Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 08, 2022 1:19 pm

HOW DOES THE MEDIA WAR WORK?
Patricia Villegas

7 Apr 2022 , 5:44 pm .

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The discredit of traditional media grows, increasingly unable to disguise their positions and the growth of information consumption in other media (Photo: Getty Images / iStockphoto)

As I write, I listen to the report of our colleague in Peru.

Once again, President Pedro Castillo faces a vacancy request to remove him from power. One of the reasons has to do with a statement to the CNN Channel in Spanish; In it, according to that medium, the President would have promised to give some kind of solution so that Bolivia achieves an outlet to the sea.

I remember that days after that dialogue, I had the opportunity to talk with the now former Minister of Women of that country and ask her if she knew the reasons why that television meeting had taken place and I showed her a recently published note in which It indicated how just CNN in its original version, had lost 80% of its viewers.

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I am telling this episode, because even today, there are some sectors in our region that disbelieve in the scenario of war that is being waged in the media and grant, as in this example, a role of journalism to those who have long since abandoned the profession. , but they take refuge in it, and are in reality agents of destabilization of everything that is outside the strategy of POWER. The media, then, are NOT only weapons of war, they are the very scene of war.

I still remember that same "journalist" (with whom President Castillo spoke, who, by the way, managed by a small difference to defeat this destituent episode), receiving awards from the Bolivian coup plotters, after having achieved a regime change in that country. in the year 2019.

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Fernando del Rincón with Luis Fernando Camacho of the Pro Santa Cruz Committee (Photo: File)

Therefore, the first thing to say, without us doubting it, is that on that TV Channel that you like, that newspaper that you usually read, that radio that plays the music that transports you, has been chosen for you to defend those interests and be part of the strategy of adding you to a side of history at a certain juncture.

Saying this in a country like Venezuela seems naive, because, along with Cuba and recently Nicaragua, Bolivia (after the coup d'état), the citizenry assumes that the media are part of the network of interests and, therefore, have already dispossessed them. of that idea of ​​objectivity and even neutrality that they have historically told us they have. Recently, in Bolivia, a study sponsored by a German foundation was published, in which 8 out of 10 of those consulted consider that the media are political actors and 72% of people consider that the media "inform according to their interests".

In other countries, where until a few years ago, this debate was described as the product of the conspiracy ideas of leftists, we are beginning to see evidence that broad sectors of the population doubt the hegemonic media and therefore have sought other sources of information. Case Colombia, in full social explosion in 2020 or Chile in the same social, political and cultural process in 2019.

In fact, these surveys by CELAG (Strategic Center for Latin American Thought), carried out in different countries of the region, show how this discredit of traditional media is progressing, increasingly unable to disguise their positions and the growth of information consumption in other media, mainly social networks.

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(Photo: TeleSur)

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(Photo: TeleSur)

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(Photo: TeleSur)

HOW DOES THIS WAR WORK?

This is a taxonomic attempt. It is the effort to dissect a fact that has become news. Of course, as in an organism, a part depends on the whole. We are facing a system, therefore, one characteristic is intermingled with another.

1. OVERINFORMATION

We are witnessing a data bombardment. It is being in the middle of a jungle, escaping from the bombs that fall one after another, one after another. Every glance at the phone becomes a tsunami of images, colors, words, languages. Spectacular photos with printed text: dead elephants, dead whales... the why, the what for... they don't appear.

Perhaps, like no other generation that preceded us, we have the ability to access information in any language, at any time, on the most diverse topics. Today the children of any city with a basic internet, talk to Siri and find the fastest answers. The same happens with the information of the situation and current affairs. But this ability to access does not mean that we obtain the knowledge.

The stories must fit in a few characters, it is the privilege of the image over the texts, the same image, the same text, put in various colors, presented in various formats, by various presenters, in various languages, who tell you the same thing, every hour, without adding a datum, an angle, a context, a contribution to memory. They are content factories, releasing "hot" news, like bread, every second. Tik, tak, tik, tak, every second.

From one moment to another, the TV screens, at that time social networks were less influential, were filled with images that were basically red lights, out of focus. What was that? The proof of the bombing of Gaddafi's government to his town in Tripoli's green square. Those images were the evidence of that attack contrary to international law.

Everyone took it for granted, but after a few days, a Latin American multimedia company (teleSUR) broadcast live, direct, from that same place, showing that there was no evidence of an attack and fewer victims. 20 years later, a report made for the British Parliament confirms that there were indeed no large-scale attacks against Libyan civilians and that Gaddafi had recaptured cities from the so-called "rebels" without attacking civilians in early February 2011.

Months later, an influential Arab chain recreated the attack on that same capital, which ultimately ended up falling, hours later, when all the media took for granted, something that in practice had already been announced, without it happening.

Right now, we have all become experts in slaps and blows, after the events of the last Oscar Awards gala and it seems that for a few hours, this event left the war in Ukraine behind.

We go from the pandemic to the war, from the war to the night of the cinema, turned into experts of one thing and another, on account of the information overload, which gives us that feeling of satiety, but which in practice constitutes an effective mechanism so that we have the position that the hegemon has built to be consumed by millions.

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2. FRAGMENTATION

Linked to this phenomenon is the fragmentation of information. It seems that we have a lot of knowledge about a topic, but really we have only been able to access a small part of it. There are many examples for this, but just COVID is an example star!

Why? When COVID arrives in Europe, not before in China, all the media turned to inform us and educate us about it. In a few days we became epidemiologists, we learned terms like curve, exponential, PCR, rapid tests, biosafety. Anyone would say that scientific journalism and health journalism finally reached the podium with a gold medal, but NO.

True and serious information was left behind and the headlines focused on death and disease as a number.

Each party was expected by millions to know how many victims and potential patients fell in the countries of the bloc. And this same disease moved to AL that of course, continues to inherit the evils.

In Chile, for example, the Minister of Health appeared at the beginning of the pandemic, saying that I WISH THE VIRUS WOULD BECOME A GOOD PERSON.

And while he was the star of the headlines, the country did not have a general quarantine, his cases became the highest % per 100,000 inhabitants at the time and the media were headlining with the minister and not telling us how the population was getting sick and dying and how the disease that was first of the rich, became poor and economically deprived.

Did it really matter what the minister had said, did he say it because he believed it? We do not have the answers, because he ratified it several times, but while everyone focused on him, COVID killed thousands of Chileans.

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3. HIDING

The avalanche of news about the disease (COVID), War (Ukraine) Violence at the Oscars, has prevented us from telling the story of the other agendas.

In the case of the pandemic, one of the most relevant facts is that the structural causes that brought us to this scenario and the effects on the most vulnerable sectors of our societies have been deliberately hidden.

In Colombia, President Duque did a program of no less than an hour a day, where he talks about COVID, but not a single reference to the other social problems in the country. The massacres occur daily, the assassination of leaders and demobilized FARC, never went into quarantine.

The country returned to war, while the media reported numbers of sick people, deaths and the false debate between economy and health.

According to INDEPAZ, at the close of this writing, this year there have been 31 massacres, with a balance of 103 victims.

Brazil loses an important part of its natural wealth in El Platanal, but unlike the previous year, the media does not headline it.

Nor with the fires in Bolivia, whose coverage, two years ago, constituted the beginning of the destitution process of then President Evo Morales. And that this year, like the previous ones, has received priority attention from the State.

But COVID, or the informative abuse of it, has also allowed not to overexpose the Venezuelan reality, which previously occupied the headlines of the news around the world, but now to deliberately hide it, make it invisible.

The inhabitants of this Latin American country had to endure the resurgence of the economic war, the failures in their public service systems, lack of gasoline, and the attempted mercenary invasion, almost in the silence of their graves. Not to mention the hundreds who returned to the country, expelled due to the health and economic conditions of the countries of the region where they had emigrated for economic reasons.

As invisible has been, with very small exceptions, the work of Cuban medicine, which not only sent brigades to more than 60 countries to support local health systems, but has also generated the ONLY Latin American vaccine against the disease.

The War in Ukraine has left us hundreds of images of refugees crossing the border between that country and Poland. Lots of journalists dispatching live, from that intersection and quite a few, from the zones of confrontation and conflict. We saw a famous reporter, with the Eifel Tower in the background, in Paris, dressed in camouflage. Paris is 2,382 km from kyiv.

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But only now, a month later, timidly, the Western media show us the actions of human rights violations of the Russian combatants. It is painfully surprising to see a video of a Ukrainian soldier, calling a mother of a Russian one, who had been discharged and was making fun of that fact of war on video. That video has all the elements to have become the headline of the big media, but it did not get there, because it is not part of the official history of the war.


Or the families tied to poles, in the Donbass area, by the Ukrainian army and the Nazi battalion.

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It is not new, Orlando Figuera, engulfed in flames in the vicinity of Plaza Francia in the Venezuelan capital, failed to be on the same covers as the "guarimberos" in full events of 2017.

The hours before the coup against Evo Morales, left us in our memory, the harassment to which Patricia Arce, mayor of a small town called Vinto, was subjected. The cameras did not show it, as they intentionally focused on the raid of the current governor of Santa Cruz, public leader of the coup plotters, arriving in La Paz with a flag and a bible.

4. FARANDULIZATION

The keys to journalistic writing today are based on the same writing scheme as the entertainment source. With the idea of ​​hooking, activating interest in the emotional, in obtaining confidential information or simple and useful recipes, we attend to some "frameworks" or general guides, for the writing of texts and presentation of information, whatever the topic that let's board

It doesn't matter if what we need is to know about the Polish economy or the fashionable colors in summer suits in Buenos Aires, because everything is written in the same way.

The 10 points to understand how to understand your mother-in-law or the 10 reasons to love your cat or Zendaya's 10 exercises to have a flat stomach.

He realizes?

In 10 steps, they give us the key to fix any problem. So don't even flinch, wearing high-heeled shoes is as easy as developing a campaign against racial discrimination.

In this logic, the information is written in a dramatic soap opera structure. A protagonist and an antagonist. One good, one bad. Putin is without a doubt the bad guy of the moment, but President Nicolás Maduro already was, as well as Miguel Díaz-Canel and even Evo Morales, trying to put out the fire in the Amazon, was the villain of the film.

There are NO shades or grays. Characters are built and on those roles, stories are developed. If this were in the fiction genre, there would be no problem, but when the story is the story of reality, we are in danger.

A NOTE

In the current situation, Putin went from being a great global leader to being psychologically unbalanced, with authoritarian traits, unable to control his emotions.

Psychologists, psychiatrists, experts in human behavior have been consulted to find the opinion, to ratify the hypothesis of the disqualification of the adversary. It is necessary, in this scheme, to diminish the "public enemy" in all his capacities.

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TO DO?

Two actions:

1. GENERATE MORE MEDIA AND MORE DISTRIBUTION HIGHWAYS

Public media are needed today more than ever. The deliberate effort of neoliberalism in Latin America and of right-wing governments in recent years has left our region with serious weaknesses in the production of news content.

The public media, the evidence expresses it, are in a good part of the continent dedicated to delivering products of extraordinary quality and value, but far from the dispute of the construction of the daily, conjunctural story. I mean, the news.

The emblematic newspaper El Telégrafo of Ecuador, born in the citizen revolution, today faces the emptying, via sale of its printing presses, by the current government.

We saw Argentine public TV cancel its weekend newscasts, because the government of Mauricio Macri "could not pay" the wages that were generated for work on holidays.

Bolivian public TV and the citizen channel, Abya Yala, were closed during the coup against President Evo Morales, while the corporate media, united with the strategy, did the requested job: achieve the coup.

There is no other way, we must have more media and more information options. Community, citizen, worker, union, neighborhood, parish, university, school journalism. It is time for the multiplication of informational undertakings on a different scale. We must strengthen what we have created, make our media speak several languages, produce on each platform under the imposed rules and challenge them with ethics, creativity and journalistic rigor.

We also have to work on more highways to distribute this content. The recent action against the Russian network RT and one of the news agencies in that country: Sputnik, shows that not only effective content production schemes must be consolidated, but also spaces to distribute them.

In a pilot plan they did it with the blockades to the teleSUR signal in Latin America. Since the very birth of multimedia, there were territories banned for its signal. From the first great coverage, around that distant 2009, Honduras was left without the signal from the Channel that had managed to obtain the images, the queen proof, of the coup that had shaken his country and the subsequent repressive actions.

The same strategy was followed by a satellite TV operator in Ecuador, in the midst of social upheaval in October 2019. And the de facto government of Bolivia eliminated our signal from all platforms, both public and private, once it managed to consummate the coup de Condition. Inexplicably, Instagram accounts, journalists' tweets, presenters and the Channel itself disappear, losing millions of users in one fell swoop.

The path undertaken by Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, member countries of teleSUR today, 16 years ago, has allowed the region and, on many occasions, the world, to find out about events that should have been hidden from large audiences. . This bold commitment has become a model for many alternative and counter-hegemonic communication ventures. It has played a stellar role in the creation of a community of critical citizens, who did not have a meeting point where they could share and contrast views on the global situation. teleSUR has been a great factory for Latin American content and has worked hard to recover the memory of our region. Today teleSUR speaks English, Spanish and produces content in Portuguese.

2. EDUCATE THE CITIZEN

Not only do we have the urgent task of democratizing information, of building more media and more highways of our own to distribute it.

If we don't train, making a parallel with the COVID vaccine, we won't have the minimum antibodies necessary to face this war that we wage daily and that is very effective, like the virus, because it is omnipresent and in many cases it is still very subtle.

It is urgent that we create, from primary schools, academic spaces to build ourselves critical subjects in the face of media stories.

