’
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Nathan Robinson and Noam Chomsky (Current Affairs, 8/3/22) : “Long before 9/11, the Taliban had reached out to the United States and offered to put Bin Laden on trial under the supervision of a ‘neutral international organization.'”
Whatever the Bush administration’s motivations, it’s clear that the reality is a far cry from NPR’s propagandistically simple formulation that the Taliban simply refused to hand over Bin Laden, and this is what led to the US attack on Afghanistan.

However, it should be noted that even in Inskeep’s version of events, the US invasion would still be an unlawful and unnecessary act of aggression. As Chomsky and Robinson wrote in Current Affairs (8/3/22):

The 9/11 attacks could have been dealt with as a crime. This would have been sane and consistent with precedent. When lawbreaking occurs, we seek the perpetrators, rather than starting wars with unrelated parties.…

If the Bush administration had wanted to “defend Americans from another terrorist attack,” it would have pursued the criminal network responsible for the original attack. Instead, it wanted vengeance, and launched an illegal war that killed thousands of innocent people.


NPR’s historical framing is an attempt to paint the Taliban as prepared to defend Bin Laden to the death, and thus complicit or supportive of the 9/11 attacks. This inaccurate portrayal serves to retroactively justify the US assault on one of the poorest countries in the world.

Despite Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan after a brutal 20-year occupation, the US continues to attack the population today. Earlier this year, the Biden administration directly invoked the horrors of 9/11 to justify robbing the Afghans of $7 billion in central bank reserves. In some twisted form of justice, the Biden administration decided to keep the stolen funds and distribute half of it to families of 9/11 victims.

The other half was to be redistributed to Afghanistan in the form of humanitarian aid, though experts warn that this is far from a substitute for restarting the economy. This despite outrage from several 9/11 families over the violence committed in their name. As the Afghan economy collapses, nearly the entire country is being plunged into misery on a mass scale, and the US is intent on making it worse (FAIR.org, 2/15/22).

In future reporting, NPR should present a clearer picture of historical events to provide proper context for their listeners, and to avoid legitimizing the ongoing, massively destructive policies of the United States by promoting official state mythology.

https://fair.org/home/npr-distorts-hist ... ghanistan/

NPR, aka 'National Propaganda Radio'. It is propaganda for people who think they are smart. I will admit to having had been one of those people, but starting with the Yugoslav war my eyes began to open. And I think it was a bit more independent before Newt put a Contract on it, though there was always class prejudice. They did 'lead' on the Irangate cover-up but that was probably the last time...And NPR does not necessarily parrot the positions of the current administration, as can be seen during the Trump regime. Rather they reflect the ruling class consensus, which is currently in favor of the Biden regime, it's war-mongering, and it's refusal to ameliorate the condition of the working class or the existential environmental crisis by any means other than lying rhetoric. It is exactly the opposite of what many think it is but 'urbane and witty' covers all sorts of things rather not thought of.

Inskeep is one of the worst but he's got plenty company.

And where do they get all these British accented reporters/commentators? MI6, that's where.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Aug 14, 2022 10:24 pm

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]A U.S. government propaganda poster from the 1940s

U.S. gov’t is world’s worst violator of freedom of press, not its protector
By Ben Norton (Posted Aug 12, 2022)

Originally published: Multipolarista on August 8, 2022 (more by Multipolarista)

The U.S. government employs many strategies to try to justify its intervention in the internal affairs and violation of the sovereignty of foreign nations. Chief among these deceptive tactics is Washington’s weaponization of accusations that its adversaries violate the freedom of expression.

This is quite ironic, given that the United States is the world’s leading violator of press freedoms, according to any consistent definition of the term.

And unlike the countries that Washington claims supposedly repress the freedom of expression within their borders, U.S. government censorship of independent media outlets and suppression of alternative voices is global, hurting people across the planet.

The Joe Biden administration has in particular gone to great lengths to depict itself as a defender of civil liberties.

In May, the White House published a statement commemorating World Press Freedom Day. The purpose of the declaration was to portray Russia as a leading violator of free speech and the United States as its noble protector.

But the reality is Washington is guilty of exponentially more persecution of journalists than anything Moscow is even accused of.

U.S. government persecution of Julian Assange threatens freedom of speech everywhere on Earth
There is no more gruesome symbol of the ludicrous hypocrisy of the United States portraying itself as a protector of press freedoms than its authoritarian persecution of the most famous journalist on Earth: Julian Assange.

The U.S. government’s ruthless attack on Assange, the founder and publisher of whistleblowing journalism website WikiLeaks, is likely the worst blow to freedom of speech carried out by any government in history, with dangerous implications for all human beings on the planet.

The U.S. case against Assange essentially amounts to a criminalization of journalism.

Washington is seeking to extradite and prosecute Assange, an Australian national who has never lived in the United States, for the “crime” of publishing truthful information exposing U.S. war crimes–in other words, for doing the kind of journalism that any good reporter should do.

Assange is facing up to 175 years in prison on 18 charges. If it succeeds in the extradition process, the United States will likely throw the WikiLeaks publisher in a medieval-style dungeon, where he will be held in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.

Due to persecution by the United States and United Kingdom, Assange has already been essentially imprisoned for a decade. Starting in 2012, the WikiLeaks journalist sought refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London. He would end up being trapped there for seven years.

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Journalist Julian Assange trapped in Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012.

In 2015, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that Assange had been “arbitrarily detained” and should be released and given compensation.

The British government ignored the UN legal experts. Instead, in 2019, UK authorities violated Ecuador’s territorial integrity, entered the embassy, and kidnapped Assange (who by that time was a naturalized Ecuadorian citizen, in addition to his Australian nationality).

Since 2019, Assange has been subjected to draconian treatment in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh prison, held alongside people convicted of “terrorism,” murder, and other violent crimes.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention once again condemned the UK government in 2019 for violating the freedoms and fundamental rights of the Australian journalist.

In Belmarsh, Assange has been held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours per day. UN legal experts have repeatedly stated that this kind of prolonged solitary confinement, which is routinely carried out by the United States and Britain, amounts to psychological torture.

In other words, Julian Assange has been effectively imprisoned for a decade, has been subjected to grueling torture, and will likely spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison, all because he committed the “crime” of doing journalism.

It is impossible to imagine a tyranny more absolute than this. With the Assange case, the United States is establishing a precedent that says it can imprison any journalist or really any person on Earth, regardless of their nationality, throw them in a dungeon for the rest of their life, and torture them. All Washington needs to do is fabricate charges and claim that that individual violated its domestic laws.

Assange is not the only victim of this kind of Kafkaesque persecution by the U.S. regime. The United States holds multiple political prisoners, including Black revolutionary journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Although it has less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States has nearly 25% of its prisoners.

U.S. censorship of media affects the entire world, not just North Americans
In its May statement on World Press Freedom Day, the Biden White House condemned Russia for passing “a ‘disinformation’ law intended to silence those speaking the truth.”

The hypocrisy could hardly be any more ridiculous. The U.S. government has used the canard of “disinformation” to censor news outlets and journalists from around the world, erasing their work and removing them from digital platforms.

While Washington accuses Moscow of violating the freedom of speech inside Russia, U.S. censorship harms the entire planet.

In March, the U.S. government forced YouTube to censor Russia’s major media network RT in every country on Earth. The European Union likewise banned Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik.

Washington and Brussels insisted this draconian violation of the freedom of speech was necessary because Moscow was supposedly spreading “disinformation” about the war in Ukraine. Their own media outlets, meanwhile, have constantly been exposed for disseminating fake news and misleading propaganda to justify illegal Western wars of aggression–which explains why just 11% of North Americans trust television news, and only 16% believe newspapers.

YouTube’s censorship of Russian media outlets did not just affect people in North America and Europe, but rather the entire world. And YouTube is not just a private company; it is owned by Google, which is inextricably linked to the U.S. government.

All major Silicon Valley companies are U.S. government contractors. Google, Facebook (which owns Instagram and WhatsApp), and Twitter have many billions of dollars of contracts with the U.S. government agencies such as the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as police departments.

The U.S. government uses Big Tech corporations in Silicon Valley as arms of soft power, censoring information that is inconvenient for its foreign-policy interests, violating the free speech of billions of people in foreign countries.

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The U.S. Justice Department seized Iran’s domain name presstv.com.

This censorship is often directly overseen by veterans of the U.S. national security state. Google and Facebook have hired dozens of former CIA agents and NATO press officers. Twitter has recruited many former FBI officers, and the top official overseeing Middle East-related content on Twitter is also a member of British Army’s psychological warfare unit, which admits to waging “information warfare.”

Silicon Valley censorship has silenced countless media outlets and journalists in China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria, and other countries targeted by the U.S. empire for destabilization

Iranian media outlets have been constantly censored by the U.S. government and its soft-power arms in Silicon Valley. The U.S. Justice Department has even seized the domain names of dozens of news websites that it alleged were being run by Iran and Yemen.

Iran’s top network Press TV has had its social media accounts censored dozens of times. The U.S. regime likewise robbed its domain name presstv.com.

This social media censorship nearly always serves U.S. government interests.

Just a week before Nicaragua’s elections in November 2021, Silicon Valley launches a coordinated purge of pro-Sandinista accounts on social media.

Hundreds of profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were censored. All of them were pro-Sandinista. Not a single account was from the U.S.-backed right-wing opposition. On the contrary, Nicaraguans from the U.S.-backed right-wing opposition are constantly promoted on social media, and verified while leftists are suspended.

The same was clear in the U.S.-led coup attempt against Venezuela. Representatives from Venezuela’s democratically elected government were suspended on Twitter, whereas U.S.-appointed coup puppets like unelected putschist Juan Guaidó and his gang of corrupt cronies were all verified and promoted.

While using vague allegations of “disinformation” to justify censoring these independent voices on social media, Silicon Valley corporations simultaneously take money from U.S. state media outlets to run ads promoting propaganda against Washington’s adversaries.

In addition to direct censorship through suspensions, there is also more subtle censorship by Silicon Valley mega-corporations.

Google, for instance, distorts its algorithm in order to promote mainstream corporate media websites, and has a blacklist of outlets that it hides in search results. This means that independent media publications, especially left-wing and anti-imperialist pages, are severely hurt by the Google algorithm and get significantly less traffic.

Even DuckDuckGo, which markets itself as a Google alternative that protects privacy, engages in this political censorship. After Russia initiated its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the website announced that it would be demoting in its search results any websites that it accuses of being pro-Russian.

While censoring independent journalists at home, U.S. government funds so-called ‘independent journalists’ abroad to destabilize foreign adversaries
While the United States persecutes journalists that expose its crimes and aggressively censors independent media outlets that operate inside its borders, Washington ironically claims to support “independent media” abroad.

In its May statement on World Press Freedom Day, the Biden White House called for supporting so-called “independent media” in foreign countries.

CIA cutouts like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have poured many millions of dollars into bankrolling media activists in countries where the United States seeks regime change.

The U.S. government claims it is supporting “civil society,” but in reality it is funding political opposition groups that use the media as a weapon to destabilize Washington’s adversaries.

By definition, these media activists are not “independent”–they are receiving funding from the U.S. government in order to advance its political interests. They are essentially indirect employees of the U.S. State Department, and instruments of Washington’s soft power.

These media activists constantly spread fake news, disinformation, and propaganda, and have played a key role in violent coup attempts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Syria, Belarus, and beyond.

The absurd hypocrisy of Washington persecuting independent journalists at home while funding them abroad highlights the deep cynicism of the U.S. regime’s information warfare tactics.

Washington may depict itself as the beacon of freedom and democracy, but its global empire is authoritarian and ruthless.

U.S. government repression impacts everyone on Earth. As long as the United States maintains its empire, and continues to try to control all of the planet’s political and economic affairs, no country, and no individual, can ever be completely safe.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/12/u-s-gov ... protector/

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Westerners Think They Are Free-Thinking Individualists and It’s Effing Adorable
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE AUGUST 13, 2022

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Cartoon showing the Western conformity of thought against China. Photo: Caitlin Johnstone.

By Caitlin Johnstone – Aug 7, 2022

The Times has published an article titled “Lady Gaga embodies everything China fears,” subtitled “The singer’s uncompromising individuality makes her a serious threat to the mass imposition of cultural conformity through censorship,” and its contents are exactly as horrifyingly idiotic as you would imagine.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the article by Ben Macintyre, because if I had to read them then so do you:

A woman looking like an extra-terrestrial praying mantis upholstered in red leather strode on to the stage at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, jets of flame shot 100ft into the air, 50,000 outrageously costumed fans screamed, and I understood why China is so terrified of Lady Gaga.

For there is nothing so wildly individualistic, so defiant of convention, so unwilling to be regimented and controlled as Lady Gaga in full voice, an erotic, exotic ubercelebrity who also contrives to be the girl next door, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from New York City.

Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball last week was the first UK performance in seven years by this raw meat-wearing, bisexual feminist who sings of liberty, drugs, addiction, mental health and the absolute right to self-expression because she, and everyone else, is Born This Way.

Simultaneously channelling Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, she is both an extreme fashion freak and defiantly ordinary, which is why she is one of the most powerful pop stars in history and, from the point of view of Beijing’s Communist leadership, a serious threat.

Macintyre goes on to explain that Lady Gaga was banned from China in 2016 for meeting with the Dalai Lama (who just between us is known to have collected a massive paycheck from the CIA for decades), which makes her a serious threat whose bold defiance and bisexual feminist individualism give Xi Jinping screaming night terrors.

“Lady Gaga poses a threat less for her political views, her visit to the Dalai Lama, and her support for LGBTQ rights than through her determination to be, and encourage others to be, entirely different,” Macintyre concludes. “Do What U Want, she sings, and Beijing trembles.”

I seriously cannot believe this article was published. Like, anywhere. I would have been surprised to see it picked up by even the most obscure clickbait blog in the seediest backwaters of the internet, much less by a prominent 237 year-old British newspaper.

But from where I sit right now, the funniest thing about it is the way the article portrays the western world as this bastion of free thought and individuality. Just that one fact alone eclipses the absurdity of the fact that the article’s author thinks the perfect symbol of this freedom is Lady Gaga strutting around in a meat dress.

I mean, just the fact that we are ingesting anti-China propaganda to facilitate the long-term strategic agendas of the US-centralized empire while reading in the Murdoch press about how free and unique we are compared to the Chinese shows you how bizarre this claim is.

In an authoritarian regime, you do what the powerful want you to do. In a Free Democracy™️, you do what you like, and it’s only by pure coincidence that what you like just so happens to always align perfectly with what the powerful want you to do.

The more you understand about the brainwashing effects of domestic propaganda in the west, the more adorable it is when you see westerners talking about themselves as free-thinking individualists living in a free society in contrast with the citizens of nations like China. A civilization whose inhabitants are continuously indoctrinated with power-serving belief systems from childhood until their dying breath is not individualist, is not free, and is not thinking. Its inhabitants only think this is so, and they think this is so because they’ve been programmed to.

