Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 17, 2020 2:21 pm

Facebook’s Soleimani Ban Flies in Face of First Amendment
If sanctions can be invoked by a social media network to take down certain content, what is next?

byAri Paul

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According to the CNN report, merely posting a photo of the general could get the Facebook authorities to take a post down. (Photo: Coda/Screenshot)

Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, took down posts regarded as too sympathetic to Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated January 3 in a controversial US airstrike. The news website Coda (1/10/20) was credited with breaking the news, and Newsweek (1/10/20) also reported that:

Iranian journalists have reported the censorship of their Instagram accounts. Posts about Soleimani have disappeared from Instagram, which is currently the only operational international social media site within Iran.

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Coda (1/10/20) appears to have been the first to break the story of Instagram’s Soleimani censorship, as part of the site’s focus on “authoritarian tech.”
According to the Facebook corporation, as quoted by CNN (1/10/20), removal of such posts is required by US sanctions; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, of which Soleimani was a commander, was designated as a terrorist organization by the US government in April:

As part of its compliance with US law, the Facebook spokesperson said the company removes accounts run by or on behalf of sanctioned people and organizations.

One might rightly ask: What constitutes a post supportive of the late military commander? According to the CNN report, merely posting a photo of the general could get the Facebook authorities to take a post down.

The International Federation of Journalists condemned the censorship:

The measures have gone even further, and some accounts of Iranian newspapers and news agencies have now been removed from the social media platform. This poses an immediate threat to freedom of information in Iran, as Instagram is the only international social media platform currently still operating in the country.

The Washington Times (1/11/20) reported:

Ali Rabiei, a spokesperson for the Iranian government, complained from his Twitter account on Monday this week about the disappearance of social media discussions about Soleimani, accusing Instagram of acting “undemocratic and unashamed.”

Much of the coverage has centered on the fact that Instagram is one of the few social media networks not widely restricted in Iran—thus, the blackout serves as a way of censoring information going into Iran. In fact, the US government news agency Voice of America (1/7/20) reported that the Iranian government was clamping down on social media posts too critical of Soleimani, and NBC News (8/21/19) reported on how Iranians used networks like Instagram to skirt government regulation. (The irony here is thick.)

But this news has also gotten journalists and press advocates worried about what this means for free speech and the First Amendment in the United States. On the one hand, as a private company, Facebook is free to make its own rules about acceptable content. Yet if the network is removing content because it believes it is required to do so by law, that is government censorship—and forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

Shayana Kadidal, a senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told FAIR that while it was possible for the US government to restrict media companies from coordinating with sanctioned entities and providing “material support” to the IRGC, the US government cannot restrict Americans from engaging in what he called “independent advocacy.”

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Facebook says that in order to comply with US sanctions laws, it “removes posts that commend the actions of sanctioned parties” (CNN, 1/13/20).
“Independent advocacy, as the law stands, can’t be banned,” he said. “For [Instagram] to remove every single post would mean it was pulling posts that are protected.”

The Washington Post (1/13/20) reported that free speech advocates were worried, with the director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling it “legally wrong.” Others concurred:

Eliza Campbell, associate director at the Cyber Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, [said] that the existing laws had failed to keep up with online speech, calling it a field of law “that hasn’t been written quite yet.”

“The terrorist designation system is an important tool, but it’s also a blunt instrument,” she said. “I think we’re walking down a dangerous path when we afford these platforms—which are private entities, have no oversight, and are not elected bodies—to essentially dictate policy, which is what’s happening right now.”

Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, [said] that Facebook and Instagram are taking “a very aggressive position and it may not be sustainable.” He said it could result in Facebook removing any speech of any Iranian mourning Soleimani’s death and could represent a “harsh new precedent.”

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In the wake of the Soleimani assassination, the wrong joke can be career-ending (New York Times, 1/11/20).

Regardless of whether the government directed Facebook to take this action, the fact that a media company felt the need to do so is proof of a chilling effect on speech. Who, specifically, is to decide what is so unabashedly pro-Soleimani material that it violates US sanctions? Is an article that merely acknowledges that many Iranians mourned Soleimani and denounced his killing a violation? Is an anti-war editorial that doesn’t sufficiently assert Soleimani was “no angel” constitute such a crime? Could satirical material that facetiously supported the Tehran regime get censored? (The last item isn’t so hypothetical: A Babson College professor was fired for jokingly encouraging Iran to follow Trump’s lead by targeting US cultural sites.)

All of these questions, and all this ambiguity, should be enough evidence that this kind of censorship would be capricious and unfairly applied, and thus inappropriate in the face of free speech protections.