An educated subject will be less difficult to co-opt by these increasingly sophisticated mechanisms. Social networks generate addictions. Just as the world has developed campaigns to prevent the consumption of illicit substances, it must build them so that we understand the mechanisms how they work and we can protect ourselves.

The very proliferation of content highways makes the work of teachers and parents more complex.

The WHO has indicated that we live in an INFODEMIC. Sharing this diagnosis, we cannot assist, without acting, in the face of the distressing situation we face.

It is imperative to work on the processes of training critical audiences, who upon reading that chlorine can cure COVID, don't even think about trying it!

Patricia Villegas is a journalist and director of TeleSur.

Paper presented on April 1st at the 3R.NETS Communication Forum at the Bolívar Theater in Caracas. Republic of Reasons of Cuba .


https://misionverdad.com/opinion/como-o ... -mediatica

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

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 09, 2022 1:11 pm

INTERVENTION BY GUSTAVO BORGES REVILLA AT THE PATRIA INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM

Gustavo Borges-Revilla

8 Apr 2022 , 10:28 am .

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The text that we publish below is a transcription of the speech made by Gustavo Borges Revilla, director of this forum, invited by the Union of Journalists of Cuba to the "Patria" International Colloquium held in the city of Havana, Cuba, on the 14th and March 15, 2022, co-sponsored by Casa de las Américas and Latin American Summary.

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I would like to begin my speech by moving a little away from the focus that brings us to this meeting, because the x-ray of the challenges that lie ahead in the field of information and communication was made quite precisely in the speeches that preceded me. For this reason, due to the value that I give to the analysis made by my colleagues, I am going to allow myself not to redound, on the contrary, I will try to immerse myself in some depths of what I believe is the underlying problem.

We can agree that we are facing a tremendously complicated global scenario, some analysts insist on marking it as the most dangerous time since the missile crisis in 1962. And any discussion that we propose to face any of our problems is inevitably determined by a present that I will allow to review now, superficially, for reasons of time.

The pace of events and the escalation of tensions between powers with the power of nuclear destruction is increasingly alarming. America's reliance on its own militaristic logic is already hopeless, and Europe continues to show that it has no intention of setting a limit to its abusive older brother. The dangerous economic bubble created by the Federal Reserve of the United States, with the printing of millions and millions of dollars at random, does not stop growing and announces a crisis greater than that of 2008. The brazen manipulation of reality by the large communication companies is at its highest peak of cynicism.

In the supposed age of informational democracy, the most outrageous lies are disseminated as unquestioned truth among a global community of dramatically ignorant consumers. The information technology giants, the so-called Big Tech, showcases of the "free world", are already openly setting themselves up as global censors, owners of the truth and unique thought. The policy of sanctions, blockade, embargo, looting, suffocation and blackmail has gotten out of every conceivable control. In short, it is not difficult to conclude that the international order that we knew is already part of history.

Meanwhile, the small countries of the Global South, separately, wage our own existential struggles, in some cases for the sole purpose of staying alive. And it is before this scenario of difficulties that we are dragged by the immediate analyzes of reality, reflecting only from small fragments of it and ignoring the total complexity of the problem.

What was expressed from the last episode of censorship on social networks against everything that is related in one way or another to Russia, its name and even its culture, is perhaps the closest and most scandalous evidence that we have at hand to describe the underlying problem. Because it is not just a question of limited censorship of social networks, but of a violent offensive against any form of thought that dares to contrast any opinion other than that cartelized by the United States and Europe, in any area of ​​life. Everything has been destroyed in the name of legality and the protection of the supposed moral and ethical consensus of the "free world". There is no right, right now,

They have shamelessly erased valuable alternative communication projects from the map, alleging reasons of supremacist thinking. The so-called culture of cancellation is promoted and accepted both in the usual banality of social networks and in the most prestigious universities with their academics. Elements of historical value of Russian multiculturalism have been condemned and stigmatized with childish arguments typical of the most mediocre mentality the world has ever seen. Music, art, sculpture, studies, books and even the language have been banned. Absolutely everything that does not fit into the story of the United States and Europe has been stigmatized, to the point of prefiguring a new apartheid. And this is exactly where I wanted to get to with the analysis, because if we think about it, we will conclude that this phenomenon is basically the end of what we were told were Western values.

It is clear at this point that we are no longer talking exclusively about information and communication issues, but about something much deeper and broader. We are talking, I repeat, of the collapse of the so-called Western values, allegedly global, based on the ideas that inspired profound cultural and social changes in the Age of Enlightenment and that made possible a new idea of ​​the world that is the one that we and previous generations we met. Freedom, fraternity, equality, the supposed absolute confidence in human reasoning, the fight against ignorance, odes to knowledge, reason and one's own criteria. This whole set of ideas that prefigured the world as we know it is basically in probably terminal collapse.

I mean, what I think we have before our eyes on this side of the world is a collapse of what we were told was "civilization." And from here on, now what remains is the naked skeleton of the beast, destroying everything that does not coincide with its new dictatorship of criteria, of standardized thinking and alleged ethical consensus that no longer mean anything to anyone.

This latest high-intensity conflict in Ukraine is giving us the opportunity to go to the bottom of the analysis. And the understanding of this should be an obligatory matter for all the peoples and countries that are victims of the same provocations. The hidden criminal siege for eight consecutive years on the peoples of the Donbass in eastern Ukraine, peoples with deep ties to Russian culture, elicited a forced response. The Russian Federation, moved by historical and security circumstances, decided to protect this population of more than 2 million people, whose pleas for help came as a result of a long list of humiliations conscientiously ignored by the rest of the world. And that is why I allow myself to speak of the crisis of the values ​​of the Enlightenment,

So, when the families of Donbás decide to exercise their right to self-determination and seek to protect themselves from a para-state clearly governed by elements of Nazi ideology, that recognition of the legitimate search for freedom and the protection of life simply does not exist for the United States and Europe. And the big media, responding to the same criminal logic and the same economic interests, silence all the voices contrary to their comprehensive story, hide the crude truth and the more than 14,000 victims of that conflict that began in 2014, the product of a coup d'etat also of criminal logic.

We are then shown, once again, the falsified, manipulated, altered reality. We are intended to raise awareness through tricked-out images, fake news, major cultural and intellectual events in favor of the perpetrators. It is the war industry, at all levels, trying to impose itself. But paradoxically, what the United States and Europe try to show as strength by exercising brutality and censorship are nothing more than signs of their own weakness, because if they really were in a moment of unquestionable strength, of total hegemony, they would not have had to appeal to the destruction of its own founding values. Instead, they would be doing it, as always, by the least expensive way, that of seduction, persuasion, blackmail and harassment, but this is not the case, today they are doing it with absolute brutality.

In short, we are at a key moment in human history, which in the eyes of some unwary might seem like a tremendous or exaggerated statement, but the speed of events in the world is proving it time and time again, although the large majorities decide to ignore it. For this reason, brothers and sisters, I believe that it is always worth insisting on going to the bottom of the problem, because in a moment of global crisis, no local or isolated action will have a significant effect or resolve the consequences that may come upon us if we do not find credible and feasible alternatives to the collapse of the capitalist system.

I also allow myself to say that it is in our countries of the Global South where the responses to the crisis of civilization will flourish. Because it is we who are concerned with the preservation of life in all its forms, the balance of relations between diverse cultures and the courage of the truth in the face of the great machine of lies and manipulations.

The framework of ideas that shaped this world and this system of profound aberrations is collapsing, and with it the future of the elites that sustain it. It is clear then that only a framework of new ideas, thought by us, the outcasts of the world, could prefigure another way of life, another way of relating and understanding each other without the culture of war. An alternative is possible only if we decide to think about it from the awareness of the present and not from the sole need to resist. For that reason we are here today in Havana, summoned by the audacity of Fidel and Chávez, when they proposed us to think globally and not isolated in our small realities. Only together is it possible to stop the tragedy and the lie.

Thank you very much.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/in ... nal-patria

Google Translator

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An attempt to "cancel" Russian culture
April 9, 13:56

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An attempt to "cancel" Russian culture

During the Great Patriotic War, Goethe was not withdrawn from any Soviet library. No orchestra has excluded Wagner from the repertoire. And today Russia also does not refuse either Taras Shevchenko or Lesya Ukrainka.

Nobody cancels Twain and Dreiser. No one thinks of throwing O'Henry out of the libraries. No one will ever cancel William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, despite the fact that both are English, and one of them is completely homosexual.

We loved, we love and we will love. We value them not because of their nationality, sexual orientation or attitude towards slavery. But because they are more than the British or Americans, more than adherents of any political views.

They are the property of the world. And ours too. By accepting samples of world culture, we do not impoverish our own, but enrich it.
By canceling Dostoevsky or Tchaikovsky, the West does not take anything from Russia - only from itself.

Because we are talking about a world heritage to which the Americans, the British, the Russians, and representatives of many other countries have contributed. Tolstoy and Bulgakov do not care how they are treated in the West. They cannot be belittled or humiliated.

Because immortals don't care about political squabbles. You are not canceling them, you are canceling a part of the great culture in yourself. And Russia will never give up either Shelley or Villon or Salinger. We are not idiots.

(c) Yunna Moritz

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7548872.html

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

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 12, 2022 2:20 pm

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If it feels like you’re being manipulated, it’s because you are
Posted Apr 12, 2022 by Caitlin A. Johnstone
Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog (April 11, 2022 ) |

If you’ve got a gut feeling that your rulers are working to control your perception of the war in Ukraine, it is safe to trust that feeling.

If you feel like there’s been a concerted effort from the most powerful government and media institutions in the western world to manipulate your understanding of what’s going on with this war, it’s because that’s exactly what has been happening.

If you can’t recall ever seeing such intense mass media spin about a war before, it’s because you haven’t.

If you get the distinct impression that this may be the most aggressively perception-managed and psyop-intensive war in human history, it’s because it is.

If it looks like Silicon Valley platforms are controlling the content that people see to give them a perspective on this war that is wildly biased in favor of the US narrative, it’s because that is indeed the case.

If it seems like a suspicious coincidence that Russiagate manufactured mainstream consent for all the same shady agendas we’re seeing ramped up now like cold war brinkmanship against Moscow, internet censorship, and being constantly lied to by the mass media for the greater good, it’s because it is a mighty suspicious coincidence.

If it seems weird to you that so many self-styled leftists are responding to this war by fanatically supporting the extremely dangerous unipolarist geostrategic agendas of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, that’s because it is weird. Really, really, really weird.


If it seems a bit hypocritical to you that the empire is blasting us in the face all day with narratives alleging Russian war crimes while that same empire is imprisoning a journalist for exposing its war crimes, that’s because it absolutely is hypocritical.

If something looks wrong about the fact that we’re about to watch a judge sign off on Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for practicing journalism while that same United States keeps pushing out narratives about the need to protect Ukraine’s freedom and democracy, that’s because it should.

If you’re beginning to get the nagging sense that the mainstream consensus worldview is a construct manufactured by the powerful, for the powerful and everything you were taught about your nation, your government and your world is a lie, that’s definitely a possibility worth considering.

If it’s starting to seem like we’re all being manipulated at mass scale to think, act and vote in a way which benefits a vast power structure that rules over us while hiding its true nature, I’d say that’s a thread worth pulling.

If you’ve a sneaking suspicion that the lies might go even deeper than that, right down to deceptions about who you fundamentally are and what this life is actually about, that suspicion is probably worth exploring.

If you’re feeling a bit like Keanu Reeves in the beginning of The Matrix right before the veil gets ripped away, I’d recommend following the white bunny and seeing how deep that rabbit hole goes.

If it has occurred to you that humanity needs to wake up from the matrix of illusion before our sociopathic rulers drive us to extinction via environmental catastrophe or nuclear armageddon, then your notes match my own.

If you believe it’s possible that these existential crises we’re fast approaching may be the catalyst we need to collectively rip the blindfold from our eyes and begin moving in a truth-based way upon this earth and creating a healthy world, then we are on the same page.

If there’s something in you that whispers there’s a good chance we make it despite the long odds we appear to be facing, I will tell you a secret: I hear it too.

https://mronline.org/2022/04/12/if-it-f ... e-you-are/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 14, 2022 1:39 pm

Twitter Re-Ban of Scott Ritter, Kafkaesque Support of Impersonator, Is All About Anti-Russia Propaganda
Posted on April 14, 2022 by Yves Smith

Scott Ritter has the misfortune to be articulate, well-reasoned, and tenacious in staking our officialdom-offending views. That has put him on Twitter’s permanent shit list. We’ll recap his current must-read article on Consortium News describing in painful detail why his second ban this month is on obviously fabricated charges. And to add insult to injury, Twitter has allowed a Scott Ritter impersonator to set up shop, despite that clearly violating Twitter’s own policies as well as identity theft laws in New York, where Ritter lives, and California, where Twitter is headquartered.

Ritter is far from the only once-prominent Twitter voice to be suspended for wrong-think on Ukraine:


And even though it would require discovery to prove it to the “preponderance of evidence” standard, Twitter’s posture as Enforcer of the Narrative sure makes it walk and talk like a state actor.

By way of background, the former UN weapons inspector was one of the loudest, most persistent, and effective critics of the bogus “WMD in Iraq” claim, which was the basis for our invasion. Ritter has now been making the rounds, mainly on non-mainstream leftish shows like CN Live! Greyzone, Maverick Multimedia, and the Antiwar Coalition as well as what is stereotyped as the bro-ish libertarian right, such at The Duran and Gonzalo Lira. Oh, and he has the temerity to still appear on the verboten RT.

