Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 12:07 pm Post subject: Tech Giants' Fake News military cartel: Google Facebook etc
Cindy Sheehan The CIA cabal at FB strikes again (maybe)--we had a group with almost 5000 members called: RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT--and it is just a blank white page now! WTF?
Was it a glitch or saved by good on the ball campaign work?
ps. this is not the first page to have dissapeared in this way! _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
What kind of an answer is that? lol
So its CIA we sit back and take it lol
So you have a better trusted medium to communicate? _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
-Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum El: Bey- dejure Claimant, Sovereign Man, Ani-Yun-Wiya-Muur, Ani-Sahone, does make this Asserveration of my own Will and Knowledge, with clean hands and in good faith, with explicit reservation of Right. Great Law of Peace, said Zodiac Constitution I make to Myself, to exist in Great Peace with Creation and People thereof.
1. -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- does not Understand the Nature and Cause of the Action of Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns, herein Respondent. Is this not correct ?
2. -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey-'s last postings on walls, was of Group "Know Thyself" which -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- created. Is this not correct?
3. -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- never received warning, during those last postings that he was posting too fast or too much. Is this not correct?
4. Never did -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- recieve warning, during those last postings, of annoying or abusive behavior. Is this not correct?
5. Nothing -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- has done can be considered annoying or abusive behavior. Is this not correct?
6. It is presumed there are other factors than those listed in Security Agreement (user agreement) between -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- and Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns, wherein Facebook Incorporated and their agents did act against -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey-. Is this not correct?
7. It is presumed the actions of Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns have created monetary and personal injury to -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey-, for which -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- may make Claim in amount including, but not limited to, nine hundred niinety-nine million gold American Eagle of the American Treasury. Is this not correct?
8. It is presumed the actions of Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns make Respondent liable for injury to -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey-. Is this not correct?
9. It is presumed actions of Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns are in collusion with policy, attempts and action of British corporation United States and Dominion of Canada to commit genocide and Crimes Against Humanity towards Aboriginal People and in particular the current Genocide acting upon Kanienkehaka (misnomered Mohawk) at Akwesasne are suffering from.
10. It is presumed -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- may make claim against Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns, if the actions of Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns are not corrected to the relief of -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey whereas account, applications and postings of -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- that existed prior to action of Facebook Incorporated and their agents are reinstated to proper groups, walls, status, messages, applications within 48 hours of this e-mail.
11. It is presumed that posting on Facebook and e-mailing of this Asseveration is sufficient notice to Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns.
12. Nothing in this Asseveration shall deprive -Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- from making Claim by other means to include electronic, paper or other media.
12. Respondent Facebook Incorporated, its officers, agents and assigns must refute or rebut that with which disagreement exist, in verified writing, with particularity, within thirty days upon receipt of this Asseveration and support disagreement with fact, evidence and law or Respondent shall provide Relief declared at count ten
-Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey- declare this Asseveration to be true and correct under the penalty of perjury pursuant to the Laws of the United States of America, 28 USC §1746(1), except as to matters stated to be on information and belief, and as to those, believes those to be true, acknowledged and executed this Thirteenth day said June, A.D. Two-thousand Nine.
Further Claimant sayeth naught.
Teste Meipso.
-Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey-
Suæ potestis esse
Respond exactly to:
-Gi-Ni-Ti-Harcum-El: Bey-
Hogansburg Post Office: c/o box 81 Pyke Road
Hogansburg
New York [near 13655] _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2016 9:53 pm Post subject: Verified news=censorship: Facebook Twitter Google Microsoft
Original title: First Draft verified news: Facebook Twitter Google Microsoft
Bellingcat - - verified news - - - what a joke!
As verified by the NSA lol
Facebook and Twitter join coalition to improve social media newsgathering
Channel 4 News, Telegraph, New York Times, Washington Post and BuzzFeed have also signed up to network organised through Google-backed First Draft
Jasper Jackson @JaspJackson
Tuesday 13 September 2016 13.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 13 September 2016 13.04 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/13/facebook-twitter-social- media-newsgathering
Facebook and Twitter have signed up to a coalition of news organisations aimed at improving reporting from social media and tackling fake news.
Channel 4 News, the Telegraph, the New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, ABC News in Australia and Agence France-Presse are among more than 20 news organisations to have signed up to the partner network, which is being organised through Google-backed First Draft.
The involvement of Facebook in particular is seen as significant given its huge role in the distribution and gathering of news, as well as growing concerns about its role in spreading fake stories and its approach to what can and can’t be posted on its platform.
The partner network is designed to help news organisations work with the tech companies to improve newsgathering, and make verification of information from social media more effective and easier to access.
It also hopes to improve the experience of eyewitnesses contacted by news organisations, and help social media users assess news they find on networks.
Áine Kerr, Facebook’s journalism partnerships manager, said the network would help it support reporters in using Facebook to find and distribute news more effectively.
“The network will help Facebook showcase the products, tools and services we have built for journalists but also ensure we are constantly learning about how to improve them based on feedback from newsrooms,” she said. “We want to ensure we are building opportunities to learn from the industry and to ensure we continually hear their questions and feedback.”
The members of the partner network will develop guidelines for best practice, but the recommendations will not be binding.
First Draft operates as a coalition of organisations specialising in social media newsgathering and verification, including News Corp-owned Storyful, Elliot Higgins’ Bellingcat and Reportedly.
First Draft managing director Jenni Sargent said: “First Draft already works so closely with both news organisations and social platforms that we feel uniquely positioned to coordinate efforts and facilitate real progress in tackling some of the key challenges facing journalists and their audiences.”
Other organisations joining the network include Al Jazeera’s AJ+, Breaking News, International Business Times UK, Reveal project, Euronews, Amnesty International, European Journalism Centre and American Press Institute.
Exclusive: A pushback is coming to the Internet’s success in giving the world access to diverse opinions and dissenting information. Politicians, mainstream media and technology giants are taking aim at what they call “fake news,” reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, a hot new issue – raised by President Obama in an international setting on Thursday and touted on The New York Times’ front page on Friday – is the problem of “fake news” being disseminated on the Internet.
Major Internet companies, such as Google and Facebook, are being urged to censor such articles and to punish alleged violators. Also, teams of supposedly “responsible” news providers and technology giants are being assembled to police this alleged problem and decide what is true and what is not.
President Obama in the Oval Office.
President Obama in the Oval Office.
But therein lies the more serious problem: who gets to decide what is real and what is not real? And – in an age when all sides propagate propaganda – when does conformity in support of a mainstream “truth” become censorship of reasonable skepticism?
As a journalist for more than four decades, I take seriously the profession’s responsibility to verify information as much as possible before publishing it – and as editor of Consortiumnews.com, I insist that our writers (and to the extent possible, outside commenters) back up what they say.
I personally hate “conspiracy theories” in which people speculate about a topic without real evidence and often in defiance of actual evidence. I believe in traditional journalistic standards of cross-checking data and applying common sense.
So, I am surely no fan of Internet hoaxes and baseless accusations. Yet, I also recognize that mainstream U.S. news outlets have made horrendous and wholesale factual errors, too, such as reporting in 2002-03 that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program (The New York Times) and was hiding stockpiles of WMD (many TV and print outlets, including The Washington Post).
And, mainstream outlets getting such life-and-death stories wrong was not just a one-off affair around the Iraq invasion. At least since the 1980s, The New York Times has misreported or glossed over many international issues that put the United States and its allies in a negative light.
For instance, the Times not only missed the Nicaraguan Contra cocaine scandal, but actively covered up the Reagan administration’s role in the wrongdoing through the 1980s and much of the 1990s.
The Times lagged badly, too, on investigating the secret operations that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair. The Times’ gullibility in the face of official denials was an obstacle for those of us digging into that constitutional crisis and other abuses by the Reagan administration. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “New York Times: Apologist for Power.”]
In that same era, The Washington Post performed no better. Leonard Downie, its executive editor at the time of the Contra-cocaine scandal, has continued to reject the reality of Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras trafficking in cocaine despite the 1998 findings of CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz that, in fact, many Contras were neck-deep in the cocaine trade and the Reagan administration covered up their criminality for geopolitical reasons.
More recently, during the mad dash to invade Iraq in 2002-03, the Post’s editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt wrote repeatedly as flat fact that Iraq was hiding WMD and mocked the few dissenting voices that challenged the “group think.”
Yet, Hiatt suffered no accountability for his falsehoods and is still the Post’s editorial-page editor, still peddling dubious examples of Washington’s conventional wisdom.
Ministry of Truth
So, who are the “responsible” journalists who should be anointed to regulate what the world’s public gets to see and hear? For that Orwellian task, a kind of Ministry of Truth has been set up by Google, called the First Draft Coalition, which touts itself as a collection of 30 major news and technology companies, including the Times and Post, tackling “fake news” and creating a platform to decide which stories are questionable and which ones aren’t.
Correspondent Michael Usher of Australia’s “60 Minutes” claims to have found the billboard visible in a video of a BUK missile launcher after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Screen shot from Australia’s “60 Minutes”)
Correspondent Michael Usher of Australia’s “60 Minutes” claims to have found the billboard visible in a video of a BUK missile launcher after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, but the scenes actually don’t match up at all. (Screen shot from Australia’s “60 Minutes”)
Formed in June 2015 and funded by Google News Lab, the First Draft Coalition’s founding members included Bellingcat, an online “citizen journalism” site that has gotten many of its highest profile stories wrong and is now associated with NATO’s favorite think tank, the Atlantic Council.
Despite Bellingcat’s checkered record and its conflicts of interest through the Atlantic Council, major Western news outlets, including the Times and Post, have embraced Bellingcat, apparently because its articles always seem to mesh neatly with U.S. and European propaganda on Syria and Ukraine.
Two of Bellingcat’s (or its founder Eliot Higgins’s) biggest errors were misplacing the firing location of the suspected Syrian rocket carrying sarin gas on Aug. 21, 2013, and directing an Australian news crew to the wrong site for the so-called getaway Buk video after the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
A screen shot of the roadway where the suspected BUK missile battery supposedly passed after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Image from Australian “60 Minutes” program)
A screen shot of the roadway where the suspected BUK missile battery supposedly passed after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Image from Australian “60 Minutes” program)
But like many news outlets that support establishment “group thinks,” Bellingcat wins widespread praise and official endorsements, such as from the international MH-17 investigation that was largely controlled by Ukraine’s unsavory intelligence agency, the SBU and that accepted Bellingcat’s dubious MH-17 evidence blaming the Russians.
If such a Ministry of Truth had existed in the mid-1980s, it might well have denounced the investigative reporting on the Contra-cocaine scandal since that was initially deemed untrue. And if “Minitrue” were around in 2002-03, it almost surely would have decried the handful of people who were warning against the “group think” on Iraq’s WMD.
Power and Reality
While it’s undeniable that some false or dubious stories get pushed during the heat of a political campaign and in wartime – and journalists have a role in fact-checking as best they can – there is potentially a greater danger when media insiders arrogate to themselves the power to dismiss contrary evidence as unacceptable, especially given their own history of publishing stories that turned out to be dubious if not entirely false.
It’s even more dangerous when these self-appointed arbiters of truth combine forces with powerful Internet search engines and social media companies to essentially silence dissenting opinions and contrary facts by making them very difficult for the public to locate.
Arguably even worse is when politicians – whether President-elect Donald Trump or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or President Obama – get into the business of judging what is true and what is false.
On Thursday, an impassioned President Obama voiced his annoyance with “fake news” twice in his joint news conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel — “because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. … If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”
Let that phrase sink in for a moment: “We won’t know what to protect”? Is President Obama suggesting that it is the U.S. government’s role to “protect” certain information and, by implication, leave contrary information “unprotected,” i.e. open to censorship?
On Friday, a New York Times front-page article took Facebook to task, in particular, writing: “for years, the social network did little to clamp down on the false news.”
The Times added, in a complimentary way, “Now Facebook, Google and others have begun to take steps to curb the trend, but some outside the United States say the move is too late.”
Info-War
This new alarm about “fake news” comes amid the U.S. government’s “information war” against Russia regarding the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts. Obama’s State Department insists that it is presenting the truth about these conflicts while Russia’s RT channel is a fount of disinformation. Yet, the State Department’s propaganda officials have frequently made false or unsupported claims themselves.
Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
Ukraine’s (now-former) Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
On Wednesday, there was the unseemly scene of State Department spokesman John Kirby refusing to answer reasonable questions from a Russian journalist affiliated with RT.
The RT journalist asked Kirby to identify the hospitals and clinics in Syria that he was claiming had been hit by Russian and Syrian airstrikes. You might assume that a truth-teller would have welcomed the opportunity to provide more details that could then be checked and verified.
But instead Kirby berated the RT journalist and tried to turn the rest of the State Department press corps against her.
QUESTION: Don’t you think it is important to give a specific list of hospitals that you’re accusing Russia of hitting? Those are grave accusations.
KIRBY: I’m not making those accusations. I’m telling you we’ve seen reports from credible aid organizations that five hospitals and a clinic —
QUESTION: Which hospital —
KIRBY: At least one clinic —
QUESTION: In what cities at least?
KIRBY: You can go look at the information that many of the Syrian relief agencies are putting out there publicly. We’re getting our information from them too. These reports —
QUESTION: But you are citing those reports without giving any specifics.
KIRBY: Because we believe these agencies are credible and because we have other sources of information that back up what we’re seeing from some of these reports. And you know what? Why don’t [you] ask … Here’s a good question. Why don’t you ask your defense ministry … what they’re doing and see if you can get…”
QUESTION: If you give a specific list —
KIRBY: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
QUESTION: If you give a specific list of hospitals —
KIRBY: No, no, no.
QUESTION: My colleagues who are listening hopefully would be able to go and ask Russian officials about a specific list of hospitals that you’re accusing Russia of …”
KIRBY: You work for Russia Today, right? Isn’t that your agency?
QUESTION: That is correct. Yes.
KIRBY: And so why shouldn’t you ask your government the same kinds of questions that you’re standing here asking me? Ask them about their military activities. Get them to tell you what they’re – or to deny what they’re doing.
QUESTION: When I ask for specifics, it seems your response is why are you here? Well, you are leveling that accusation.
KIRBY: No, ma’am.
QUESTION: And if you give specifics, my colleagues would be able to ask Russian officials.
As Kirby continued to berate the RT journalist and stonewall her request for specifics, an American reporter intervened and objected to Kirby’s use of the phrase “‘your defense minister’ and things like that. I mean, she’s a journalist just like the rest of are, so it’s – she’s asking pointed questions, but they’re not …”
Kirby then insisted that since RT was “a state-owned” outlet that its journalists should not be put “on the same level with the rest of you who are representing independent media outlets.” (But the reality is that Voice of America, BBC and many other Western outlets are financed by governments or have ideological benefactors.)
Public Diplomacy
Kirby’s hostility toward legitimate questions being raised about U.S. or U.S.-allied assertions has become typical of Obama’s State Department, which doesn’t seem to want any challenges to its presentation of reality.
A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by Chevron, with its logo to Nuland’s left.
A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by Chevron, with its logo to Nuland’s left.
For instance, during the early phase of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry called RT a “propaganda bullhorn” and Richard Stengel, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, issued a “DipNote” saying RT should be ostracized as a source of disinformation.
But Stengel’s complaint revealed a stunning ignorance about the circumstances surrounding the February 2014 putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
For instance, Stengel cited RT’s “ludicrous assertion” about the U.S. investing $5 billion to promote “regime change” in Ukraine. Stengel apparently wasn’t aware that Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland had cited the $5 billion figure in support of Ukraine’s “European aspirations” during a public speech to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013.
At the time, Nuland was a leading proponent of “regime change” in Ukraine, personally cheering on the Maidan demonstrators and even passing out cookies. In an intercepted, obscenity-laced phone call with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland said her choice to lead Ukraine was Arseniy “Yats is the guy” Yatsenyuk, who ended up as Prime Minister after the coup.
So, was Stengel a purveyor of “fake news” when he was accusing RT of disseminating fake news or was he just assembling some propaganda points for his underlings to repeat to a gullible Western news media? Or was he just ill-informed?
Both democracy and journalism can be messy businesses – and credibility is something that must be earned over time by building a reputation for reliability. There is no “gold seal” from the Establishment that makes you trustworthy.
It’s simply important to do one’s best to inform the American people and the world’s public as accurately as possible. Awarding trust is best left to individual readers who must be the ultimate judges of what’s real and what’s fake.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
image_pdfimage_print
Tags: Barack Obama Bellingcat Donald Trump Facebook Google New York Times Robert Parry Russia Syria Ukraine Washington Post
Post navigation← Iran Deal Tests Trump’s IndependenceAmerica’s Post-Trump Widening Divide →
86 comments for “What to Do About ‘Fake News’”
Dennis Rice
November 18, 2016 at 6:53 pm
Well, here we are to Orwell and 1984 (although a few years past that).
No doubt, the US “Ministry of Truth” will come about, just as has spying on average Americans by the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and others(?).
Truth is, those in power in high places; government or Wall Street and the multi-rich, are the ones scared; scared of ordinary people, those of a different faiths (especially Muslims), Hispanics…. The ‘high powers and wealthy’ don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes, but they sure as hell want the military and the local police to protect them.
The mainstream media can’t be trusted – period.
Reply
rosemerry
November 19, 2016 at 4:34 am
Correct. Remember also the cover-up by the NYT of James Risen’s report which might has influenced the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush. It was published only a YEAR later when Risen’s book was about to be released.
Many of the stories of Iran’s wickedness concocted by “reporters” bear little relationship to truth. Reporting the words of General Flynn even now distort the truth big league!!
Reply
Roland Laycock
November 19, 2016 at 6:52 am
I listen to the lies pumped out of the US daily and the UK media pass it on down the chain, there is more truth on the internet and these day I find the Russian tell more truth
Reply
Arby
November 20, 2016 at 3:47 pm
That’s not sketicism though. You should question it all. I agree that RT is awesome. But it still stinks, even if many of it’s journos are doing first rate work. And the reason I say that it stinks is that when RT recently ‘fixed’ it’s commenting features, it hired a company called Spot.IM, created and run by two Israelis. The buck stops with them, then, when we find that Spot.IM heavily censors comments on RT’s website. I found out QUICKLY that only people saying little and/or saying exactly what those whose interests align with the Russian government want to have visible were left alone. Don’t believe me? See for yourself. Pop in, read around, and comment, meaningfully. You can certainly attack US-inspired violence without danger of being disappeared, but you will be surprised at how, if you’re not sufficiently pro Putin and pro Jewish religion, you may run into difficulty. (And check out my blog post titled “Irony And An Iron Grip” – http://bit.ly/2er8gG9)
Reply
onno
November 19, 2016 at 9:28 am
Well said. Truth is also part of democracy and today’s Washington proves to be a center of tyranny not only for the American people but also for the world. Illegal actions by a government, military actions abroad, genocide and other atrocities overseas plus domestic anarchy and oppressing the American people by executing mostly innocent people on American streets by the police – without prosecuting them – is a far away from the famous Gettysburg speech – more than 150 years ago – in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln:’ that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of FREEDOM – and the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”
It’s sad to see that in the past 50 years – since JFKenndy’s presidency this great nation has denied the American people to live FREE and in Peace. Washington is an autocracy with the rich and neocons ruling with an iron fist domestically and globally without ANY respect for human beings and their HUMAN RIGHTS. Washington attacking sovereign nations without a UN mandate and bombing civil targets like schools and hospitals in violation of the Geneva Convention.
And now electing a Republican president who has to worry about his life because MSM propaganda under control of Democrats have brainwashed the people with a ‘SCARE Message’ initiated by a bloodthirsty Hillary Clinton. Booth Congress and the White House are guilty in this conspiracy.
Reply
Liam
November 19, 2016 at 5:42 pm
Great post. Highly recommend. We have descended way down the rabbit hole. That is why things have felt so strange for the past decade. The media is creating this madness. I’m a progressive anti-war former Dem who voted for Jill Stein but I think Trump will actually bring some normalcy back to life as we used to know it. The media are the ones stirring us all up and after all this war and anti-Russia propaganda they definitely can’t be trusted any longer. Frankly speaking, they are dangerous. If we just learn to cancel them out then life will be a lot nicer and closer to the truth. Thanks for your great comment.
Reply
bfearn
November 18, 2016 at 7:18 pm
Obviously governments need independent Truth Departments with teeth. Any politician or influential member of the public who lied could be sanctioned and forced to issue a truthful statement.
Many people think this would never work because who is to say what is the truth. Ironic that our courts are supposed to be based on ‘the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ but when it really matters the truth is elusive at best.
Reply
Erik
November 18, 2016 at 7:56 pm
Very true, if you mean that governments need independent means of verification rather than Orwellian “Truth Departments.” As you note the truth is elusive, in large part because it annoys most people to be cautious, even in the rare cases when social commitments and inclinations do not bias them.
This is why I advocate an independent federal college of policy analysis constituted to protect all points of view, and to debate among university experts of several disciplines the status and possibilities of each world region, and the policy options. Prevention of bias is the major issue, but if made an independent branch of the federal government it would be free of the groupthink bias of other branches. It should produce debate summaries commented by all sides and available to the public for comment. The ability to see all sides challenged and responding in an orderly manner is essential to public understanding.
The availability of such debates would have much reduced the groupthink and hysteria which have led to our endless mad wars since WWII. The debates would also show the superficiality and deceptiveness of most right-wing thinking in foreign and domestic policy, and would also require a much higher standard of left-wing argument. Political candidates unaware of existing debates would be easier to expose, and media commentators would have a starting point and a standard for media investigation and analysis.
It is very hard work to do the research, dig up sensible views in opposition, criticize and perhaps change one’s own views, and present the troubling alternative viewpoints honestly and courageously. Good journalists such as those found here do much of that work for the public, but organized expert debate can cover a lot of the ground for them and give them a foundation from which to explore current events and unexamined views and evidence.
The Library of Congress runs the Congressional Research Service which attempts to answer such questions from Congress with a mere 108 million annually (for tens of thousands of major questions), providing mostly commented summaries of published papers, which can include stink tank propaganda and research that they cannot evaluate professionally. We could do a lot better with a College of Policy Analysis.
As others have noted or feared, the problem of ensuring the independence and impartiality of such a college of debate is a great and largely new problem, which I hope to solve with the help of others.
Reply
Jack Flanigan
November 18, 2016 at 10:05 pm
You endorse truth departments, “with teeth”?
Are you serious?
Maybe I have missed some subtle irony here.
regards
Reply
Dr. Ip
November 19, 2016 at 5:47 am
“Governments need independent Truth Departments with teeth.” So that “Any politician or influential member of the public who lied could be sanctioned and forced to issue a truthful statement.”?
What kind of dystopian future are you pimping for? Torture until the truth is told? Excuse me, until you tell me the truth I want to hear.
The Man is going to take over the High Castle in January
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series)) .
By then, most of the elements of the new repression will be in place. Find non-USA servers for your news outlet, move your valuables to a place not directly under the thumb of the new regime. Difficult to do of course. And if you organize resistance, use encrypted communication, or, better yet, talk face to face with people, ditch Facebook and the social media traps.
Or, just keep your head down, fade into the background and hope that the poem written by Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group, does not come true… again!
The following is a poetic version of his statements:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Reply
Bill Cash
November 19, 2016 at 8:32 pm
Glad to see a post recognizing the danger from a Trump regime.
Reply
Dennis Merwood
November 18, 2016 at 8:01 pm
State Department spokesman John Kirby’s answers to reasonable questions from that Russian journalist affiliated with RT should immediately result in him being fired for his despicable treatment of this young lady on Wednesday. What a shocking display of bias, hubris and ignorance from a State Department employee. This can’t be allowed to be swept under the rug.
Reply
Gregory Herr
November 19, 2016 at 12:29 pm
A quick link that begins with Maria Zakharova’s response to Kirby’s insolence and then picks up the exchange between Kirby and the RT reporter:
backwardsevolution
November 19, 2016 at 5:43 pm
Dennis Merwood – OMG, yes, he should be immediately fired. What arrogance and stupidity!
Gregory Herr – thanks for the link. To read about it is one thing; to actually see it is another.
Reply
Kiza
November 18, 2016 at 8:24 pm
I assure you that when the communist country regimes were censoring the news it has always been with the greatest concern for the proper informing of the citizenry and against “fake news” distributed by the questionable entities. Likewise with all other insecure regimes and totalitarian regimes. They always worry about the poor consumers of news and how they will be miss-informed. The fact that the Western regimes are now applying identical concerns about accuracy of informing public against the challengers of its propaganda is just another irony of the win in the previous Cold War.