Free press advocates in the United States should think seriously in the coming days about how to respond. If sanctions can be invoked by a social media network to take down certain content, what is next? In order not to find out, we’ll need a concerted pushback to Facebook’s censorship from journalists and civil libertarians.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020 ... -amendment

Curiously, I got this link from a post that was taken down & I greatly doubt the poster did it.
Club des Cordeliers @cordeliers Jan 15

Sanctions do not require censorship. Facebook is protected by the First Amendment. It is choosing to take down Iranian and pro-Iranian content in order to score points with Congress and the Trump Administration.
So then, Twitter too. The analysis found on twitter is more often than not lacking, at best, and will not be missed much but the flow of current & historical information will. Still best to ride this pony until it falls down.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 23, 2020 2:14 pm

How Western Left Media Helped Legitimate US Regime Change in Venezuela
LUCAS KOERNER

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Jacobin: Venezuela and the Left:
In Jacobin (2/5/19)…

It’s been a year since Juan Guaidó began his US-anointed mandate as “interim president” of Venezuela.

Following the opposition leader’s failure to secure reelection as National Assembly president this month, Washington and its corporate media stenographers have hysterically decried a “coup” (FAIR.org, 1/10/20) against the coup leader, moving absurdly to recognize a new parallel parliament that he can still be in charge of.

However, the January 23 anniversary of Guaidó’s farcical self-proclamation has a darker legacy largely ignored by the corporate media: the almost unprecedented US decision to recognize a leader with no effective state control has unleashed a level of economic warfare unseen outside of Cuba, Iran or North Korea.

The recognition was a not-so-subtle signal to transnational economic actors to terminate their business with Caracas, and was followed by a crippling oil embargo, later upgraded to a blanket ban on all dealings with Venezuela’s state. Last year alone, illegal US sanctions are estimated to have destroyed one quarter of Venezuela’s economy, which had already shrunk by half since 2013, in part due to longstanding US economic siege.

Why is it that Trump is able to get away with what is effectively a policy of mass murder in Venezuela, similar to simultaneous US economic warfare against Iran?

The Western media has certainly played a crucial role in delegitimizing the democratically elected Maduro government (e.g. FAIR.org, 5/20/19, 5/23/18, 5/16/18), while systematically concealing the deadly impact of sanctions (FAIR.org, 6/26/19, 6/14/19).

However, despite nominally opposing Washington’s Venezuela policy and its corporate media gendarmerie, global North progressive media have, like during the recent coup in Bolivia (FAIR.org, 12/10/19), tended to repeat imperial ideological tropes, casting the Maduro government as authoritarian, corrupt and/or guilty of much worse human rights violations than the US and its allies.

While invariably couched in the language of “left” analysis, this coverage weakens domestic opposition to the US and other Western states’ murderous onslaught on the Venezuelan people.

The 2019 Coup
Western progressive outlets have a peculiar habit of rolling out their “critiques” of leftist or otherwise independent governments in the global South right at the moment when these states are under imperial assault, echoing the corporate media’s unanimous regime-change chorus (FAIR.org, 4/30/19).

In the days and weeks following the January 23, 2019, start of the US-backed opposition’s sixth coup effort of the past 20 years, Northern leftist publications posted a number of articles featuring scathing attacks on the Maduro administration.

NACLA: Venezuela and the Left
…and in NACLA (2/5/19), the “left” position is that “Maduro was not democratically elected”—mainly because people who had tried to overthrow the government were not allowed to run for president.

NACLA (2/5/19) and Jacobin (2/5/19) led the charge, simultaneously publishing a piece by sociologist Gabriel Hetland denying that Maduro was democratically elected and accusing him of “increasing authoritarianism.” On top of numerous factually problematic attacks on the Venezuelan government, Hetland went as far as to outline hypothetical conditions that “potentially warranted” foreign intervention—namely a “humanitarian catastrophe”—but declining to say that they apply to Venezuela, despite the existence of what he termed a “humanitarian crisis.” The Trump administration repeatedly cites “humanitarian catastrophe” as a justification for its coup and illegal sanctions, a charge that has been echoed by corporate media and the Western human rights industrial complex.

Also in NACLA (2/13/19), Rebeca Hanson and Francisco Sanchez professed their agnosticism regarding whether Guaidó’s US-backed self-proclamation constituted a coup, stating that “depending on how the constitution is interpreted, one of the two men has a rightful claim to assume executive power.”

They went on to anecdotally note a “general sentiment in many popular sectors…that neither [the government nor opposition] ‘side’ can be trusted,” conveniently ignoring the fact that around 31% of the Venezuelan electorate voted to reelect Maduro in May 2018 and a similar percent of the population told Pew they trusted the government a few months later. A smaller percentage of the electorate routinely wins elections in the US. That is, around 6 million people—overwhelmingly from Venezuela’s working-class and poor sectors—still support Maduro.

Despite the authors’ pretension of ethnographic “nuance,” the mask drops when they editorially decry Maduro’s “cronyism, corruption and exploitation”—claims they make no effort to factually justify. They also falsely accuse state security forces of having “killed 21,752 people” in 2016, when the very report they link to places the figure at 4,667, which is still quite high but must be properly contextualized (Venezuelanalysis.com, 7/12/19).

Vanessa Baird hit on similar themes a few days prior in the New Internationalist (1/24/19), lampooning Maduro as “hardly a model leader or democrat.” Indeed, the author appeared to be unaware that Maduro was ever elected at all, stating that his “lamentable rule…started when Hugo Chavez died in 2013.”