Freedom of thought and freedom of speech only exist on the fringes of western society, in such small numbers that they make no difference. The mainstream population whose numbers could be used to effect revolutionary change are herded into political factions which are designed to prop up status quo power at every turn and corresponding media echo chambers which keep them from providing any meaningful resistance to the machine.

As a whole we are marching in perfect accordance with the will of our masters: voting how they like, thinking how they like, speaking how they like, working how they like, shopping how they like, and living how they like. It is only the power-serving narratives put in our minds by our education systems and our media which tell us we are free. And it is only those power-serving narratives which have trained us to look down our noses at people in nations like China.



(caitlinjohnstone.com)

https://orinocotribune.com/westerners-t ... -adorable/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 19, 2022 3:01 pm

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Amnesty International finishes discrediting itself by calling for an audit of its report on Ukrainian war crimes
Originally published: Donbass Insider on August 15, 2022 by Christelle Néant (more by Donbass Insider) | (Posted Aug 18, 2022)

On 4 August 2022, Amnesty International published a report denouncing the tactics of the Ukrainian army that endangered civilians, in other words, Ukrainian war crimes (even if AI does not dare to call a spade a spade). Ten days later, the organisation retrogrades violently and indicates that independent experts will verify the said report to understand “what went wrong”. If Amnesty International already had a shaky reputation, this story has just sent it to the dogs. Here is a look at this disaster of an NGO that is neither neutral nor independent.

Since the beginning of the conflict in Donbass eight years ago, Amnesty International has been conspicuous for its unbelievable silence regarding the Ukrainian army’s repeated war crimes against civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), or the systematic human rights violations in Ukraine (e.g. the torture of people arrested by the SBU, such as Larissa, whom we recently interviewed).

The rare times when Amnesty International talks about it, it is systematically by trying to put the two parties back to back (to appear balanced), except that in fact by reading the text in detail, one realizes that there is no balance between the two parties, and that AI reproaches, for example, the DPR and the LPR for a legal vacuum that does not exist (despite what this organisation says, there are laws in these republics, human rights ombudsmen, and contrary to what is alleged, prisoners are well treated there, as the OSCE was able to attest during its visits)! Whereas the evidence of the systematic use of torture by the SBU and the Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalions is legion! But hush, we must make believe that the NGO is neutral…

So when on August 4, 2022, Amnesty International finally spoke openly about what we have been denouncing for months, namely the use by Ukrainian soldiers of schools, flats, hospitals, etc., for military purposes, thus endangering civilians, we said to ourselves, this is it: they are finally doing their job. Even if they don’t dare to say openly that what the Ukrainian army is doing is in fact a war crime, and they continue to say that even so, if civilians are being killed it’s Russia’s fault.

It’s “funny” I don’t remember Amnesty International condemning so strongly the Ukrainian army’s constant bombing for eight years on purely civilian areas of Donbass, which caused thousands of victims among the inhabitants, including more than a hundred children, in places where there were no positions, no pieces of weaponry, no soldiers of the popular militias. Where were Amnesty International’s variable geometry condemnations when the Ukrainian army shelled the centre of Donetsk on 5 July 2022, in a place where there was nothing military, killing 10-year-old Veronica, or when it shelled the funeral ceremony of Commander Korsa in the centre of Donetsk, killing eight civilians, including a 12-year-old child, Katia, who wanted to become a ballerina?

Where is the Amnesty International report condemning the Ukrainian army’s shelling of the centre of Makeyevka with cluster munitions (the same ones it accuses Russia of using in a big way) on 6 July 2022, which left three children dead and four injured as they played in a building yard?

Where is the Amnesty International report condemning the Ukrainian army’s massive use of rockets filled with “petal” mines against the residential areas of Donetsk, Makeyevka, Yassinovataya and Gorlovka, which have already killed more than 40 civilians, including children, who have to undergo amputations after stepping on or picking up these small toy-like mines?

No, none of this will be denounced by Amnesty International, despite its grand declarations about its neutrality, its absence of ideology, etc. The reality is quite different and you only have to read AI’s reports to see that they are anything but neutral. The reality is quite different and one only has to read AI’s reports to see that they are anything but neutral. And its backtracking on one of the only reports where it reveals part of the truth will not help its reputation.

Indeed, just three days after the report was published and in the face of the outcry it triggered in Ukraine, Amnesty International had to issue a second statement to say that it “deeply regrets the distress and anger that our press release on the Ukrainian army’s combat tactics has provoked”.

Amnesty International adds that “since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022, Amnesty International has rigorously documented and reported on war crimes and abuses in Ukraine, interviewing hundreds of victims and survivors whose stories illuminate the brutal reality of Russia’s war of aggression” and that “in this conflict, as in all others, Amnesty International’s priority is to ensure that civilians are protected“. Given AI’s silence during the eight-year war in the Donbass about the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian army against civilians, I have my doubts about the organization’s priorities. Because the brutal reality of the war waged by the Ukrainian army against its own population in the Donbass since 2014 is of no interest to Amnesty International.

Moreover, AI’s bias is obvious when one reads this sentence from the press release: “We have challenged the world to demonstrate its solidarity with Ukrainians through concrete action, and we will continue to do so. Clearly, like the OSCE, Amnesty International finds it hard to hide the fact that its solidarity with civilians is variable depending on where they are. If they are on the Ukrainian side, it’s fine, if they are on the Donbass or Russian side (since Russian territories are also bombed by the Ukrainian army, which has caused Russian civilian victims), radio silence, the solidarity stock is exhausted, move along, nothing to see…

The statement makes this clear: “Nothing we have documented about the actions of Ukrainian forces in any way justifies Russian violations.Russia is solely responsible for its violations against Ukrainian civilians”. So if Ukrainian soldiers shoot at Russian soldiers or civilians in the Donbass from a hospital, a school, or use civilians as human shields, it is the fault of the Russians if civilians are hit by the response fire. Great. For AI if terrorists take people hostage and the police cause a few civilian casualties by eliminating the terrorists who are firing into the crowd, the police are the bad guys and the only ones responsible for the deaths… Fascinating logic!

The message for the population of Donbass and the Russian soldiers who have come to defend it is very clear: let the Ukrainian army shoot at you, let it exterminate you as it has done for the past eight years, and above all shut up, because if you defend yourselves and your shots cause victims on the other side, you are bad guys! The fact that Ukraine buried the Minsk agreements in February 2022, and was about to apply the Croatian solution (ethnic cleansing) in the Donbass before Russia’s intervention, does not seem to bother the Amnesty International observers and their somewhat special logic too much.

But where Amnesty International’s reputation has just been hit by a Titanic-style iceberg is when the organization’s management decided to fold in the face of the outcry over its report, and to have its report audited by international experts in order to, and I quote, “understand exactly what went wrong and why, in order to learn lessons and improve our human rights work”, as there were alleged problems with “the procedures and decisions taken in the run-up to the press release, including the research carried out, the process of preparing the press release, the legal and policy analysis and the timing of its publication”.

But what problems are you talking about? The fact that it took you months to finally talk about what is known to all those who seriously inform themselves about what is happening in Ukraine? Do you think that when Ukrainian soldiers film themselves (!!!) in schools, kindergartens, or hospitals, with their weapons etc., this is not sufficient evidence to denounce these actions?

Juan Sinmiedo/Fearless John/Ukraine exposed. @Youb
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses

Chroniques des conflits mondiaux
https://t.me/chroniques_conflit_ukraine

Cheburashka’s War Room
https://t.me/cheburashkas_war_room

Juan Sinmiedo/Fearless John/Ukraine exposed.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses

Juan Sinmiedo/Fearless John/Ukraine exposed. @You
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses

And this is just the latest videos I’ve seen! There are dozens and dozens of videos showing Ukrainian soldiers in schools!

When the head doctor of the Volnovakha hospital says openly on camera that Ukrainian soldiers shot at Russian soldiers from the hospital buildings, what more do you need?

When residents of Mariupol themselves say that Ukrainian soldiers chased them out of their flats to shoot at Allied forces, and the headquarters of a Ukrainian unit is found in a school, what more do you need?


When the fighters of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov regiment shot at buildings to destroy them before fleeing the advancing Russian army, and killed two grandmothers by throwing grenades into their flat, where was your relationship and solidarity with the civilians?


No Amnesty International, the problem with this report is not your procedures, nor the research you did, nor the preparation of the press release. The problem is that for eight years your complicit silence has given the Ukrainian authorities the illusion that their worst crimes will always remain hidden and unpunished, like a brat who is never told no and never punished.

And by giving in to the hysterical outcry of the Ukrainian authorities, like parents who give in to their child rolling around screaming on the floor in a supermarket, you have just proved that you don’t deserve the name you bear, and that you would definitely do better to change it to “Amnesia International”. At least that would be more honest and it would save you from having to pretend that you are neutral and impartial by producing reports that you disavow in less than two weeks.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/18/amnesty ... ar-crimes/

Videos at link.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 23, 2022 1:53 pm

How One Spook-Run London College Department is Training the World’s Social Media Managers
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 22, 2022
Alan MacLeod

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Staffed by NATO military officers and former government ministers and notorious for training the West’s top spies, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London is also providing the workforce for many of the largest social media companies. This includes Facebook, TikTok, Google, and Twitter.

A MintPress study of professional databases and employment websites reveals a wide network of War Studies alumni holding many of the most influential jobs in media, constituting a silent army of individuals who influence what the world sees (and does not see) in its social media feeds.

SPY SCHOOL

Set in an imposing building near the banks of the River Thames in Central London, the Department of War Studies is at the heart of the British establishment. Current staff includes the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K. Minister of Defense, and a host of military officers from NATO and NATO-aligned countries.

It is also a favored training ground for the secret services. A 2009 report published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system,” also mentioning that the department’s faculty have “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.”



In 2013, then-Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director Leon Panetta gave a speech at the department. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” he said, adding that expansion into tech, surveillance, and cyberwarfare was of critical importance.

Last year, MintPress investigated the department’s intelligence links more deeply.

Moreover, the university has freely admitted to having entered into a number of secret funding agreements with the U.K. Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defense. However, it has refused to elaborate on these contracts, telling investigative news outlet Declassified U.K. that doing so could undermine national security.



While the Department of War Studies plays a key role in producing the West’s intelligence operatives, it also trains many of the world’s top journalists, as well as social media managers, whose task it is to protect us from the misinformation put out by the others. As such, it is a central part of the new high-tech information war being waged between Russia and the West, in which the national security state is increasingly taking control over the means of communication under the guise of protecting us from the Kremlin.

FACEBOOK

At any one time, the department educates around 1,000 students, many of whom have gone on to become top military commanders, intelligence chiefs, and government officials, both in the West and in countries as disparate as Jordan, Nigeria, and Singapore. But increasingly, large numbers of War Studies graduates are finding employment in the most influential media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Silicon Valley.



Chief amongst the social media companies where War Studies graduates hold considerable sway is Facebook (now rebranded as Meta). For example, while working at senior levels in the U.K. government, Mark Smith pursued a Master’s at the department, completing it in 2009. Between 2007 and 2017, he worked for the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Office, and the National Security Secretariat. According to his own LinkedIn profile, he was deployed overseas three times as a political advisor to top NATO military commanders and was a key figure in strategizing responses to ISIS and other terrorist groups, as well as working on the Ministry of Defense’s response to the Scottish independence question.

In 2017, Smith moved straight from the government to Meta, where he is now the Global Director of Global Content Management, giving him considerable power to dictate what is allowed and what is censored from the world’s biggest news and media platform.

Facebook’s Global Director of Strategic Response is also a former War Studies student. After graduating, Caitlin Baker worked on Middle Eastern counterterrorism policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington and as Director for Jordan and Lebanon at the National Security Council at the White House. Between 2015 and 2017, she was also VP Joe Biden’s Middle East Policy Advisor. During this time period, the administration rapidly expanded its drone program, coming to bomb seven countries simultaneously.

In October 2017, Baker moved seamlessly from the Defense Secretary’s office to work for Facebook’s strategic response team, rising to become a global director. The strategic response team decides how Facebook will react to global events like elections, wars and coups, determining what content will be permissible and which views will be banned or suppressed.

There are many more War Studies graduates in influential roles at Facebook, including:

Louis Babington-Reynolds, Public Policy Manager for Dangerous Organizations;
Monica Thurmond Allen, Director of Public Policy for Campaigns and Programs;
Claire Akkaoui, Intelligence Lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa;
Olivia Minor, Intelligence Analyst for Europe, the Middle East and Africa;
Évia Orlando, Imminent Risk Project Manager;
Fiona Moodie, Lead Regulatory Litigation Counsel;
Dane Roth, Design Program Manager;
Kettianne Cadet, Program Manager, People Experience.
While this is certainly not to say that all those mentioned are government plants, or even that they are anything but model employees, this connection does come at a time when Facebook has rapidly begun intertwining itself with the national security state. In 2018, the company announced that, in a bid to combat fake news, it was partnering with NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council, in a deal that gave the latter significant influence on the platform’s content. Today, Facebook’s head of intelligence is NATO’s former press officer. And a MintPress study published last month detailed how the company has hired dozens of former CIA officials, many of whom now hold the most politically sensitive positions in the company and are in charge of deciding what billions of users see daily.

TIKTOK

War Studies alumni also hold or held several influential positions on the video platform TikTok. These include Haniyyah Rahman-Shepherd, an intelligence analyst who works on threat detection and identifying hate speech, extremism, and mis- and disinformation; Michelle Caley, content strategy leader; Manish Gohil, a former risk analyst for TikTok; Alexandra Dinca, investigations lead; Jeanne Sun, safety program manager; and Tom Dudley, head of physical security.



Scott O’Brien, meanwhile, worked for both Facebook and TikTok, first as an intelligence analyst for Facebook, where he specialized in “human rights investigations” in “at-risk countries,” according to his LinkedIn. He is now an influence operations intelligence and discovery analyst at TikTok. Before that, he worked for the infamous intelligence agency, Pinkerton.

In recent times, TikTok has been the recipient of significant amounts of government attention. From the Trump administration’s threats to ban the platform altogether to the news that President Biden was briefing TikTok stars on how they should cover the war in Ukraine, the U.S. government, it appears, performed a 180-degree turn on the app. This occurred at the same time as the company began employing large numbers of state functionaries in key positions, including individuals from NATO, the White House, and the CIA. A MintPress investigation detailing all this described it as a “NATO to TikTok pipeline.”

TWITTER AND GOOGLE

Twitter has comparatively fewer War Studies alumni. But some are in important positions. For instance, Global Program Manager Sean Ryan describes his role as “lead[ing] a global program team that drives a holistic understanding of Twitter’s dynamic risk and threat landscape while working across the cyber, physical, information, platform, policy, health, and reputation domains.” He notes that his analysis, “informs the decision-making of strategic leadership while supporting key policies across multiple teams.”



Twitter’s director of insider risk and investigations, Bruce A., is also a former KCL man. Bruce A. spent 23 years in the FBI, becoming a supervisory special agent, leaving the bureau in 2020 to directly transfer to Twitter.

Bruce is one of just dozens of FBI agents and analysts that Twitter has hired in the past few years – the majority of whom have been parachuted into highly politically sensitive fields, such as security, content moderation and trust and safety, thus effectively giving the bureau considerable influence over the platform’s content and outlook.