BTW, for me personally the official “news” is the synonymous with official propaganda, there are not as many “errors” in the “news” as Mr Parry politely claims. It is all blatant, old-fashioned regime propaganda.
Reply
Derek
November 18, 2016 at 8:33 pm
The New York Times is one of the most biased publications in existence. There’s is “fake news” like everyone else’s. Basically, there ARE no news sites that give factual reporting, without leaning toward one of the two choices in political parties that the government has allowed us to choose between. I opted out long ago. This article itself is fake news, to me.
Reply
John
November 18, 2016 at 8:36 pm
Attention earthlings…..humans with an IQ over 140 know truth does not exist……At the 10 dimension every potential exist simultaneously……Humans are boring …….Storm the castle anyway : )
Reply
Realist
November 19, 2016 at 6:48 am
Well, yeah, everyone knows that’s what the Telosians revealed to Captain Kirk: “Captain Pike has his reality and you have yours.” Exactly how an uncountable number of entangled probability waves precisely collapse defines your life alone, and no one else’s (until it’s repeated several quadrillion times to the quintillionth power… in an infinite universe).
Reply
Joe Lauria
November 18, 2016 at 9:08 pm
Excellent and necessary piece. Regarding Kirby’s remarks about RT not being on the same level as Western independent media: Just because most Western media aren’t state-owned doesn’t mean they are independent. They are corporate-owned, and the state is essentially corporate-owned, so the media has the same owner as the state does. I totally agree that it must be up to readers alone to identify fake sites and not share anything from them and warn others, who can then make up their own minds. Here, for instance, are three that I find untrustworthy: Christian Times, EU Times, and Your News Wire.
Reply
Sam F
November 19, 2016 at 9:03 am
Yes, it is interesting that big business moves to the extent possible to control public information and elections. That may in itself be sufficient reason for state control of businesses larger than a few hundred employees. Constitutional amendments restricting funding of elections and mass media to registered limited individual contributions may not be enough.
Reply
Lee Francis
November 20, 2016 at 7:40 am
Yes, much of the propaganda of the West’s state-controlled media has simply been outsourced to the private sector. Publications like the Times, Washington Post, Guardian, don’t have to be told what to do or print, they instinctively know, since they inhabit the same privileged, socio-economic status as high-ranking state functionaries, celebrities, and the super rich. Essentially the western ruling elite is, in fact, a coalition of elites, of which the media is one. The great American theorist C Wright Mills pointed this out in the 1950s, in works such as ‘The Power Elite’ and ‘The Sociological Imagination’ where he identified this elite triumvirate as 1. The corporate rich, 2., The political directorate, and 3., The Warlords. This coalition has since been joined by the mass media. A much-neglected thinker and writer who ought to be more widely read.
Reply
Joe Tedesk
November 18, 2016 at 9:14 pm
When a government installs a Ministry of Truth that is a sign that the government is being caught in to many lies. You have heard the saying, and the truth will set you free, well true freedom wouldn’t need to have a Ministry of Truth, because the truth would be out in the open for everyone to see. Only those with something to hide need to regulate the truth. So while the U.S. deregulates unscrupulous business practices, the commons will be made to hear regulated news stories, which is deemed good for the commons to hear. A Ministry of Truth, would surpass the evilness of Citizens United, and the Revolving Door Politicos, plus a few other unwanted things we in modern America have succumbed to live with. If this keeps up, we will all be passing around secret notes to each other, while attempting to learn what is real…God help America!
Reply
Joe Tedesk
November 19, 2016 at 12:04 am
Do any of you remember way back when the TSA and Homeland Security was installed how everyone said, well if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about? Will the new meme on the streets be, if the press writes the truth then the press will have nothing to worry about? I’m a little weary of this innocent trap, and the way it gets thrown around. People forget that when these type of laws are constructed and implemented that that puts the ball into some authoritarians hands, and your fate relies on the interpretation of that authoritarians principles, and that there my friend is the slippery slop which threatens our free press, and basic freedoms to boot.
Another thing, will a law against fake news ever get pass a person such as Steve Bannon. Compare Brietbart News and Huffington Post to news sites such as consortiumnews or counterpunch. Brietbart has often broke news with stories which are not actually that factual. I have never seen Breitbart report anything Israeli without the American conventional bias. I’m not knocking opinion pieces, but when opinion obfuscates the facts, well that is a different story, because then that author is lying to you. Why in fact almost all articles written by the MSM misreports the Palestintian’s struggle against their Zionist overlords, and that’s a fact.
So will the Trump Adminstration go after the fake news outlets. Will both Houses of Congress be okay with this, and will the same Houses of Congress be okay with the fallout of such a freedom of press issue tying up their congressional phones lines, and jamming away their Tweeter accounts with their voter complaints? This time it will all be on the Republicans, and for now the Republicans, who desperately need a new face lift, will be for not if they dare throw down the gauntlet on the press, by going after the fake news. Will the Republicans find it worth the trouble, or will they punt to 2020?
Reply
Monte George Jr.
November 19, 2016 at 3:33 pm
Good points. The three Greatest Lies Ever Told are:
1. “The check is in the mail.”
2. “A land without a people, for a people without a land”
3. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”
Reply
Joe Tedesk
November 20, 2016 at 12:36 am
Thanks for keeping your comment clean.
Anyway this whole ‘fake news’ freak out is because Hillary loss. It’s plain and simple. I’m not sure what liberal in America means anymore. Hillary got pretty ugly with Russia, and now the Democrate’s are pointing to fake news, as being a problem. I’m one of those old fashion liberals, I don’t like war, and I want so much freedom of the press, that I’ll decide what’s true and what’s not true. And you can damn me for doing it.
You can’t stop lies during an election season. Way back when in the olden days political parties would pay drunks to go from tavern to tavern spreading rumors and lies. Politics is what it is. It’s an evil brew of power and greed getting over on other powerful and greedy creatures all with the same goal, and that is to take the people’s money. So, there will always be the skeleton in the closet, and everybody’s got something to hide, except for me and my monkey. Thanks again for your three greatest lies ever told.
Reply
evelync
November 18, 2016 at 9:31 pm
I was troubled when Obama made that statement because he seemed angry that the “truth” he and the establishment are pushing (and believe?) is being challenged.
I feel bad for him. He’s lost control of the narrative.
If he publicly welcomes and thanks Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the other leakers who have been informing the public with facts then his “search” for the “truth” will gain some validity.
Reply
rosemerry
November 19, 2016 at 4:41 am
Bingo, evelync! Truthtellers are on of Obama’s favorite victims, and Hillary C and Joe (Biden) are relentless against Assange and Snowden who deserve every praise for bringing the truth to us all. As Assange points out, in all the ten years of its existence Wikileaks has NOT been found to disseminate false information. Who can claim that in the US MSM?
Reply
Joe Tedesk
November 18, 2016 at 10:06 pm
For consortiumnews IT; 9:04pm est, on this iPad I have 10 comments so far, on my MAC desk top I have only the first 2 comments that were posted. Just thought you may like to know this.
Reply
evelync
November 18, 2016 at 11:05 pm
Thanks, Joe, for pointing this out.
On my iPad I see 15 comments at 8:46 Central time.
On the IMac using Safari where I am recognized with I’d and email addressfor CN i also see 15 comments.
But with your tip about the comments showing only 2 on your desk top, I was curious.
I used my Mac desktop but used Firefox which apparently does not automatically recognize my user name and email address for CN.
and there were only 2 comments
Dennis Rice and bfeam.
Those are also the first 2 comments on the list of 15.
Perhaps all comments are only available to people who have signed in with an user name and email address.
And unidentified readers only get to see those that were previewed by Editors?
I’m pretty sure I’ve noticed this phenomenon before.
Not sure what if any editor function may be responsible for this.
Interestingly the “….Pointing Fingers” article has the same phenomenon.
37 comments when my email address is recognized for me ( on the Mac) vs 31 on Firefox – no recognition.
I haven’t checked any others.
Perhaps “known” commenters, get immediate access while unknown “readers” only see what has passed through an editors’ screen?
Reply
evelync
November 18, 2016 at 11:15 pm
I think when I noticed this phenomenon before and then checked back later, the newer comments were eventually added to the rest and the total was correct….
Reply
Joe Tedesk
November 19, 2016 at 12:08 am
Open the door Hal.
Reply
Curious
November 19, 2016 at 3:44 am
Correction Joe, that should be “open the pod bay door Hal”
But it’s a good esoteric reference for an older generation.
Reply
Joe Tedesk
November 20, 2016 at 12:44 am
Curious, thanks for the correction. I guess that’s why I fail at auditions because I ad lib too much. I make a great extra, though. Take care my friend see you at the pod bay door, and say hi to Hal for me.
I’ll ignore that older generation remark, as soon as I get up to change the tv channel.
Fritz
November 18, 2016 at 10:14 pm
I new this kind of information control would be inevitable. Obama is abominably devious making such statements.
Reply
Sammy TT
November 18, 2016 at 10:15 pm
Just stop trying to care. There is no way back. There is no hope. This is the way the world ends.
Reply
ltr
November 18, 2016 at 10:28 pm
Brilliant essay. I needed this because I did not understand the issue. Also, I was especially bothered by the way in which the RT reporter was treated.
Reply
Kiza
November 19, 2016 at 12:35 am
Well, this was definitely not the first time that “Admiral” (of McHails Navy) Kirby spat the dummy, I recall at least two other occasions a very similar thing happened. It appears that US State Department is proud of such treatment of journalists – question the official narrative and stand accused of being an employee/agent of the opponent’s Ministry of Military. Even the fact that someone came up with a brilliant idea to appoint a rough and tumble military character into a sensitive and sophisticated role of Public Relations illustrates a terminal decline of a former superpower. Because a true power does not need to dress down the non-embedded journalists as if they were misbehaving sailors, just to maintain the lies.
Reply
Curious
November 19, 2016 at 4:03 am
Kiza,
Kirby is obviously wound a bit too tight I would say, but the lies are rather consistent coming out of the State Department over the years. Do you remember Jen Psaki and her lies? There are so many but it was unbelievable when she referenced the violence and the people leaving Eastern Ukraine for Russia by saying there is no violence and these people are just probably going over to see their Aunties, or relatives. On youtube there is still the version of her reacting to V. Nulands’ phone conversation about the EU and Yats. Her cover was basically saying ‘I don’t know why Russia would put something like that out on the news’ etc. and blaming Russia for the things Nuland herself said. It is quite amazing.
And then Psaki gets moved to a PR, or similar position in the White House…. go figure.
Reply
Kiza
November 19, 2016 at 5:54 am
There is a big difference between Psaki and Kirby, obviously. Psaki’s lies and justifications were good humor and produced many a laugh despite all the deaths sitting behind those lies. Kirby’s call is: kill them all no prisoners taken. Kirby is a rep of the US Government which nothing can embarrass any more – if (more than) half of all US voters (probably not all citizens) can vote for the Clinton corruption and body count then why not attack a foreign journalist at a press conference, on top of the regular patriotic lying? All criteria are gone, humanoid wild animals are on the prowl, only a global nuclear war can cure their madness.
Reply
Frank
November 18, 2016 at 11:23 pm
Hello Folks, I like your site and I like your spot on news as I am a “News Junkie”.. I do however wish to tell your writers and Editors
to cut down on the verbiage.. They, the writers can be much and more expressive with less .. To be blunt, They are too *
Windy… Please tell them to be less repetitive.. Are you paying them by the word??? That is a mistake .. Brief and to the point can
be very essential in this day and age, something we need.. Can Consortium do this or are you another Zionist Helpmate..
Reply
evelync
November 18, 2016 at 11:28 pm
Hello there, Frank.
Some of us appreciate the depth of the articles we read here.
So I for one like them just as they are written.
Reply
Curious
November 19, 2016 at 4:07 am
Hello Frank, let me guess “bluntly” that you are so Twitter Brained out that 140 characters is relevant to you.
Or, just read faster. This is just a suggestion.
Reply
rosemerry
November 19, 2016 at 4:43 am
I can’t bother to read the rest of your pathetic comment. Go figure.
Reply
Joe B
November 19, 2016 at 7:43 am
Occasionally an article will go into more depth in some areas than one needs at the moment, but having the detail is important to others. Writers here must compromise comprehensive coverage for new readers, with conciseness for those familiar with the subject and prior articles. Learning to skim unneeded paragraphs can help.