A month later, as the US prepared to force “humanitarian aid” into Venezuela and fears of war loomed large, Baird (New Internationalist, 2/12/19) mused about “the desirability of Maduro stepping down.” She then produced a laundry list of misrepresentations about Maduro, which appeared to have been partly lifted, albeit with even less nuance, from Hetland’s article for NACLA (2/5/19) and Jacobin (2/5/19). “Technically, Maduro was the winner of the May 2018 elections—but only after banning leading opposition parties and candidates from running,” she claims:

This—along with cancelling a recall referendum in 2016, dissolving the opposition-led National Assembly in 2017, and “stealing” the October 2017 governor elections—has seriously dented his democratic credentials.

In this last assertion, she goes well beyond what even anti-Maduro analysts like Francisco Rodriguez and Dorothy Kronick have claimed.

Nation: Venezuela’s Deadly Blackout Highlights the Need for a Negotiated Resolution of the Crisis
The Nation (3/13/19) for a “negotiated resolution” in Venezuela—i.e., regime change.

Following the devastating March blackouts, The Nation (3/13/19) likewise posted a piece by Hetland, lambasting Maduro as “corrupt and increasingly repressive” and claiming that his “authoritarian” government “bears primary responsibility for the country’s dire situation,” though conceding that “US sanctions and violence by the US-supported opposition have contributed to Venezuelans’ suffering.”

The article contained wild factual inaccuracies, including the claim that Caracas residents were collecting water from the extremely polluted Guaire River, as well as misleading death statistics from the blackouts. Hetland also cites pro-opposition pollster Datanalisis to assert that an “estimated 15% of the population” supports Chavismo, a dramatic underestimation refuted by the fact that Maduro won 6.2 million votes in 2018—or 31% of the total electorate—which is firmly in line with Chavista turnout levels since 2013. Datanalisis also badly overestimated what opposition turnout would be in both the 2017 regional elections and the 2018 presidential elections, undermining its credibility.

Around the same time, NACLA (3/26/19) published an article with the claim that

Maduro’s record includes suffocating democratic institutions and procedures, colossal economic mismanagement, vast corruption, repression, human rights violations and a humanitarian crisis.

The author, Dimitris Pantoulas, offers no evidence to support his accusations and, more incredibly, makes no mention of illegal US sanctions, which have severely exacerbated Venezuela’s crisis, blocking political and economic solutions. Pantoulas goes on to blame the US-led coup on democratically re-elected Maduro, whose “resistance to democratic solutions made his opponents…concentrate their efforts on ousting him by any means necessary.”

Just one day after the failed US-backed April 30 military putsch, Dissent (5/1/19) published an article with the sensational claim that “Venezuela today is simply not a democracy.” The author, Jared Abbott, fired off a series of deceptive claims, including repeating US propaganda that illegal sanctions “were supposed to target” only government officials, rather than intentionally destroy what was left of Venezuela’s economy. Not content to delegitimize the 2018 elections with the canard that an opposition victory “was close to impossible,” Abbott recited US State Department talking points impugning “past elections under Chavismo” as “hardly models of fairness” on the grounds of unequal access to state resources, ignoring the US government’s massive support for the opposition over the course of its six coup attempts since 2002. The author also rehashes Hetland’s dubious Dananalisis-sourced claims about Maduro’s support, lamenting the “insidious pathologies” and “authoritarianism” of a global South political movement under murderous imperial siege.

A few weeks later, Jacobin (5/23/19) published another article by Hetland. The university professor backpedaled on some of his previous claims, but nevertheless made a point of excoriating “government repression of peaceful protest and dissent amid a broader turn away from political democracy and towards authoritarian rule.” Hetland appeared to be entirely unaware that the opposition attempted a coup d’etat scarcely three weeks before, and that top opposition figures were permitted to lead sizeable anti-government street rallies literally the day after.

Likewise writing in Jacobin (9/30/19), just weeks after the Trump administration escalated its sanctions regime to a sweeping embargo, Michael Brooks and Ben Burgis rightly blamed imperial violence for blocking the sovereign development of global South countries like Venezuela. But the authors also felt compelled to echo Washington in “acknowledg[ing] the reality of the Venezuelan government’s authoritarianism.” They went on to state that

the premise that [presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’] brand of democratic socialism would involve anything like the kind of repressive crackdowns that have happened recently in Venezuela is absurd.

It’s hard to know whether to judge such an incredible statement as condescendingly Eurocentric or just plain naive, given that a Sanders administration would likely face some kind of establishment coup effort if it tried to implement its radical agenda, and its legitimate attempts to defend itself would inevitably be deemed “repressive” by elites.

The 2017 Insurrection
This pattern of progressive “critiques” of Chavismo and the Maduro government just at the moment when the country is under heightened imperial onslaught is not new.

From April through late July 2017, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition launched a violent street insurrection aimed at ousting the president, similar to the leadup to Bolivia’s November 2019 coup d’etat. Over 125 people were killed, including protesters, bystanders and government supporters.