Google, too, employs a number of War Studies graduates, among them Asia-Pacific Information Policy Lead Jean-Jacques Sahel, Policy Advisor Grant Hurst, and Global Threat Analyst Jessica O.

JOURNALISM

For a single department in one college of a university, it is remarkable the impact that the Department of War Studies has had on the field of journalism as well. The department punches vastly above its weight, with alumni in most of the world’s top media outlets, including CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as a host of individuals populating the ranks of the British state broadcaster, the BBC. Indeed, it appears that if breaking into the field of journalism is the goal, then a degree from the Department of War Studies is more helpful than one from King’s College London’s Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, its de facto journalism school.

Some of these journalists cut their teeth at investigative outlets Bellingcat and Graphika, both of whom are funded by the U.S. government and both of whom put out questionable reports demonizing official enemy nations. No fewer than six Bellingcat employees or contributors — including Cameron Colquhoun, Jacob Beeders, Lincoln Pigman, Aliaume Leroy, Christiaan Triebert and senior investigator Nick Waters — all pursued postgraduate studies within the department. Indeed, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins joined the Department of War Studies in 2018 as a visiting research associate.

Graphika, meanwhile, is also inordinately staffed by KCL War Studies graduates. Together, these two groups pump out highly-publicized “intelligence” reports warning of nefarious actions committed by Russia or other official enemy states, all while quietly being funded by the U.S. national security state themselves.

STATE-BACKED NEXUS

The Department of War Studies publishes similar work to Graphika. Indeed, its faculty was crucial in propagating the idea of Russian interference in American elections, being the source of many of the most far-reaching claims about Moscow’s influence in American society. Reports published by the department accuse Russia of carrying out a campaign of “information-psychological warfare” and advise that military spending should be increased and that NATO must re-up its commitment to countering Russia. Professor Thomas Rid even testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the “dark art” of Russian meddling and condemned WikiLeaks and alternative media journalists as unwitting agents of disinformation.



Many of the organizations detailed above were also identified as proposed members of a Western government-aligned “counter”-propaganda nexus hoping to be established by the EXPOSE Network. EXPOSE was allegedly a secret U.K.-government-funded initiative that would have brought together journalists and state operatives in an alliance to shape public discourse in a manner more conducive to the priorities of Western governments.

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A chart showing the leadership structure of the EXPOSE network published as part of the Integrity Initiative Leak 7

The Department of War Studies’ Dr. Neville Bolt was on the organization’s preliminary advisory panel, alongside Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council (NATO’s think tank) and Ben Nimmo, former NATO press officer, and ex-director of investigations for Graphika, and Facebook’s current head of intelligence. Training support, meanwhile, would be provided by individuals from Bellingcat.

In the past year, MintPress has been detailing how much of the public sphere, from social media organizations like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok to big search engines such as Google, to think tanks and fact-checking organizations, are quietly much more closely linked to the national security state than first meets the eye. The Department of War Studies at King’s College London is an important part of this state-backed nexus. It is a one-stop shop for training many of the spies, think tank employees, journalists, and supposedly independent intelligence investigators who have been at the forefront of the new information war.

Put simply, one department staffed by former and current military officers is training the people producing the news (journalists), the ones manipulating it (intelligence officials), and the ones who are in charge of sorting fact from fiction and pinpointing disinformation (social media managers). It is quite the system. All the while, they continually warn of the threat of (foreign) state-backed influence operations.

To be clear, Kremlin propaganda is real, but its reach is decidedly minor in comparison to the massive disinformation campaigns being launched by the Western national security state. And the Department of War Studies is a key part of this information war.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/08/ ... -managers/

BBC Assault on Antiwar Academics Was Apparent Product of UK Intel Plot
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 21, 2022
Kit Klarenberg

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Leaked emails expose the fingerprints of UK intelligence all over a factually challenged BBC special that aimed to deprive antiwar academics of their jobs and destroy their reputations.

On May 31, BBC Radio initiated an embarrassing imbroglio when it broadcast a factually challenged, overtly propagandistic documentary special called Ukraine: The Disinformation War.

Fronted by a British state information warrior named Chloe Hadjimatheou, the program professed to investigate “where the new red lines are being drawn in an age of disinformation,” and how “academics, journalists and celebrities have shared misinformation” by attempting to “raise questions about the official narrative” of the conflict in Ukraine. In reality, the show amounted to a malicious state propaganda assault on academics who questioned the dominant narrative of the war.

The program took aim at Tim Hayward of Edinburgh university and Justin Schlosberg of Birkbeck in London, singling the academics out for challenging official claims about Russia’s invasion. BBC’s Hadjimatheou portrayed the two as pawns of the Kremlin who personally posed a direct threat to democracy, world peace and the “international rules based order.”

It was clear the goal of the program was to end the careers of Hayward and Schlosberg, and intimidate any other credentialed academic who might consider dissenting against British foreign policy.

What might have been less apparent to casual listeners was that the BBC’s smear-job was coated with the fingerprints of British intelligence.

British state broadcaster frames targets with wild distortions, innuendo

Among Hayward and Schlosberg’s most unforgivable sins, according to the BBC special’s producer, Chloe Hadjimateou, was publicly urging their Twitter followers to question the declarations of Western officials and mainstream media outlets about April’s still-dubious Bucha incident, in which Russian troops allegedly massacred scores of military-aged men.

Yet neither academic had cast doubt on whether something terrible had actually taken place in Bucha. What’s more, Schlosberg has been an outspoken critic of Russian state-backed media who has condemned Moscow’s invasion many times, even stating that Russia may well have carried out a “civilian massacre” in the Ukrainian city, “on top of other heinous war crimes.”

However, such sentiments did not fit the program’s preordained agenda. So it was necessary for Schlosberg’s views to be grossly distorted to the point of libel, via omission, manipulation and selective editing.

Three weeks after broadcasting its defamatory attack on dissenting academics, the BBC was forced to issue a clarification and formal apology, acknowledging that Hadjimatheou had ascribed perspectives to Schlosberg he did not express, while nonetheless failing to address the most egregious misrepresentations in which she engaged. A further correction was published on August 5. These rare admissions of fault were prompted by Schlosberg filing formal complaints.

The BBC has published a correction and apology for their treatment of me in the recent @BBCradio4 documentary on Ukraine, the Disinformation War..https://t.co/Pp6sSUljuZ

— Justin Schlosberg (@jrschlosberg) June 23, 2022


In attacking Hayward, the British state broadcaster took a more aggressive approach than it did in its attack on Schlosberg. BBC producers contacted an indeterminate number of Hayward’s students, including through their private cellphones, hoping to dig up dirt on the academic and identify individuals willing to publicly condemn him, his courses, and political positions.

In the end, the BBC obtained statements from two Edinburgh University students willing to snitch on Hayward. The first, Kvitka Perehinets, was a Ukrainian native Hayward had never taught or met, but who had many negative things to say about his tweets on Bucha, and Russia’s alleged bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol.

The BBC emphasized that “many” of Perehinets’ relatives remained in Ukraine, with “some of them fighting.” Yet the broadcaster completely omitted the fact that the student was a prolific contributor to Kyiv Independent, a propaganda operation funded by Western governments and intelligence cutouts, which disingenuously claims to be supported entirely by reader donations and “commercial activities.”

In @BBCWorld‘s latest hit piece against @Tim_Hayward_ describe @kvitkanadiia as a ‘student’ without disclosing her state funding. She’s an author at @KyivIndependent. Which uncritically amplifies Ukrainian govt disinfo and was set up with seed money from the US/CAN govts & EEfD. pic.twitter.com/kOEHynH74l

— Michael Martin (@MichaelNo2War) June 2, 2022


The second student had been taught by Hayward but only during a course during the Fall semester of 2021 which was completely unrelated to the Ukrainian conflict. Her criticism centered on Hayward’s invocation of the OPCW’s coverup of the April 2018 Douma false flag in a single lecture, as part of a critical thinking exercise, about which no official complaint was ever lodged.

Hayward was not apprised of the students’ comments at any point prior to broadcast, including during his lengthy interview with Hadjimatheou, or even when he approached her and her colleagues after learning of their fishing expedition.

Further, neither he nor Schlosberg were offered any opportunity to respond to the assorted charges leveled at them by a rogues’ gallery of establishment pundits featured in the program, which furthered its misleading, specious narrative.

Among those called in to denounce the academics was Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “specialist disinformation reporter” – an un-ironic although inadvertently accurate title, given her own predilection for perpetuating fake news. Spring branded Schlosberg’s comments on Bucha a demonstration of “how disinformation and misinformation operates – through omission.”

“It might not be your intention…[but] if you have a decent following, profession or a title that means people are likely to trust what you’re saying, you play a part, and you can’t pretend you aren’t a weapon in this war, if you do that on social media,” the pseudo-expert Spring alleged.

Journeyman journalist and British intelligence collaborator Paul Mason chimed in to reinforce the BBC pundit’s points. The Grayzone has exposed Mason’s involvement in a clandestine effort coordinated with, if not directed by, a British intelligence official named Andy Pryce. In a series of email exchanges obtained and published by this site, Mason and Pryce plotted to disrupt and destabilize the anti-war, anti-imperialist left in the UK and abroad.

In his comments to the BBC, Mason accused Hayward, Schlosberg, and others like them, of “actively promoting the talking points of the Kremlin,” even when they “condemn the invasion” of Ukraine.

“The degradation of facts into maybes is really important,” Mason said. “All that Russia needs is for [a] false fact to embed itself in a commonly accepted view. The persistent dissemination of small lies adds up to a big false picture of history. It goes from newspapers to academia. It goes from academia into diplomacy.”

These talking points were echoed by James Roscoe, a longtime British state propagandist whose CV includes stints as chief press officer to Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Queen’s communications secretary, and multiple Foreign Office roles, including in Iraq and on counter-terrorism, suggesting an intelligence background.

In an unintentionally revealing comment, Roscoe revealed the true motives behind the West’s counter-disinformation push. When those like Hayward and Schlosberg challenge prevailing narratives around controversial events, he said, “what [people] hear is, ‘this fact is disputed’, and that’s the critical thing.”

Questioning the official line is entirely unacceptable from Roscoe’s perspective, particularly with regard to international bodies. As he remarked, “[states] are not in a position to make a decision one way or another, and the way that feeds into the UN, is that they’re stuck in the middle.”

Neither Roscoe nor the BBC acknowledged that he has continually attempted to sway opinion within the United Nations Security Council while serving as London’s Acting Deputy Permanent Representative to the organization.

On May 4, for example, Roscoe branded Kremlin claims about the existence of US-funded biolabs on Ukrainian soil as “discounted and patent nonsense.” The US Department of Defense has since admitted the biolabs did indeed exist.

Delighted to meet with James Roscoe @jmsroscoe, who recently joined @UKinUSA as Deputy Head of Mission. Looking forward to working with you James. pic.twitter.com/0PbIAXy0wX

— NI Bureau (@NI_Bureau) August 16, 2022


Holding the BBC to account for “McCarthy-style atmosphere around dissenting views”

The British state broadcaster’s effort to ruin the reputations of a pair of antiwar academics contained an ‘”offline” component too.

Not long after Schlosberg’s interview with Hadjmatheou was completed, the BBC put a number of loaded questions to his employers at Birkbeck based on extremely damaging misrepresentations and outright falsifications of his public statements, political and academic positions, social media activity, and teaching approaches.

The exercise may well have been intended to compel Birkbeck to publicly condemn Schlosberg, if not terminate his employment. Instead, Hadjimatheou’s slanderous queries were forwarded to her target. Schlosberg responded with a withering and extensive rebuttal to each smear. While Hadjimatheou acknowledged receipt of the response prior to broadcast, none of his ripostes were cited in the program.

Schlosberg’s rebuttal appears in full below:

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Schlosberg’s intervention nonetheless influenced the content of Ukraine: The Disinformation War, in unseen ways. Before transmission, a purported academic expert on disinformation named Emma Briant published several frenzied tweets accusing him of having her scheduled appearance in the documentary canceled. The posts indicated Schlosberg’s responses to the BBC’s bad faith attacks had been shared with her, a puzzling and deeply unprofessional move for a producer to make.

Even more curiously, Schlosberg’s complaint did not reference Briant, nor was she mentioned in his interview with Hadjimatheou. So why did she believe he had played any role in her omission from the program?

One explanation could be that it was originally intended for Briant to reinforce the malicious dog-piling and defamation of the academics featured by Mason, Spring, and Roscoe, but Schlosberg’s robust pre-broadcast critique generated interference from higher level producers concerned that the program had become so wildly prejudiced its credibility was hopelessly and undeniably compromised.

As such, it may have been necessary to cut Briant from the show to maintain the vaguest semblance of “balance” and basic journalistic standards, and provide a modicum of insulation against potential legal action. This could have prompted Hadjimatheou to furnish Briant with Schlosberg’s responses to explain why she was excluded from the program, which then led the disinformation warrior to erroneously conclude he was personally responsible.

Nonetheless, Briant seems to have played a significant behind-the-scenes role in the making of Ukraine: The Disinformation War. As The Grayzone exclusively revealed June 21, she has collaborated closely with Paul Mason in a secret war on “rogue” academics that challenge pro-war orthodoxy.

The disgraceful genesis of a BBC smear job

As part of this covert collaboration, Emma Briant privately introduced Paul Mason to researchers and scholars this April in order to equip him with professional tools to pinpoint “who in Britain denies the Bucha massacre/reflects the Russian line.”

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Among the academics with whom Mason was put in touch, Huw Davies at Edinburgh University, specifically cited Tim Hayward as one such “rogue.” He also offered to provide software to assist the journalist’s quest – a resource that could have flagged social media postings by Schlosberg, given his well-shared tweets on Bucha.

In her emails with Mason, Briant also fingered Greg Simons, an academic at Sweden’s Uppsala University, accusing him of enjoying “DIRECT RUSSIAN STATE CONTACT [emphasis in original].” The basis of this bombastic charge was Simons’ receipt of an anodyne survey by Andrey Kovalev, an academic at a university in Moscow, and then forwarding it to a listserv in which both he and Briant participated.

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Briant boasted of her access to that mailing list, bizarrely suggesting Simons’ routine email communication represented a clear example of the Kremlin’s sinister “techniques of recruitment.” She argued it should be publicized to “educate and raise awareness” of the Kremlin’s “grooming” of academics and others in the Western world. However, her feverish analysis overlooked Kovalev’s well-established record as a reformist liberal linked to a UK-based charity documenting human rights abuses in Russia.

Briant also failed to mention the revealing requests she issued to that same listserv. In one instance in 2015, she solicited contributions to Defence Strategic Communications, the in-house psyops journal of NATO whose editorial board she occupied. Would the self-styled “maven of persuasion” consider this to amount to direct Western state contact?

Briant furnishes BBC with false claim of academic’s Russia ties

This May, as an apparent result of Briant’s rumor-mongering, BBC correspondent Anna Meisel invited Simons to be interviewed by her colleague, Chloe Hadjimatheou, duplicitously framing the program as an open-minded examination of whether “there is a McCarthy-style atmosphere around dissenting views.”