Ritter’s view of the war has been decisively opposed to the version pumped out by the press: Russia is winning and will win decisively. He’s been overly bullish on the timetable, but has given detailed accounts of how Russia has engaged in classic “maneuver warfare” to shape the battlefield and dictate the nature and timing of the engagement. He’s also stressed that media employees and supposed military experts who’ve never seen a day of combat keep projecting US methods onto Russia and thus completely misconstruing what is going on. Russia has not gone the US route of taking out electricity, cell towers, the Internet, and railroads at the onset. Nor has it bombed cities into rubble, which it could easily have done. It has instead gone easy on civilians, taken more military losses, and has prosecuted the war in a more step-by-step, grinding manner, slowly but systematically destroying Ukraine’s ability to wage war while avoiding its cities as much as possible. Russia follows Clausewitz, and Clausewitz argued the fastest path to victory was destroying armies, not cities.

That all was well enough tolerated for a while. But then Ritter tweeted on Bucha, and Twitter being Twitter, he was limited to his bottom line:

The Ukrainian National Police committed numerous crimes against humanity in Bucha. Biden, in seeking to shift blame for the Bucha murders onto Russia, is guilty of aiding and abetting these crimes. Congratulations America… we’ve created yet another Presidential war criminal!”

As Ritter explained in his current Consortium News piece, he had support for that provocative statement. We’ll take the liberty of quoting at length, on the assumption that he wants others to see his work:

On the television screen before me, the President of the United States was making a live appearance, where he addressed the Bucha killings. “You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” Biden told the gathered reporters. “Well, the truth of the matter,” he continued, “you saw what happened in Bucha….

I had just finished an article for Russia Today (RT) on the Bucha incident…

The available data coming out of Bucha was ultimately inconclusive but, if anything, strongly suggested Ukrainian culpability, not Russian. The certainty expressed by the President led me to believe that he was privy to classified information otherwise unavailable to the general public…it looked like I might be in the uncomfortable position of having to withdraw my conclusions and correct the record….

Shortly after Biden spoke, however, my cellphone alerted me to a Reuters article with a headline proclaiming, “Pentagon can’t independently confirm atrocities in Ukraine’s Bucha, official says.”….

I turned off the television, and proceeded to spend the next 40 or so minutes researching the available information about the Bucha incident. One of the leading news stories was a New York Times report based upon commercially available imagery which the authors of the article, Malachy Browne, David Botti and Haley Willis, claimed was taken on March 19, 2022, putting a lie to Russian claims that when its troops pulled out of Bucha on March 30, no bodies were present.

However, when I examined the video and still photographs of the Bucha bodies, I was struck by the fact that they didn’t appear to have been left in the street to decompose for two weeks (the bodies were “discovered” by the Ukrainian National Police on April 2.) Bluntly speaking, bodies begin to bloat some 3-5 days after death, often doubling in size. They will remain this way for up to ten days, before they burst, spilling a puddle of putrid liquid into the ground around the corpse.

In comparing The New York Times’ image with the video of the bodies on the ground, I was struck by a scene in the movie My Cousin Vinny, where Vincent Gambini, a streetwise New York lawyer played by Joe Pesci, cross examined a witness on the issue of the preparation of Grits. “Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than on any place on the face of the earth? Well perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove!”….

The available evidence that could be extracted from the images from Bucha showed bodies that by appearance appeared to have been killed within 24-36 hours of their discovery—meaning that they were killed after the Russians withdrew from Bucha. The exact time of death, however, could only be determined after a thorough forensic medical examination.

Many of the bodies had white cloth strips tied to their upper arm, a visual designation which indicated either loyalty to Russia or that the persons did not pose a threat to Russians. The bodies that lacked this white cloth often had their hands tied behind their backs with white cloth that appeared similar to that which marked the arms of the other bodies.

Near to many of the bodies were the green cardboard box adorned with a white star which contained Russian military dry rations that had been distributed to the civilian population of Bucha by Russian troops as part of their humanitarian operations.

In short, the evidence suggested that the bodies were of civilians friendly to, or sympathetic with, Russia….

On April 2, an article appeared in an official Ukrainian government website, LB.ua, entitled “Special forces regiment ‘SAFARI’ began to clear Bucha of saboteurs and accomplices of Russia.” According to the article, “Special forces began clearing the liberated, by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, city of Bucha of the Kiev region from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops.” According to the article, the Safari Regiment was comprised of personnel from various special police units, including the Rapid Operational Response Unit and the Tactical Operational Response Police.

There was other information—a video where a Ukrainian official warns the citizens of Bucha that on April 1 a “cleansing operation” was going to be conducted in Bucha, and that the citizens should remain indoors and not to panic. Another video, also from April 1, purported to show members of the Safari Regiment shooting civilians who were not wearing the blue distinguishing armbands signifying loyalty to the Ukrainian cause.


Ritter continues with the Twitter kangaroo court part of the story. He was banned for “abuse and harassment”.

This is absurd because the only person about whom Ritter said bad things was Joe Biden. If Ritter had actually threatened Biden, he would have been whisked off by the FBI in no time flat. Instead he merely called Biden a war criminal, which this site has done (for Yemen) and many others have done for every US president going back at least to Clinton. Even for defamation, which has a much lower legal bar, public figures are assumed to be used to being on the receiving end of criticism.

A lot of Twitterati complained about the Twitter ban. Ritter was reinstated at the very end of April 6. By the morning of April 10, he was banned again. It has all the hallmarks of someone having leaned on Twitter to go back to its original stance.

Twitter invoked a Ritter reply to an April 3 tweet….which had been deleted by its author @MattGallagher0 so the world at large could not review even one side of the exchange. This was Ritter’s response:

The Marines [murdered] more Iraqis in Haditha than the Russians killed Ukrainians in Bucha, for the simple fact that Haditha wasn’t a case of false flag mass murder. Bucha, on the other hand…

In case you care about the fine points, Ritter explains Haditha in his article, and he’s also sometimes referred to it in his videos.

This tweet was again depicted as harassment and abuse. Clearly it isn’t. Rather, Twitter has a zero tolerance policy about anyone saying that Bucha sure looks like a Ukraine caper.

Ritter has company:

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Now we get to the part where Twitter is making it clear it has it in for Ritter. I won’t belabor the painful and absurd details, which Ritter documents at Consortium News. But the short version is Twitter has allowed a Ritter impersonator to set up shop, and the impersonator explicitly states that his account is a revived account of the old @realScottRitter. Despite Ritter’s protest, despite the fake account clearly violating Twitter policies as well as laws against identity theft, Twitter is refusing to take it down.

Frankly, this is stupid on Twitter’s part, since it makes it indisputable that they are carrying out a vendetta against Ritter, as opposed to acting on corporate policies.

Glenn Greenwald has the stature to describe the larger narrative-enforcing machinery on Twitter:
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald

This isn't that far off from what is actually happening. Occasionally they create "fact-checking" groups with the most neutral and benign-sounding names (Center for Extremism Studies) that are always funded by the same western security state agencies and liberal billionaires.
Michael Tracey
@mtracey
· 23h
To minimize the danger of trauma on Twitter, literally every tweet should be subject to pre-approval "fact-checking" by a consortium of Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council, the State Department, and the UK Foreign Office
2:02 PM · Apr 13, 2022·Twitter Web App
This sorry episode illustrates one of the big reasons we’ve never spent much time on Twitter. As we say here regularly, “If your business depends on a platform, you don’t have a business.” Yes, if Lambert, Jerri and I spent more time on Twitter, we’d probably have more followers. We’d also have much less rich interactions (think of all of the careful and well reasoned comments here, with their many links). And it would all be owned by the platform.

Naked Capitalism is like a poor Barvarian kingdom: out of the way, with a big flat expanse in all directions (as in highly visible approaches), with a shabby castle. But we have a very deep moat, very high walls. and enough grain, goats, chickens, and root vegetables to last out a very long siege.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/04 ... ganda.html

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SCOTT RITTER: Twitter Wars—My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Ongoing Assault on Free Speech
April 13, 2022

At some point, the U.S. people, and those they elect to higher office need to bring Twitter in line with the ideals and values Americans collectively espouse when it comes to free speech and online identity protection.

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(Cathy Vogan/Consortium News)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

Monday, April 4, 2022: It was, from my point of view, just another day in the life of @RealScottRitter—my Twitter “handle.” I had a phone call scheduled with the editor of a publication I write for where we would discuss topics for a weekly column I was responsible for. I was also under deadline for another article I was writing for a second outlet that published my work, and was preparing a pitch to a third platform for another article. Such is the lot of a freelance writer—it is literally publish or perish.

Part of my routine is to watch the news and keep up to speed on breaking events. This usually involves sitting in an overstuffed arm chair surfing news channels using a remote while simultaneously monitoring the various news feeds and social media applications on my smart phone. On this morning I was monitoring the breaking news out of the Ukrainian town of Bucha, north of Kiev, where the bodies of civilians had been discovered strewn along a major thoroughfare.

The Ukrainian government was blaming the Russian troops, while the Russian leadership blamed Ukraine. As usual, getting to the bottom of an issue like this from my vantage point thousands of miles distant from the literal scene of the crime was a mission impossible.

On the television screen before me, the President of the United States was making a live appearance, where he addressed the Bucha killings. “You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” Biden told the gathered reporters. “Well, the truth of the matter,” he continued, “you saw what happened in Bucha. This warrants him [Russian President Vladimir Putin]—he is a war criminal.”

Biden went on to declare that his administration was gathering evidence for a possible war crimes trial. “We have to gather all the details so this can be an actual—have a war crimes trial,” Biden said. “This guy is brutal, and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it.”

I had just finished an article for Russia Today (RT) on the Bucha incident, and had assembled what I believed to be the available data regarding what had transpired on the ground there. As such, Biden’s words took me by surprise.

The available data coming out of Bucha was ultimately inconclusive but, if anything, strongly suggested Ukrainian culpability, not Russian. The certainty expressed by the President led me to believe that he was privy to classified information otherwise unavailable to the general public.

My curiosity was piqued as much as my ego was pickled—RT had published my article, and now it looked like I might be in the uncomfortable position of having to withdraw my conclusions and correct the record. That, however, was the price of credibility—if you are wrong, say so, correct the mistake, and move on.

Shortly after Biden spoke, however, my cellphone alerted me to a Reuters article with a headline proclaiming, “Pentagon can’t independently confirm atrocities in Ukraine’s Bucha, official says.” The article quoted an unnamed “senior defense official”, speaking on condition of anonymity, that “the Pentagon can’t independently and single handedly confirm that, but we’re also not in any position to refute those claims.”


I turned off the television, and proceeded to spend the next 40 or so minutes researching the available information about the Bucha incident. One of the leading news stories was a New York Times report based upon commercially available imagery which the authors of the article, Malachy Browne, David Botti and Haley Willis, claimed was taken on March 19, 2022, putting a lie to Russian claims that when its troops pulled out of Bucha on March 30, no bodies were present.

However, when I examined the video and still photographs of the Bucha bodies, I was struck by the fact that they didn’t appear to have been left in the street to decompose for two weeks (the bodies were “discovered” by the Ukrainian National Police on April 2.) Bluntly speaking, bodies begin to bloat some 3-5 days after death, often doubling in size. They will remain this way for up to ten days, before they burst, spilling a puddle of putrid liquid into the ground around the corpse.

In comparing The New York Times’ image with the video of the bodies on the ground, I was struck by a scene in the movie My Cousin Vinny, where Vincent Gambini, a streetwise New York lawyer played by Joe Pesci, cross examined a witness on the issue of the preparation of Grits. “Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than on any place on the face of the earth? Well perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove!”

All I could do is stare at the satellite image and the bodies and wonder if the esteemed journalists of The New York Times expected their audience to suspend belief for a moment and accept that the laws of biology that govern the decomposition of human remains were suspended in Bucha.

The available evidence that could be extracted from the images from Bucha showed bodies that by appearance appeared to have been killed within 24-36 hours of their discovery—meaning that they were killed after the Russians withdrew from Bucha. The exact time of death, however, could only be determined after a thorough forensic medical examination.

Many of the bodies had white cloth strips tied to their upper arm, a visual designation which indicated either loyalty to Russia or that the persons did not pose a threat to Russians. The bodies that lacked this white cloth often had their hands tied behind their backs with white cloth that appeared similar to that which marked the arms of the other bodies.

Near to many of the bodies were the green cardboard box adorned with a white star which contained Russian military dry rations that had been distributed to the civilian population of Bucha by Russian troops as part of their humanitarian operations.

In short, the evidence suggested that the bodies were of civilians friendly to, or sympathetic with, Russia. It would take a leap of faith to conclude that Russian troops gunned these unfortunate souls down in cold blood, as alleged by the Ukrainian government.

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Victims in Bucha. (Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Development Mikhail Fedorov/Wikimedia Commons)

On April 2, an article appeared in an official Ukrainian government website, LB.ua, entitled “Special forces regiment ‘SAFARI’ began to clear Bucha of saboteurs and accomplices of Russia.” According to the article, “Special forces began clearing the liberated, by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, city of Bucha of the Kiev region from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops.” According to the article, the Safari Regiment was comprised of personnel from various special police units, including the Rapid Operational Response Unit and the Tactical Operational Response Police.

There was other information—a video where a Ukrainian official warns the citizens of Bucha that on April 1 a “cleansing operation” was going to be conducted in Bucha, and that the citizens should remain indoors and not to panic. Another video, also from April 1, purported to show members of the Safari Regiment shooting civilians who were not wearing the blue distinguishing armbands signifying loyalty to the Ukrainian cause.