Reply
Frank Russell
November 18, 2016 at 11:30 pm
Hello Folks, I like your site and I like your spot on news as I am a “News Junkie”.. I do however wish to tell your writers and Editors
to cut down on the verbiage.. They, the writers can be much and more expressive with less .. To be blunt, They are too *
Windy… Please tell them to be less repetitive.. Are you paying them by the word??? That is a mistake .. Brief and to the point can
be very essential in this day and age, something we need.. Can Consortium do this or are you another Zionist Helpmate.. I hope
not..
Reply
Zachary Smith
November 19, 2016 at 2:00 am
Can Consortium do this or are you another Zionist Helpmate.
Krazy Krap here!
(hope that’s a “brief enough” comment for this fellow)
In my opinion the Internet Tubes are full of places for the people with 30-second attention spans. Joe Bageant once wrote of trying to help a “newbie” computer user learn to use Google to find out about his rights against getting evicted” He watched the guy type in the words “rinters kicked out” before the two of them got sidetracked on a porn site which turned up in the search.
Yet two weeks later he had found the neoconservative website NewsMax.com and learned how to bookmark it. Sometimes I think the GOP emits a special pheromone that attracts fools and money.
Reply
Joe B
November 19, 2016 at 7:54 am
I think that this fellow’s comment was merely one of impatience.
The GOP pheromone exuded is ignorance plus selfishness. For acceptance into their trust, acceptance of the Repub social contract of “do unto them before they can do unto you” must then be proven by statements showing that virtue=money, democracy=mob rule, humanitarianism=subversion, and justice=tyranny. It satisfies the individual need to have available efficient means to defeat any residue of moral consideration remaining from youth, without wasting time on complex rationales for the most selfish conduct. It reminds me of a dog sniffing the posterior to identify friend or foe.
Reply
Pat
November 18, 2016 at 11:32 pm
Ironically, it’s Trump the “fascist” who says he’ll defend the Bill of Rights. Whether he actually will, remains to be seen, but at least it’s included in his official policy statement. In a year of one bizarre twist of events after another, it would be strange indeed if President Trump went after Google and Facebook for violating Americans’ right to freedom of speech.
(“Fascist,” according to anti-Trump protesters, who believe it because they read it in The Washington Post and The New York Times.)
Reply
Pat
November 18, 2016 at 11:40 pm
P.S. I agree with others who view this article as extremely important. The left will be watching President Trump on many issues, but someone other than the mainstream media need to keep an eye on First Amendment rights.
Reply
Zachary Smith
November 19, 2016 at 2:33 am
What to Do About ‘Fake News’
I can describe my own experience on this issue by admitting I’ve been gulled by “fake news” for most of my life. It simply never dawned on me that the Power Elites controlled virtually every source of information to which I had access. A person would suppose he/she could rely upon the public library, and in the old days that did help. As the years passed I learned that some of the things I’d accepted as God’s truth were lies. Today that’s a chancy proposition, for my own public library has been taken over by Right-Wing Christianists. Have I ever mentioned the 7 books on Sarah Palin I ran into on their shelves a few years ago? A check of their online catalog showed they carry all three movies of the abysmal Atlas Shrugged movies. They offer many dozens of the “Left Behind” books and movies. There are some token Climate Change materials, but many more Denier books and movies. In their magazine racks I once counted over a dozen journals with “Christian” in their titles. Try to research “abortion” and you’ll run into 6 feet of shelf space by the “anti” authors and one solitary book in favor. That single book was horribly written – which is probably why it’s allowed to remain there.
TV was equally bad. I slowly put each of the major network evening news on my no-watch list until only the one with Peter Jennings was left. One night I watched him tell a bald-faced lie (one he surely knew was a lie!) about an issue in the Middle East with that professional solemn and earnest expression on his face, and that was the end of my TV news watching.
We’re a “one-holer” around here with regard to newspapers. The Indianapolis Star is a right-wing rag, and probably a signficant reason Indiana remains an ignorant right-wing state.
With the internet a person can compare what he sees with other sites, and all of it against his education and trusted old books. If and when the Power Elites crack down on the internet I’ll have to try to locate a short-wave radio and attempt to get some glimpses of real news from overseas from that, for I won’t have any other method I can now imagine.
Reply
Kiza
November 19, 2016 at 6:18 am
The largest Australian “private” printed news company, Fairfax covering Sydney and Melbourne market, started a push to move its content online more than 20 years ago. But what was truly interesting was that at that time it had two different versions of the news, one for the printed edition and another for the online edition. This was the simplest and the best differentiation and segmentation of the news market I have ever experienced. Essentially, the print readers were not computer savvy enough to peruse the Internet and get the variety of information it offered, which meant that they were easier to be lied to. If the printed edition would lie 95% about some world news topic, the online edition would lie only about 10%. I also heard an explanation that the editors of the two editions were different and that the one online was under much less political pressure, so maybe it was not all a planned, that is smart differentiation.
I do not peruse the Fairfax stinking pile any more, printed or online, so I cannot state if this differentiation is still maintained. But I would guess not, because there are far fewer people now who cannot use the Internet – now it would be all pure propaganda.
Reply
Abe
November 19, 2016 at 2:45 am
Thank you, Robert Parry, for your ongoing attention to the deception operations conducted by Eliot Higgins and the fake “citizen investigators” at Bellingcat.
The fake “news” generated by Higgins and Bellingcat is employed by the more aggressive factions in Western governments, which seek to sabotage peace efforts in Ukraine, Syria and other parts of the world.
The Internet offers a ubiquitous, inexpensive and anonymous method for “open source” deception and rapid propaganda dissemination.
With no credible evidence of crimes by the Syrian government in its battle against terrorists or direct Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine, and faced with the prevailing distrust of the Pentagon or Western intelligence agencies, Washington advanced an internet-based “open source” Propaganda 3.0 strategy.
The Pentagon and Western intelligence agencies now disseminate propaganda by making it “publicly available” via numerous channels, including “investigations” conducted by fake “citizen journalist” Higgins and his Bellingcat site.
The actual purpose of deception operatives like Higgins and bellingcat is to provide a channel for Western propaganda to more effectively reach the public and be perceived as truthful.
As Ray McGovern pointed out in “Propaganda, Intelligence and MH-17” on Consortium News (August 17, 2015):
“The key difference between the traditional ‘Intelligence Assessment’ and this relatively new creation, a ‘Government Assessment’ is that the latter genre is put together by senior White House bureaucrats or other political appointees, not senior intelligence analysts. Another significant difference is that an ‘Intelligence Assessment’ often includes alternative views, either in the text or in footnotes, detailing disagreements among intelligence analysts, thus revealing where the case may be weak or in dispute.
“The absence of an ‘Intelligence Assessment’ suggested that honest intelligence analysts were resisting a knee-jerk indictment of Russia, just as they did after the first time Kerry pulled this ‘Government Assessment’ arrow out of his quiver trying to stick the blame for an Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack outside Damascus on the Syrian government.”
The primary source in both “Government Assessment” episodes, both the 2013 chemical attack in Syria and the 2014 crash of MH-17 in Ukraine, the one person in common who generated what McGovern accurately described as “pseudo-intelligence product, which contained not a single verifiable fact”, was British blogger and media darling Eliot Higgins.
Higgins and the Bellingcat site serve as deception “conduits” as defined by the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Joint Publication 1-02), a compendium of approved terminology used by the U.S. military.
Within military deception, “conduits” are information or intelligence gateways to the “deception target”, defined as the “adversary decision maker with the authority to make the decision that will achieve the deception objective.”
The primary “deception targets” of Propaganda 3.0 are Western government policymakers and the civilian populations of the United States and Europe Union.
Higgins has vigorously promoted this deception strategy. In a January 2015 article, “Social media and conflict zones: the new evidence base for policymaking”, Higgins citied “Bellingcat’s MH17 investigation” as a prime example. Higgins’ “overarching point” was that “there is a real opportunity for open source intelligence analysis to provide the kind of evidence base that can underpin effective and successful foreign and security policymaking. It is an opportunity that policymakers should seize.”
US and EU policymakers definitely have seized the opportunities provided by Higgins, Bellingcat and other “open source” deception operatives.
Reply
F. G. Sanford
November 19, 2016 at 2:48 am
Passing government lies off as fact has actually been codified in a document produced by Cass Sunstein, Harvard law professor and husband of hysterical harpy Samantha Power. He was the administration’s “Information guru” during the first term. It’s a “how to” manual that has apparently been circulated among government agencies. It has a historical antecedent in the form of the infamous CIA Dispatch #1035-960 encouraging news agencies to ridicule doubters as “conspiracy theorists”. If the oldest profession is prostitution, then the second oldest must be blackmail. Disinformation has been around and documented at least since Aristotle. But with the passage of legislation permitting actual state-sponsored and funded disinformation campaigns directed against the domestic population by agencies such as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, we’ve gone way beyond anything Orwell imagined. Not only do they lie, but they are so bold as to write down and describe the methodology and make it publicly available. And nobody seems to care! Sunstein had a press encounter not unlike Kirby’s when some journalists confronted him. They were armed with a copy of his treatise on “Cognitive Infiltration”, the guidelines for introduction of the “Distort, Degrade, Deny and Deceive” elements into mainstream social discourse. FOLKS, I AIN’T MAKIN’ THIS UP! It’s fascinating to watch Sunstein’s emotionless denials of flat fact when confronted with irrefutable evidence. Kirby, at least, looked somewhat taken aback. Not Sunstein. He appeared cool and collected with a complete lack of remorse. I only know of one place to find the video: it’s in a documentary on Youtube called, “The ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Conspiracy”. Not that I’m pushing the idea, but I don’t know anyplace else to find it. But back to the second oldest profession. I suspect that by now, there’s a lot of behind the scenes negotiations taking place. Hillary doesn’t want to go to jail, there’s a legacy to protect, and legitimacy on the world stage has been tarnished. Erdogan is certifiably loony, Ukraine is a failed state tumbling into chaos, European nationalists are vying for supremacy, and refugees are destabilizing the social order. The money supply is in turmoil, unemployment is rampant and there is a global recession. I’m waiting for somebody to “spill the beans” to save themselves. I think it’s either that…or war. I can’t wait to read the fake news. Odds are, it’ll be about 89% true!
Reply
Brad Owen
November 19, 2016 at 6:05 am
I’ve stopped reading all main news mags, like time and newsweek (does that still exist?), all newspapers, and all TV news and talk shows about 25 years ago. I used to participate in all of that stuff, big time, in the seventies and eighties, but I saw how it all messes with your head and subtly shapes your perceptions until you don’t know if your thoughts are your own, or are just “plants”. It’s a subtle difference from not caring. It is not permitting the MSM inside my head in any case, despite their sheep-herding “Ministry of Truth”, which, BTW, already exists folks. The Soviets were wise to just sit quietly in the park and play their chess games, waiting out the “storm of lies and deceit”. They made it through. We’re just entering ours.
Reply
Gregory Kruse
November 19, 2016 at 1:07 pm
Blade Runner.
Reply
Gregory Kruse
November 19, 2016 at 1:08 pm
Fascinating.
When did the term ‘conspiracy theory’ become an automatic excuse for dismissal? The documentary film by Adam Green, The Conspiracy “Theory” Conspiracy provides an in-depth examination of this phenomenon, particularly as it is propagated by the media elite.
“The mainstream media’s agenda is clear,” instructs the narrator during the film’s opening minutes. “They want you to believe that conspiracies don’t exist, the world is exactly like they say it is, and anyone who disagrees is to be marginalized, mocked and shamed.”
As presented in the film, some conspiracy theories are admittedly rooted in wild and grandiose fantasy, but many others are serious societal considerations which have stemmed from those who have dared to question the official accounts given to us by figures of power and authority. For their efforts, these dissenters are far too often labeled as part of the lunatic fringe, and the mainstream media dismisses their concerns as the nonsensical ramblings of a conspiracy theorist.
The film argues that our responsibility as citizens is to question, especially when those in power have the motivation and the influence to provide a false narrative.
The mainstream media’s vilification of many of those who dare to question official accounts is illustrated through a rapid fire succession of hundreds of media clips from the likes of every major news network, including the 24-hour cycles of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.