NACLA: Why is Venezuela Spiraling Out of Control?
NACLA (4/28/17) faults both its own government for trying to overthrow Venezuela’s, but also blames Venezuela’s government for the way it responds to attempts to overthrow it.

NACLA (4/28/17) and Jacobin (republished 5/14/17) fired the opening shots on that occasion as well, posting yet another article by Hetland declaring that “opposition violence and the government’s increasing authoritarianism are both to blame” for the bloodshed. As in his more recent NACLA (2/5/19)/Jacobin (2/5/19) piece, the academic cited a laundry list of “authoritarian” abuses riddled with factual errors and outright misrepresentations. Hetland urged leftists to “reject any and all calls for imperialist interventions,” yet declined to acknowledge his own government’s illegal sanctions targeting Venezuela, which, according to economist Mark Weisbrot (The New York Times, 6/30/16), “helped convince major financial institutions not to make otherwise low-risk loans, collateralized by gold, to the Venezuelan government.”

As the deadly anti-government protests continued to escalate, Jacobin (5/19/17) went after Caracas-based Latin American television network teleSUR. The author, Patrick Iber, quoted several academics describing the state channel as “a totally useless source of information” and a “lapdog” for the government. Readers may find it painfully obvious that teleSUR, like every other state outlet on the planet, has an editorial line largely shaped by its state’s geopolitical interests. Nevertheless, Iber and his editors decided to prejudicially exceptionalize teleSUR in this regard, while amazingly ignoring the fact that Venezuela was under assault by their own imperial state at that very moment.

With the danger of civil war looming larger and larger, Jacobin (7/8/17) went on to publish a particularly unhinged “think” piece by Mike Gonzalez, which went as far as to suggest that a helicopter terrorist attack against government installations perpetrated by a rogue police officer was a false flag operation. The article was so scandalous that the editors allowed the publication of a contrasting perspective by George Ciccariello-Maher (Jacobin, 7/29/19) debunking Gonzalez’s falsehoods.

The deck was, however, already stacked in favor of those voices assailing the Venezuelan government as “authoritarian” or “anti-democratic,” which one might resonably conclude to be the editorial line of the magazine. It would appear that dissent from this orthodoxy is the exception, not the rule, for Jacobin’s editors, who have all but refused to publish contrarian opinions, including this author’s critiques of Gabriel Hetland (Venezuelanalysis.com, 5/19/17; Mint Press News, 2/25/19) submitted to the leftist journal.

This editorial line also appears to be well-entrenched at Dissent and the New Internationalist, which have both declined to provide their readers with dissenting viewpoints.

It’s worth noting that NACLA has displayed more balance in its Venezuela coverage, publishing a broader spectrum of perspectives on both the Maduro government and the position of the international left (e.g., 5/11/17, 7/21/17, 7/26/17, 10/4/17, 5/18/18, 5/25/18). In 2019, the journal likewise published alternative viewpoints critiquing US regime change and the right-wing Venezuelan opposition (2/8/19, 5/23/19; 5/31/19, 8/14/19), though none addressed the controversial issue of international left solidarity with the Maduro government. Nevertheless, the number of articles repeating US imperial discourse portraying the Venezuelan government as “authoritarian,” “corrupt,” “repressive” or otherwise illegitimate (e.g., 2/5/19, 2/13/19, 3/26/19) notably increased relative to 2017. For its part, The Nation has been more consistent in publishing a more expansive range of perspectives on Venezuela (e.g., 5/1/17, 5/26/17, 1/25/19, 5/2/19).

Uncritical criticism
As I explained in my previous article on Bolivia (FAIR.org, 12/10/19), the purpose is not to censor leftist debate on Venezuela and the Bolivarian process. The problem is that the progressive media overage we have reviewed above largely amounts to what Lenin termed “uncritical criticism.”

Despite rightly repudiating US sanctions and threats of military intervention, Western leftist critics accept the very imperial ideological premises justifying the murderous onslaught.

By employing the thoroughly Orientalist discourse of “authoritarianism” and “human rights,” these critics wittingly or unwittingly delegitimize a government which is arguably more legitimate than any number of regional governments that face no credible external threat at all.

Angel Prado (photo: Saber y Poder)
Angel Prado: “We take a firm position supporting our government as long as it maintains an unwavering stance against imperialism.” (photo: Saber y Poder)

In critiquing the Maduro administration, Northern leftists would be wise to heed the words of real revolutionaries on the ground in Venezuela, such as El Maizal Socialist Commune spokesperson Angel Prado, who told this author:

We have indeed been very critical of some policies of our government. Honestly we don’t support some of the pacts made with reformist sectors, with certain economic sectors. But we take a firm position supporting our government as long as it maintains an unwavering stance against imperialism….

We are working very hard in our popular movement—the political base for this process—and one day we are going to have enough strength not only to combat US imperialism, but also those [internal] sectors that have been unfortunately harming our process, enriching themselves in a context of war….