A Tweet

By the evening of April 5, I believed I had more than enough information to try and put forth a counter-narrative to the one being pushed by The New York Times and President Biden, namely that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for the Bucha killings.

“The Ukrainian National Police,” I composed on Twitter, “committed numerous crimes against humanity in Bucha.” Drawing on the precedent of the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal established at the end of the Second World War to prosecute Nazi war criminals, I then went on to state that “Biden, in seeking to shift blame for the Bucha murders onto Russia, is guilty of aiding and abetting these crimes. Congratulations, America…we’ve created yet another Presidential war criminal!”

At 9:42 p.m. I hit “send,” and the deed was done.

As far as Twitter metrics go, this tweet didn’t do so badly—5,976 “likes”, 2,815 retweets, and 321 comments, for a total of what Twitter calls 265,098 “impressions.”

It also got me suspended from Twitter.

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The next day, April 6, at 11:57 a.m., I received an email from Twitter Support, notifying me that my account, @RealScottRitter, “had been suspended for violating Twitter Rules,” specifically for violating rules against abuse and harassment. “You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone or incite other people to do so. This includes wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm.”

I re-read the tweet in question, wondering how anyone could possibly interpret its contents as violating the rules cited by Twitter Support. Who had I harassed or incited others to harass? I followed the procedures to appeal the suspension and went on with my daily routine—minus the part where I interact with the people I follow, and those who followed me, on Twitter.

My suspension caught the eye of several people who follow my tweeting activity. Several of these people reached out to inquire as to what happened and were as confused as I was over the grounds cited by Twitter for the suspension.

The end result of this was a very heart-warming grass-roots protest against the Twitter decision to suspend my account of such intensity, that one had to believe it caught the eye of one of the Twitter bureaucrats tasked with monitoring the temperature in Twitterdom. On April 6, at 11:54 p.m., I received an email from Twitter Support notifying me that “After further review, we have unsuspended your account as it does not appear to be in violation of the Twitter Rules.”

Life, it seemed, could return to normal, with me safely ensconced in my overstuffed arm chair, frantically working the controls to the television remote while monitoring my all-important, and recently restored, Twitter account.

Nothing good, however, lasts forever.

I went to sleep on Saturday night, April 9, content that all was well in the world. I woke up to find yet another email from Twitter Support notifying me that my Twitter account had, yet again, been suspended. The offending tweet this time pre-dated the original alleged rule-breaker by three days.

On April 3, sometime prior to 7:16 p,m., Matt Gallagher, an Iraq War veteran-turned author who uses the Twitter handle @MattGallagher0, had tweeted out a tweet that has since been deleted. I took umbrage at Gallagher’s remarks and tweeted the following reply:

“The Marines [murdered] more Iraqis in Haditha than the Russians killed Ukrainians in Bucha, for the simple fact that Haditha wasn’t a case of false flag mass murder. Bucha, on the other hand…”

Once again, I was accused of violating Twitter’s rules against abuse and harassment.

I repeated the appeals process, spelling out my position in detail. “The tweet you have singled out,” I wrote, “is a response to a tweet that has since been deleted by its author, so it is difficult to put it into its full context.”

My understanding of the now deleted tweet is that its author, @mattgallagher0, made the argument that the U.S. had not engaged in acts of violence against civilians similar to what Russia had been accused of in Bucha. My response, which you have flagged for suspension, pointed out, factually, that the U.S. Marine Corps had actually murdered more innocent civilians in Haditha (my tweet inadvertently left out the word ‘murdered’). I then pointed out that the Haditha case had actually been prosecuted, meaning it wasn’t a false flag incident.

I then reiterated my long-standing position that Bucha was a false-flag event where the Ukrainian National Police carried out the murder of Ukrainian civilians and that the blame for these deaths is being wrongly transferred onto Russia (i.e., a ‘false flag’).

This tweet is fact based, expressing a point of view derived from a consistent fact set, and in no way constitutes harassment or abuse. Likewise, this tweet does not wish or hope that anyone experiences physical harm. No rules have been broken. Please restore my account to its full capacity as soon as possible.

Twitter Support replied to my appeal, noting that “it looks like this is connected with your original case, so we’ve added it to that first report. We’ll continue our review with this information. If you have more details you think we should know, please respond to this email to send them our way. We appreciate your help!”
Max Blumenthal
@MaxBlumenthal
.
@RealScottRitter was suspended from Twitter for expressing an opinion opposite to the official version of events in Bucha.

@Twitter can’t acknowledge it censors opinions contradicting the mainstream US line, so it justifies Ritter’s suspension on grounds he engaged in “abuse”
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1:07 PM · Apr 11, 2022·Twitter for iPhone
1,068 Retweets 73 Quote Tweets 2,768 Likes
Concepts of Free Speech

I was flummoxed, to say the least. I fired off a reply to Twitter Support. “Just a reminder,” I wrote,

“that you decided in my favor in the original case, and lifted the suspension imposed then. How this can be a continuation of an already resolved issue is disconcerting, to say the least. Please lift this current suspension, since no rules have been violated, and fix whatever issue within your system, whether human or algorithm, which flags my tweets on the basis of somehow being connected to a past case that had been resolved in my favor.”

The silencing of any voice, let alone one which had gained a semblance of traction in the national debate about the war in Ukraine (one of my threads assessing Russian military operations had gone viral, amassing some 1,639,386 “impressions”), should be a disturbing event for all those who claim to respect the concepts of free speech enshrined by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

U.S. courts have often struggled to determine what exactly constitutes protected speech when it comes to social media platforms such as Twitter. A recent case, Knight First Amendment Institute v. Donald J. Trump, has argued that Twitter’s actions in blocking an account represent a violation of the First Amendment, which on the face of it, seems like a legally questionable assertion, given that the First Amendment only protects free speech from government infringement.

The argument in support of this position holds that Twitter is essentially a state actor, and as such bound by the First Amendment. According to this line of thinking, a private corporation can be classified as a state actor if it has been working with the government, either from collusion or coercion, to accomplish the state’s agenda.

Such an exception is important because it stops the government from simply using private businesses to accomplish otherwise unconstitutional goals. Indeed, in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

The extent to which Twitter qualifies as a state actor has not been fully tested in the U.S. court system. A key element to any such consideration would be the degree to which the various congressional hearings, which have been convened for the purpose of chastising the CEO’s of social media companies including Twitter for allowing disinformation to be posted in forums they control, is congressional pressure that, it can be argued, rises to the level of inducement to violate speech otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

If Twitter is found to be acting as a de facto “state actor”, then, under the First Amendment, it may not exclude speech or speakers from the [public] forum on the basis of viewpoint, a point driven home by the Supreme Court in its decision in Hartman v. Moore (2006), which affirms that “the First Amendment prohibits government officials from subjecting an individual to retaliatory actions…for speaking out.”

The bottom line is that Twitter’s suspension of my account on the basis of activity Twitter itself has determined did not violate its rules, runs dangerously afoul of First Amendment free speech protections.

Fake Scott Ritter

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It would be one thing if Twitter stopped at simply trampling my First Amendments rights. But the icing on the cake, so to speak, regarding the insanity that is the brain-dead world of Twitter policy, was revealed to me when, on April 12, I was approached by people on another social media platform noted for its ability to censor free speech—Facebook/Meta—who asked me if I was back on Twitter. “Hi Scott,” this person asked. “Are you on Twitter? If so, what exact name/moniker is it? I got people who follow your work asking.”

I responded by noting that “I’m currently banned, awaiting resolution of an appeal. But when I’m not banned, my Twitter is @RealScott Ritter.”

This individual wrote back. “Scott, it appears there is a new account using your name…I have a friend checking it out and says there are followers gaining fast.”

I investigated the issue, and sure enough, there it was: @NewScottRitter. Same profile set up, same photographs—the cover art for my new book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, and the iconic image of U.S. inspectors posing with the U.S. flag outside the gate of a Soviet missile factory in Votkinsk.

“Scott Ritter—new account for @RealScottRitter,” it proclaimed. “Banned from Twitter for speaking the truth Formerly @RealScottRitter.”

Joined in April 2022, the page noted, and already had 5,394 followers (as of Wednesday morning).

I knew it was fake. I joined in July 2018, and it took me three years to accumulate 4,000 followers.

A quick review of the Twitter content made it clear that this was no parody account, and that someone was using my name and identity to promulgate policy issues, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, that I assiduously avoid.

I reached out to Twitter through their online help platform, where I filed a complaint about someone impersonating me. “My account, @RealScottRitter”, I wrote, “is currently suspended. I have appealed this suspension. I have been informed by others that a new account, @NewScottRitter, has emerged, pretending to be me. It is not, and should be removed from Twitter as soon as possible.”

As a parting shot to the insanity of my current suspension, I closed with, “The sooner you lift the unjustified suspension of my account, the less opportunity will exist to impersonate me on your platform.”

Twitter responded in short order, asking me to verify that I was, in fact, Scott Ritter. To do this, I had to provide an image of a government issued photo identification. Twitter got my current New York driver’s license, which still uses the photograph from my first New York State driver’s license, issued back in 1992.

The 1990’s haircut and oversized eyewear notwithstanding, Twitter seemed to accept my submission as de facto proof that I was, indeed, the real Scott Ritter. I waited for justice to prevail, and the fake New Scott Ritter to be unceremoniously kicked off Twitter for impersonating me.

It was not to be.

Twitter replied, having taken all of one hour to review this issue (my suspension, by way of comparison, was closing in on its 96th hour of review.)

“We have an update about @NewScottRitter,” the email from Twitter Support announced, providing me with the case number. “We investigated the reported account,” the email read, “and determined it is not in violation of Twitter’s misleading and deceptive identities policy.”

My jaw literally hit the floor.

“In order for an account to be in violation of the policy,” the email continued, “it must portray another person or business in a misleading or deceptive matter. For more information, please make sure to read and understand our full policy.”

I dutifully clicked the link provided by Twitter, and was taken to a page that read “Misleading & Deceptive Identities.”

“You may not,” the page started, “impersonate individuals, groups, or organizations to mislead, confuse, or deceive others, nor use a fake identity in a manner that disrupts the experience of others on Twitter.”

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I may be a simple Marine, but @NewScottRitter literally starts off by proclaiming “I’m back on Twitter!” Who, if not the real Scott Ritter, was the new Scott Ritter purporting to be? There is no other way to read “I’m”, literally “I am”, to mean anything other than “I”, meaning “me.”

“We want Twitter to be a place where people can find authentic voices,” the policy continues. How nice. “That means one should be able to trust that the person or organization featured in an account’s profile genuinely represents the account owner. While you are not required to display your real name or image on your profile, your account should not engage in impersonation or pose as someone who doesn’t exist in order to deceive others.”

News flash, Twitter Support: @NewScottRitter is using my name and image to deceive over 5,000 people that “he” is “me.” If that doesn’t fit the definition of “impersonation,” nothing does.

“Accounts that use deceptive identities can create confusion, as well as undermine the integrity of conversations on Twitter.”

You mean like when I have people contacting me on Facebook/Meta to find out if the person their friend is interacting on Twitter is really me?

“For this reason, you may not misappropriate the identity of another person, group, or organization, or create a fake identity for deceptive purposes.”

Unless, of course, you’re misappropriating the identity of Scott Ritter. Then it’s fair game.

Twitter Support then went on to explain what it defines as a “misleading or deceptive identity.”

“One of the main elements of an identity on Twitter is an account’s profile, which includes a username (@handle), account name, profile image, and bio.”

For example, @RealScottRitter uses my real name, a profile image of a real book I really authored accompanied by a real photograph of the real me with real inspectors outside a real Soviet missile factory holding a real U.S. flag, backed up by a real bio that informed the reader that I was a “former United Nations Weapons Inspector, former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, author, and analyst.”

“An account’s identity is deceptive under this policy,” Twitter Support notes, “if it uses false profile information to represent itself as a person or entity that is not associated with the account owner, such that it may mislead others who use Twitter. Deceptive identities may feature the likeness of another person or organization in a manner which confuses others about the account affiliation.”

When Twitter suspended me, I was put on notice that any effort to bypass the suspension by creating a new account was prohibited. I made it clear to Twitter that I was currently serving a suspension under appeal. As such, one would think that, when I declared that the account @NewScottRitter was not in any way, shape, or form affiliated with me, the real Scott Ritter, that it was, by definition, using “false profile information to represent itself as a person or entity that is not associated with the account owner.”

The fact is that people out in Twitterdom who had followed me when I was able to tweet under my actual account were, in fact, confused by the existence of this fake account.

Twitter’s rules are very specific about what sort of behavior is prohibited under its rules regarding “Misleading & Deceptive Identities.” For instance: “You can’t pose as an existing person, group, or organization in a confusing or deceptive manner.”

You can’t use “stolen profile pictures”, particularly those depicting other people. This, apparently, is a big no-no in Twitterdom. “One of the main factors in our review,” Twitter Support proclaims, “is whether a profile uses an image that depicts another person or entity.”

For instance, a picture of a book cover with the name “Scott Ritter” emblazoned on it, or a picture of a group photo where Scott Ritter features prominently. “If we find evidence that demonstrates an unauthorized use of an other’s image (such as from a valid report from the individual or organization depicted), we will then assess whether the profile image is used in a misleading or deceptive manner.”

Twitter Support then describes the next step—determining whether the account is intended to deceive others. “We are most likely to take action if an account falsely claims to be the entity portrayed in the profile photo.”

A quick review of @NewScottRitter has the fake me claiming to be the real me by using my stolen profile images and then declaring “I’m back” after being “Banned from Twitter for speaking the truth.”