Reply
Jay Diamond
November 19, 2016 at 2:49 am
One other pitfall in the matter of “truth squading” is that I have witnessed so many instances where people point out “untrue” stories that are in reality not too subtle satire that goes over the alleged heads of hapless readers. Satire in the eye of a witless beholder can be easily derided as “fake news”.
Reply
jaycee
November 19, 2016 at 3:05 am
One of the most effective fake news stories occurred in 1991, when the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter portrayed a nurse who had witnessed Iraqi atrocities, and made a heartfelt (but fake) appearance before the US Congress. This performance was said to have sealed Congressional support for what became the first Gulf War. It is highly illegal to lie in testimony before these lawmakers, but no one ever faced censure, even after it was learned that PR firm Hill & Knowlton had cooked up the whole thing. The 1991 Gulf War began the post-Cold War military interventions in the Middle East which continue to this day.
Obviously, the power structure cares little if news is “real” or “fake” – just that their message is being received. A result of the sudden concern over fake news is that Google will be withdrawing its Adsense program from designated fake news purveyors, taking away a source of revenue for some alternative outlets. Obama could have instead called for prioritizing critical thinking skills in the education system, assisting the public to cut through the BS themselves rather than have the government and its corporate sponsors engage in forms of censorship.
Reply
backwardsevolution
November 19, 2016 at 7:00 am
jaycee – “Obviously, the power structure cares little if news is “real” or “fake” – just that their message is being received.” Yes, in order to herd the crowd in whatever direction they want us to follow. And so many people blindly follow, never thinking for a minute that their government might be lying to them.
The elite must be going crazy right about now. I mean, how are you going to get away with looting, lying and overthrowing when the Internet and whistle blowers are breathing down your neck?
As far as there being some government department overseeing information, OMG, no! Wouldn’t they just love that?
Reply
KilbankerI
November 19, 2016 at 3:24 am
It’s totalitarianism, and it’s going to keep oppressing, impoverishing, and murdering everyone but the handful of crooks at the apex. Govrrnment must he eradicated in order to cease all illigitimate, criminal, evil acts. That can’t be peaceful.
Reply
backwardsevolution
November 19, 2016 at 7:01 am
Kilbankerl – yes, yes, and yes.
Reply
David Scherer
November 19, 2016 at 4:42 am
So Bob Parry hates conspiracy theories. That’s too bad. Two or more parties who collude to deceive others for selfish motives would seem to be the meat and potatoes of real investigative journalism. Pity. He’s really one of the best and I’d hope he’d take on the conspirators.
Reply
Brad Owen
November 19, 2016 at 6:42 am
He’s a journalist, David. Think of a street light named “Respectability”. Journalists can look anywhere within that circumscribed area on the street, but dare not venture into the Darkness just beyond. Only detectives go there on a hunch, and just to satisfy their own curiosity.
Reply
Joe B
November 19, 2016 at 8:16 am
He seems to have done that often, but sensibly avoids affirming the unsupported theory until evidence emerges. No one wants to have to retract a careless judgment, and journalists can avoid that without denying possibilities.
Reply
art guerrilla
November 19, 2016 at 6:22 am
@ dennis-
i was going to post an obligatory 1984 reference, as far as newspeak is now operative: fake=real/real=fake, true=false/false=true, etc…
it REALLY has devolved to the level where language is perverted beyond meaning, where words don’t mean what we think, where simple morality has no place…
journalists are among the first to feel the lash of Empire: you are either a toady and bow, or you are an enemy and die…
it is simply astonishing that this slow-motion trainwreck is taking place in front of our eyes…
surreal, * surreal…
Reply
backwardsevolution
November 19, 2016 at 7:05 am
art – you are right, it is absolutely scary.
Reply
Realist
November 19, 2016 at 6:33 am
The corporate mainstream media was quite conspicuously pushing an agenda to get Hillary elected. I guess all the current carping by Obama and some of his dead end supporters who control media are sour grapes, because obviously their self-serving subjective narrative was rejected by the voters in favor of the other side’s self-serving subjective narrative in the recent election. One thing about Obama that has grown worse over his eight years in office: he resents being wrong, being called out on being wrong, and losing in the court of public opinion. His remedy is usually to become very snarky and talk trash about his critics or opposition. It’s a very annoying trait he has that I have just about had a bellyful of. I distinctly dislike the way he is busy in Europe right now trying to paint Trump into a corner on continuing NATO aggression and extending the sanctions against Russia just before Trump is to take office and be making these decisions. And they say Trump is insulting! He is, but he doesn’t PRETEND to be civil like Obama would have you believe he is. Trump gives it back to you in return for your disrespect. He’s not a stealth slanderer like Obama has been. And, that’s the truth.
Reply
backwardsevolution
November 19, 2016 at 7:08 am
Realist – very well said. Obama is a fake, but he’s fooled a lot of people.
Reply
Bob Van Noy
November 19, 2016 at 11:17 am
As always thank you Robert Parry. Watching MSM trying to explain President Trump is frustrating to say the least… Never has there been such a total concentration of disinformation in Both reporting And editorializing in the large news entities of the press and television. The aspect that was most notable and distinct this election cycle was the totality of it, coupled with little or no dissent within the various media. Even the commentary sections of print media lost there edge somehow by editing or by massive trolling. Freedom Of The Press seems like a fading concept of long ago, seemingly silenced by the constant appearance by political spokespersons, and think tank experts. Thank goodness for those unfettered, idealistic classes of the distant past that mentioned, in passing, that one should be credible, honest and sincere, because it was important to Democracy itself…
Reply
David F., N.A.
November 19, 2016 at 5:13 pm
I wonder if the corporate media (or another corporate entity) is behind all this fake fake news. Now the multinationals’ real fake news (msm) can justify its existence to a public consisting of mostly mindless conservative and conservaDem drones. I loved watching the real fake news prancing around as if they own the monopoly on the truth (that’s Orwellian for lies (FoxNews) and half-truths (MSNBC)). They busted me up. On a serious note: our bought-and-paid-for government will use this fake fake news to pass laws that will outlaw it and the real real target, any real real news that isn’t deemed real fake news. Globalization marches on.
Reply
Joe Giambrone
November 19, 2016 at 7:09 pm
GLADIO.
Americans are more easily brainwashed because they don’t know what their government is capable of and already been exposed of doing.
Reply
Gregory Herr
November 20, 2016 at 6:48 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful essay on the 28 pages and also the piece on Gladio. Another example of scoundrel capability was Operation Northwoods, a Pentagon plan of false flag terrorism that was rejected by a horrified JFK.
Reply
Curious
November 21, 2016 at 6:16 am
Joe,
I brought up Gladio before during the discussion regarding the coup, or potential coup in Turkey. The ex-defense minister was quoted as saying Gladio has been running Turkey for years. The _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Ben Norton - Glenn Greenwald - November 26 2016, 6:17 p.m.
THE WASHINGTON POST ON THURSDAY NIGHT promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg – headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” – cites a report by a new, anonymous website calling itself “PropOrNot,” which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.”
The group’s list of Russian disinformation outlets includes WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute.
This Post report was one of the most widely circulated political news articles on social media over the last 48 hours, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of U.S. journalists and pundits with large platforms hailing it as an earth-shattering exposé. It was the most-read piece on the entire Post website after it was published on Friday.
Yet the article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics. It was not surprising to learn that, as BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel noted, “a lot of reporters passed on this story.” Its huge flaws are self-evident. But the Post gleefully ran with it and then promoted it aggressively, led by its Executive Editor Marty Baron:
Follow
Marty Baron ✔ @PostBaron
Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent researchers http://wpo.st/PHWG2
2:07 AM - 25 Nov 2016
Photo published for Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
Researchers say sophisticated tools were used to boost Trump and undermine Clinton.
washingtonpost.com
3,150 3,150 Retweets 2,429 2,429 likes
In casting the group behind this website as “experts,” the Post described PropOrNot simply as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Not one individual at the organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group “to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”
In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda – even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage – while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy but without the courage to attach their names to their blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin Senator, the group refers to its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as “The List.”
The credentials of this supposed group of experts are impossible to verify, as none is provided either by the Post or by the group itself. The Intercept contacted PropOrNot and asked numerous questions about about its team, but received only this reply: “We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get back to you today =) [smiley face emoticon].” The group added: “We’re over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s involvement.”
Thus far, they have provided no additional information beyond that. As Fortune’s Matthew Ingram wrote in criticizing the Post article, PropOrNot’s Twitter account “has only existed since August of this year. And an article announcing the launch of the group on its website is dated last month.” WHOIS information for the domain name is not available, as the website uses private registration.
More troubling still, PropOrNot listed numerous organizations on its website as “allied” with it, yet many of these claimed “allies” told The Intercept, and complained on social media, they have nothing to do with the group and had never even heard of it before the Post published its story.
Follow
Eliot Higgins ✔ @EliotHiggins
Just want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave permission to them to call Bellingcat "allies" https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/802050100231020544 …
3:08 PM - 25 Nov 2016
180 180 Retweets 191 191 likes
25 Nov
Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald
This WashPost story gets more and more embarrassing by the minute: https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/802166958426914816 …
Follow
Eliot Higgins ✔ @EliotHiggins
.@ggreenwald No-one I've spoken to listed as "allies" on their site had even heard of them before the WP piece.
9:18 PM - 25 Nov 2016
50 50 Retweets 71 71 likes
Follow
James Miller ✔ @Millermena
I can confirm. I've no idea what this website is nor who runs it. Not sure how that makes us "allies." Looks like just a blogroll https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/802192611608031233 …
4:52 PM - 25 Nov 2016
71 71 Retweets 67 67 likes
At some point last night, after multiple groups listed as “allies” objected, the group quietly changed the title of its “allied” list to “Related Projects.” When The Intercept asked PropOrNot about this clear inconsistency via email, the group responded concisely: “We have no institutional affiliations with any organization.”
In his article, the Post’s Timberg did not include a link to PropOrNot’s website. If readers had the opportunity to visit the site, it would have become instantly apparent that this group of ostensible experts far more resembles amateur peddlers of primitive, shallow propagandistic clichés than serious, substantive analysis and expertise; that it has a blatant, demonstrable bias in promoting NATO’s narrative about the world; and that it is engaging in extremely dubious McCarthyite tactics about a wide range of critics and dissenters.
To see how frivolous and even childish this group of anonymous cowards is – which the Post venerated into serious experts in order to peddle their story – just sample a couple of the recent tweets from this group:
Follow
PropOrNot ID Service @propornot
Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject - they're so vewwy angwy!! It's cute 😊 We don't censor; just highlight.
11:26 AM - 26 Nov 2016
1 1 Retweet 4 4 likes
Follow
PropOrNot ID Service @propornot
Fascists. Straight up *' fascists. That's what we're up against. Unwittingly or not, they work for Russia. http://bzfd.it/2fo3ew7
8:14 PM - 22 Nov 2016
Photo published for Tila Tequila's Descent Into Nazism Is A Long Time Coming
Tila Tequila's Descent Into Nazism Is A Long Time Coming
The self-proclaimed "alt-reich queen" has a long history of anti-Semitism, and an even longer one of internet trolling.
buzzfeed.com
2 2 Retweets 1 1 like
As for their refusal to identify themselves even as they smear hundreds of American journalists as loyal to the Kremlin or “useful idiots” for it, this is their mature response:
Follow
PropOrNot ID Service @propornot
We'll consider revealing our names when Russia reveals the names of those running its propaganda operations in the West 😂
8:11 PM - 25 Nov 2016
3 3 Retweets 9 9 likes
The Washington Post should be very proud: it staked a major part of its news story on the unverified, untestable assertions of this laughable organization.
One of the core functions of PropOrNot appears to be its compilation of a lengthy blacklist of news and political websites which it smears as peddlers of “Russian propaganda.” Included on this blacklist of supposed propaganda outlets are prominent independent left-wing news sites such as Truthout, Naked Capitalism, Black Agenda Report, Consortium News and Truthdig.
Also included are popular libertarian hubs such as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute, along with the hugely influential right-wing website the Drudge Report and the publishing site WikiLeaks. Far-right, virulently anti-Muslim blogs such as Bare Naked Islam are likewise dubbed Kremlin mouthpieces. Basically, everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary-Clinton/Jeb-Bush spectrum is guilty. On its Twitter account, the group announced a new “plugin” that automatically alerts the user that a visited website has been designated by the group to be a Russian propaganda outlet.