But above all, we as a people have preserved our unity, despite the difficult situation of the last six years, and we have refused to allow US imperialism to put its boots here. I think it’s a very important victory on the part of the Venezuelan people, and the world should know it.

With total clarity, Prado identifies the national confrontation with US imperialism as primary, while recognizing that final victory depends on defeating bureaucratic elites intent on using the crisis to entrench their class power.

If revolutionaries like the El Maizal communards are unequivocal in backing their government against imperialism—despite being on the receiving end of state repression—then Western progressives ought to show similar integrity in uncompromisingly opposing their own states’ rapacious violence abroad.

https://fair.org/home/how-western-left- ... venezuela/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 08, 2020 11:50 am

My twitter account has been suspended for suggesting that Nancy Pelosi be strapped to Trump & chucked into a volcano.

It seems there is more than a little of this going around. I have appealed, we shall see.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 11, 2020 6:46 pm

blindpig wrote:
Sat Feb 08, 2020 11:50 am
My twitter account has been suspended for suggesting that Nancy Pelosi be strapped to Trump & chucked into a volcano.

It seems there is more than a little of this going around. I have appealed, we shall see.
Hello,

Your account has been suspended and will not be restored because it was found to be violating the Twitter Terms of Service, specifically the Twitter Rules against participating in targeted abuse.

In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs on our platform, we do not tolerate abusive behavior. This includes inciting other people to engage in the targeted harassment of someone.

You can learn more about our rules against abusive behavior.
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Motherfuckers, the shit I've seen....
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 19, 2020 11:31 pm

Elliott Abrams threatens the multistate teleSUR again

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Elliott Abrams is linked to the fearsome "death squads", paramilitary groups of the extreme right, made up of military men, uniformed policemen and civilians. | Photo: Reuters
Posted 19 February 2020 (51 minutes ago)

Trying to justify the flagrant violation of the right to freedom of expression, Abrams hinted that the international network must be examined because it might not be a news agency.

The person in charge of Venezuela before the Department of State of the United States (USA), Elliott Abrams , threatened on Wednesday to take "measures" against the international teleSUR network .

"I have no announcement to make regarding Telesur, but we are analyzing it very carefully, because we have had many reports that Telesur is not really a source of news," Abrams said .

Trying to justify the flagrant violation of the right to freedom of expression, Abrams hinted that the international network must be examined because it might not be a news agency, "we are watching TVSUR closely, they intend to reflect only the views of a Government instead of being a source of news, "he added.

Due to its informative nature of making visible events in the region that hegemonic media make invisible, the multistate has been the victim of constant attacks, recently the opponent, Juan Guaidó, announced "recovering the signal" of the channel and appointed an imaginary board of directors, which has been linked to the Venezuelan extreme right, as well as acts of corruption in the country.

Who is Elliott Abrams?
Abrams was appointed by US President Donald Trump to take charge of strengthening ties with the Venezuelan opposition and jointly building the illegal economic, financial and commercial sanctions against the South American Nation.

Today, in charge of Venezuela before the State Department, he has served as a diplomat and advisor during the most reactionary governments of his country, where he appears in the administrations of Ronald, Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump.
US Congressman @IlhanMN forces Elliot Abrams to respond to death squads in Central America in the 1980s, and demands that he respond if he continues to think the same way. #Venezuela pic.twitter.com/4ivHk1Fai0

- Larissa Costas (@Larissacostas) February 13, 2019
Elliott Abrams is linked to the fearsome "Death Squads" , paramilitary groups of the extreme right, made up of soldiers, policemen without uniforms and civilians, who carried out actions against political opponents or suspected of being opponents of the Government and the system political in force in El Salvador, during the Salvadoran civil war. The peculiarity is that these groups were frequently trained in the US.

As Deputy Secretary of State for Human Rights for the Ronald Reagan Administration in the 1980s, Abrams supported US-backed dictators in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in their campaigns of repression, including death squads.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/eeuu-ell ... -0036.html

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 27, 2020 12:42 pm

ABC News Suspends Reporter For Identifying As A 'Socialist'

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David Wright has been working with ABC News for 20 years, according to the network’s website. | Photo: David Wright Facebook

Published 26 February 2020 (11 hours 44 minutes ago)

“I feel terrible about it. I feel that the truth suffers, the voters are poorly informed, and people also have the opportunity to tune into whatever they want to hear,” Wright said in the video where only occasional glimpses of his face are seen.


United States ABC News said Wednesday that it suspended veteran correspondent David Wright after he was heard describing himself as a “socialist,” and criticizing the outlet’s political coverage in an undercover video released by right-wing website Project Veritas.

“Any action that damages our reputation for fairness and impartiality or gives the appearance of compromising it harms ABC News and the individuals involved,” an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson added that "to avoid any possible appearance of bias, [Wright] will be reassigned away from political coverage when he returns.”

The journalist was covering the New Hampshire primary for “Nightline” earlier this month when he purportedly made the comments to a member of Project Veritas.

In the seven-minute video, Wright shares his disappointment with how the network covers the news.