Twitter allows exceptions to its policy if the profile in question contains “context that indicates the account is not affiliated with the subject of the profile image, as with parody, commentary, or fan accounts.”

A cursory review of @NewScottRitter contains nothing that would remotely fit this description. According to Twitter’s own rules, the account @NewScottRitter represents a flagrant violation of its “Misleading & Deceptive Identities” policies.

Unless, of course, the account you are seeking to deceive others about belongs to the real Scott Ritter.


I reside in the State of New York. In 2008, New York amended its Internet impersonation law (section 190.25 of the Penal Law) by adding Subdivision 4, making it a crime to impersonate another person by electronic means, including through use of a website, with the intent to obtain a benefit or injure or defraud another person.

Internet impersonation, it turns out, is a Class A misdemeanor which carries a maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and a one-year term of imprisonment for each violation or act of impersonation. According to the law firm of Hunton, Andrews, Kurth, the law covers “social networking sites … that make it easy to upload someone else’s photo and pretend to be that person.” The law is designed to deter cases of “misrepresenting oneself through the use of the Internet.”

I’m not a lawyer, I don’t play one on television, and I didn’t spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express, so my legal opinion is worth less than the paper it would be written on. Having said that, I believe someone who impersonates through deception for purposes not directly related to parody or commentary can be found to have engaged in behavior which has the real potential to injure or defraud another person.

How one defines injury from a legal perspective is a job best left to lawyers, but I would imagine that issues such as reputation and financial harm would qualify. How do you gauge reputation online? I don’t really know.

What I do know is that I have done my best to be assiduous with the facts when it comes to tweeting about issues of importance, especially when those issues fall under the umbrella of topics that my life’s experience lends some credibility to when commenting on them—arms control, military affairs, Russian and Middle Eastern relations, intelligence, and national security. One metric which is popularly used to measure the impact, or “clout,” of a given account is the number of followers one attracts.

Building a “following” was never on my mind when engaging on Twitter—it just happened. I do my best to interact responsibly with the people I follow, and with those who follow me. Twitter, like most social media platforms, has an addictive quality that lends itself to becoming an integral part of one’s daily routine—check your twitter account, see what’s happening and, if the topic lends itself to it, participate in the on-line conversation by contributing tweets of your own. I would also post articles I had written that were published on other platforms, as well as links to interviews I had given.

Why Go on Twitter?

Image
Twitter’s original headquarters, San Francisco. (Caroline Culler User:Wgreaves/Wikimedia Commons)

One of my reasons for joining Twitter was to contribute to the overall process of engaging in responsible debate, dialogue, and discussion about issues of importance in my life and the lives of others, in order to empower people with knowledge and information they might not otherwise have access to, so that those who participate in such interaction, myself included, could hold those whom we elect to higher office accountable for what they do in our name.

To me, such an exercise is the essence of democracy and, for better or for worse, Twitter had become the primary social media platform I used to engage in this activity.

From my perspective, credibility is the key to a good Twitter relationship. I follow experts on a variety of topics because I view them as genuine specialists in their respective fields (I also follow several dog and cat accounts because, frankly speaking, dogs and cats make me laugh.) People follow me, I assume, for similar reasons. Often I find myself in in-depth exchanges with people who follow me, or people I follow, where reasoned fact-based discourse proves beneficial to both parties, as well as to those who are following the dialogue.

Before my Twitter account was suspended, I had close to 95,000 “followers.” I’d like to believe that the majority of these followed me because of the integrity and expertise I brought to the discussion.

Having someone hijack my identity and seek to resurrect my suspended account by appealing to those who had previously followed me can only be damaging to whatever “brand” I had possessed that managed to attract a following that was pushing 100,000. When one speaks of injury, one cannot ignore the fact that reputations can be injured just as much as the physical body.

Indeed, while a body can heal itself, reputations cannot. The fact that Twitter has facilitated the wrongful impersonation of me and my Twitter account makes it a party to whatever damage has been accrued due to this activity.

A Law Unto Itself

It is not as though Twitter can, or ever will, be held accountable for such actions. Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), holds that internet platforms that host third-party content — think of tweets on Twitter—are not (with few exceptions) liable for what those third parties post or do.

Like the issue of Freedom of Speech, the concept of holding Twitter accountable for facilitating the fraudulent misappropriation of a Twitter user’s online identity is a legal bridge too far. Twitter, it seems, is a law unto itself.

My Twitter War came to an end today when I received an email from Twitter Support proclaiming that “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,” adding that “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.”

This ruling, it seems, is not appealable.

At some point in time, the U.S. people, and those they elect to higher office to represent their interests, need to bring Twitter in line with the ideals and values Americans collectively espouse when it comes to issues like free speech and online identity protection.

If Twitter is to be absolved of any responsibility for the content of ideas expressed on its platform, then it should be treated as a free speech empowerment zone and prohibited from interfering with speech that otherwise would be protected by law.

The U.S. Constitution assumes that society will govern itself when deciding the weight that should be put behind the words expressed by its citizens. Thus, in a nation that has outlawed slavery and racial discrimination, organizations like the Klu Klux Klan are allowed to demonstrate and give voice to their odious ideology.

America is a literal battlefield of ideas, and society is better for it. Giving voice to hateful thought allows society to rally against it and ultimately defeat it by confronting it and destroying it through the power of informed debate, discussion, and dialogue; censoring hateful speech does not defeat it, but rather drives it underground, where it can fester and grow in the alternative universe created because of censorship.

In many ways, my Twitter Wars represent a struggle for the future of America. If Twitter and other social media platforms are permitted to operate in a manner that does not reflect the ideals and values of the nation, and yet is permitted to mainstream itself so that the platform controls the manner in which the American people interact when it comes to consuming information and ideas, then the nation will lose touch with what it stands for, including the basic precepts of freedom of speech that define us as a people.

Mainstreaming censorship is never a good idea, and yet by giving Twitter a free hand to do just that, the American people are sowing the seeds of their own demise.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/13/s ... ee-speech/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 17, 2022 1:54 pm

NYT Smears Journalist, Calls 2014 Ukraine Coup ‘Conspiracy Theory’
April 15, 2022

It is an uncontroversial matter of public record that the U.S. government sponsored the 2014 coup in Ukraine, writes Ben Norton.

Image
The New York Times Building in Manhattan. (Adam Jones/Flickr)

By Ben Norton
Multipolarista.com



The New York Times published a ridiculous article smearing me with misleading claims, and even used an image of my face menacingly crossed out by a red line.

The newspaper dismissed my factual statement that the United States sponsored a violent coup d’etat to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, calling this objective truth a “conspiracy theory,” while deceptively erasing the overwhelming evidence that I presented.

Ironically the Times itself, back in 2014, reported some of these facts that it now disparages as a “conspiracy theory,” as I document below in this article.

The Times’ hatchet job violates basic journalistic practices. The newspaper did not even reach out to me with a request for comment, while it defamed me and published a photo of my face.

The smear piece is a case study in the U.S. newspaper of record’s propaganda techniques. And it is part of a transparent drive to advance the U.S. government’s new cold war on China and Russia.

The fact that The New York Times collaborates closely with the U.S. national security state is well established. The newspaper has publicly admitted to sending sensitive stories to the U.S. government for approval before publication, to ensure that “national security officials” have “no concerns.”

Prominent former New York Times reporter James Risen wrote in an exposé that the newspaper’s editors are “quite willing to cooperate with the government,” and that there has been an “informal arrangement” in which U.S. officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”

The Times also has a long, inglorious history of attacking anti-war voices in the United States, while spreading demonstrably false claims from anonymous government officials to justify Washington’s wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, Libya to Syria.

I don’t need to remind anyone of the Times’ leading role in amplifying lies about supposed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) in Iraq.

But there have also been many lesser-known fake news stories disseminated by the U.S. newspaper of record, like when it blamed Vietnamese communists for the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or falsely claimed that Iraqi soldiers took Kuwaiti babies out of incubators to die, or amplified the lie that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi gave Viagra to his soldiers and encouraged them to sexually assault women.

Then there are the more recent examples of the Times willingly spreading U.S. government disinformation, from the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory to the completely manufactured “Bountygate” scandal, to the equally ludicrous fake news farce known as “Havana Syndrome” – the notion that mass hysteria suffered by U.S. spies was secretly caused by futuristic Russian, Chinese, and/or Cuban “microwave weapons” or “radio-frequency energy” ray guns.

The newspaper’s April 11 report, titled “China’s Echoes of Russia’s Alternate Reality Intensify Around the World,” follows in this same propagandistic vein.

The article was written by Paul Mozur, Steven Lee Myers, and John Liu. The Times apparently needed three reporters to file this story, but not one of them could be bothered to reach out to me for comment.

If they were students in a college journalism 101 class, they would have failed their assignment.

The director of the C.I.A., William Burns, confirmed in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing this March that Washington is engaged in an “information war” against Russia.

Former top State Department official Eliot A. Cohen likewise stated clearly that, in Ukraine, the “United States and its NATO allies are engaged in a proxy war with Russia.”

This New York Times smear piece must be understood in this context: The newspaper of record is acting as a tool of U.S. government information warfare, a hatchet man for Washington, launching neo-McCarthyite attacks on independent journalists who dare to challenge the official NATO propaganda line.


The article accuses China of helping Russia amplify purported “disinformation” over the war in Ukraine. And it singles out this present author, independent journalist Benjamin Norton, smearing my factual statements as so-called “conspiracy theories.”

The newspaper published the following passage:

“Russian and Chinese state media have also increasingly drawn on the opinions of the same group of internet celebrities, pundits and influencers, featuring them on their shows as well as in YouTube videos. One of them, Benjamin Norton, is a journalist who claimed that a coup sponsored by the United States government took place in Ukraine in 2014 and that U.S. officials had installed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.

He first explained the conspiracy theory on RT, although it was later picked up by Chinese state media and tweeted by accounts like Frontline. In a March interview, which China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, trumpeted as an exclusive, Mr. Norton said the United States, not Russia, was to blame for Russia’s invasion.

‘Regarding the current situation in Ukraine, Benjamin said that this is not a war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but a war planned and provoked by the United States as early as 2014,’ an unnamed CCTV narrator said.”

For starters, the specific RT interview that the Times referenced was a discussion I had with left-wing American comedian Lee Camp, and it was actually conducted on Feb. 23, a day before Russia invaded Ukraine (although it was not published until Feb. 25).

Camp has a long history as a grassroots activist in the U.S. anti-war, anti-racist, and environmentalist movements. The notion that he was secretly being controlled by the Kremlin is laughably preposterous.

Camp had repeatedly emphasized for years that he had total editorial control over his show – until YouTube erased his hundreds of episodes in an authoritarian purge of undesirable Russia-linked journalists.

The New York Times has already faced backlash for spreading ridiculous, defamatory claims about Lee Camp as well. It was only a matter of time until it came after me, in its war on progressive independent journalists.

The most cartoonishly nonsensical claim in the Times’ smear piece is the idea that the U.S. government organizing a coup in Ukraine is an outlandish “conspiracy theory.”

Anyone vaguely familiar with the elementary history of U.S. foreign policy knows that Washington has sponsored coups d’etat around the world – from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1960 to Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965 to Chile in 1973, Haiti in 1991 to Haiti again in 2004, Venezuela in 2002 to Ukraine (the first time) in 2004, Honduras in 2009 to Bolivia in 2019, and so, so many more.

Then again, The New York Times has a long history of echoing disinformation from anonymous U.S. government officials in order to deny and whitewash these coups, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that it remains in denial about the 2014 U.S.-backed putsch in Ukraine.

After absurdly accusing me of promulgating a “conspiracy theory,” the Times embedded a screenshot of a March 11 tweet from China’s news program Frontline, with an image of me. The newspaper added a red line, crossing out the tweet – and my face.

New York Times Frontline China Ukraine Benjamin Norton

The New York Times screenshot, with the red line added by the newspaper, which inadvertently, either through hubris or ignorance, includes mention of the very evidence of the coup it omits from its story.

The Times did not actually embed the tweet, so its readers were not able to watch the video clip to hear my full comments.

The newspaper also conveniently failed to mention my citation of the leaked recording of a 2014 phone call in which U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland discussed who the prime minister of Ukraine’s post-coup government would be, and who did indeed become prime minister a few weeks later.

These omissions show how disingenuous the corporate media’s propaganda is. Legacy publications like The New York Times believe their audience is so foolish and so susceptible to foreign supposed “disinformation” that they will not even let readers listen to a 30-second video of an independent American journalist and make up their own minds.

In the clip, I made the following, 100 percent factual comments about the Ukraine crisis:

They [Western governments] promised this [not to expand eastward after the reunification of Germany] to the Soviet Union multiple times; we have the documents showing it. And NATO lied.

And we also have a recorded phone call, from the top U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland, in which she actually handpicks the top officials of the Ukrainian government that took over after the 2014 U.S.-backed coup.

This coup in Ukraine is what started a civil war in the country, and now they act as though they have nothing to do with it, and Russia is the only aggressor.


According to The New York Times, these objectively true statements – that Western governments repeatedly broke their promise to Moscow not to expand eastward, and that Washington sponsored a coup in Ukraine in 2014 – constitute a dangerous “conspiracy theory.”

As of the publication of this present article, April 14, this Frontline video has only 158 views, 10 likes, and three retweets on Twitter. But the U.S. newspaper of record wants its readers to believe that this little-seen clip of me stating undeniable facts about the recent history of Ukraine endangers the very fabric of American society.


It is an uncontroversial matter of public record that the U.S. government sponsored the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

The 2014 phone call between Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, is a smoking gun.