Follow
PropOrNot ID Service @propornot
We just published a BETA (very beta) version of our Chrome plugin, which highlights domains we've IDed: http://bit.ly/2fumsNx
9:43 AM - 25 Nov 2016
11 11 Retweets 17 17 likes
TO HYPE ITS OWN STORY, the Post article uncritically highlights PropOrNot’s flamboyant claim that stories planted or promoted by Russia’s “disinformation campaign” were viewed more than 213 million times. Yet no methodology is provided for any of this: how a website is determined to merit blacklist designation or how this reach was calculated. As Ingram wrote: “How is that audience measured? We don’t know. Stories promoted by this network were shared 213 million times, it says. How do we know this? That’s unclear.”
Presumably, this massive number was created by including on its lists highly popular sites such as WikiLeaks, as well The Drudge Report, the third-most popular political news website on the internet. Yet this frightening, Cold War-esque “213 million” number for Russian “planted” news story views was uncritically echoed by numerous high-profile media figures, such as New York Times deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman and professor Jared Yates Sexton — although the number is misleading at best.
Some of the websites on PropOrNot’s blacklist do indeed publish Russian propaganda — namely Sputnik News and Russia Today, which are funded by the Russian government. But many of the aforementioned blacklisted sites are independent, completely legitimate news sources which often receive funding through donations or foundations and which have been reporting and analyzing news for many years.
The group commits outright defamation by slandering obviously legitimate news sites as propaganda tools of the Kremlin.
One of the most egregious examples is the group’s inclusion of Naked Capitalism, the widely respected left-wing site run by Wall Street critic Yves Smith. That site was named by Time Magazine as one of the best 25 Best Financial Blogs in 2011 and by Wired Magazine as a crucial site to follow for finance, and Smith has been featured as a guest on programs such as PBS’ Bill Moyers Show. Yet this cowardly group of anonymous smear artists, promoted by the Washington Post, has now placed them on a blacklist of Russian disinformation.
The group eschews alternative media outlets like these and instead recommends that readers rely solely on establishment-friendly publications like NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed and VICE. That is because a big part of the group’s definition for “Russian propaganda outlet” is criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
PropOrNot does not articulate its criteria in detail, merely describing its metrics as “behavioral” and “motivation-agnostic.” That is to say, even if a news source is not technically a Russian propaganda outlet and is not even trying to help the Kremlin, it is still guilty of being a “useful idiot” if it publishes material that might in some way be convenient or helpful for the Russian government. In other words, the website conflates criticism of Western governments and their actions and policies with Russian propaganda. News sites that do not uncritically echo a pro-NATO perspective are accused of being mouthpieces for the Kremlin, even if only unwitting ones.
While blacklisting left-wing and libertarian journalists, PropOrNot also denies being McCarthyite. Yet it simultaneously calls for the U.S. government to use the FBI and DOJ to carry out “formal investigations” of these accused websites, “because the kind of folks who make propaganda for brutal authoritarian oligarchies are often involved in a wide range of bad business.” The shadowy group even goes so far as to claim that people involved in the blacklisted websites may “have violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related laws.”
In sum: they’re not McCarthyite; perish the thought. They just want multiple U.S. media outlets investigated by the FBI for espionage on behalf of Russia.
WHO EXACTLY IS BEHIND PROPORNOT, where it gets its funding and whether or not it is tied to any governments is a complete mystery. The Intercept also sent inquiries to the Post’s Craig Timberg asking these questions, and asking whether he thinks it is fair to label left-wing news sites like Truthout “Russian propaganda outlets.” Timberg replied: “I’m sorry, I can’t comment about stories I’ve written for the Post.”
As is so often the case, journalists – who constantly demand transparency from everyone else – refuse to provide even the most basic levels for themselves. When subjected to scrutiny, they reflexively adopt the language of the most secrecy-happy national security agencies: we do not comment on what we do.
Timberg’s piece on the supposed ubiquity of Russian propaganda is misleading in several other ways. The other primary “expert” upon which the article relies is Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a pro-Western think tank whose board of advisors includes neoconservative figures like infamous orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis and pro-imperialist Robert D. Kaplan, the latter of whom served on the U.S. government’s Defense Policy Board.
What the Post does not mention in its report is that Watts, one of the specialists it relies on for its claims, previously worked as an FBI special agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force and as the executive officer of the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. As Fortune’s Ingram wrote of the group, it is “a conservative think tank funded and staffed by proponents of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.”
PropOrNot is by no means a neutral observer. It actively calls on Congress and the White House to work “with our European allies to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT financial transaction system, effective immediately and lasting for at least one year, as an appropriate response to Russian manipulation of the election.”
In other words, this blacklisting group of anonymous cowards – putative experts in the pages of The Washington Post – are actively pushing for Western governments to take punitive measures against the Russian government, and are speaking and smearing from an extreme ideological framework that the Post concealed from its readers.
EVEN MORE DISTURBING than the Post’s shoddy journalism in this instance is the broader trend in which any wild conspiracy theory or McCarthyite attack is now permitted in U.S. discourse as long as it involves Russia and Putin – just as was true in the 1950s when stories of how the Russians were poisoning the U.S. water supply or infiltrating American institutions were commonplace. Any anti-Russia story was – and is – instantly vested with credibility, while anyone questioning its veracity or evidentiary basis is subject to attacks on their loyalties or, at best, vilified as “useful idiots.”
Two of the most discredited reports from the election season illustrate the point: a Slate article claiming that a private server had been located linking the Trump Organization and a Russian bank (which, like the current Post story, had been shopped around and rejected by multiple media outlets), and a completely deranged rant by Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald claiming that Putin had ordered emails in the WikiLeaks release to be doctored – both of which were uncritically shared and tweeted by hundreds of journalists to tens of thousands of people, if not more.
The Post itself – now posing as warriors against “fake news” – published an article in September that treated with great seriousness the claim that Hillary Clinton collapsed on 9/11 Day because she was poisoned by Putin. And that’s to say nothing of the paper’s disgraceful history of convincing Americans that Saddam was building non-existent nuclear weapons and had cultivated a vibrant alliance with Al Qaeda. As is so often the case, those who mostly loudly warn of “fake news” from others are themselves the most aggressive disseminators of it.
Indeed, what happened here is the essence of fake news. The Post story served the agendas of many factions: those who want to believe Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton; those who want to believe that the internet and social media are a grave menace that needs to be controlled, in contrast to the objective truth which reliable old media outlets once issued; those who want a resurrection of the Cold War. So those who saw tweets and Facebook posts promoting this Post story instantly clicked and shared and promoted the story without an iota of critical thought or examination of whether the claims were true, because they wanted the claims to be true. That behavior included countless journalists.
Facebook has expanded the roll-out of its fact-checker tool to combat ‘fake news’ as more users report the appearance of the ‘disputed’ message alert. The pop-up lets users know when a story’s accuracy is questionable before they share it.
Users in regions including the US have reported seeing the warning, advising them that “before you share this content, you might want to know that the fact-checking sites, Snopes.com and Associated Press disputed its accuracy.”
The alert then allows the user to share the story or cancel.
The tool is not yet in operation in all regions, with the UK, Ireland and Australia among countries so far known not to be seeing the alert when tested against a story known in some regions of the US to display the alert.
The alert first appeared earlier this month, when users reported a ‘disputed’ news tag appearing on stories deemed false by the organizations employed by Facebook to fact check.
Associated Press (AP), one of the fact checkers partnered with Facebook, published details last week on why a story on the alleged Irish slave trade was false. The story it’s based on is prompting the ‘disputed’ alert when users attempt to share it on Facebook.
Facebook announced the plan to crack down on ‘fake news’ last December, following unproven claims it contributed to the US presidential election result by providing a vehicle for questionable news sources.
The tech giant partnered with fact checkers including ABC News, FactCheck.org, AP, Snopes and Politifact as part of the plan.
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos (Click for details). _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
oh dear just look at the headlines, BBC, Sky News, BBC. Looks like the Queeens velvet gloves are coming off ahead of ww3 oh joy!!
fact checked by the establishment, we're doomed... _________________ 'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'
“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”
A man walks past a building on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. Google recently noted ‘Usage of our services have increased every year, and so have the user data request number.’
A man walks past a building on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif.
Google announced Friday that it’s adding a special feature to its news service — Fact Check. Searchers will now know who checked the validity of a news story and the conclusion they arrived at.
The Fact Check tag “identifies articles that include information fact checked by news publishers and fact-checking organizations.” Each Fact Check snippet “will display information on the claim, who made the claim, and the fact check on that particular claim.”
The rating system will rank stories from “true” to “false” but will also denote stories it finds “partly true” and “partly false.” Searches will also have the option, via hyperlink in the snippet, to review the fact-checkers’ content on the same subject.
Advertisment
This, of course, begs the question: Who are the fact-checkers?
Anyone can volunteer to be one, says Google, cautioning that “Only publishers that are algorithmically determined to be an authoritative source of information will qualify for inclusion.”
Currently, the growing list of 115 organizations includes the likes of CNN, The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, and The New York Times, to name a few.
So now, not only will the corporate media be able to deem which content is acceptable and which isn’t, it’ll also be able — again, the link will be right there in the snippet — to guide readers toward their own view on the matter.
Fact Check: A rating system for the corporate media and by the media corporations.
Incidentally, there’s already a mechanism in place for calling out bs. It’s called the independent media.
Stories published in our Hot Topics section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEXDLWbRPpc _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Facebook has apparently implemented a new political censorship regimen, under the rubric of fighting spam. Either that, or their spam filter is in drastic need of overhaul.
On Monday, August 15, 9/11 Truth News contributor Jon Gold received a message from facebook informing him that his ability to post content to any page other than his own had been disabled. When attempting to add supplemental information to Naomi Wolf's posting of Jason Leopold's Richard Clarke article, Gold was informed by a pop up message:
Thinking this was perhaps an error, Gold logged out and then back into facebook.
When he again tried to post a comment, he received another warning.
Jon Gold wasn't alone in having his posting privileges disabled.
The Addicting Info blog reported:
On Sun. Aug. 14, liberal page administrators and bloggers in my network started spreading the word that they had been blocked from posting ANY content on ANY other wall for 15 days. No prior warning was given.
The offenders are charged with posting links to news/opinion articles – such as this liberal’s guide to Republican talking points – a small number of times to LIKE-MINDED pages with which they regularly interact. (Some reported making posts to as few as 4 other pages before being suspended – for 15 days – with no warning!) I’ve also been alerted that Facebook has revoked some administrator’s posting privileges for sharing links to their liberal Facebook page on the walls of other liberal pages.
Ray Nowosielski, director of the film 9/11 Press For Truth and owner of the site secrecykills.com, reported receiving this message from a friend: "I've been trying to post the link for your page "Secrecy Kills" on some 9/11 related pages, and Facebook just blocked me," adding that he was warned with the same messages as those received by others.
Jon Gold: "I haven't changed my posting practices. Sure, I post a lot of information, but I'm never told not to by anyone whose wall I've posted on. I'd also like to point out that George Tenet lied to the 9/11 Commission."
http://911truthnews.com/911-truth-news-included-in-facebooks-new-polit ical-censorship
Login to post comments
» Login to post comments 2 votes
Please like
this article on Facebook.
Ugh... what am I saying. I never liked Facebook, because as an IT guy, I understand what it is. And what I don't understand is why people would freely participate in this cesspit of censorship and surveillance. But, I know Jon Gold and YT have nothing but the best of intentions, so I strongly disapprove of what Facebook have done here, although I also know this is exactly what they're all about. Like Youtube.
So....They're taking this "limited hangout" show pretty far, aren't they? Maybe there's something to Fenton, Schopmeyer and Duffy & Nowosielski's research after all.
SnowCrash on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 10:32am.
» Login to post comments 2 votes
facebook sucks
It really, truly does.
I managed to steer clear of it up until about a year ago, and then got sucked in.
Several of my friends have quit it successfully though, so there is hope...
YT on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 10:56am.
» Login to post comments 4 votes
Julian Assange: Facebook Is 'Appalling Spy Machine' (VIDEO)
Julian Assange: Facebook Is 'Appalling Spy Machine' (VIDEO)
In an interview with Russia Today (RT), Julian Assange called Facebook the "most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented."
He told RT's Laura Emmett,
"Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence."