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It is therefore likely that Mason’s machinations triggered Lowkey’s invitation to appear in Ukraine: The Disinformation War. In fact, Mason emailed Pryce, the UK intelligence officer, the day after that invite was sent, informing him that Hadjimatheou was “doing an investigation into Stop The War’s disinfo tactics.” He added that he’d “contributed some critical soundbites,” and expected his targets to “go mad and claim it’s all state harassement [sic].”

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For her part, Hadjimatheou appears to be a go-to when state-linked operatives require the reputations of dissenting voices to be destroyed. A typically obscure figure, she has an eerie habit of surfacing at intermittent intervals to front lavish multi-part apologias for groups and individuals tied to British intelligence.

In April 2016, for example, Hadjimatheou produced the elaborate Islamic State’s Most Wanted, which glorified the work of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, an ostensible citizen journalist collective reporting on abuses by ISIS in the Syrian city it claimed as its de facto capital, and made heroes of its activists.

In truth, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently was an astroturf operation created by a Foreign Office contractor called ARK, which was itself headed by the probable MI6 operative Alistair Harris. The endeavor appears to have achieved little beyond enraging local residents and ensuring many of its contributors were brutally killed by ISIS.

.@chloehadj‘s first major BBC project on Syria was the product of a “national security-directed bankrolling bonanza.” Her second one was an assault on critics of the UK-funded White Helmets’ founder, who killed himself after his corruption came to light. https://t.co/5jQLGbWaUG

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 2, 2022


Hadjimatheou was also placed in charge of an extensive cleanup of the mess left by the mysterious November 2019 death of James Le Mesurier, the former UK military intelligence officer who founded the US and British-funded Syrian White Helmets organization. After Dutch mainstream media published a report exposing the corrupt financial practices that likely led to Le Mesurier falling from a balcony to his death – a probable suicide – Hadjimatheou snapped into action to produce a 15-part BBC radio series called Mayday.

Confirming what was already abundantly clear, adjudicators agreed that the White Helmets propaganda show by BBC hack @chloehadj failed to meet the Corporation’s editorial standards for accuracy by reporting false claims. https://t.co/ljVxPdbfaJ

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 5, 2021


Airing throughout October 2020, the program elevated its protagonist to the status of secular saint, libeled and defamed critics including Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, whitewashed the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) coverup of the false flag attack in Douma, Syria, and denigrated courageous OPCW whistleblowers to such an extent the BBC was forced to acknowledge major flaws in the serial.

BBC’s Hadjimatheou named as prospective collaborator in leaked intel emails

While obviously designed to shut down scrutiny of Le Mesurier and the bogus, human rights-violating humanitarian group he created, Hadjimatheou’s series raised more questions than it answered – particularly on the nature of her relationship with British intelligence, via ARK. Mason’s leaked emails now place her in close proximity to his Foreign Office “friend,” Andy Pryce.

Pryce’s Counter Disinformation and Media Development is funded by the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, the mechanism by which British intelligence bankrolls cutout organizations. These beneficiaries include ARK and Le Mesurier’s Mayday Rescue.

The most recently available official program summary for CDMD states that Pryce’s unit seeks to “protect UK national security by reducing the harm to democracy and the rules-based international order caused by Russia’s information operations.” Its work is said to include “mentoring with UK media organisations; consultancy on programming; funded media co-productions.”

If that excerpt was not sufficient to raise obvious concerns about the circumstances in which Islamic State’s Most Wanted, Mayday and Ukraine: The Disinformation War came about, consider that during the latter’s production, Mason was cooking up plans to take down The Grayzone in coordination with many of the individuals connected to the program.

This May, an intelligence contractor named Amil Khan proposed to Mason that they construct a coalition of individuals who had “been target [sic]” by The Grayzone, in order to collate evidence that could be submitted to a British government body or regulator, thus crippling this outlet financially, and ensure its “relentless de-platforming.”

Mason recommended inviting the state-funded “open source” media outlet Bellingcat to ensure “intel service input by proxy.” He also proposed including Briant, Hadjimatheou, and his “Foreign Office friend”, a euphemism for Pryce.

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Khan concurred and suggested adding Marianna Spring, the BBC disinformation pseudo-specialist, to the mix. Though it is unclear how far this effort progressed, Hadjimatheou repeatedly mentioned The Grayzone in her interviews with Hayward and Schlosberg.

Was this outlet also a prospective target of the BBC’s credibility-strained documentary?

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/08/ ... ntel-plot/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 24, 2022 2:05 pm

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Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, speaks at a Facebook event for marketing professionals in 2012. Image: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

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Originally published: Boston Review on August 3, 2022 by Matthew Crain (more by Boston Review) | (Posted Aug 24, 2022)

The race to commercialize the Internet is over, and advertising is the big winner. This is excellent news if you are an executive or major shareholder of one of the handful of companies that dominate the $600 billion global digital advertising economy. For almost everyone else, advertising’s good fortunes have meant the erosion of privacy, autonomy, and security, as well as a weakening of the collective means to hold power accountable.

This is because the industry’s economic success is rooted in its virtually unrestrained monetization of consumer surveillance. Digital advertising technologies are widely distributed but largely operate under the control of a few giant companies whose monopoly-like market power has, among other ills, unleashed a wave of manipulative communication and deepened a revenue crisis among the nation’s most important journalism outlets. For the ownership class of Silicon Valley, digital advertising has been a gold mine of epic proportions. For democratic society, it is gasoline on a fire.

Constant surveillance is the essence of the $600 billion digital advertising economy.
The deep problem is surveillance advertising: a business model based on persistent and invasive data collection. At its core, surveillance advertising uses data to try to find ever more effective ways to predict and influence people’s behaviors and attitudes. Of course, advertising is old; companies, politicians, and other groups have long been interested in knowing and influencing many kinds of publics. Today’s regime of surveillance advertising on the Internet is not so much a new development as an acceleration of long-standing social trends at the intersection of technology, marketing, politics, and capitalism at large.

That acceleration has been in the works for decades. Though widespread popular scrutiny of Internet tech companies has exploded only in recent years, the key moments in the historical construction of surveillance advertising unfolded in the mid-1990s, when the new technology of the World Wide Web was transformed from an outpost on the fringes of business to a central nervous system for commercial monitoring. To paraphrase Thomas Streeter, surveillance advertising is not something that happened; it is something that was done. In other words, the massive data collection infrastructure that undergirds the Internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Surveillance advertising was created by marketers, technology start-ups, investors, and politicians, a coalition bound by the desire to commercialize the web as quickly as possible. Through bouts of competition and collaboration, private and public sector interests steered digital networks toward maximizing their monitoring and influence capacities, tilling the soil for all manner of deceptive communication practices and wreaking havoc on less invasive media business models. The legacy of this period is the concentration of surveillance capacity in corporate hands and the normalization of consumer monitoring across all digital media platforms we have come to know today.

The political and economic roots of surveillance advertising are important pieces of a larger conversation about Internet companies and the power they wield in society. This conversation went mainstream in 2017 as journalists, tech workers, activists, and academics investigated and publicized a cascade of scandals coming from Silicon Valley. In what became known as the “techlash,” the world’s biggest Internet companies faced international public rebuke over controversies around gender discrimination, appalling labor conditions, lax data security, anticompetitive behavior, tax avoidance, addictive product design, algorithmic bias, and objectionable military contracts. Public opinion cratered as pollsters reported that “few Americans trust major tech companies to consistently do what is right.”

Facebook was at the epicenter of the techlash, especially following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But the vitriol around the Cambridge Analytica and Russian disinformation scandals reflected a deeper complaint: the pervasive consumer surveillance at the heart of the Internet’s advertising business model was out of control. The large reserves of public goodwill that Facebook (now Meta), Google, and the like had enjoyed for much of their existence seemed to be running dry. Certainly these companies had faced criticism in the past, but the techlash was different in that it fostered more than disconnected, one-off condemnations of this or that shameful incident. A structural analysis began to take shape, particularly around the collective harms of business models based on surveillance advertising. As digital rights researcher-activist Nathalie Maréchal argued, microtargeted advertising “drives company decision making in ways that are ultimately toxic to society.” It was becoming widely obvious that consumer data collection was not simply about providing “relevant” ad messages, as ad platforms often claimed. “Their business depends on manipulating behavior,” wrote journalist Rana Foroohar. “It is a business model that causes endless collateral damage.” Even the creator of the World Wide Web weighed in. “We don’t have a technology problem,” said Tim Berners-Lee. “We have a social problem.”

The most important lesson of the techlash has been to unmask a series of seemingly extraordinary scandals as business as usual—inevitable outgrowths of a surveillance advertising system that most people had simply taken for granted as the way the Internet works. Facebook and other ad platforms framed the scandals as a matter of “bad actors” hijacking their systems, but this defense was a shallow attempt to obscure the fact that data-driven influence peddling is their industry’s bread and butter. Facebook had not been hijacked; its platform had been used as intended. The same was true for disinformation operations, which simply plugged into the existing digital advertising apparatus to reach groups deemed most susceptible to political influence. Leveraging surveillance to strategically target vulnerable audiences is not some rogue use of digital advertising technology; it is its very nature. As Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott put it in their summary of the election scandals, this stuff is “digital marketing 101.”

To understand how we got into this mess—and how we might get out of it—we have to look beyond the recent past to the longer contours of twentieth-century political economy. We have to ask, in particular, how and why certain surveillance technologies and practices were elevated or suppressed as the web congealed around business priorities.

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First, some context. Today more money is spent on digital advertising—meaning online and mobile formats—than on any other media channel in the United States. Analysts estimate that more than half of global ad spending goes to digital platforms. Consumer monitoring is now effectively ubiquitous under what investigative journalist Julia Angwin calls a “dragnet” of surveillance. This system depends on an infrastructure of data collection and targeted messaging that undergirds nearly all modern digital media. Leading ad platforms like Google and Meta operate vast networks of surveillance that extend well beyond their own sites and applications. A study of 1 million popular websites found that nearly 90 percent collect and exchange data with external third parties of which most users are unaware. From period-tracker apps to porn sites, ad platforms scoop up all manner of sensitive personal information in order to power their “digital influence machine.” Privacy has been obliterated as surveillance advertisers have created countless ways to link online and offline information.

Surveillance advertisers use data to build consumer profiles, sorting people into various categories and rating them against any number of predictive benchmarks such as creditworthiness, propensity to buy a luxury car, or risk for alcoholism. Meta maintains profiles not only for its 2.7 billion users but also for people who have never signed up for any of the company’s services. And all this data can be used to make startling and intimate predictions.

The most important lesson of the “techlash” has been to show that seemingly extraordinary scandals are just business as usual.
The business objective of all of this data collection and profiling is to sell the capacity to influence people’s actions and attitudes, what Shoshana Zuboff, in her recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), calls the “means of behavioral modification.” Today the cutting edge of this practice uses data signals to forecast and test people’s vulnerability to different kinds of appeals. Advertising that is designed to exploit emotions and personality traits has been found to be particularly promising. Internal documents leaked in 2017 show that Facebook claimed its ad platform could predict the emotional states of teenage users to enable advertisers to reach those who feel “worthless” and “insecure” in real time. As Frances Haugen, the ex-Facebook employee turned whistleblower, told Congress last year: her former company knew about the harmful impacts of its business model but chose to “put profits over people.”

Yet there is good cause to be skeptical of claims about surveillance advertisers’ persuasive power. As Cory Doctorow argues, microtargeted advertising is more a sales pitch aimed at marketers than a consumer mind-control ray. Despite the proclamations of self-interested proponents and well-meaning critics, many studies find that Internet advertising is not all that effective at modifying consumer behavior. But, as Doctorow points out, focusing on the effectiveness of a given ad campaign misses the forest for the trees. Leading advertising platforms like Google and Facebook have created a global communications infrastructure grounded in covert surveillance and asymmetrical control over information. In building these kinds of systems, ad platforms encourage, naturalize, and profit from manipulative and discriminatory behaviors by their clients, rendering Internet users as little more than marks to be sold to the highest bidder.

The surveillance advertising industry is dominated by a handful of companies including Google, Meta, and Amazon, which together control nearly three-quarters of the global digital advertising market. These firms are the world’s foremost purveyors of commercial surveillance and, despite recent market turbulence, among the most valuable corporations in existence. Market power and political power are deeply intertwined. Meta, followed closely by Amazon, is on track to spend more money on lobbying than any other U.S. company this year. Google, ranking a few spots lower on the spending list, maintains a “55,000 square foot office, roughly the size of the White House, less than a mile away from the Capitol Building.”

One of the most troubling outgrowths of digital advertising’s market concentration is the exacerbating revenue crisis among U.S. news organizations. For over a decade, news outlets have been confronting a death spiral in which declining ad revenue prompts cutbacks and layoffs, which reduce the quantity and quality of news production, which further depresses revenue. Although the problem is multifaceted, the fact that two or three companies hoover up the majority of advertising spending in the United States means that news organizations must compete with every other ad-supported Internet service for the scraps.

Newspapers, still the most important source of original reporting, have suffered the worst. According to the Pew Research Center, the total number of newsroom employees in the newspaper sector was cut in half between 2008 and 2019. As ad platforms have grown rich using consumer data to power targeted advertising, news organizations have shuttered their doors at an alarming rate. Paper closures have created a dramatic expansion of what Penelope Muse Abernathy calls “news deserts.” As of 2018, “half of the 3,143 counties in the country now have only one newspaper, usually a small weekly, attempting to cover its various communities.” The dismal outcome of this journalism crisis, writes Victor Pickard, is “a lack of public access to high-quality information, a loss of diverse voices and viewpoints, and the evisceration of public service journalism.”

It didn’t have to be this way. No law of nature says that every new communications technology must be harnessed to the cause of advertising, let alone transformed into an engine of systemic consumer surveillance. Although there were strong social pressures to bring advertising to the Internet, there was no guarantee such efforts would succeed—particularly not on the World Wide Web, which was released into the public domain by Berners-Lee in the hopes that it might become a “universal medium for sharing information.” Early web technology was designed to be open-ended and flexible, but it was also anonymous and nonintuitive, hardly optimized to serve the marketing needs of business. So how exactly did we get here?

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One answer to that question has begun to emerge from Silicon Valley itself. In the wake of the techlash, a procession of Silicon Valley defectors have taken to opinion pages and conference daises to lament the state of their industry. Having more or less disembarked from the surveillance advertising money train, a handful of former executives and investors have newly emerged as conscientious objectors. Chamath Palihapitiya, who served as Facebook’s vice president of growth, confessed that he felt “tremendous guilt” for his role in the company’s global expansion, even though it made him extremely wealthy. After condemning his former employer for “creating tools that are ripping apart the fabric of society,” Palihapitiya added: “I don’t use this shit and my kids are not allowed to use this shit.”