In the leaked recording – a transcript of which was published by the BBC – Nuland and Pyatt can be heard discussing who would be the new prime minister of Ukraine’s upcoming post-coup regime.

“Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience,” Nuland said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, showing her cozy relationship with the right-wing, pro-Western Ukrainian politician by shortening his surname.

Mere days after the U.S.-backed February 22 coup, Yatsenyuk became prime minister of Ukraine – just as Nuland had insisted he should.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/WV9J6sxCs5k[/youtube[

Yet the smoking gun evidence of a top State Department official and U.S. ambassador discussing who the prime minister of Ukraine would be was overshadowed by another comment Nuland made in the phone call: “Fuck the EU.”

That single line inspired condemnations by European governments, and got much more attention than the fact that U.S. diplomats were caught hand-picking the leaders of the upcoming Ukrainian coup regime.

In its April 11, 2022 smear piece attacking me, The New York Times refused to acknowledge this Nuland phone call. But the newspaper did repeatedly report on the recording back in 2014.


In fact, U.S. government officials confirmed the authenticity of this leaked phone call in none other than The New York Times itself.

In a February 6, 2014 report, the Times admitted that the recording of the call was posted on Twitter “just as Ms. Nuland was in Kiev meeting with Mr. Yanukovych and opposition leaders.”

Then on Feb. 10, the newspaper published a softball article on Nuland, in which the hardline right-wing hawk shrugged off the scandal and proudly confessed, “I’m well known as the least diplomatic diplomat there is.”

But now, in 2022, the Times acts as though acknowledging these events that the newspaper itself reported back in 2014 is indulging in a dangerous “conspiracy theory.”

The New York Times claims the fact that the U.S. government sponsored a coup in Ukraine is part of an “alternate reality.” But the historical record shows that the Times is the one living in an alternate reality, where the U.S. government’s crimes don’t exist, and the Kremlin alone is responsible for all evildoing in the world.

The reality that the violent 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a coup d’etat has also been obliquely acknowledged by The New York Times.

In a February 22, 2014 report on his violent ouster, the Times quoted Yanukovych saying, “I am a legitimately elected president. What is happening today, mostly, it is vandalism, banditism, and a coup d’état.”

The newspaper presciently titled that article “With President’s Departure, Ukraine Looks Toward a Murky Future.” The country’s future was indeed quite murky.

On February 27, 2014, the Times followed up with a report on “Crimea, where a heavily ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population mostly views the Ukrainian government installed after the ouster last weekend of Mr. Yanukovych as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup.”

Image

Was The New York Times spreading “Russian disinformation” or a “conspiracy theory” back in 2014?

A few weeks later, in a March 17 report on the rebellion by Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east of the country, the Times admitted, “Many Ukrainians, who saw demonstrators in the capital chase President Viktor F. Yanukovych from office last month in what some in this country regard as a justified uprising and others call a coup, wondered what part of Ukraine might remain, day by day, under the interim government’s control.”

Of course I am far from the only journalist who has pointed out the U.S. government’s role in the violent 2014 coup in Ukraine.

Back at the time, some of this was acknowledged even in mainstream outlets.

In an April 2014 article titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war,” published in top British newspaper The Guardian – the U.K.’s equivalent of The New York Times – columnist Seumas Milne noted that prominent U.S. politicians like Senator John McCain were in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014, working alongside far-right extremists.

Milne recalled that “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a U.S.-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and “the U.S. ambassador haggled with the state department over who would make up the new Ukrainian government.”


The Guardian admitted these undeniable facts back in 2014. But now in 2022, according to The New York Times, this objective history is a scandalous “conspiracy theory.”

These views have also been expressed by renowned University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, a mainstream political scientist who is highly respected in his field.

Mearsheimer’s 2015 University of Chicago lecture “Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault?” went viral in the wake of Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, and has roughly 25 million views as of the publication of this present article.

In that 2015 lecture, Mearsheimer repeatedly referred to the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 as a coup. He added that there were “significant fascist elements among the protesters, who were armed, [and] there is killing on the Maidan.”

“If you have a coup in Kiev, and some of the people who come to power have fascist tendencies or are fascists, however you want to define that term, it’s going to have really huge consequences,” Mearsheimer said.

The scholar argued that the three “deep causes” of the crisis in Ukraine were NATO expansion, EU expansion, and U.S. government “democracy promotion” programs – read: regime change.

“It just shows you how discombobulated American foreign policy is these days. And of course the Ukraine crisis is just one of many messes that we’ve made,” Mearsheimer summarized, referring to the U.S. government.

Mearsheimer reiterated these points in a 2014 article, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations – the furthest publication possible from “Russian propaganda.”


But The New York Times dismissed this as a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

Mearsheimer in fact reiterated his analysis in a presentation on March 2, 2022, emphasizing the role of the United States and NATO in causing the war in Ukraine that was escalated by Russia’s February 24 invasion.

Mearsheimer explained that the crisis “was precipitated in large part by a coup that was supported by the United States that took place in Ukraine and resulted in a pro-Russian leader, President Yanukovych, being overthrown and being replaced by a pro-American prime minister.”

Mearsheimer was joined in this March 2 event by longtime former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern, a specialist in Russian affairs. McGovern agreed that the U.S. government sponsored the 2014 coup in Ukraine, pointing to the infamous phone recording of Nuland and Pyatt.



The U.S. government stenographers at The New York Times would like their readers to believe that these undeniable facts are a loony “conspiracy theory,” and that anyone who mentions them is guilty of regurgitating “Chinese and Russian state propaganda.”

But many countries across the Global South recognize the role of the United States and NATO in starting the war in Ukraine.

The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, blamed NATO for the violence in Ukraine, in comments to his country’s parliament on March 17: “The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.”


Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales, who was himself overthrown in a U.S.-backed far-right coup in 2019, declared publicly that “the U.S. uses Ukraine to militarily, politically, and economically attack the people of Russia.” He condemned “the interventionist expansionism of NATO and the U.S.,” warning that its “hegemony of weapons and imperialism puts world peace at risk.”

Brazil’s left-wing Workers’ Party made similar comments. And The Guardian reluctantly acknowledged that many leaders across Africa are “calling for peace but blaming Nato’s eastward expansion for the war [in Ukraine], complaining of western ‘double standards’ and resisting all calls to criticise Russia.”

According to The New York Times, all of these Global South nations are engaged in an elaborate “conspiracy theory.”

Perhaps even current C.I.A. Director William Burns himself could be accused of being complicit in this “conspiracy theory.”

Back in 2008, when he served as U.S. ambassador to Russia, Burns published a confidential embassy cable in which he warned that NATO expansion to Ukraine would cross Moscow’s security “redlines” and “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

Was the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and current C.I.A. director guilty of spreading “Putinist disinformation” by acknowledging that Moscow might have to respond to Western military encirclement?

(It is worth emphasizing that we only have this document thanks to whistleblowing journalistic publication WikiLeaks, whose founder and longtime editor Julian Assange is a political prisoner, persecuted by the U.S. government for daring to expose its crimes. The New York Times has been complicit in the information warfare campaign waged by Washington in order to vilify Assange and justify this gruesome campaign of political persecution.)

Image

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia William Burns, current C.I.A. director, warns in a 2008 cable that NATO expansion to Ukraine could force Russia to intervene.

Outside of the bubble of Western chauvinism that The New York Times exists to reinforce, the vast majority of the world’s population clearly sees that the United States and NATO are responsible for the war in Ukraine.

But it is quite clear to me what the Times’ goal was in its deceitful April 11, 2022 smear piece: By including me in this article on so-called “disinformation” supposedly spread by Chinese and Russian media, the U.S. newspaper of record is trying to get me banned on social media.

Over years of work I have managed to build a relatively substantial platform for my independent journalism. Large corporate outlets like The New York Times, which willingly collaborate with the U.S. government, see me and other independent journalists as a threat to their chokehold on media.

So these legacy publications want to create some kind of justification for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to purge me and other independent journalists who expose the role of Washington in causing the war in Ukraine.

Their goal is authoritarian: they want control over all media, an iron grip on people’s access to information. They don’t believe in the freedom of the press or expression; they believe journalists or media outlets that expose inconvenient facts about the U.S. government should be silenced and destroyed.

They are guilty of the very same authoritarian crimes that they project onto Washington’s geopolitical adversaries.

The Washington Post’s editorial board made this goal explicit in an article it published on the same day, April 11, calling on social media platforms to ban Chinese news outlets, supposedly for amplifying Russian “disinformation.”

Like The New York Times, The Washington Post enjoys a close relationship with the U.S. government. The latter also happens to be owned by hundred-billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos, whose company Amazon has massive contracts with the C.I.A., Pentagon, and other agencies that make up the U.S. national security state.

The extreme neo-McCarthyite campaigns being driven by the Times, the Post, and many more corporate media outlets demonstrate how the mainstream press is a key instrument of Washington’s information warfare.

As the United States escalates its new cold war on China and Russia, leading newspapers are dropping any pretense of fidelity to basic journalistic principles and enlisting as loyal foot soldiers in the information war. Those of us who are independent journalists who refuse to dutifully toe the U.S. regime’s line are in their crosshairs.

Benjamin Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the founder and editor of Multipolarista, and is based in Latin America. // Benjamín Norton es un periodista, escritor, y cineasta. Es fundador y editor de Multipolarista, y vive en Latinoamérica.

This article is from Multipolarista.com.


https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/15/n ... cy-theory/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 18, 2022 2:17 pm

IRONY.....
MSNBC Blast From The Past: It's Our Job To Control How People Think... Not Elon Musk's
Tyler Durden's Photo
BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, APR 17, 2022 - 06:33 AM
While it is obvious to many why the mainstream media - and all things leaning left - are so utterly incensed at the richest man in the world's decision to offer to buy Twitter, a brief blast from the MSNBC past serves as an important reminder of just how the media and their overlords see their roles in modern society.

Image

As hours of coverage and an avalanche of op-eds are unleashed to explain to the masses why they should grab their pitchforks as Elon Musk offers to buy a social media platform at a significant premium for shareholders, this brief MSNBC clip from 2017 perfectly summarizes where the real panic lies.


None other than MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' Mika Brzezinski said the following words in her out-loud voice...

"The dangerous edges here are that he is trying to undermine the media, trying to make up his own facts, and it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsen, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think..."

And then the nail in the 'oops, I just told the truth coffin':

"...and that is our job."

To which the effervescent Joe Scarborough replies:

"Yeah".

Watch the full clip here:

[youtube]http://twitter.com/i/status/1515105781560971266[/youtube]

And in case you thought perhaps her mind had changed over the years and she had realized the error of her gaslighting ways, on Friday's 'Morning Joe', Brezinski doubled-down, sounding the alarm over Twitter’s possible management shakeup, calling a hypothetical Elon Musk takeover a "very dangerous precedent" for America.

"...are there any ways to stop him if he wants to buy Twitter? Are there any guardrails around something like this? Because this could be a very dangerous precedent,"

"He does not believe in the consequences of words," added Brezinki's guest, who had written earlier that "Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter represents a chilling new threat: billionaire trolls taking over social media."

So there you have it folks... be afraid, very afraid of being able to think for yourself!!

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/msn ... elon-musks
That the means of communications are already in the hands of billionaires goes completely unmentioned, talk about elephants in the room...Durden likes to cast himself as some sort of libertarian iconoclast and likes the click bait anyhow, the talking heads on TV, fronting for the ruling class consensus, take exception to Musk, an obnoxious and unreliable character, not unlike Trump in certain respects, but less popular. So make it all about Musk, but ignore them elephants.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 20, 2022 1:50 pm

Image
OPINION – Opening the Gates to World War III (Photo: HF International https://hellasfrappe.blogspot.com/)

Where’s the truth? How the CIA shapes the minds of Americans
Originally published: Antiwar.com on April 18, 2022 by Ted Snider (more by Antiwar.com) - Posted Apr 20, 2022

Like Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’, propaganda is pouring out of the U.S. that is shaping our perceptions of the war in Ukraine. It is produced by the CIA, it is pronounced by the State Department and it is published by the media. It is coming from everywhere.

The heroes and the villains were cast from the start. The media rewrote history and created the myth of the “unprovoked war.” As if Russia’s launching of an illegal war was not sufficient to cast them as the villain in our minds, the media everywhere added the adjective “unprovoked” to create the super-villain needed to produce the necessary support for the war. As if NATO had not broken its promise not to encroach on Russia’s borders. As if Russia’s security concerns had not been ignored. As if Russia has not been surrounded by military bases and missiles. As if Ukraine wasn’t being flooded with weapons. As if Yeltsin and Putin had not protested and drawn their red lines for years.

The heroes and villains were further developed and characterized by stories that came out of Ukraine in the early days of the war. On the first day of the war, a Russian ship aimed its guns at Snake Island and demanded the surrender of the Ukrainian forces. Establishing the roles of super-villain and super-hero in our minds, the Ukrainians bravely defied the Russians, and the Russians remorselessly murdered the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian guards “died heroically,” Zelensky said, promising that “All of them will be posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine.”

But the guards couldn’t be posthumously awarded anything because they weren’t dead. They were captured and released a few days later. But the characters had been cast in our minds. Not enough that the Ukrainians really were heroically defending their land against an illegal and villainous Russian assault, to produce the necessary war fervor, a super-villain was needed.

Only days later, a Russian warship was seriously damaged or destroyed by Ukrainian forces only, like the guards of Snake Island, to seemingly show up a few days later.

The western media would also continue to clean up the story and clarify the hero and the villain by erasing the Ukrainian ultranationalists from history and from the story, from their role in the Donbas to their role in 2019 of pressuring Zelensky out of making peace with Russia and signing the Minsk Agreement to their role today.