It's not new ground for the Wikileaks founder. In March, Assange told Cambridge University students that the Internet is "the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen."
During the Russia Today interview, Assange explained that Facebook, Google and Yahoo all provide automated interfaces for the U.S. intelligence (starts around 2:00 in the video below). "When they add their friends to Facebook," Assange said, "they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies."
--------
I know Assange is right. In fact, he's being mild.
SnowCrash on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 11:17am.
» Login to post comments 0 votes
I can't help but think,
I can't help but think, though, that anyone who's actually worth spying on, is not going to be posting their real name, address and links to their real friends and activities, terrorist or otherwise.
I don't mean to make light of the surveillance that does take place, but, really, if they're spying on 9/11 truthers, they evidently need to find some real work to do.
That said, I have never had a FB account..
jnelson on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 4:30pm.
Show "Is There A Vast Conspiracy?" by Aidan Monaghan
» Login to post comments 2 votes
9/11 Truth News is one of the
9/11 Truth News is one of the only grounded sites left online that stands up for 9/11 Justice. This is one of the few sites I can actually send my critical and intelligent friends. I'm embarrassed by almost every other 9/11 justice affiliated page and frankly, I also fear any rational thoughtful person reading some of the conspiracy theories you are continually asserting Aidan.
http://www.911truthnews.com
If you go and judge for yourself. You will appreciate a website will to verify and present the highest quality information. Oh and wait, they'll even correct it if you point out an error!?
Whoever heard of such a thing?? (sarcasm)
kdub on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 6:46pm.
Show "What Is Your View Of 9/11 Blogger?" by Aidan Monaghan
Show "As For "9/11 Truth News" ..." by Aidan Monaghan
» Login to post comments 5 votes
What a pathetic joke
Especially coming from a guy who continues to give his endorsement to some of the most vile, disruptive and anti-scientific conspiracy porn garbage (CIT) to ever see the light of the day. Of course you have nothing nice to say about a site that does its best to present credible, verified information to the public and remain free of conspiracy theories. Your pathetic "LIHOP" "limited hangout" mantras are so worn out they had already become the butt of jokes years ago:
Other, more radical conspiracy theorists characterized Mr. Cheney's confession of orchestrating 9/11 on behalf of a group of moneyed imperialists and Bush administration business cronies as "a limited hangout" - a partial revelation of apparently damaging information, in reality designed to cover up the role of yet darker and more powerful forces behind the scenes.
"Cheney is just another LIHOP gatekeeper. This is a cover-up," said Frederico Head. As the spokesperson of DestroyAllGatekeepers.net, Mr. Head leads a fast-moving nationwide campaign devoted to exposing all other 9/11 conspiracy sites as CIA fronts.
A thumbs down from Aidan Monaghan is a sure sign that 9/11 Truth News is on the right track.
Thanks!
YT on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 5:04am.
Show "Just For The Record" by Aidan Monaghan
» Login to post comments 5 votes
Whatever Monaghan
You keep twiddling about with your theories.
We'll keep reaching out to the public in a credible manner.
YT on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 5:59am.
Show "Your Credible Conspiracies" by Aidan Monaghan
» Login to post comments 6 votes
YAWN... and good luck to you buddy
You'll need it.
YT on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 7:34am.
Show "A Credible Approach?" by Aidan Monaghan
» Login to post comments 9 votes
The confusion is coming from you Monaghan
By the way, it looks like the Clarke-Tenet story (that you've been trying to shout down for the last week) has gotten David Swanson, of all people, to start to talk more realistically about 9/11. Legitimate advocates for 9/11 justice who are familiar with Swanson will understand what a breakthrough this is for the cause and celebrate it.
YT on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 7:45am.
» Login to post comments 6 votes
Shortage
Apart from the fact that YT supports CD research, and that I'm convinced 911truthnews would report on credible CD research, there is no shortage of CD reporting about 9/11, wouldn't you say?
Also, are you of the opinion that the further away from the official story, the truer something is? Shouldn't that mean that a missile hit the Pentagon, flight 93 never took off, the flights 'allegedly' hitting the WTC were holograms and the buildings were destroyed with mini nukes? After all these theories satisfy your demands: they are completely at odds with the "official story".
Oh, not scientifically supported? Okay, then what scientifically supports CIT's malarkey? (A theory you endorse, which means you think Lloyd England the innocent cabbie is an 'accomplice') Witness testimony? Cite me a scientific paper expounding the unparalleled accuracy of witness testimony. What scientifically supports DRG's voice morphing boondoggle? Cite me your peer reviewed, published scientific analysis of the Betty Ong/Cee Cee Lyles audio. And we already know what happened to AA 77's FDR, don't we?
911truthnews is very scientific: it refrains from promoting pseudo-/anti-scientific, anti-journalistic, anti-historiographic rubbish, such as no hijacker theory, and it slants towards research not given the time of day elsewhere, because it is constantly derided as 'limited hangout' by the paranoids and the popcorn truthers.
SnowCrash on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 12:30pm.
» Login to post comments 4 votes
To be clear...
http://911truthnews.com/about-911-truth-news/method/
Jules on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 2:28pm.
» Login to post comments 4 votes
We have plenty of CD content
Often scooping other sites.
For instance, I haven't seen this one here yet: Remember Building 7 10th Anniversary TV Ad If people are feeling deprived of news about the buildings, I recommend they check our tags for "WTC" and "WTC 7". Just click the TOPICS link at the top of every page. By the way, today is the one year anniversary of the launch of the site. Happy Birthday to us!
YT on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 9:18pm.
» Login to post comments 4 votes
Happy 1 year. Please keep it
Happy 1 year.
Please keep it going for another and further.
grumpy brian on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 11:24pm.
» Login to post comments 5 votes
Thanks man
Much appreciated!
YT on Thu, 08/18/2011 - 12:52am.
» Login to post comments 4 votes
Witness testimony
If you asked witnesses in New York City where exactly the plane flew half a mile before impact, you'd get some wildly inaccurate stories. You'd easily be able to find hundreds of witnesses who are way off, ignoring the other 40% who also got it way off, but in the opposite direction. The remaining 20% might get the flight path right, who knows, I'm being very optimistic. To base an elaborate theory of conspiracy and quixotic physical evidence fakery on a biased selection of witnesses is sheer insanity, especially in lieu of any positive evidence (verification). You whine about science a lot, and loudly, as if you have any credentials to lecture the rest of us on the scientific method. Good, I'll throw down the gauntlet. Cite me a scientific paper in a credible, peer reviewed journal which lauds the 'accuracy' of witness testimony.
Meanwhile, if you promote NoC + impact, (which is a well-known in-between phase for folks who are slowly coming to terms with the fact that the whole CIT circus is a con, although some may never recover, ask Chris Sarns) I suggest you take it up with CIT, because they emphatically reject it. Their theory is flyover. You know, because you endorsed their work.
"Just because the TV and prominent officials say otherwise does not make it so."
No, it is so, because people lightyears ahead of you in Pentagon research have shown you it is so, over, and over, and over. If it weren't for these people, you'd probably be promoting that nonsense right now, but you wouldn't get it past editorial review at 911truthnews, which is what makes the site reliable. They're not scared of conspiracy, they're just better researchers than you are.
I'll leave it at that.
SnowCrash on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 12:09pm.
» Login to post comments 5 votes
Aidan Monaghan's comments are a huge disappointment
Aidan, regarding your retarded comment "not very much for the 9/11 researcher or activist to "hold on to" so to speak." Don't be such a fool. Why does a 9/11 news site have to be for activists? There is a whole wide array of information about 9/11 to be looked at besides what is mostly talked about in this struggling, conspiracy-porn-driven movement. Maybe this website is for other people. Why would you have a problem with that? I used to respect you and all the work you put into the FOIA angle, which BTW often leads to dead ends but is important nonetheless.
Your childish complaining about a website because you have no influence over it is disappointing, although not at all shocking. It would be helpful for you to stop peddling this LIHOP hoax which is used to hide credible evidence, and quite frankly you are supposedly too smart (according to your "fans") to fall for that kind of stuff.
But mainly, if you want to do a better with an activist news site, then go ahead and build one and post to it all day long. It's a lot of work. That website is built by people that actually hit the streets and do boots-on-the-ground activism. You have a right to criticize it from your arm chair, I guess. But you are only discrediting your own work by being so close-minded.
Your comments are a good example why I often think this movement won't deliver "the truth" to anyone, it's going to have to go mainstream and out of the ghetto created by comments like yours. Let's hope this cause can still go mainstream, and 911truthnews.com does an excellent job of facilitating that.
So, snap out of it and be helpful for a change and try supporting other people.
President Ford on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 2:31pm.
» Login to post comments 0 votes
The topic of this thread
is facebook's political censorship of 9/11 Truth News.
Please feel free to contact someone directly if you want to address issues outside of the thread topic, or you can submit a new blog on the topic you wish to discuss.
Thanks for your understanding and adherence to the site rules and guidelines.
Many thanks for all your work on behalf of 9/11 truth.
LeftWright on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 2:51pm.
» Login to post comments -1 vote
kdub, AM, YT and SC
Please do not bring old arguments into this thread, as that is in direct violation of the site rules and guidelines.
The topic of this thread is facebook's political censorship of 9/11 Truth News.
The topic is not the particular merits of individual 9/11 truth sites, the Pentagon, etc.
If you want to continue this rhetorical food fight, PLEASE take it somewhere else.
Thanks.
LeftWright on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 1:43pm.
» Login to post comments 1 vote
Jon Gold
and Peace of the Action were already spied on. This is fact. Friends of Jon just leveled heavy accusations at a former CIA director. Are you naive? (No offense)
If you knew the true extent of the spy grid around you, you and Aidan wouldn't be saying such silly things. This is all separate from whether or not this specific incident was targeted or not. I tend to assume error or coincidence, not intentionality.
P.S. Here's another example. You may need some basic programming and networking knowledge to follow this case study.
SnowCrash on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 6:47pm.
» Login to post comments 4 votes
When you think of facebook
Try to visualize this:
Yes, this is an actual visual representation of Facebook's database. Now ask yourself what an intelligence agency would do with that information, if they had access to it. Problem is: they have access to it.
SnowCrash on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 11:25am.
» Login to post comments 1 vote
So do we
it's like a sword, two sides to cut.
Sitting-Bull on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 1:53pm.
» Login to post comments 1 vote
Like a sword
SnowCrash on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 2:30pm.
» Login to post comments 2 votes
policies
Has anyone looked into FB's policies on this?
I had them block me from posting in the past when I was posting about Green Party gubernatorial candidate Laura Wells' (who was arrested for attempting to just ATTEND the governor debate) on the various news sites FB pages (and the specific page for the debate itself) which were ignoring her.
My sense was that specific orgs complained that they were being spammed. And FB seems robotic enough that humans are not necessarily at the other end of a spam complaint, mainly just stats probably and an equation. But you never know. The censorship of Ron Paul from the Rethug straw poll coverage was pretty amazing (reported on the Daily Show, worth watching).
Victronix on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 2:00pm.
» Login to post comments 0 votes
UPDATE
From Jon Gold: "On Monday, it was reported that I received a ban on Facebook. The warning said that my "ability to post on Page walls has been suspended for 15 days." However, I'm noticing that I can post on anyone's wall, and comment on any post. I just can't comment on anything on 911TruthNews.com's FB page. See below:
Unfortunately, I don't know who to contact at Facebook to try and remedy this situation."
YT on Wed, 08/17/2011 - 9:28pm.
9/11 Experiments: The Force Behind the Motion
Propaganda Can’t Melt Steel Beams
Air Defense Exercise a Month Before 9/11 Was Based Around Osama Bin Laden Carrying Out an Aerial Attack on Washington
9/11 Blogger receives no foundational or corporate money other than from the ads on the left. We rely on your individual support. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Welcome to 1984: Big Brother Google now watching your every political move
Robert Bridge
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013. robertvbridge@yahoo.com
Published time: 9 Sep, 2017 11:36
Welcome to 1984: Big Brother Google now watching your every political move
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/402588-google-eric-schmidt-republicans/
Google has taken the unprecedented step of burying material, mostly from websites on the political right, that it has deemed to be inappropriate. The problem, however, is that the world's largest search engine is a left-leaning company with an ax to grind.