“I feel terrible about it. I feel that the truth suffers, the voters are poorly informed, and people also have the opportunity to tune into whatever they want to hear,” Wright said in the video where only occasional glimpses of his face are seen.

“And so, it’s like there’s no upside, or our bosses don’t see an upside in doing the job we’re supposed to do, which is to speak truth to power and hold people accountable.”

“We don’t hold him to account. We also don’t give him credit for what things he does do,” Wright said. “We’re interested in three things: the outrage of the day, the investigation, and the palace intrigue of who’s backstabbing whom. Beyond that, we don’t really cover the guy.”

The journalist is also asked if he considers himself a democratic socialist.

“Like, more than that, I consider myself a socialist,” Wright appears to respond, explaining that he favors “national health insurance,” “reining in corporations” and narrowing the wealth gap.

Wright has been working with ABC News for 20 years, according to the network’s website. His reporting has been featured on all of the outlet’s biggest platforms, including “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/ABC ... -0021.html

Considering the snitch this may not be true, but it doesn't matter at all. Appearances are everything.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 27, 2020 11:50 am

Trump Is Now Openly Trying to Censor His Critics. He May Succeed.
His campaign’s cease and desist letter to broadcast stations is a frightening assault on free speech.
By MARK JOSEPH STERN

MARCH 26, 20206:50 PM

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Donald Trump speaks during a coronavirus press briefing at the White House.
Jim Watson/Getty Images

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has made thousands of false, offensive, and damaging claims that could hurt his reelection odds. Democrats plan to use these statements as campaign fodder through the November election. On Wednesday, the Trump campaign adopted a new tactic to neutralize these attacks: It threatened to sue critics of the president in a brazen effort to censor Trump’s opponents into silence. Any real legal action is unlikely to hold up against the First Amendment. But Trump doesn’t need to succeed in court in order to win.

This threat came in the form of a cease and desist letter sent to television broadcast stations across the country. The letter orders these networks to stop airing an ad created by Priorities USA, a Democratic Super PAC. That ad, “Existential Threat,” juxtaposes Trump’s many dismissive comments about the pandemic with a chart tracking the rising number of infections in the United States. It ends with one line of text: “America needs a leader we can trust.”

As political ads go, this one is fairly run-of-the-mill. The ad begins with Trump saying “the coronavirus,” then cuts to him saying “this is their new hoax.” According to the Trump campaign, that edit renders the ad “patently false, misleading, and deceptive.” Its letter provides the full context of Trump’s “hoax” remarks, made during a rally. Here’s the key section:
Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs, you say, “How’s President Trump doing?”, “Oh, nothing, nothing.” … One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since he got in. It’s all turning, they lost. It’s all turning, think of it, think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.
snip


In the past, Trump has floated the idea of challenging the licenses of broadcast stations that air “fake news.” But the idea was, and remains, a non-starter, because today’s FCC simply does not revoke licenses on the basis of a station’s political speech. Allowing federal bureaucrats to censor political expression—even when it is arguably “misleading”—raises grave constitutional concerns with which the agency would rather not grapple. The Trump campaign may file complaints against stations that air the Priorities USA ad, but these grievances will cause the stations a minor headache at most, and do not seriously jeopardize their licenses.

The possibility of a lawsuit is a more substantial menace. Trump’s campaign accuses stations of broadcasting “false information” and reserves its right “to pursue all legal remedies available.” That translates to a defamation suit. Stations will have to devote significant time, resources, and money to fight off any legal action, but they will probably prevail. The First Amendment was designed to safeguard political speech. It requires public officials to prove that their critics knowingly lied, or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, to win defamation suits. The Supreme Court has even granted constitutional protections to outright lies, holding that “an interest in truthful discourse alone” is not “sufficient to sustain a ban on speech.” Following SCOTUS’ lead, lower courts have invalidated state laws that penalize knowingly false statements made by political campaigns.

snip

And therein lies the true danger here: Not that stations will actually lose in court, but that they grow so afraid of legal action that they self-censor. Trump is already trying to scare reporters out of covering him accurately; he has threatened to sue several news organizations, including CNN, and his campaign filed a frivolous libel suit against the New York Times. Media outlets are already on alert that Trump might draw them into expensive legal battles. In light of Wednesday’s letter, TV stations are also now aware of that risk. They may refuse to run ads that contain factually debatable criticisms of the president for fear of a costly lawsuit. Meanwhile, they will all continue to give airtime to the president’s incessant lies, because they are newsworthy. Trump can use the power of the pulpit to tilt the playing field in his favor. He could successfully monopolize the marketplace of ideas in the midst of his reelection campaign.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... etter.html


Burying critics in lawsuits has been the prez's go-to tactic since he became a public figure, proly before. It is amusing that these wankers refer to TV news as 'the marketplace of ideas...
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:33 am

Western media unlocked: hypocrisy behind COVID-19 reports
3 APRIL, 2020 ~ 1 COMMENT
For more than a year now I have not read or listened to any ‘Western’ media outlets. The initial reason was that I began to notice that even though they all proclaimed to be presenting ‘facts’ independent of ideology, they would all fall into line when the Western liberal order needed to be defended.