Then the U.S. began to write the perfect super-villain for the perfect script and the perfect public perception. From the beginning, Russia was deliberately targeting civilians. Not just killing them like a villain, but deliberately killing them like a super-villain

But a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency leaked to Newsweek that, in the first month of the war, “almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.” A retired Air Force officer, working with a “large military contractor advising the Pentagon,” told Newsweek that “the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks.” The advisor warned that “If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately . . . then we are not seeing the real conflict.” The Newsweek article points out that the U.S. dropped more missiles on the first day in Iraq in 2003 than Russia dropped on Ukraine in the first 24 days. “The vast majority of the airstrikes are over the battlefield, with Russian aircraft providing “close air support” to ground forces. The remainder–less than 20 percent, according to U.S. experts–has been aimed at military airfields, barracks and supporting depots.” The DIA analyst concluded that “that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians. . . . I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so.”

More recently, a senior DIA official told Newsweek,

It’s bad. And I don’t want to say it’s not too bad. But I can’t help but stress that beyond the clamor, we are not seeing the war clearly. Where there has been intense ground fighting and a standoff between Ukrainian and Russian forces, the destruction is almost total. But in terms of actual damage in Kyiv or other cities outside the battle zone, and with regard to the number of civilian casualties overall, the evidence contradicts the dominant narrative.

According to Washington and the media, Russia was not only targeting civilians from the very beginning of the war, they were also planning possible chemical weapons attacks. President Biden, himself, claimed that Putin was considering using chemical weapons in Ukraine. But a “senior U.S. defense official,” in a leak that was reported by Reuters on March 22, said that “There’s no indication that there’s something imminent in that regard right now.”

Two weeks later, “three U.S. officials” told NBC News that “there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine.” It was disinformation intended, they said, “to deter Russia from using banned munitions.”

The disinformation campaign is being coordinated by the White House National Security Council. The released declassified information, the officials said, “wasn’t rock solid:” they were publicizing “low-confidence intelligence.” It was propaganda being used in the disinformation war against Russia. But that disinformation is being consumed by the U.S. public and shaping its perceptions of the war to create the necessary war fervor.

The promised false flag attack against the Russian speaking people of the Donbas that would justify the Russian invasion and feature video of fake corpses, “never materialized.”

The U.S. also tried to “get inside Putin’s head” and, perhaps more importantly, shape public perception in the West of a weak, incompetent and disconnected Putin, by releasing intelligence that discovered that Putin is being misled by his advisors about Russia’s military performance in Ukraine. While some officials said that intelligence was reliable, others said it “wasn’t conclusive–based more on analysis than hard evidence.” When questioned, Biden later classified it as “speculation” and “an open question.”

Another case of disclosing disinformation in an attempt to warn China, to negatively shape public perception of China and to continue to attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and China was the claim by U.S. officials that Russia had asked China to supply weapons. European and U.S. officials told NBC that that accusation “lacked hard evidence” and that, in fact, “there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia.”

While U.S. officials say the disinformation war is meant to deter Russian actions and to get inside Putin’s head, it is simultaneously being consumed by Americans and getting inside their heads, shaping their perceptions of Putin, Russia and the war.

The shaping of the American mind by the media has a long history in the CIA. In the first quarter century of the CIA, according to Carl Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists . . . carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.” Occasionally, “full‑time CIA employees masquerad[ed] as journalists abroad.” Cooperation included articles written by the CIA running almost word for word under columnists’ bylines and “planting misinformation advantageous to American policy.”

The disinformation war was not confined to new organizations. The Church Committee found that, by the end of 1967, the CIA had already subsidized the publication of well over one thousand books.

By 1955, the CIA was collaborating with Hollywood to shape the American mind through movies. In Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, Joel Whitney says “the goal was ‘to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety’.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff plotted on how to insert those ideas and actually met with top Hollywood figures at the MGM Studios office of director John Ford. The CIA would go so far as to have operatives infiltrate Hollywood studios. Paramount Studios even had an executive and censor who was a CIA operative who made sure Paramount’s movies cut out any anti-American content or criticism of U.S. foreign policy.

So, where’s the truth. For most Americans, being informed citizens of the world and informed participants in democracy means turning to the newspapers and news outlets. But those newspapers and news outlets are reporting disinformation emanating from the CIA, the State Department and the White House that is shaping the perceptions and the minds of the American people.

https://mronline.org/2022/04/20/wheres-the-truth/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 24, 2022 5:38 pm

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American Commissars
April 23, 2022
By Chris Hedges – Apr 19, 2022

Social media platforms are aggressively censoring all who challenge the dominant narrative on Ukraine, the ruling Democratic Party, the wars in the Middle East and the corporate state.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — The ruling class, made up of the traditional elites that run the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, is employing draconian forms of censorship on its right-wing and left-wing critics in a desperate effort to cling to power. The traditional elites were discredited for pushing through a series of corporate assaults on workers, from deindustrialization to trade deals. They were unable to stem rising inflation, the looming economic crisis and the ecological emergency. They were incapable of carrying out significant social and political reform to ameliorate widespread suffering and refused to accept responsibility for two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East. And now they have launched a new and sophisticated McCarthyism. Character assassination. Algorithms. Shadowbanning. De-platforming.

Censorship is the last resort of desperate and unpopular regimes. It magically appears to make a crisis go away. It comforts the powerful with the narrative they want to hear, one fed back to them by courtiers in the media, government agencies, think tanks, and academia. The problem of Donald Trump is solved by censoring Donald Trump. The problem of left-wing critics, such as myself, is solved by censoring us. The result is a world of make-believe.

YouTube disappeared six years of my RT show, “On Contact,” although not one episode dealt with Russia. It is not a secret as to why my show vanished. It gave a voice to writers and dissidents, including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, as well as activists from Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, third parties, and the prison abolitionist movement. It called out the Democratic Party for its subservience to corporate power. It excoriated the crimes of the apartheid state of Israel. It covered Julian Assange in numerous episodes. It gave a voice to military critics, many of them combat veterans, who condemned US war crimes.

It no longer matters how prominent you are or how big a following you have. If you challenge power, you are at risk of being censored. Former British MP George Galloway detailed a similar experience during an April 15 panel organized by Consortium News in which I took part:

I have been threatened with travel restrictions were I to continue the television broadcast I had been doing for almost an entire decade. I have been stamped by the false label ‘Russian State Media,’ which I never had, by the way, when I was presenting a show on Russian state media. It was only given after I ceased to have a show on Russian state media, ceased because the government made it a crime for me to do so.

My 417,000 Twitter followers had been gaining a thousand a day, going like a runaway train, then suddenly it hit the buffers when the Elon Musk story emerged. I expressed the view that oligarch that he no doubt is, I prefer Elon Musk to the kings of Saudi Arabia, who it turns out are presently major shareholders in the Twitter company. As soon as I joined that fight, my numbers literally crashed to a halt, with shadow bans and all the rest of it…


All of this is happening before the consequences of the economic crash brought about by western policy and our misnamed leaders has really hit yet. When economies begin to not just slow down, not just hiccup, not just experience levels of inflation not seen for years, or decades, but becomes a crash, as well it might, there will be even more for the state to suppress, especially any alternative analysis as to how we got here and what we must do to get out of it.”

Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and Marine Corp intelligence officer, called out the lie about weapons of mass destruction prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Recently, he was banned from Twitter for offering a counter-narrative about dozens of killings in the Kyiv western suburb of Bucha. Many of the victims in Bucha were found with gunshot wounds to the head and with their hands tied behind their back. International observers and eyewitnesses have blamed Russia for the killings. Ritter’s alternative analysis, right or wrong, saw him silenced.

Ritter lamented the Twitter ban at the forum:

It took me three years to get 4,000 followers on Twitter. I thought that was a big deal. Then this Ukraine thing comes up. It exploded. When I got suspended for the first time for questioning the narrative in Bucha my account had just gotten over 14,000. By the time my suspension was lifted I was up to 60,000. By the time they suspended me again I was close to 100,000. It was out of control, which is why I am convinced the algorithm said: You must delete. You must delete. And they did. The excuse they gave was absurd. I was abusive and I was harassing by telling what I thought was the truth.

I don’t have the same insight in the Ukraine I had in Iraq. Iraq, I was on the ground doing the job. But the techniques of observation and evaluation that you are trained as an intelligence officer to apply to any given set apply to Ukraine today. Simply looking at the available data set, you cannot help but draw the conclusion that it was Ukrainian national police, mainly because you have all the elements. You have motive. They don’t like Russian collaborators. How do I know? They said so on their website. You have the commander of the national police ordering his people to shoot people in Bucha on the day in question. You have the evidence. The dead bodies on the street with white armbands carrying Russian food packets. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Could there be data out there I am not aware of? Absolutely. But it is not there. As an intelligence officer I take the available data. I access the available data. I provide assessments based on that available data. And Twitter found that objectionable.”


Two pivotal incidents contributed to this censorship. The first was the publication of classified documents by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The second was the election of Donald Trump. The ruling class was unprepared. The exposure of their war crimes, corruption, callous indifference to the plight of those they ruled, and extreme concentration of wealth shredded their credibility. The election of Trump, which they did not expect, made them afraid they would be supplanted. The Republican Party establishment and the Democratic Party establishment joined forces to demand greater and greater censorship from social media.

Even marginal critics suddenly became dangerous. They had to be silenced. Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate in 2016, lost about half her social media following after mysteriously going offline for 12 hours during the campaign. The discredited Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, charged Stein, along with Trump, with being a Russian asset. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent three years investigating Stein, issuing five different reports before exonerating her.

Stein spoke of the threat to freedom of speech during the forum:

We are in an incredibly perilous moment.It’s not only freedom of the press and freedom of speech, but it is really democracy in all its dimensions that is under threat. There are all these draconian laws now against protest. There are 36 that have been passed that are as bad as a 10-year prison sentence for demonstrating on a sidewalk without a permit. They differ state by state. You need to know the laws in your state if you protest. Drivers have been given license to kill you if you are out in the street in some states as part of a protest.

The first indication that we were not only being marginalized – one accepts that if you defy established power and practice independent journalism, you will be marginalized – but censored came in November 2016. Craig Timberg, a technology reporter for the Washington Post, published a story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” It referred to some 200 websites, including Truthdig where I wrote a weekly column, as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.”

Unnamed analysts, described as “a collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds” from the anonymous “organization” PropOrNot, made the charges in the story. PropOrNot’s report drew up “the list” of 200 offending sites that included WikiLeaks, Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Naked Capitalism, Counterpunch, AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com and the Ron Paul Institute. All these sites, they said, either wittingly or unwittingly functioned as Russian assets. No evidence was offered for the charges, since of course there was none. The only common denominator was that all were critics of the Democratic Party leadership.

When we challenged the story, PropOrNot tweeted out: “Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject – they’re so vewwy angwy!!”

We were blacklisted by anonymous trolls who sent out Twitter messages, later deleted, that sounded as if they were written by a gamer living in his parent’s basement.

Timberg did not contact any of us beforehand. He and the paper refused to reveal the identity of those behind PropOrNot. I taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. If one of my students had turned in Timberg’s story as a class assignment, he or she would have failed.

The established elites desperately needed a narrative to explain the defeat of Hillary Clinton and their own growing unpopularity. Russia fit. Fake news stories, they said, had been planted by Russians in social media to elect Trump. All critics, on the left and the right, became Russian Assets. Then the fun began.
The outliers many of us find repugnant began to disappear. In 2018, Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify deleted the podcasts, pages and channels of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars website from their platforms. The precedent was set. Once they could do it to Jones, they could do it to anyone.

Twitter, Google, Facebook and Youtube used the charge of foreign influence to start employing algorithms and shadow banning to silence critics. Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, chair of the Kingdom Holding Company, which dismissed Elon Musk’s recent offer to buy the social media platform, has a large stake in Twitter. It is hard to find a more despotic regime than Saudi Arabia, or one more hostile to the press, but I digress.

Sites that once attracted tens or hundreds of thousands of followers suddenly saw their numbers nosedive. Google’s “Project Owl,” designed to eradicate “fake news,” employed “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content” and downgrade “offensive” material. Traffic fell for sites such as Alternet by 63%, Democracy Now by 36 %, Common Dreams by 37 %, Truthout by 25 %, The Intercept by 19% and Counterpunch by 21%. The World Socialist Web site saw its traffic fall by two-thirds. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were all but erased. Mother Jones editors in 2019 wrote that they suffered a sharp decline in its Facebook audience, which translated to an estimated loss of $600,000 over 18 months.

The IT people at Truthdig, where I had a weekly column at the time, found that impressions – specific words such as “imperialism” typed into Google that bring up recent stories including mine – now did not include my stories. Referrals to the site from impressions for my stories fell from over 700,000 to below 200,000 in a 12-month period.

But pushing us to the sidelines was not enough, especially with Democrats’ looming loss of Congress in the midterm elections and Joe Biden’s abysmal poll numbers. Now we must be erased. Dozens of lesser-known sites, writers and videographers are disappearing. Facebook, for example, removed a “No Unite The Right 2-DC” event connected to a page called “Resisters,” appearing to advertise a counter-rally on the anniversary of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Paul Jay, who runs a site called The Analysis, ran a video essay on February 7, 2021 called, “A Failed Coup Inside a Failed Coup.” YouTube banned the piece, saying it was “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.” Tulsi Gabbard, after posting on March 13 that the US funded bio labs in Ukraine and blaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s foreign policy, said she was shadowbanned on Twitter. The “Russians with Attitude” podcast account was suspended on Twitter. It covered the information war in Ukraine and “cried foul” on the Ghost of Kiev. Social media platforms have been especially harsh on those questioning Covid policy, blocking websites and forcing users, social media platforms, or online outlets to delete posts.