Another prominent voice in this chorus belongs to venture capitalist Roger McNamee, an early Facebook funder and erstwhile mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. In a New York Times op-ed titled “A Brief History of How Your Privacy Was Stolen,” McNamee decried the tech sector’s embrace of “business models based on surveillance and manipulation.” According to McNamee, there are two major causes at play. One is that technological innovation has removed prior constraints on data gathering and processing, making it easier than ever to push the norms of decency in business. The other is a recent cultural shift in Silicon Valley, whereby company leaders and investors have moved away from ethical capitalism to pursue aggressive, greedy, and monopolistic business practices. As Google and Facebook raked in the profits, ethics were thrown out the window, and consumer surveillance began to flourish in more industries across the economy.

Like every other communications system in existence, the Internet’s prevailing economic structure has been heavily shaped by public policy.
For McNamee, these shifts have “transformed capitalism” to such an unpleasant degree that it is now necessary for the government to step in. Although he rightly calls attention to the growing harms of commercial surveillance, McNamee’s account rests on the idea that the marriage between technology and capitalism has only recently become dysfunctional, and now that things have gone off the rails, external political forces must be marshaled to bring things back into proper alignment. In this telling, the techlash represents an aberration from a benevolent technocapitalism that normally functions largely outside of politics. The state enters into the picture only as a last resort, the bumbling sheriff summoned to rein in the excesses of power-hungry villains like Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and the “PayPal mafia.”

To put it bluntly, these accounts are wrong. Surveillance advertising has never existed outside of politics. On the contrary, like every other communications system in existence, the Internet’s prevailing economic structure has been heavily shaped by public policy. Perhaps the most important policies are those created by what sociologist Paul Starr calls “constitutive choices,” the formative decisions that have structuring effects on subsequent media system development. Various forms of legislation, regulation, and government subsidy were foundational to the establishment of U.S. commercial broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, for example. It was the Federal Radio Commission, at the behest of Congress and the executive branch, that “cleared the dial” of many public and nonprofit broadcasters to give exclusive licenses (for free) to some of the nation’s most powerful technology companies, as Tim Wu has noted. From that point forward, broadcasting proceeded almost entirely on advertising-supported basis.

In the absence of public activism, the state has reliably made media policy in service of private sector interests, but no political outcome is ever guaranteed. Commercial radio was highly contested, as evidenced not only by organized citizen opposition but also by the decisions of peer nations like Great Britain to reject advertising and establish alternative public models. Ideally, democratic political institutions should provide countervailing levers of control over media development, though U.S. history shows a mixed track record in that regard. Nevertheless, even in the face of strong structural inertia, there are always real political choices to be made, especially during a platform’s formative years. The Internet was no exception.

For surveillance advertising, two moments of policy making stand out as particularly important. The first was the overarching decision that the Internet would be privatized and commercialized. Beginning in the late 1980s, federal policy makers worked closely with a range of commercial interests to establish what was framed as a “non-regulatory, market oriented” approach to Internet policy. The guiding principle was that the private sector would lead Internet system development, and the government’s primary role was to facilitate private profits. This left a regulatory vacuum around consumer data collection and gave the nascent online advertising industry free rein to build business models around hidden surveillance.

The latter moment occurred at the end of the 1990s, when the progenitors of today’s surveillance advertising behemoths faced the very first public activism for Internet privacy. Responding to increasingly invasive data collection practices, a coalition of advocacy groups mounted a campaign to convince legislators to reverse the government’s laissez-faire approach to Internet privacy. Despite the public concern, Congress and the White House prioritized the growth of the commercial Internet over serious consideration of the ramifications of a surveillance-based digital economy. Though largely overshadowed by the web’s mythos of “friction-free” markets and entrepreneurialism, the regulatory foundations of modern commercial Internet surveillance were forged in this period through negotiations over privacy policies, user consent, data merging, and industry self-regulation, which became the baseline policy framework for online data collection in the twenty-first century. The neoliberal consensus was that commercial surveillance on the Internet was a business like any other: best to let the market sort out the details. Both of these moments reflect the increasingly anti-democratic nature of communications policy-making in the United States. As Patricia Aufderheide notes, “the public is endlessly invoked in communications policy, but rarely is it consulted.”

McNamee’s framing of Silicon Valley’s moral failure hews closely to Zuboff’s influential theory of “surveillance capitalism.” Zuboff’s premise is that the relationship between technology, business, and consumer data under surveillance capitalism represents a marked deviation from prior modes of economic production. For Zuboff, capitalism has gone “rogue.” Much like diagnoses that ignore the net’s political foundations, this position disregards historical continuities to focus only on what is new. Although the magnitude of contemporary commercial surveillance is certainly mind-bending, the system reflects enduring structural imperatives within a capitalist political economy dependent on perpetual growth. As Douglas Rushkoff notes, when we point to “corruption” as the source of technology woes, “we are implying that something initially pure has been corrupted by some bad actors.” Concentrating on bad actors often means ignoring the political economic forces that have incentivized surveillance advertising and so fabulously rewarded its most successful practitioners.

Neil Postman once proposed that the first question to ask about a new technology must be: “What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?” Adding another layer of inquiry, Raymond Williams argued that “the key question about a technological response to a need is less a question about the need itself than about its place in an existing social situation.” In other words, what matters is not only who shapes technology and for what purpose, but also the social position of both the shapers and the purposes. Surveillance advertising has been developed as a tool to help marketers understand, predict, and control consumer behavior. It is a technological response to a concrete business problem: How do we sell more stuff as efficiently as possible? But surveillance advertising also reflects a broader set of deeply rooted social needs within the capitalist political economy. To answer both Postman and Williams: history shows that the structural problem surveillance advertising is meant to address is the accumulation of capital, arguably among the most pressing needs of the most powerful people in our society for quite some time.

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Historical analysis is foundational to a political economy of surveillance advertising because it denaturalizes prevailing institutional arrangements and social relations, showing the structural forces and human political agency at work. Internet advertising was precipitated by a commercial mass media system that, over the course of the twentieth century, came to play a central role in the global economy, but its roots stretch back further. Rather than a break from the past, supercharged online surveillance is better understood as an acceleration of capitalism’s longstanding imperative to produce consumer demand.

Although advertising is sometimes discussed as a single industry, it is really a nexus of business activity across many institutions and economic sectors. Companies of all kinds spend money on advertising to reach new and existing customers: they hire ad agencies, public relations firms, and many variations in between to create and execute strategic communication campaigns on their behalf. Most of this money flows through various kinds of media outlets, which earn revenue by selling access to their audiences. John Sinclair summarizes all of this as an “assemblage of interests we can think of as the ‘manufacturing/marketing/media complex.’”

In the absence of public activism, the state has reliably made media policy in service of private sector interests.
It is important to appreciate the special role played by marketers, in particular. Although advertising puts a lot of coins in a lot of pockets, the purse is largely controlled by companies looking for ways to drive consumption. Still, the marketing complex is a roomy concept that allows for internal divisions, disagreements, and competition among its participants, all of which are held together by a basic need to continuously enlarge the social canvas on which advertising takes place.

The marketing complex began to coalesce in the late 1800s as the U.S. economy became increasingly organized around mass production and consumption. Manufacturers, retailers, advertising agencies, and media outlets found common interest in building out national consumer markets. The need to rationalize and professionalize the creation of consumer demand within an increasingly productive and centralized corporate capitalism precipitated what historian Daniel Pope calls “the making of modern advertising.” In increasingly concentrated markets, brand advertising became a way for big companies to compete with each other without lowering prices and to erect barriers to keep out potential new competitors.

Although modern ad campaigns took a variety of forms, mass marketing became the prevailing strategy, in alignment with the affordances of industrial printing and broadcasting technologies. Mass-produced goods in the same product category were often more or less equivalent, so advertising was used to create product differentiation, or what Thorstein Veblen called the “production of saleable appearances.” Over time, the tone of advertisements shifted from the descriptive nature of early print ads to the more affective character of brand marketing, but the core component of mass media advertising was its reach. Beginning with turn-of-the-century large-circulation newspapers and magazines, and intensifying during the network broadcasting era, scale was king.

Some degree of market segmentation entered the picture with commercial radio and specialty magazines, but only according to rough estimates of consumer demographics. Gathering and processing detailed information about consumers was for the most part an expensive and time- consuming process. Large swaths of the media sector became dependent on advertising revenue, and on the whole, business was good. Advertising expenditures settled in to account for between 2 and 3 percent of U.S. GDP. Media empires were created as advertising became the “leading edge” of the “global advance of consumerism,” serving the ideological and market-building needs of a profitable and astonishingly productive industrial economy.

Things began to shift as the U.S. economy slumped into what Robert Brenner calls the “long downturn,” a worldwide period of debilitating stagnation that began in the 1970s and dragged into the early 1990s. To mitigate what became a crisis of profitability, businesses began to reorganize systems of production, finance, and consumption on a global basis. This was a complex and uneven process that hinged on investment in heretofore publicly funded information and communication technologies, from computers to telecommunications networks. Dan Schiller has shown that while commodification of information has always been involved in capital accumulation, the last fifty years have seen information and communication technologies become a vital pole of growth for an emergent “digital capitalism.” The political mobilization of private sector interests played a significant role in these changes. In the United States and elsewhere, policies of privatization, deregulation, and “free trade” achieved mainstream orthodoxy under the moniker of neoliberalism.

Compelled by a changing political economy, the marketing complex embarked on its own lurching reconfiguration around information and communication technologies and the systematic integration of consumer data into advertising practices. In the 1980s ad agencies became increasingly interested in using computer databases to target specific audience demographics through tactical ad placement across media channels. “Customer relationship marketing” strategies such as loyalty programs used data to establish lasting connections with high-value consumers while excluding those deemed undesirable. Though it had been around for many years, consumer surveillance was now seeping into advertising’s mainstream. During this period, audience fragmentation and the shifting demographics of the U.S. population put national mass advertising under increasing strain. In 1965 an ad campaign could reach 80 percent of eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old women by purchasing three television commercials; a few decades later, it required nearly a hundred prime-time spots to achieve the same result. For major marketers, these trends threatened a loss of control over a changing media system that had long been dictated by their interests.

No law of nature says that every new communications technology must be transformed into an engine of mass surveillance.
By the 1990s, the marketing complex was keenly attuned to the emergence of a new crop of interactive media that included the World Wide Web. The web was simultaneously a danger and opportunity, at once conceivable as advertising’s next frontier and its mortal wound. Among the greatest threats was that interactivity would provide individuals with new kinds of media autonomy—perhaps even the power to excise advertising altogether. The U.S. remained the unquestioned stronghold of global consumer capitalism, but such a position requires constant maintenance through advertising-based media and communications systems designed to stoke demand and foster consumer subjectivities. To turn threat into opportunity, the marketing complex needed the support of the federal government, as well as a push from the investor class of Silicon Valley. The politicians made the rules that governed the web’s commercialization, while the venture capitalists, chasing monopoly profits, supplied the cash to build out the first generation of surveillance advertising companies.

Fueled by speculative capital, dotcom upstarts like DoubleClick, CMGI, and Yahoo became the progenitors of today’s surveillance advertising behemoths. Billions of banner ads washed over the formerly non-commercial Internet like a plague. When it became apparent that hardly anyone clicked on these obtrusive ads, greater personalization was put forward as a solution for reining in the chaos of an interactive medium that gave consumers too much control over their media experiences. Of course, efforts to make ads “relevant” hinged on two things: the technical capacity to collect, exchange, and monetize consumer data at unprecedented scale, and the freedom to do so unhindered by regulatory safeguards around such outdated notions as privacy.

By the end of the 1990s, a sociotechnical infrastructure for surveillance advertising had been established. While the financial mania of the dotcom bubble did not last, the business practices, technical capacities, and accommodating political framework for surveillance advertising endured. When Google and Facebook went on to build advertising empires in the intervening years, they relied on more than just good vibes and heaps of venture capital. They also banked on the political premise that data collection would be pervasive by default, that they would be free to build the tools of mass surveillance and targeted persuasion without being held to public account.

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What is to be done? Public policy is among only levers of power capable of tempering the relentless drive for consumer surveillance. It is, after all, the exact set of tools that private and public actors used to set up the legal foundations of surveillance advertising in the first place. When Google bought DoubleClick in 2007, the merger had to be cleared by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). After an eight-month investigation into potential competitive ramifications, the deal was permitted by a 4-1 vote. Although privacy advocates filed objections with the Commission, concerns about consumer surveillance were not formally factored into the deliberations.

Explaining the exclusion, the FTC noted that privacy concerns were “not unique to Google and DoubleClick,” but rather “extend to the entire online advertising marketplace.” In other words, the FTC argued that consumer monitoring was already so well established that it did not make much sense to question the institutional build-up of surveillance capacity that would result from the merger. Equally significant, the commissioners admitted that even if they had wanted to consider data collection and privacy issues as part of the merger review, they simply had little jurisdiction over such matters. Consumer surveillance on the Internet is industry’s domain; the private sector is in charge. This is the political legacy of the dotcom era.

The only solution is a political program that confronts the surveillance advertising business model head on.
The surveillance advertising industry remains acutely aware of the importance of public policy. Google and Meta have built empires on the proposition that the founding political principle of the Internet—private sector leadership—can endure any “techlash” with enough lobbying and public relations maneuvering. Testifying before Congress in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers he was “not opposed to regulation,” as long as it was the “right regulation.”

It is crystal clear to anyone paying attention that industry self-regulation and the “notice and choice” privacy paradigm are utter failures. When pressed, surveillance advertising platforms will continue to roll out transparency tweaks, privacy dashboards, and other changes that fiddle at the margins of their enterprises. They will curb some of the more egregious uses of their systems, while their public relations teams applaud a job well done. What these companies will not do, however, is anything that might undermine their core business model of unaccountable surveillance. That is, unless democratic society gives them no choice.

The only solution to a problem of this magnitude is a political program that confronts the surveillance advertising business model head on. There is no easy path forward, but public pressure may have finally spurred U.S. policymakers to action as legislators consider a range of privacy, data security, and antitrust interventions into the formerly untouchable realm of Big Tech. One such effort is the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, introduced in the House of Representatives this January. It is unique among legislative proposals in that it focuses on the underlying business model, rather than specific privacy harms.

We now know what twenty-five years of neoliberal Internet governance looks like. We are living with the outcome of “letting the private sector lead.” It is past time for an alternative political vision for the Internet—one that includes greater democratic accountability, more equitable distribution of power, and far less subservience to the demands of the market.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/24/how-cap ... -internet/

The suggested remedies can be accomplished, but only under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 29, 2022 4:09 pm

Caitlin Johnstone: FBI’s Muting of Hunter Biden Story
August 26, 2022
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Zuckerberg’s deployment of algorithms to please the F.B.I. is a glaring example of how billionaires and government work together to control information in an oligarchy.

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By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Facebook restricted visibility of The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election after receiving counsel from the F.B.I., according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.

“Basically the background here is the F.B.I., I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

Zuckerberg said a decision was made to restrict that information on Facebook’s multibillion-user platform. He said that unlike Twitter, which banned the sharing of the article entirely, Facebook opted for the somewhat subtler option of censorship by algorithm.

“The distribution on Facebook was decreased,” he said, adding when pressed by Rogan that the decreased visibility of the article happened to a “meaningful” extent.