The experience has been liberating. I began focusing on other sources, from China and Russia and the many parts of the world that have been colonised in the past by ‘Western’ powers. I found that they have little time for the gossip, lies and propaganda of ‘Western’ sources, and that they are particularly annoyed by the assumption that former colonisers still feel they have a right to interfere in their previous spheres of – usually brutal – influence. I also found that this pretty much sums up most of the world’s population, since the ‘West’ comprises a motley crew of about 15-18 countries, with only 14 percent of the global population.

And for those who still like to think that state-owned media outlets can be trusted, my response is: do not! For example, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) likes to promote itself as a trusted source of information. But it not only propagates vigorously the Western liberal model (seeing the rest of the world in its own image), but often descends into outright racism. It is no wonder that only 31 percent of Australians trust such outlets, although their alternative options are even worse.

A longer introduction that initially intended, but it is worth viewing this video produced by China Daily and called ‘Western Media Unlocked: Hypocrisy Behind COVID-19 Reports’.



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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 13, 2020 4:15 pm

EXPOSING THE DISINFORMATION INDUSTRY
APRIL 8, 2020 PAULR 12 COMMENTS
In my last post I mentioned the growth of an industry of disinformation ‘experts’ who themselves spread disinformation. If anybody has any doubts about it, evidence of how this industry operates came out this week in the form of a couple of short reports from the University of Manchester, which is the home of a research project known as ‘Reframing Russia’.

Led by Professor Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz, both well respected researchers, the project primarily studies the Russian media network RT, saying that ‘ we test hypotheses … that challenge conventional thinking and presumptions about RT and really get to grips with RT’s recalibration of Russia’s public image for international audience.’ Beyond RT, however, the Reframing Russia team also comment occasionally on issues relating to the Russian media and disinformation more generally, and this is where this week’s news comes into play.

First off, we had a frenzy of complaints that the Russian news agency RIA had published an article claiming that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been ventilated while in hospital suffering from coronavirus. This resulted in a series of denunciations of Russia in the press and on social media, followed by a public statement by Johnson’s office that the story was Russian ‘disinformation’. Rather embarrassingly, however, news soon came out that Johnson had been taken into intensive care and was being provided with oxygen, apparently indicating that the RIA story had been true.

The Reframing Russia team therefore decided to investigate. Apparently, the accusations of Russian disinformation were due to ‘mistranslation’ of what RIA had said, which was not that Johnson was being intubated, but that he ‘will’ (future) be receiving artificial ventilation, a phrase that in Russian includes ‘non-invasive use of an oxygen mask’. In other words, RIA didn’t report that something had already happened, but made a prediction which turned out to be true. ‘In sum’, concludes Reframing Russia, ‘there is no evidence of any attempts by Russian news providers to spread disinformation about Prime Minister Johnson’s state of health’. The whole story, in other words, was sloppy journalism. As Reframing Russia puts it, this case indicates how

rudimentary journalistic standards relating to the careful verification of source materials are … sidestepped. … the inaccuracy with which Russian coverage of the COVID-19 crisis is represented in the EU and the UK is concerning. Countering disinformation with mis/disinformation is counterproductive.

That brings us neatly onto the research project’s second report, which deals more generally with claims that the Russian state has been spreading disinformation about the coronavirus. The report involves an analysis of the output of the European Union’s counter-disinformation service EUvsDisinfo, which has been the source for a large number of media stories claiming that the Russian Federation is actively spreading false stories about COVID-19 for nefarious political purposes.

To check whether EUvsDisinfo’s claims were correct, Reframing Russia examined the specific stories the EU organization had flagged as disinformation, but also went beyond that by taking a wider look at what Russian TV has been saying about the COVID pandemic. Observing the output of Russian TV’s Channel 1, the team concluded that, ‘there was little sign here of the coordinated pro-Kremlin “conspiracy theory propaganda’ flagged by EUvsDisinfo.’ On the contrary, ‘The extent of EUvsDisinfo’s misrepresentation of Russian COVID-19 media coverage in the material we then analyzed is troubling.’

The research team identified two ways in which EUvsDisinfo misrepresented the truth. The first is ‘omission’: ‘in some cases individual sentences are extracted from the context of the source materials and rephrased in the form of summaries and headlines which make them sound particularly outrageous. Failure to supply contextual information encourages misreading of the significance of the relevant media.’

The second form of misrepresentation is ‘blatant distortion’. For instance, EUvsDisinfo issued a report claiming that Sputnik Latvia had said that ‘COVID-19 had been designed specifically to kill elderly people’. In fact, ‘the article in question … was clearly ridiculing a whole series of international conspiracy theories … the article highlights their idiocy.’

Beyond this, Reframing Russia attacks EUvsDisinfo’s methodology for assuming that ‘random websites without any traceable links to Russia state structures’ are similar to state-funded media outlets, and that all are part of a coordinated Kremlin-led campaign. This is true even in the case of ‘conspirological, far-right websites which are actually critical of Putin.’