These sites make billions of dollars by selling our personal information to corporations, advertising agencies and political public relations firms. They know everything about us. We know nothing about them. They cater to our proclivities, fears, habits and prejudices. And they will silence our voices if we do not conform.

Censorship will not halt America’s march towards Christian fascism. Weimar Germany attempted to thwart Nazi fascism by enforcing rigorous hate-speech laws. In the 1920s, it banned the Nazi party. Nazi leaders, including Joseph Goebbels, were prosecuted for hate speech. Julius Streicher, who ran the virulently anti-Semitic tabloid The Stormer (Der Stürmer), was fired from his teaching post, repeatedly fined and had his newspapers confiscated. He was taken to court numerous times for libel and served a series of jail sentences.

But like those serving sentences for the assault on the Capitol on January 6, or like Trump, the persecution of Nazi leaders only enhanced their stature the longer the German ruling class failed to address the economic and social misery.

There are many similarities to the 1930s, including the power of predatory international banks to consolidate wealth into the hands of a few oligarchs and impose punishing austerity measures on the global working class.

“More than anything else, the Nazis were a nationalist protest movement against globalization,” notes Benjamin Carter Hett in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and The Downfall of the Weimar Republic.”

Shutting down critics in a decayed and corrupt society is equivalent to turning off the oxygen on a seriously ill patient. It hastens mortality rather than delaying or preventing it. The convergence of a looming economic crisis, fear by a bankrupt ruling class that they will soon be banished from power, the growing ecological catastrophe and the inability to thwart self-destructive military adventurism against Russia and China, have set the stage for an American implosion.

Those of us who see it coming, and who desperately seek to prevent it, have become the enemy.



Featured image: Original illustration by Mr. Fish.

(MintPress News)

https://orinocotribune.com/american-commissars/

Fine and all but what's wrong with commissars? Every time Hedges looks to be improving he writes something to prove you wrong.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 25, 2022 1:10 pm

BIG TECH'S ROMANCE WITH CANCEL CULTURE
pepe escobar

23 Apr 2022 , 4:50 pm .

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The culture of cancellation is integrated into the techno-feudalist project (Photo: Financial Times)

This month, several of us – Scott Ritter , ASB Military News , myself, among others – were canceled by Twitter. The unstated reason: We were challenging the officially sanctioned narrative about the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.

This was kind of predictable, like everything Big Tech . I barely lasted seven months on Twitter. And that was enough time. Contacts in California told me it was on their radar because of how quickly the account had grown, and its enormous reach, particularly after the start of Operation Z.

I celebrated this act of cancellation by experiencing an aesthetic illumination in the Aegean Sea, the home of Herodotus, father of history. In addition to this, it was heartwarming to be recognized by the great George Galloway in his moving tribute to the whites of the new McCarthyism.

Parallel to this, the expectation of free speech being saved by Elon Musk's benign intervention offered a "Mars Attacks" humorous pause.

Techno-feudalism is one of the predominant themes in my latest book, The Furious Twenty , published in early 2021 and thoughtfully and meticulously reviewed here .

The culture of cancellation is integrated into the techno-feudalist project: either you comply with the hegemonic narrative or suffer the consequences. I knew that, in my case, judgment day was inevitable in relation to Twitter and Facebook –two of the guardians of the internet, along with Google–, because, like countless other users, I had previously been sent to those "prisons" infamous

I once sent a sharp message on Facebook highlighting that I was a columnist/analyst for a well-established media company based in Hong Kong. Some human, and not an algorithm, must have read it, because the account was restored in less than 24 hours.

But then the account was simply disabled, without any kind of warning. I requested the proverbial "review". The answer was a demand for proof of identity. Less than 24 hours after that, the verdict came in: "Your account has been disabled" because you haven't followed the very nebulous "community standards." The decision was "reviewed" and "cannot be reversed."

I celebrated with a mini Buddhist requiem on Instagram .

By then, my Hellfire-struck Facebook page clearly identified to the general public who I was: "Asia Times geopolitical analyst." The fact is that Facebook algorithms shut down an Asia Times columnist , with a proven track record and a profile of global reach. Algos have never had the (digital) guts to do the same thing to a senior New York Times or Financial Times columnist .

Asia Times ' Hong Kong lawyers sent a letter to Facebook management. Predictably, there was no response.

Of course, becoming a target of cancel culture – twice – does not even remotely compare to the fate of Julian Assange, jailed for over three years in Belmarsh under the most scandalous of circumstances, and about to be sent to “ trial” in an American gulag for the crime of practicing journalism. However, the same "logic" applies: journalism that does not follow the line of the hegemonic narrative must be eliminated.

OBEY OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES

Back then I discussed the matter with various Western analysts. "You're ridiculing the president of the United States while pointing out the positives in Russia, China and Iran. That's a deadly combination," as one succinctly put it.

Others were simply stunned: "I wonder why they restricted you when you work for a reputable outlet." Or they made the obvious connections: "Facebook is a censorship machine. I didn't know they might not offer reasons why they do it, but they're part of the deep state."

A banking source who frequently places my columns on the desks of a select group of Masters of the Universe puts it in New York terms: "Severely f*ck the Atlantic Council." There is no room for doubt: the specimen who oversaw my account termination was a former Atlantic Council charlatan."

Publisher and writer Ron Unz in California had his Facebook account purged in April 2020 from his wildly popular Unz Review portal . Next, readers who attempted to post articles from the page were met with an "error" message with the message describing its content as "abusive."

When Unz mentioned my case to renowned economist James Galbraith, "he was really shocked, and thought this pointed to a very negative censorship trend on the Internet."

The "censorship trend" is a fact, for a long time now. Take for example this 2020 State Department report identifying the "pillars of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem."


DEPARTMENT OF STATE GUIDANCE

The Pompeo-era report demonizes "conspiracy-minded radical" websites that happen to be extremely critical of US foreign policy. They include Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation —where I'm a columnist—and Canada-based Global Research , which republishes most of my columns (but so does Consortium News , Zerohedge , and many other US portals). I am quoted by name in that report, along with a few high-profile columnists.

The report's “investigation” states that Strategic Culture – which is blocked by Facebook and Twitter – is run by the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service. This is ridiculous. I met in Moscow the previous editors, young, energetic, with inquiring minds. They had to quit their jobs because after that report they started to be severely threatened online.

So the order comes directly from the State Department, and that hasn't changed under Biden-Harris: Any analysis of Washington's foreign policy that deviates from the norm is a "conspiracy theory," terminology that was invented and perfected. by the CIA.

Couple this with the partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council – which is, de facto, a NATO think tank – and now we have a truly powerful ecosystem.

LIFE IS WONDERFUL

Every piece of silicon in the valley connects Facebook to a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) LifeLog project, an attempt by the Pentagon to "build a database that tracks the entire existence of a person. Facebook launched its portal on the exact same day – February 4, 2004 – that DARPA and the Pentagon shut down LifeLog.

DARPA offered no explanation. MIT's David Karger said at the time: "I'm sure such research will continue to be funded under another name. I can't imagine DARPA 'abandoning' such a critical area of ​​research."

Of course, the mother evidence directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some of its essential actors manifest themselves, like Douglas Cage, nothing more and nothing less than the conceptualizer of LifeLog: "At this point Facebook is the true face of the pseudo Life-Log (...) We have ended up providing the same type of information detailed staff to advertisers and data brokers without provoking the kind of opposition that LifeLog did.

So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention pontificating about a journalist's job, or assuming you're qualified to cancel him or her. Facebook is an "ecosystem" built to sell private data at exorbitant profits, offering a public service like a private company, but above all sharing the accumulated information of its billions of users with the US national security state. .

The resulting algorithmic stupidity that Twitter also shares – unable to recognize nuance, metaphor, irony, critical thinking – is perfectly integrated into what the former CIA analyst. Ray McGovern brilliantly dubbed the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academy-think tanks (MICIMATT) complex.

In the United States, at least the rare expert on monopoly power identified this neo-Orwellian drive as accelerating "the collapse of journalism and democracy."

Facebook " fact-checking professional journalists" doesn't even qualify as pathetic. Otherwise Facebook – and not analysts like McGovern – would have taken down Russiagate. I would not routinely cancel Palestinian journalists and analysts. I would not disable the account of Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran who was actually born in the United States.

I've gotten a few messages saying that being canceled by Facebook – and now Twitter – is a badge of honor. Well, nothing is permanent (Buddhism) and everything flows (Taoism). So having been – twice – eliminated by an algorithm qualifies as a cosmic joke at best.

https://misionverdad.com/traducciones/e ... ancelacion

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 28, 2022 2:13 pm

COMPATIBLE WITH THE IMPERIAL AEGIS
HOW THE US FORMED A LEFT TO ITS MEASURE
27 Apr 2022 , 10:01 am .

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Frances Stonor Saunders did an in-depth investigation in which she unravels the threads of the CIA and the US in the formation of a left compatible with their imperialism (Photo: Dimitris Vetsikas / Pixabay)

In order to oppose the Soviet Union, socialism, and communism, the US government largely resorted to covert ideological weapons, funding a "healthy" left to safeguard the interests of capitalism in the world.

A well-documented topic that was recently touched on by journalist Benjamim Norton in order to highlight that Washington's intervention has been a key issue in the divisions of the western left, which has caused groups supposedly affiliated with the original ideas of the socialism oppose anti-imperialism or openly support imperial policies.

GOING TO AND FINANCING THE "NON-COMMUNIST LEFT"

In the first half of the 20th century, after the two world wars and after the success of the Russian Revolution and the achievements of building socialism in the Soviet Union became evident, many American and European intellectuals leaned towards socialist theories and the communism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and the influence of right-wing liberalism was diminishing. This situation caused alarm in the power groups in Western countries that directed the course of capitalism, especially in the United States.

After World War II, sights were set on communism as the number one enemy of the West and the Cold War began. The US government and intelligence agencies realized that the best way to combat the communists was to recruit people who were unhappy with the project but still professed an affinity with leftist ideals. This allowed to give the image that the opposition to communism was not only expressed by reactionaries.

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Second conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin, June 1960 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The strategy of relying on "non-communist leftists" became a fundamental device of anti-communist political operations in the second half of the 20th century.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE US GOVERNMENT

Ben Norton mentions specific and highly influential cases that resulted from Washington's covert operations to harm the development of a bloc that confronted capitalism. Among them was Herbert Marcuse, a French intellectual who earned the title of "godfather of the new left," one that was no threat to corporations and their plans internationally.

The reason Marcuse became famous was because he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which is the organization that preceded the CIA. The author was originally hired by US intelligence services to investigate Nazism in Germany, but after World War II he continued to work for them on investigations against the Soviet Union. According to Norton's investigation, his "criticism" of Soviet policies was financed by the US government. In fact, one of Marcuse's best-known books, Soviet Marxism , was based on research funded by the OSS and the State Department.

Norton also mentions Carl Gershman as another figure exposing US government intervention in divisions on the Western left. Gershman was the leader of the Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA), a party that was born from the separation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), and later was in charge of the presidency of the NED from its foundation until 2021.

THE CULTURE WAR AND SOME OF ITS PRODUCTS

Between April 25 and 29, 1966, The New York Times published a series of articles revealing that, for more than 15 years, the CIA had financed dozens of cultural magazines around the world, creating a powerful network of influence on the left. . At the center of this work was the so-called Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded in 1950.

The system created by the CIA allowed it to finance a large number of covert projects. At its height, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had bases in 35 countries, all European capitals, as well as in Japan, Latin America, India, Australia, the Philippines, among others.

In her book The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (1999) , British historian Frances Stonor Saunders notes that "there were very few writers, poets, artists, historians, scholars, or critics in post-war Europe whose names were not related in some way way with this secret company".

The "culture war" unleashed by the CIA had one large-scale goal: to alienate European intellectuals from sympathy with the Soviet Union and to impose American cultural values ​​on the world. The main theoreticians of this movement, James Burnham and Irving Kristol , later worked on the formation of neoconservatism, a political branch supported by American politicians who advocate war to resolve international conflicts, based on the supremacist ideology that America is an "indispensable nation."

The founding forum of the Congress, held in West Berlin in 1950, was attended by the leading writers, philosophers, critics, and historians of the West in the post-world wars era: Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. , to name a few.

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The successful work of the CCF in creating and sponsoring prestigious literary and political magazines made the CIA a key player in the ideological formation of the people. Among them were The New Leader (USA), Partisan Review (USA), Paris Review (France), Der Monat (Germany), Mundo Nuevo (Latin America) and many other publications that were considered benchmarks of opinion and criticism of the western left.

At present, exactly the same methods are used by the same politicians and money order to achieve similar results in promoting a useful left, be it internationally, with intellectuals conveniently turning "anti-war" when it comes to Russia's denazification operation in Ukraine and calls China "authoritarianism" when it takes steps to protect itself amid proven biological weapons threats; or at the level of the Latin American region, with "disillusioned" groups of governments in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which end up collaborating, knowingly or not, with the imperialism led by the United States.

However, the ideological component is what has prevailed over time, when money is not necessary to buy consciences. It is notorious, as in the case of the Spanish left , that it is not necessary to spend large amounts of money to put intellectuals and creators at the mercy of the NATO agenda. For also the banality and intellectual atomization in the field of ideas, training and information, as well as large-scale psychological operations, have hit the target of the positions of many who justify the Anglo-Imperial will over the formation of a multipolar world and dignity.

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