As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is becoming the preferred censorship method on large Silicon Valley platforms because it can be done to far more people with far less objection than outright de-platforming and bans.


In addition to being censored across social media platforms, the Hunter Biden laptop story was first ignored and dismissed by the mainstream news media, then spun as a Russian disinformation operation. Those media outlets eventually came around to admitting that the leaked emails were probably authentic, and Hunter Biden tacitly authenticated them himself when he acknowledged that the information “could” have come from his laptop.

Nothing we know so far that came from that laptop was as scandalous as the unified front presented by the news media and Silicon Valley in reducing the political impact of an October surprise before a presidential election.

And now we know that the reason the world’s largest social media platform censored that particular story was because they were cautioned by the F.B.I. against allowing such information to circulate. How many of those other institutions suppressed that news story because they were told to by the F.B.I. or other government agencies? How often are U.S. government agencies involving themselves in the act of censorship? What other information is being suppressed in this or similar ways? What other information will be suppressed in the future?

Because of the veils of government and corporate secrecy which obscure our view of the behaviors of power, we don’t get to have answers to these questions. All we get to have is what oligarchs like Zuckerberg choose to tell us, in whatever way and to whatever extent they choose to tell us about them.

But even what we’ve been told is pretty ugly. A government agency and a social media platform of unprecedented influence teaming up together to silence impactful political speech is censorship by any sane definition. Mainstream liberals can come up with all kinds of arguments for why the continually expanding justifications for online censorship are fine and normal and not really censorship, but are they able to maintain those justifications when government agencies are actively involved? Is it really better when political speech is being censored by a collaboration of government operatives and billionaires than censored directly by the government alone?


Alan MacLeod has been putting out a number of reports with Mintpress News documenting the way many veterans from the F.B.I., C.I.A., NSA and other government agencies have been recruited to work for tech companies like Google/YouTube, Facebook/Meta and Twitter. The intimacy with which these government and corporate entities are working together is growing and they’re making less and less effort to conceal it.

In a power structure without clear boundaries separating corporations from the government, corporate censorship is state censorship. The mightiest power structure on Earth is growing more and more brazen and shameless about this reality.

You know you are living in an oligarchy when Mark Zuckerberg has more political influence over your country than any elected official. Democracy is an illusion. Those who live under the U.S. empire are a propagandized and politically impotent population who only think they are free because they’ve been given the illusion of freedom, and less and less effort is being made to sustain that illusion.

We are ruled by unelected sociopaths who have no wisdom, no compassion, and no intention of ever relinquishing their rule. This will continue unless and until enough of us wake up to what’s going on to stop them.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/26/c ... den-story/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 30, 2022 4:49 pm

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Intelligence operative confirms British gov’t is targeting The Grayzone
Originally published: The Grayzone on August 24, 2022 by Kit Klarenberg (more by The Grayzone) | (Posted Aug 29, 2022)

The Arvamusfestival (Opinion Festival) convened this August by the Estonian Foreign Ministry featured as its centerpiece an English-language panel on “how to deal with misinformation…in the interests of curbing its propagation.”

During the discussion, a British state operative named Ross Burley descended into a rant about The Grayzone, demanding it be banned from YouTube on the baseless grounds that it is a “Russian propaganda outfit.”


Chaired by a local journalist, the panel was comprised of Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab representative Lukas Andriukaitis, Ivo Juurvee of Estonian think tank the International Centre for Defence and Security, Elīna Lange-Ionatamishvili of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, and Burley, the co-founder & Executive Director of something called the Centre for Information Resilience.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the assorted guests clamored in complete lockstep for state censorship, counter-propaganda campaigns, and for private citizens to engage in grassroots information warfare to curb the spread of supposed “misinformation.”

On the latter point, panelists hailed the pro-NATO troll farm known as the Lithuanian Elves as heroes. They likened the Elves to NAFO, or the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, a more recently created troll farm which harasses public figures contradicting official Western messaging about the proxy war in Ukraine, and which encourages citizens to mimic their information warfare tactics.

Both NAFO and the Elves are ostensibly informal collectives that claim to be concerned with rebutting Russian “fake news.” They have earned praise from mainstream media and endorsements by Western government officials. NAFO has been so frequently accused of being sponsored or directed by intelligence actors, its members—identifiable by “doge” profile photos—have transformed charges to that effect into an in-joke meme.

Towards the end of an otherwise stultifyingly dull conversation, Burley blurted out a revealing comment.

Clad in dark clothes, shades and sporting a salt-and-pepper beard, the professional information warrior asserted that social media companies such as YouTube had a “responsibility” to remove content published by individuals like Patrick Lancaster, an independent American journalist embedded with Russian and allied forces, and Graham Philips, a British citizen recently sanctioned by his own government, in an utterly unprecedented development. (The state has seized his property and assets, and frozen his bank accounts).

“I saw Russell Brand, who has a huge following on YouTube, was interviewing a journalist called Aaron Maté on his channel. Aaron Maté works for The Grayzone,” Burley continued. “The Grayzone is a Russian propaganda outfit, so it’s incredibly irresponsible for YouTube and other social media companies to continue to host these people.”

The Grayzone is not a “Russian propaganda outfit,” however, and any suggestion that it is would qualify as straight up defamation. Still, while Burley could not pronounce Aaron Maté’s surname correctly, his belief this outlet is Kremlin-backed cannot be attributed purely to ignorance and ineptitude.

Indeed, Burley’s demand that The Grayzone and anyone hosting its contributors be banned from major social media networks suggests his participation in an active campaign by British intelligence.

So who is Burley, and what does he want?

A UK state psy-ops specialist cultivates Nina Jankowicz, sponsors NATO troll farms

Burley is the founder of the Centre for Information Resilience, ostensibly a“non-profit social enterprise building a global coalition to identify, counter and expose disinformation and influence operations,” founded in June 2020. A section on the Centre’s website indicates Burley and other spokespeople have served as talking heads in seemingly countless mainstream media reports on the scourge of disinformation.

Not one of these articles though has seemingly acknowledged Burley’s lengthy period of employment at the British Foreign Office, or ongoing role as “Civilian Deployable Expert” in Whitehall’s Stabilisation Unit, which he has occupied since March 2017.

Under the auspices of this post, Burley spent nearly three years in senior positions at Zinc Network, a highly suspect UK Home and Foreign Office psy-ops contractor whose activities are almost completely hidden from public view by the draconian Official Secrets Act.

That Burley remains tied to the Stabilisation Unit today raises the obvious question of whether his Centre is, in fact, a British government cutout, conducting info-war operations at arm’s length from the state. It may be significant that Centre for Information Resilience “Director of Special Projects” Tom Southern is a Zinc Network veteran as well.

Whatever the truth of the matter, a NATO Stratcom Centre of Excellence profile boasts that during the period Burley was involved with Zinc Network, he “designed, implemented, and led several of the UK Government’s counter disinformation programmes,” including Open Information Partnership (OIP).

Burley has also played a pivotal role in supporting the career of perhaps the most infamous character to emerge from the novel counter-disinformation industry. Nina Jankowicz, the disgraced former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board once sat on the advisory board of Burley’s Centre for Information Resilience, and was or still is an advisor to his shadowy OIP. An official financial disclosure form indicates Jankowicz received thousands of dollars from both entities in 2021.

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Launched in early 2019 by Zinc Network, NATO propaganda offshoot The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Western state-funded investigative collective Bellingcat, and funded wholly by the Foreign Office, OIP’s sparse official website concisely frames the enterprise as “a diverse network of organisations and individuals united in our determination to counter and expose disinformation.”

In reality, the OIP is one of many Foreign Office information warfare initiatives that seeks to manipulate citizens at home and abroad, by maligning alternative viewpoints and suppressing evidence which British officials and spooks want kept out of the public domain.

As The Grayzone revealed, the OIP is the “flagship” component of a multi-million-pound effort by Whitehall to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” in countries comprising the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia. A classified “theory of change” for the project circulated to implementing contractors redacts its ultimate intended objective. In other words, the OIP’s agenda is so sensitive, even its participants are forbidden from knowing the overriding goal their activities serve.

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The OIP’s theory of change

Throughout Moscow’s “near abroad,” OIP constructed a vast, covert nexus of Russian-speaking social media personalities, providing them with extensive support, including “innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models,” in order to create and promote slick British state propaganda, masquerading as citizen journalism.

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These relationships were so intimate, they necessitated “daily management.” The “compelling content” churned out by those influencers allegedly reached “millions of people.”

Other OIP documents contain remarkable admissions. For example, one states openly that a key barrier to combating Russian “disinformation” is that “certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true [emphasis added].”

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Elsewhere, the risk of OIP “[being] interpreted as a UK-sponsored disinformation or ‘troll factory’” is judged to be a major concern.

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A lengthy Foreign Office-funded appraisal of 56 prospective OIP network members is also extraordinarily candid. Bellingcat, a founding member of the OIP, was judged to be “somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Far harsher words were reserved for Propastop, a supposed fact-checking and counter-disinformation initiative which received funding by the Estonian Ministry of Defense, and was endorsed by the EU, NATO, Western think tanks, and the media.

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The Foreign Office assessment concluded Propastop was linked to “neo-fascist groups,” and had incited violence against Estonia’s Russophone minority: “Its reporting is widely considered to lack credibility and they have published a number of intentionally false and defamatory articles about Russian media outlets.” As a result, the Foreign Office argued that Propastop should be “removed from consideration for inclusion in the network.”

The much-vaunted Lithuanian Elves were similarly accused of “fomenting anti-Russian prejudice and spreading falsehoods” in the same document. Yet the group became a dedicated OIP member alongside the Nazi-affiliated Propastop. Content produced by the latter has been widely shared on social media since February 24th, while the Elves have received much fawning media coverage.

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In an April Euronews article, none other than Ross Burley hailed the Elves as an “incredibly effective” coalition of “the best people, the most committed people,” working together in a “collegiate and systematic way.”

British intelligence creates ‘Elves academy’
The established narrative of the Elves’ origin spins out a story of concerned citizens spontaneously banding together to counter Russian “trolls” online. Soon after their foundation, the Elves were serendipitously discovered by the Lithuanian Armed Forces Stratcom division, which then publicized the movement at a late 2015 NATO conference. Word of these discussions subsequently leaked to the media, and the model took off across Europe.

Leaked files related to the internal workings of Integrity Initiative, a covert Foreign Office information warfare operation staffed by military and intelligence veterans, point to a very different, and far shadier, origin story. The information contained in these documents furthermore raises obvious concerns about who or what is directing the activities of NAFO, the social media troll farm that recently came into existence to harass critics of the Ukraine proxy war.

The Integrity Initiative files strongly suggest there is little meaningful distinction between Lithuania’s Stratcom unit and the Elves, and show the Initiative was funded by the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense to arrange monthly trips abroad for its Stratcom staff, so the psy-ops divisions of other NATO member state militaries could be taught in the “infowar techniques” practiced by the group.

In other cases, NATO armies created “units within their own ranks” mirroring the Elves. For instance, the British Army’s 77th Brigade information warfare division operates explicitly according to “Lithuanian techniques.”

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The Integrity Initiative also established an “Elves academy”, flying scores of academics, journalists and activists from across Europe to Vilnius, where they received “practical lessons and training.” In-country follow up visits to participants were later conducted by “Elves instructors”, to ensure local networks abroad “[developed] effectively.”

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Giedrius Sakalauskas, a founder of the Elves, has proudly disclosed that his outfit is primarily concerned with conducting hostile operations and disseminating propaganda—the very activities the Elves profess to oppose.

In November 2020, Sakalauskas contributed a chapter to an academic handbook on “Disinformation and Fake News”, in which he revealed the Elves subscribe to the philosophy that “the best defense is offense.” This has consisted of the mass reporting of social media users who express the “wrong” opinions on NATO, and spreading “positive news” about Lithuania, the EU and NATO.

In the months before the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the Elves targeted Adidas for producing a range of garments emblazoned with the Soviet hammer and sickle. The deluge of negative online comments grew so intense, the company pulled the products from sale in just two days. Sakalauskas states that a “group of likeminded Ukrainian activists joined in on the action.”

When Walmart—a company whose boardrooms are not exactly a bastion of harcore Marxist-Leninist agitation—began marketing a range of Communist-themed clothing items that same year, the Elves once again went to work, successfully pressuring the retailer to remove the products from sale. Both campaigns relied heavily on memes and hashtags centered on the sarcastic query “Walmart, why not swastika?”

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The Lithuanian government is a prolific promoter of the toxic fraud of “double genocide,” which falsely equates the mass slaughter of the country’s population by the Nazis with political repression during Soviet rule. In 2010, Vilnius passed legislation enshrining this mephitic myth in law, and criminalizing public discussion of the Lithuanian genocide of the country’s Jews before the Wehrmacht invaded. Similar measures were adopted by Kiev five years later.

British intelligence sets sights on The Grayone

The close proximity of Ross Burley to two insidious British intelligence constructs goes a long way toward explaining his baseless and censorious attacks against The Grayzone.

Both OIP and Integrity Initiative—and in all likelihood the other “counter disinformation programmes” that Burley led—are assets of the Foreign Office’s shadowy Counter Disinformation and Media Development unit. And this wing of the Foreign Office is staffed by senior intelligence operatives like Andy Pryce.

So who is Pryce?

In a series of recent investigations, The Grayzone has exposed him as a close collaborator and possible handler of British journalist Paul Mason. Leaked emails reveal how Mason’s war on the anti-war left was conducted in close coordination with Pryce, and how the pair discussed constructing an intelligence-supported “info op” that would be publicly presented as an “organic” grassroots endeavor. They planned to call it the “International Information Brigade”—in effect, Integrity Initiative 2.0.

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Accordingly, Burley’s false characterization of The Grayzone as a “Russian propaganda outfit” and his casual calls for this outlet to be censored by major social media platforms are not just the inane ramblings of an obscure, self-appointed “disinformation expert”; they are a reflection of the British government’s position. Even more disturbingly, it’s clear that his superiors in Whitehall have the ability to make his proposed ban a reality.

This June, YouTube deleted a discussion between The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté about the leaked Mason emails, on the ostensible basis of “harassment and bullying.”

Thus it appears the Foreign Office can now simply order the removal of offending content and bans of those who perpetuate it directly, while tech companies eagerly acquiesce.

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But British state operatives like Burley are not satisfied with the arbitrary deletion of a single tweet or the removal of a YouTube livestream. As he made abundantly clear in his presentation Estonia, he and his cohorts seek nothing less than a comprehensive firewall around all sources of news and commentary that disrupt their imperial objectives.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/29/intelli ... -grayzone/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 01, 2022 2:02 pm

We’re Being Trained To Worry About ‘Russian Propaganda’ While Drowning In US Propaganda

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One of the weirdest, most insane things happening today is the way the entire western world is being trained to freak out about “Russian propaganda” — which barely exists in the west — while ignoring the fact that we are spending every day marinating in billions of dollars worth of US empire propaganda.

CNN has an article out titled “Darya Dugina’s death provides a glimpse into Russia’s vast disinformation machine — and the influential women fronting it” on the recently assassinated daughter of Alexander Dugin, a Russian political thinker of wildly exaggerated influence.