Overall, the Reframing Russia report concludes with characteristically British understatement, that

Our analysis demonstrates that EUvsDisinfo’s headlines and summaries border on disinformation … The source material cited by EUvsDisinfo demonstrates that the Russian state is, in fact, not targeting countries with an organised around the current public health crisis.

The research team suggests two reasons for this: first, ‘a profound misunderstanding of how the media in neo-authoritarian systems such as Russia’s work’ (everything is not, in reality, dictated by the Kremlin), and; second, ‘The outsourcing of services by state institutions to third parties without a proper assessment of their qualifications to do the required work’. In EUvsDisinfo’s case, the work is outsourced to some 400 volunteers, who are ‘operating in a post-Soviet space saturated … by anti-Russian attitudes.’

In short, the disinformation experts don’t understand how Russia operates, and they are also unprofessional, and driven by anti-Russian biases.

I’d go farther than this. The output of the disinformation industry doesn’t ‘border on disinformation’, it is to a large degree disinformation. Furthermore, the industry’s output is a product of more than just lack of understanding and lack of professionalism. I’d argue that it’s inherent in the industry itself. Institutions have purposes, and the methods they use reflect those purposes. The purpose for which the disinformation industry was set up is to be a tool in the current East-West geopolitical conflict. The method is to make Russia look bad by presenting Russia as a source of disinformation, which in some way is said to undermine Western unity, democracy, and all the rest of it. In short, disinformation ‘experts’ exist to find Russian disinformation. It’s what they do. If they can’t find it, their reason for existence disappears. So, they find it. And if they can’t, they fabricate it. The ‘blatant distortion’ identified by Reframing Russia is part and parcel of what this industry is.

Sadly, EUvsDisinfo is hardly unique. Other examples, such as the Ukrainian organization Stop Fake and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, abound. The problem is that our media and politicians take them seriously. As Reframing Russia notes, ‘Since it [EUvsDisinfo] bears the EU stamp of credibility, it is unsurprising that the material provided [by it] provided the basis for a series of national international press articles’. This applies more generally. The output of the disinformation industry is widely treated as truth. But as the Reframing Russia team have so ably demonstrated, in reality much of it is not.

https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/20 ... -industry/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 14, 2020 1:23 pm

The problem with Western bourgeois media
14 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT
Simply put: the problem with Western bourgeois media is that it is thoroughly politicised.

Let me explain. It began with my work on Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Western Governance. In the final chapter, I examine the outlines provided by both Engels and Marx concerning the possibilities for socialist governance. At one point, they observe that elections in a socialist system would be non-politicised.

The reason: the nature of politics in a Western bourgeois political system is antagonistic. Political parties represent class interests and these are antagonistic, constantly seeking to bring down the class enemy. Under a socialist system, this would not be the case, since the majority – workers and peasants at the time – would control the reins of power. So elections would be based on ability and merit.

In that final chapter of the book, I used China as an example of non-politicised elections. More elections are held in China every year than in bourgeois states, from grass-roots to the National People’s Congress. Crucially, these elections are based in ability and merit for the position and not on political party platforms. They are non-antagonistic.

What has all this got to do with the media? Western bourgeois media is a function of the bourgeois state. The regime in question routinely conceals crucial information, covers up scandals and so on. So it falls to the media to undertake ‘investigative reporting’ to uncover what is hidden. The longer tradition is to rely on ‘anonymous’ sources, usually political operatives who feed the media tantalising titbits. These days, it uses social media and other highly unreliable sources of ‘information’ for the sake of a ‘scoop’. In other words, Western media is part of the whole politicised system. It is inherently antagonistic, constantly focusing on political matters. Indeed, it is notable how seamlessly former politicians turn up as media commentators.

If you have been brought up on this system, you cannot imagine any other role for the media. And you may well have bought the myth that this bourgeois media provides ‘reliable’ information and the ‘truth’, that it only can be trusted to keep you informed.

The problem arises when this model is applied internationally. It is assumed that very different governmental systems operate in the same way: hiding crucial information that needs to be uncovered. International engagement becomes antagonistic, with Western bourgeois media seeking to do the same to other governments and in the process completely misunderstanding how other countries work. And if the media in, say, Russia or China, operates in a very different way (such as providing verified factual information), it is branded as ‘state-controlled media’.

As Lenin already pointed out in 1917 concerning bourgeois ‘freedom of the press” ‘In reality it is not freedom of the press, but freedom for the rich, for the bourgeoisie, to deceive the oppressed and exploited mass of the people’.

Even more:
‘Freedom of the press’ in bourgeois society means freedom for the rich systematically, unremittingly, daily, in millions of copies, to deceive, corrupt and fool the exploited and oppressed mass of the people, the poor. This is the simple, generally known, obvious truth which everyone sees and realises but which ‘almost everyone’ ‘bashfully’ passes over in silence, timidly evades.
To sum up, Western media is a parasite on the bourgeois system, which arose in Western Europe only a few hundred years ago. It is antagonistic, based on capitalist class conflict, and completely useless in our time.

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