The article uses Dugina’s assassination to further stoke its audience’s ever-growing panic about Russian disinformation, quickly becoming a commentary on Russia’s entire propaganda network without bothering to articulate how Dugina’s death “provides a glimpse” into its workings.

e — whose coverage of the Ukraine war has eclipsed that of all recent wars the US has been directly involved in — and it becomes clear that this message we’re being fed that we all need to panic about Russian propaganda is itself propaganda.

The CNN write-up criticizes RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan for saying in 2012 that “When Russia is at war, we are, of course, on the side of Russia.” As though CNN ever sides against the US during US wars. Not only does CNN consistently take the side of the US government in every single war, it conducts brazen propaganda operations to help start new ones, like the time it staged a scripted interview with a small Syrian child calling for US military interventionism in Syria.

The only difference between Russian state media and US state media is that Russian state media is honest about what it is.


This wave of nonsensical, artificially created panic about Russian disinformation has been used to dismiss any and all information which comes out that casts the US empire and its lackeys in a negative light as Russian propaganda or the work of Russian agents. We’ve seen this over and over again, from the way Julian Assange has been falsely cast as a Kremlin operative to the way indie media are falsely framed as Russian propaganda operations.

The latest example of this deception is the way incriminating leaked emails of prominent British figures published by The Grayzone have been dismissed in a new Politico hit piece as a dishonest representation of emails obtained by Russian hackers per “the Russian playbook”. Grayzone staff hastened to point out that not only does the Politico article fail to grapple with the rather important question of what the leaked emails actually contain, but that it failed to mention that its primary source is a UK Foreign Office veteran and psyops specialist who has a publicly stated vendetta to get The Grayzone censored online.

The manufactured hysteria about a nonexistent epidemic of Russian propaganda in the west has people so blinkered and confused that it’s become impossible to criticize the most powerful government in the world for its planet-threatening brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower on any online forum without getting accused of being a secret agent for the Kremlin. My own social media notifications are continuously lit up with accusations of Putin loyalty and rubles in my bank account just for criticizing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth, despite never having worked for Russia or any other government.

What’s funny about all this is that by constantly warning of the dangers of Russian propaganda, imperial spinmeisters are admitting that they know it’s possible to manipulate public thought at mass scale using media. They’re just lying about who’s doing it to us.

In reality, they’re not worried about Russian propaganda. “Russian propaganda” is just a spooky story we are told to keep us from noticing that our civilization is saturated in US propaganda.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/08/31 ... ropaganda/

“I’m Worried We’re Becoming A Thought-Controlled Dystopia, Like China!”

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John: I’m worried about China.

Jane: Oh yeah? What about it?

John: Well more I’m worried about the example they’re setting, and that western governments will start implementing their technocratic oppression style to turn us all into a bunch of brainwashed, homogeneous obedience machines.

Jane: What makes you think Chinese people are all brainwashed and homogeneous?

John: Oh my God, don’t you watch the news? Have you not heard of their social credit score system? The state censorship and propaganda those people are subjected to? The CCP literally doesn’t let them have access to western social media platforms because our free thought and democratic values might interfere with their conformity policing. How have you not heard about this? It’s in the news constantly.

Jane: Constantly?

John: Oh yeah, it’s like a major news story all the time. All across the political spectrum, too. Fox News, CNN, The Washington Post. Alternative media too like Infowars and The Epoch Times; even lefty YouTubers like Vaush talk all the time about how bad it is in China.

Jane: So because you’re being given the same message by all the western media you consume, you’re worried about the enforcement of thought conformity in… China?

John: Yeah. Of course.

Jane: And this is why you’re worried that, at some point in the future, that kind of brainwashing and homogeneity might someday be inflicted upon us by powerful people in the west?

John: I mean yeah, if the CCP doesn’t do it to us first. Did you know they’re trying to take over the world?

Jane: They are?

John: Oh yeah! The Chinese want to take over the world and give us all a social credit score so we’ll all think the same. How do you not know about this? Don’t you ever watch TV?

Jane: How do you know it’s true though?

John: That they want to conquer us and give us a social credit score? Come on! Open your eyes! Have you seen how they treat their own population? They’re genociding the Uyghurs as we speak! Millions and millions of them in Nazi-style extermination camps! Plus they deliberately released the Covid virus to hurt us after cooking it up in a lab, they’re taking over Hollywood and infiltrating our political and academic institutions, and they’ve colonized the entire continent of Africa! Of course the CCP wants to rule us! Don’t you ever watch Tucker Carlson? They’re truly, deeply evil, and we’ve got to do something to stop them.

Jane: Sounds like you’ve got this China thing all figured out. You’re right, that sounds really scary. I can’t imagine what it would be like, living in a thought-controlled dystopia where your rulers are brainwashing everyone into obedience and making sure everybody thinks the same way about stuff.

John: Yeah! Finally you get it! I’m glad you’ve come around. Honestly you’re the first person I know who didn’t already understand these things about China.

Jane: I’ll bet.

John: So do you think it will happen? Do you think our government will implement a social credit score system to make us all believe lies and propaganda, like the Chinese?

Jane: You know, I wouldn’t worry about it.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/08/20 ... ike-china/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 08, 2022 2:03 pm

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The historic collapse of journalism
By Patrick Lawrence (Posted Sep 08, 2022)

Originally published: Consortium News on September 6, 2022 (more by Consortium News) |

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

There are sort of these force multipliers. We have our compadres. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be putting out this message on their own.

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

I wrote at length about the Times piece in Salon, where I was foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning media and the nature of public space altogether.

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Price live blogging at the White House, Aug. 2014. (Kori Schulman/Obama Archives)

Rhodes described a White House press corps comprised of post-adolescents thoroughly dependent on the geese-feeding arrangement, especially when they reported on national security questions: “They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes and Price were describing some qualitative turn in the media’s relations with power. I do not mean to suggest these relations were ever in living memory very good, but at some point there had been a swoon, a giving way from bad to worse. “When you read routine press reports in the Times or any of the other major dailies,” I wrote of the Rhodes profile, “you are looking at what the clerks we still call reporters post on government bulletin boards, which we still call newspapers.”

When did this come about? Why had this come about? Was there yet worse to come? How did we get here, in other words, and where are we going? These were my questions. They are still my questions. I am moved to consider them again by the coverage of mainstream correspondents working in Ukraine. Among the many things we may want to call them, they are geese.

The New Yorker Once Upon a Time

My first inkling that something was changing in the way the American press looked out at the world and reported what its correspondents saw was close to home, a small-bore case — small bore, something large to think about in the telling of it. I was living in Japan at the time, the late 1980s through the mid–1990s. Apart from my duties for the International Herald Tribune, I was writing “Letter from Tokyo” for The New Yorker.

There was a long and honored tradition of “Letters from” at the time: Janet Flanner from Paris, Jane Kramer from all over Europe, Mollie Panter–Downes from London. Bob Shaplen, whose gave his career to Asia, was long The New Yorker’s “Far East correspondent” and wrote Letters from more or less every Asian capital. It was Shaplen, late in his career and his life, who handed off to me.

What distinguished The New Yorker’s foreign coverage, including all the Letters from, was the way it was produced. Those who wrote it were not only there: They had been there a long time, typically, and knew their various theres thoroughly, even intimately. They wrote not from the outside looking in, noses pressed against glass, but from within the places and among the people they were covering. You got the inside dope, as they used to say, when you read their pieces—the whispers in the palace, the chatter on the street. The stuff ran far deeper than anything you could read in the dailies.

My New Yorker was Bob Gottlieb’s New Yorker, Gottlieb having succeeded the famous William Shawn in the editor’s chair. Bob wanted to give the magazine an update while preserving its special character. Then Bob was ousted in favor of Tina Brown, who was obsessed with flash-and-dash and “buzz.” Everything had to have buzz. David Samuels could have profiled Tina: She was that sort. She ruined the magazine. She is long gone now, but The New Yorker has never recovered from Tina.

Tina’s editors accepted the Letters from Tokyo I filed after she took over, but none ever ran. In my next and last dealing with The New Yorker, a few years later, I proposed a profile of Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo Prefecture, an accomplished sailor, and a fire-breathing nationalist full of anti–American bile. I liked Ishihara precisely for his bile, though when you interviewed him he stopped just short of pistol-whipping you.

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Tina Brown, April 2012. (Financial Times/Wikimedia Commons)

The New Yorker took no interest in the proposed piece. A few months later it ran a profile of none other than Shintaro Ishihara written by a reporter sent out from New York who, it was clear from his report, had but superficial knowledge of his topic or anything else to do with Japan.

My experience was soon evident in The New Yorker’s foreign coverage altogether. It no longer looked to correspondents who were long and well dug in overseas, but to people sent out for a story and then brought back. I describe a subtle turn, but it had profound implications. A magazine noted for its coverage of foreign places “from the inside out”—my phrase for it—decided it wanted reportage that put the American sensibility first. The outside in would more than do. I read this now as an early indication of a shift in America’s way of seeing others—or not.

As Seen From Washington

In 1995, as my final files to The New Yorker were going unpublished, Tom Friedman took over “Foreign Affairs,” a column with a long, I will not say hallowed history at The New York Times. Friedman’s arrival, with his bluster, his beer-belly prose, and his liberal jingoism, was another sign of the times. Big Tom writing in that space twice a week made it very clear that the practices of correspondents and commentators were changing—which, I can see now as I could not then, marked a change in the American consciousness.

I never much liked the Foreign Affairs column. Its relationship to power always seemed to me ethically questionable. It began in the late 1930s as “In Europe” and was ever after among the most sensitive assignments at the paper. C.L. Sulzberger, scion of the owners and a C.I.A.. collaborator during the Cold War, captured that patrician certainty the U.S. possessed during the first few postwar decades.

When she took over the column in the 1980s, Flora Lewis described a Continent restless within NATO’s confines and the American embrace. Here and there in the archives you can find columns that test the limits of the franchise. But you will never find one in which the limits are made visible.

Rereading such people, I am struck by certain things nonetheless. They had an appreciation for complexity and diversity — not just out in the wild dark beyond the Western alliance, but within it, too. However bad the work — and Cy Sulzberger’s columns collected clichés like barnacles on a sailboat’s bow — it derived from living and working abroad for many years. They display the confidence Americans felt amid the American Century. But rarely, if ever, were they triumphant or righteous. They didn’t have anything to prove.

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Thomas Friedman in 2005. (Charles Haynes/Wikimedia Commons)

The first thing Friedman did when he inherited the Foreign Affairs space on the opinion page was move the column to Washington — no more living among others. The second thing he did was stop listening to others apart from a few friends and acquaintances. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his execrable hymn to neoliberal globalization as led by the U.S., he described himself as a “tourist with attitude.” Tom had it in one. As he explained in that 1999 book, his favorite sources were bond traders and hedge fund managers.

“In today’s global village, people know there is another way to live, they know about the American lifestyle, and many of them want as big a slice of it as they can get—with all the toppings. Some go to Disney World to get it, and some go to Kentucky Fried in northern Malaysia.” This was Big Tom in the Foreign Affairs chair. This is the degeneration of American comment on the world beyond our shores—in “real time,” let’s say.

The Foreign Affairs column is now gone altogether, I should add. The Times killed it years ago. Why would anyone want to read a column with a name like that, after all?

If my topic is a gradual lapse in the professional practices of American journalists, a gradual indifference to “being there,” we cannot think about this on its own. Their delinquencies are to be understood as symptoms of a larger indifference among us toward the world that has taken hold since, I will say, Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall and the U.S. entered its memorably awful decades of triumphalism. Gradually since then, it has mattered less and less what other people think or do or what their aspirations might be. The only way to see things is the American way.

The cases I have described are early signs of this turn for the worse. But if they are symptoms, they are also causes. It is possible to be both, after all. This is the power of media when put to perverse purpose. Many of us have become progressively indifferent to others since the 1990s, and this is in large part because our print and broadcast media have shown us how.

9/11’s Hit on Journalism

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Speechless. (Mr. Fish)

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed things again—in the practices of our media, in the Zeitgeist altogether. Fifteen years on from those tragedies, Ben Rhodes and Ned Price were feeding their geese. Six years on from that, we are getting the worst press coverage of overseas events I can remember from the correspondents fielded in Ukraine.

A few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush’s press secretary arranged a conference call with America’s leading editors in Washington. Ari Fleischer’s intent was to secure the cooperation of newspapers and broadcasters as the administration defined and prosecuted its new “war on terror.” He asked those on the line to black out coverage that revealed how America would wage this war. Fleischer was especially eager to keep from public view the operations of the C.I.A. and the rest of the national security apparatus. All present that day readily obliged the Bush administration in these matters.

Some years later, Jill Abramson, The New York Times’s Washington bureau chief at the time of the Fleischer call, gave us what seems the only extant account of the exchange. “The purpose of the call was to make an agreement with the press — this was just days after 9/11—that we not publish any stories that would go into details about the sources and methods of our intelligence programs,” Abramson explained in a lengthy lecture in 2014 at the Chautauqua Institution, a convocation of well-intended self-improvers in western New York. “It wasn’t complicated to withhold such information. And for some years, really quite a few years, I don’t think the press, in general, did publish any stories that upset the Bush White House or seemed to breach that agreement.”

I marvel when I consider what we now know of “such information.” It included C.I.A. kidnappings, which the government later termed “extraordinary renditions” so as to obscure the truth of what it did, along with its use of “black sites” where uncharged detainees were subject to waterboarding and other forms of sadistic torture. “Such information,” it later turned out, also included the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate surveillance of Americans and whichever non–Americans it chose.

I marvel because had the press’s most influential editors determined to tell Ari Fleischer where to get off, just as they should have and in just such terms, these things may not have occurred, and the American government and American media might have emerged from the Sept. 11 events as more honorable institutions.

When a White House press secretary considers it proper to convene such a gathering and ask those present to participate in the censorship of their own publications, it is plain that media’s relationship to power—in this case political and administrative power—was already compromised. The editors to whom Fleischer appealed soon after accepted the term “war on terror” with no recorded hesitation or objection. This was another breach of professional ethics with far-reaching consequences, given that a state of war inevitably alters the media’s relations with power.

I count these in-unison responses as a defining moment in the decline of American media and their coverage of foreign affairs during the post–2001 years. To understand this, it is necessary briefly to consider what happened to America and Americans altogether on that late-summer morning in Lower Manhattan and in Washington.

Sept. 11 marked the uncannily abrupt end of “the American Century” and—not to be missed—the consciousness it engendered among Americans. I have made this point in this space and elsewhere on previous occasions. There was, in short, a psychological collapse vastly more consequential than the collapse of the towers, sorrowful as the 3,000 fatalities were.

America’s policy elites assumed a defensive crouch that day. They turned away from the world and against it all at once. The Bush administration was openly xenophobic with all its talk of “Islamofascism” and other such ridiculous notions. Most Americans turned in the same way. When Jacques Chirac refused to enlist France in Bush’s “coalition of the willing” against Iraq, the French became “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” a phrase I have always liked for its hardy American jingoism. Remember “Freedom Fries?”

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George W. Bush speaks with Ari Fleischer, left, and Karl Rove aboard Air Force One Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, during the flight from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to Andrews Air Force Base. (Eric Draper, Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library)

From the World to Against It

This hostility toward others has lurked in the American mind since the 17th century, breaking the surface all too frequently. The Irish in the 19th century were ignorant, the Italians greasy, and the Chinese yellow and a peril. Sept. 11 plunged America into this sewer once again. For a time it was perfectly fine to refer to Muslims as “ragheads.”

This shift, away from the world and against it, is regrettable enough as a matter of the national posture. But it has been especially fateful in leading the coverage of overseas events in our major dailies and broadcasters straight down the chute. As we have it, this coverage has become the worst in my fairly long lifetime, but a note of caution on this point: I have called American media’s coverage of foreign affairs the worst in my lifetime on numerous occasions in the past only to find its deterioration deepens inexorably and sometimes by the day.

Why is this? Why do I settle on Sept. 11, 2001, as the point of departure?

Jill Abramson went on to serve as The Times’s executive editor. Although that interim ended when she was fired after two and a half years, she was a journalist of very high stature, if not of high caliber. Here is what she said when she explained to her Chautauqua audience the reasons the American press caved so cravenly to Ari Fleischer’s objectionable demands. “Journalists are Americans, too. I consider myself, like I’m sure many of you do, to be a patriot.”

These two sentences flabbergast me every time I think of them. For one thing, they are an almost verbatim repeat of what scores of publishers, editors, columnists, correspondents, and reporters said after Carl Bernstein, in the Oct. 20, 1977, edition of Rolling Stone, exposed more than 400 of them as C.I.A. collaborators. Joe Alsop, columnist at the New York Herald Tribune and later The Washington Post and a Cold Warrior par excellence: “I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen.”

Does nothing ever change? Do people such as Abramson ever learn anything?

For another, from Alsop’s time to Abramson’s and ours, it does not seem to occur to these people that for an editor or reporter to be a good American requires only that he or she be a good editor or reporter. Instead, they reason that in times of crisis it is somehow necessary that the media betray their fundamental principles — as if these are at bottom expendable.

“What happened no longer mattered. Balanced sourcing no longer mattered. Accuracy no longer mattered. The work of witnessing no longer mattered. Conformity mattered.”

Final point here: American media’s gravest error during the Cold War, the progenitor of all others, was their willing enlistment in the cause of the new national security state. This is what Alsop was talking about. It was accomplished by, I would say, 1948 or 1949 at the latest: In other words, the press and broadcasters climbed on the Truman administration’s newly declared crusade more or less immediately.

And this is also what Jill Abramson was talking about out in the wilds of Chautauqua 65 years later. And that is what American media did immediately after Sept. 11: They enlisted once again in the national security state’s new cause.

By Abramson’s time, America had consolidated a global empire that was merely nascent when Joe Alsop and his brother, Stewart, were writing. The distinction is important. Long before any of this, Rudolf Rocker, one of those true-blue anarchists the late 19th century produced, published Nationalism and Culture. This book — hard to find now and expensive when you do — reminds us: As an empire gathers and guards its power, all institutions of culture are required in one or another way to serve it. None that do not can survive. Rocker used “culture” very broadly. In his meaning of the term, a given nation’s media are cultural institutions, and the bitter truth he articulated applies.

After Sept. 11, at first subtly and then not so, one administration after another insisted that there is only one way to understand the world — the American way — and there is no need to understand or consult as to anyone else’s. I am tempted to invite readers to finish this paragraph, but this seems impolite. So: This way of thinking, or refusing any longer to think, is essentially defensive, the refuge of the anxious and uncertain. And if it has not defined the downward spiral in the quality of mainstream media’s post–2001 foreign coverage, this is a very close call.

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John Pilger on CN Live! Dec 2021

John Pilger, the Australian–British correspondent and filmmaker, remarked after the U.S. cultivated the 2014 coup in Kyiv, “The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember.” Hear, hear, although I imagine John can think of more “most complete” blackouts now, eight years on.

Those readers and viewers who confined their sources of information to the mainstream got some impossibly black-hats, white-hats version of events in Ukraine after the February 2104 coup — which was not a coup but a “democratic revolution.” This was just as the policy cliques in Washington wanted it.

The U.S. role in the putsch, the presence of neo–Nazis among the putschists, the antidemocratic character of a duly elected president’s overthrow, the new regime’s subsequent bombardment of civilians in the eastern provinces — an eight-year campaign — the wholesale discrimination since against Russian speakers and critical media, the assassinations of opposition political figures, Washington’s use of Ukraine in its longtime drive to subvert Russian— all of this was left out.

By the time the crisis in Ukraine erupted, the war in Syria had been on for more than two years. I am not calling this a civil war because it wasn’t one. The U.S. tipped what began as legitimate demonstrations against the Damascus government in late 2011 into an armed conflict by early 2012 at the latest. It was roughly then that Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s adviser at the time, memoed the secretary of state: Good news, we’ve got al–Qaeda on our side in Syria.

Imagine Being There

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A Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army fighter loads an M2 Browning during the fighting in northern Aleppo Governor-ate, November 2016. (Mada Media, Wikimedia Commons)

Of the barely covert coup operation, of the arming of jihadist fanatics against the secular Assad government, of the savage murders, kidnappings, and torture the C.I.A. effectively financed: No, of the true nature of this war we read nothing unless we resorted to the few independent journalists principled enough to report from Syrian soil. Imagine that: Being there.

How the Western print media and networks reported the Syrian crisis has seemed to me — I keep resorting to this — among the worst cases of dereliction in my lifetime. Western correspondents remained in Beirut or Istanbul and got their information through sources on the ground in Syria via telephone, Skype, or social media.

And who were these sources? Opposition figures or the Syrian staff of Western nongovernmental organizations, by and large anti–Assad sources to a one. But never mind that: This stuff went into the reporting as objective. The admirable Patrick Cockburn laid all this out years ago in a very fine piece in The London Review of Books, back when the LRB published such things.

And where did these correspondents turn when they needed a pithy analytic quotation? To American scholars, think tank inhabitants, and government officials in Washington. This practice, I should add, is in no wise limited to the Syria coverage. With a Beirut or a Beijing dateline, American correspondents now think nothing of quoting Americans and then reading back to America what Americans think of this or that foreign affairs question.

These inexcusable practices were across the board in Syria. I will name two names because I think naming names in these kinds of cases is important. Ben Hubbard and Ann Barnard, both of The New York Times, were among the worst offenders. They led the pack as they referred incessantly to murderous jihadists as “moderate rebels,” that now-infamous phrase. It was in large part because these moderate rebels would behead them were they to report from Syria that Hubbard, Barnard et al rarely set foot in the country, if they ever did, to cover the war they purported to cover.

By this time, it was very clear: What began with Ari Flesicher’s conference call was now a consolidated process. No foreign correspondent whose accounts of events did not match quite precisely the Washington orthodoxy could report for mainstream media. What happened no longer mattered. Balanced sourcing no longer mattered. Accuracy no longer mattered. The work of witnessing no longer mattered. Conformity mattered. Those doing principled work in the independent press, the work of bearing witness, now as then, are routinely vilified.

Parenthetically, I see that I have once again asserted the importance of independent media in our time. This cannot be underscored too often. I happen to think American media have a bright future, miserable as its present prospects may appear. It will not be easily or quickly won, but this future lies with independent publications such as this one.

How far was it from the bureaus in Beirut to Ben Rhodes’ office in the Obama White House? A hop-skip, I would say. With Rhodes as Obama’s “communications strategist, and Ned Price his deputy spinner in chief, the correspondents covering Syria could have done the exact same job were they among the “compadres” Price spoke of in 2016—Washington journalists who reported on foreign events after he fed them like geese. This same is true of the correspondents now covering the Ukraine crisis.

With one difference: It remains only to maintain the appearance that one is working as a foreign correspondent — the heroic pose. Reenactment seems to be the point now. Other than this and with a few exceptions, they have all come home — incuriously, lethargically home, one gets the impression with neither inspiration nor guts, resigned to the new routine.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/08/the-his ... ournalism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Sep 18, 2022 2:46 pm

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022
ACTION ALERT: Crime Claims of CNN’s New Police Expert Don’t Hold Up to Facts
JULIE HOLLAR

In its latest move to the right, CNN recently hired former NYPD flack John Miller as its “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.” As Josmar Trujillo observed more than five years ago (FAIR.org, 6/21/17), Miller “has spun the revolving door between law enforcement and media like perhaps no one else,” moving back and forth between jobs at the NYPD, FBI, ABC and CBS.

Just last year, while working for the NYPD, Miller falsely testified that there was “no evidence” the department had spied on Muslims in mosques—when, in fact, AP had won a Pulitzer in 2012 for uncovering how after 9/11 the NYPD “systematically spied on Muslim neighborhoods, listened in on sermons, infiltrated colleges and photographed law-abiding residents” (Popular Information, 9/7/22). Shahana Hanif, the Muslim city council member who called out Miller’s lies, told Popular Information:

John Miller had the audacity to lie under oath about the nature of this program to my face…. Someone like John Miller should not be in public service nor should they be given a platform on a mainstream cable news network.

Predictably, within days of joining CNN, Miller offered up a healthy dose of dishonest copaganda to the network’s audience.

Heads I win, tails you lose
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John Miller misexplains crime stats to CNN‘s audience (New Day, 9/7/22).
On CNN New Day (9/7/22), anchor John Berman brought up the issue of crime in New York City, noting that murder and shooting rates had fallen over the past year, and asking Miller to explain “how…that was achieved.”

Miller replied:

Well, I know how it was achieved because I was there. And that was achieved by extraordinarily smart deployments, which is the Bronx was driving the shooting numbers for the city a year ago. They flooded the Bronx with police officers on overtime. They flooded the Bronx with police officers working a sixth or seventh day.

They shifted tours around. They were very strategic, watching every shooting, every dot on the map and pushing resources there. And they were able to suppress that.

Berman then asked Miller how to explain the seeming anomaly that “you can get the murder right and shootings down, but robbery, felony assaults and overall crime, all up?”

Miller responded:

When you take the larceny, burglary, auto theft, these are all covered under New York’s new bail reform laws, which is, criminals know — criminals have very good intelligence, as good as the police when it comes to collecting information and distributing that among each other—they know that there are certain charges where the judge in New York state, not just New York City, is legally prohibited, prohibited by law, from setting bail in that case.

So they know I commit the crime, if I get caught, I’ll be out as soon as I get my hearing. Now, that has caused recidivism, which was always a problem, to skyrocket. So basically when you look at the larceny, the robberies—which are just larcenies where somebody tried to stop them—the burglaries, the auto thefts…. We have people, John, coming from New Jersey, where they have plenty of cars, to steal cars in New York City, because they know if they get caught, they will not go to jail.


In sum: some crimes are down because police have flooded crime-ridden neighborhoods, but that same flood of police has nothing to do with an increase in other crimes, because bail reform.

NY Post: NYPD’s own stats debunk claims of bail reform leading to spike in gun violence
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New York Post (7/8/20): “Most people released under the criminal justice reforms or amid the pandemic had no known ties to the bloodshed…. Cops should focus on the flow of illegal guns into the city.”
Unsurprisingly, this is exactly the argument Miller’s former employer, and New York mayor and former cop Eric Adams, have been making recently, based on data they will not publicly release, and that contradicts all actually available data (City and State New York, 8/3/22; Crime and Justice, 2021; Quattrone Center, 8/16/22).

Curiously, when shootings were up in 2020 (and other crimes were down), the NYPD’s argument had it that that was the result of bail reform. At the time, the total mendacity was called out by even the right-wing, cop-loving, Murdoch-owned New York Post (7/8/20). Now with the crime rates reversed, the NYPD and its allies are hoping the baseless bail reform blame will stick on a different target.

Contrary to evidence

In fact, murder and shooting rates are down slightly nationwide, after two years of increases. Criminal justice observers note that, while one should always be cautious in attempting to explain short-term changes in crime rates because of the many interacting factors involved, the nationwide shifts strongly point to national, rather than local, causes—foremost among them the major social and economic dislocations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic that have diminished as pandemic-related restrictions have lifted (Brennan Center, 7/12/22). Gun sales in particular have been mostly dropping since the spring of 2021, after a massive spike from March 2020 through January 2021—a surge in available weaponry that surely encouraged the rise in gun-related crimes like homicide and shootings (FAIR.org, 7/20/21).

Indeed, it would be very surprising if the NYPD were able to significantly reduce shooting rates by “flooding the Bronx with police officers,” as most research has found no or minimal reductions in violent crime with increased policing—including in New York City. Instead, more cops mostly translates into more arrests for low-level crimes, and the substantial costs those impose on heavily policed communities (FAIR.org, 1/27/22).
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Vera Institute (4/19): “While the pretrial population comprised about half of people in jail prior to the early 1990s, it now accounts for approximately two-thirds of people in jail nationwide.”
Bail reform is not a policy that says that people who get caught “will not go to jail.” The purpose of bail historically was to make sure that someone accused of a crime—presumed innocent until proven guilty—would show up for their trial. But over the past few decades, the number of people in jail who have not yet been convicted of a crime has increased dramatically, and bail has become a punishment for the poor and a cash cow for the multi-billion dollar bail bond industry.

In fact, research shows that pretrial detention increases the likelihood of conviction, the harshness of the sentence, and the likelihood of recidivism. Given that detainees often wait months for trial, pleading guilty regardless of the circumstances can often seem like the best option for getting back to their life, job (and income), family and community. That pretrial detention also increases crime shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the disruptions it causes in people’s lives, and given that their increased conviction rate makes it harder for them to get work after release (Vera Institute, 4/19).

New York State’s 2019 bail reform prohibited bail for most misdemeanor and nonviolent felony charges, and required judges to consider the person’s ability to pay when setting bail. Other states and cities have pursued similar reforms. These reforms have reduced the number of people in jail awaiting trial. But according to all available evidence, they haven’t increased crime.

In the most comprehensive assessment of the impact of bail reform on recidivism in New York City, the city’s Office of Criminal Justice reported that as of June 2021, pretrial rearrest rates—the recidivism Miller claimed was skyrocketing “because they know if they get caught, they will not go to jail”—”have remained consistent over time and have not changed with bail reform,” at around 4%. And fewer than 1% are arrested for felonies, like auto theft and burglary.

Moreover, rollbacks in spring 2020 to those reforms allowed judges to set bail for even nonviolent felony cases that involved “persistent felony offenders”—which means the recidivism Miller and the NYPD are highlighting is not impacted by bail reform.

In other words, basically everything Miller said about NYC crime was false pro-punishment propaganda. And that’s what passes for “objectivity” at today’s CNN.

ACTION:

Please ask CNN to explain why a person who lied repeatedly and under oath about law enforcement actions, and is now misrepresenting the evidence on the causes of crime trends on CNN‘s own programming, should be offered to its viewers as an expert on police policies and practices.

CONTACT:

Messages to CNN can be sent here (or via Twitter @CNN). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/17/sahra-w ... bundestag/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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