Let's face it, deep down in our heart of hearts we knew the honeymoon wouldn't last forever. Our willingness to place eternal faith in an earth-straddling company that oversees the largest collection of information ever assembled was doomed to end in a bitter divorce from the start. After all, each corporation, just like humans, has their own political proclivities, and Google is certainly no exception. But we aren't talking about your average car company here.
The first sign Google would eventually become more of a political liability than a public utility was revealed in 2005 when CEO Eric Schmidt (who is now executive chairman of Alphabet, Inc, Google's parent company) sat down with interviewer Charlie Rose, who asked Schmidt to explain "where the future of search is going."
Schmidt's response should have triggered alarm bells across the free world.
"Well, when you use Google, do you get more than one answer," Schmidt asked rhetorically, before answering deceptively. "Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once... and we should never be wrong."
Really?
Think about that for a moment. Schmidt believes, counter-intuitively, that getting multiple possible choices for any one Google query is not the desirable prospect it should be (aren't consumers always in search of more variety?), but rather a "bug" that should be duly squashed underfoot. Silly mortal, you should not expect more than one answer for every question because the almighty Google, our modern-day Oz, "should never be wrong!" This is the epitome of corporate hubris. And it doesn't require much imagination to see that such a master plan will only lead to a colossal whitewashing of the historic record.
For example, if a Google user performs a search request for - oh, I don't know - 'what caused the Iraq War 2003,' he or she would be given, according to Schmidt's algorithmic wet dream, exactly one canned answer. Any guesses on what that answer would be? I think it's safe to say the only acceptable answer would be the state-sanctioned conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction, an oft-repeated claim we now know to be patently false. The list of other such complicated events that also demand more than one answer - from the Kennedy assassination to the Gulf of Tonkin incident - could be continued for many pages.
Schmidt's grandiose vision, where there is just "one answer to every question," sounds like a chapter borrowed from Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where omnipresent Big Brother had an ironclad grip on history, news, information, everything. In such a intensely controlled, nightmarish world, individuals - as well as entire historical events - can be 'disappeared' down the memory hole without a trace. Though we've not quite reached that bad land yet, we're plodding along in that direction.
That much became disturbingly clear ever since Donald Trump routed Hillary Clinton for the presidency. This surprise event became the bugle call for Google to wage war on 'fake news' outlets, predominantly on the political right.
'Like being gay in the 1950s'
Just before Americans headed to the polls in last year's presidential election, WikiLeaks delivered a well-timed steaming dump, revealing that Eric Schmidt had been working with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as early as April 2014. This news came courtesy of a leaked email from John Podesta, former chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, who wrote: "I met with Eric Schmidt tonight. As David reported, he's ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn't pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn't seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going..."
via GIPHY
The implications of the CEO of the world's most powerful company playing favorites in a presidential race are obvious, and make the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s resemble a rigged game of bingo at the local senior citizens center by comparison. Yet the dumbed-down world of American politics, which only seems to get excited when Republicans goof up, continued to turn on its wobbly axis as if nothing untold had occurred.
Before continuing our trip down memory lane, let's fast forward a moment for a reality check. Google's romance with the US political left is not a matter of conjecture. In fact, it has just become the subject of a released internal memo penned by one James Damore, a former Google engineer. In the 10-point memo, Damore discussed at length the extreme liberal atmosphere that pervades Google, saying that being a conservative in the Silicon Valley sweat shop was like "being gay in the 1950s."
"We have... this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves. Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s. These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that’s a huge problem because there’s open discrimination against anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative."
Beyond the quirky, laid back image of a Google campus, where 'Googlers' enjoy free food and foot massages, lies a "monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves,"says Damore, who was very cynically fired from Google for daring to express a personal opinion. That is strange.
Although Google loudly trumpets its multicultural diversity in terms of its hiring policy, it clearly has a problem dealing with a diversity of opinion. That attitude does not seem to bode well for a search engine company that must remain impartial on all matters - political or otherwise.
Back to the 2016 campaign. Even CNN at the time was admitting that Google was Donald Trump's "biggest enemy."
When NBC4 reached out to Google about the issue, a spokesperson said a "technical bug" was what caused Trump to disappear into the internet ether. Now, where have we heard the word "bug" before? It is worth wondering if this is what Eric Schmidt had in mind when he expressed his vision of a "one answer" Google search future?
In any case, this brings to the surface another disturbing question that is directly linked to the 'fake news' accusations, which in turn is fueling Google's crackdown on the free flow of news from the political right today.
In the run up to the 2016 presidential election, poll after poll predicted a Clinton landslide victory. Of course, nothing of the sort materialized, as even traditional Democratic strongholds, like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan pulled the lever for Trump. As the Economist reported: "On the eve of America’s presidential election, national surveys gave Hillary Clinton a lead of around four percentage points, which betting markets and statistical models translated into a probability of victory ranging from 70 percent to 99 percent."
The fact that Trump - in direct contradiction to what the polls had been long predicting - ended up winning by such a huge margin, there is a temptation to say the polls themselves were 'fake news,' designed to convince the US voter that a Clinton landslide victory was forthcoming. This could have been a ploy by the pollsters, many of whom are affiliated with left-leaning news corporations, by the way, for keeping opposition voters at home in the belief their vote wouldn't matter. In fact, statisticians were warning of a "systemic mainstream misinformation" in poll data favoring Clinton in the days and weeks before Election day. Yet the Leftist brigade, in cahoots with the Googlers, were busy nurturing their own fervent conspiracy theory that 'fake news' - with some help from the Russians, of course - was the reason for Hillary Clinton's devastating defeat.
Who will guard us against the Google guardians?
Just one month after Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, purportedly on the back of 'fake news,' Google quietly launched Project Owl, the goal of which was to devise a method to "demote misleading, false and offensive articles online," according to a Bloomberg report. The majority of the crackdown will be carried out by machines. Now here is where we enter the rat's nest. After all, what one news organization, or alternative news site, might consider legitimate news and information, another news group, possibly from the mainstream media, would dismiss as a conspiracy theory. And vice versa.
In other words, what we have here is a battle for the misty mountain top of information, and Google appears to be paving the way for its preferred candidate, which is naturally the mainstream media. In other words, Google has a dog in this fight, but it shouldn't. Here is how they have succeeded in pushing for their crackdown on news and information.
The mainstream media almost immediately began peddling the fake news story as to why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. In fact, it even started before Clinton lost the election after Trump jokingly told a rally: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing... I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” The Democrats, of course, found no humor in the remark. Indeed, they began pushing the fake news story, with help from the likes of Amazon-owned Washington Post, that it was Russians who hacked the DNC email system and passed along the information to WikiLeaks, who then dumped it at the most inopportune time for the Democrats.
With this masterly sleight of hand, did you notice what happened? We are no longer talking about the whereabouts of Clinton's estimated 33,000 deleted emails, nor are we discussing how the DNC worked behind the scenes to derail Bernie Sanders' chances at being a presidential candidate. Far worse, we are not considering the tragic fate of a young man named Seth Rich, the now-deceased DNC staffer who was gunned down in Washington, DC on July 10, 2016. Some news sites say Rich was preparing to testify against the DNC for "voter fraud," while others say that was contrived nonsense.
According to the mainstream media, in this case, Newsweek, only batshit crazy far-right conspiracy sites could ever believe Seth Rich leaked the Clinton emails.
"In the months since his murder, Rich has become an obsession of the far right, an unwilling martyr to a discredited cause," Newsweek commented. "On social media sites like Reddit and news outlets like World Net Daily, it is all but an article of faith that Rich, who worked for the Democratic National Committee, was the source who gave DNC emails to WikiLeaks, for which he was slain, presumably, by Clinton operatives. If that were to be true—and it very clearly isn’t—the faithful believe it would invalidate any accusations that Donald J. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in tilting the election toward him."
Blame Russia
The reality is, we'll probably never know what happened to Mr. Rich, but what we do know is that Russia has become the convenient fall guy for Clinton's emails getting hacked and dumped in the public arena. We also know Google is taking advantage of this conspiracy theory (to this day not a thread of proof has been offered to prove Russia had anything to do with the release of the emails) to severely hinder the work of news sites - most of which sit on the right of the political spectrum.
"You know, I think fake news as a whole could be an issue [in elections]. From our perspective, there should just be no situation where fake news gets distributed, so we are all for doing better here. So, I don't think we should debate it as much as work hard to make sure we drive news to its more trusted sources, have more fact checking and make our algorithms work better, absolutely," he said.
Did you catch that? Following the tiresome rigmarole, the Google CEO said he doesn't think "we should debate it as much as we work hard to make sure we drive news to its more trusted sources..."
That is a truly incredible comment, buried at the sea floor of the BBC article. How can the head of the largest search engine believe a democracy needn't debate how Google determines what information, and by whom, is allowed into the public realm, thus literally shaping our entire worldview? To ask the question is to answer it...
"Just in the last two days we announced we will remove advertising from anything we identify as fake news," Pichai said.
And how will Google decide who the Internet baddies are? It will rely on "more than 15 additional expert NGOs and institutions through our Trusted Flagger program, including the Anti-Defamation League, the No Hate Speech Movement, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue," to determine what should be flagged and what should not.
Feeling better yet? This brings to mind the quaint Latin phrase, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves? especially since these groups also have their own heavy political axes to grind.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Pichai and his increasingly Orwellian company already stand accused of censorship, following the outrageous decision to bar former Congressman Ron Paul and his online news program, Liberty Report, from receiving advertising revenue for a number of videos which Paul recently posted.
Dr. Ron Paul would never be confused as a dangerous, far-right loony. Paul is a 12-term ex-congressman and three-time presidential candidate. However, he is popular among his supporters for views that often contradict those of Washington’s political establishment, especially on issues of war and peace. Now if squeaky clean Ron Paul can't get a fair hearing before the Google/YouTube tribunal, what are chances for average commentators?
“We have no violence, no foul language, no political extremism, no hate or intolerance,” Daniel McAdams, co-producer of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, told RT America. “Our program is simply a news analysis discussion from a libertarian and antiwar perspective.”
McAdams added that the YouTube demonetization “creates enormous financial burdens for the program.”
Many other commentators have also been affected by the advert ban, including left-wing online blogger Tim Black and right-wing commentator Paul Joseph Watson. Their videos have registered millions of views.
“Demonetization is a deliberate effort to stamp out independent political commentary – from the left or the right,” Black told the Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray. “It’s not about specific videos... It’s about pushing out the diversity of thought and uplifting major news networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.”
In light of this inquisition against free speech and free thought, it is no surprise that more voices are calling for Google, and other massive online media, like Facebook and Amazon, to become nationalized for the public good.
"If we don’t take over today’s platform monopolies, we risk letting them own and control the basic infrastructure of 21st-century society," wrote Nick Srnicek, a lecturer in the digital economy at King’s College London.
It's time for Google to take a stroll beyond its isolated Silicon Valley campus and realize there is a whole world of varying political opinion out there that demands a voice. Otherwise, it may find itself on the wrong side of history and time, a notoriously uninviting place known as 1984.
@Robert_Bridge
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
A former Facebook executive said Thursday Facebook and Google act as "surveillance states" because of the vast amount of data they have on users.
Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings, spoke with CNBC about the state of the technology industry.
"Amazon is a microscopic portion of global consumption today, so ultimately I think it has more room to grow before it invites regulatory overview," Palihapitiya said. "On the other hand, Facebook and Google effectively are surveillance states. And they have so much personal, private information about so many citizens of so many countries."
Palihapitiya worked at Facebook from 2005-2011, and has worked as a venture capitalist since.
He referenced Google having to deal with European regulators and being fined for breaching antitrust rules, saying, "It's already beginning. Because it's part and parcel to them realizing that there's too much power unbounded."
Facebook announced in March that it does not allow the data it collects on users to be used by developers for surveillance of any kind.
Google removed hundreds of apps over the summer after it determined they were being used to conduct cyberattacks. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Getty Images / Jeff J Mitchell
After facing multiple accusations of allowing terrorists a "safe space" online, the world's biggest tech companies are set to work together to fight extremism online.
Joining forces, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have created a new group that will make the platforms "hostile" to terrorists and extremists. Dubbed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, the organisation has three main aims: to develop 'tech solutions' to oppose terrorism online, research relevant issues, and share information as much as possible.
Facebook launches Online Civil Courage Initiative to tackle rising extremism in the UK
Facebook launches Online Civil Courage Initiative to tackle rising extremism in the UK
Facebook 23 Jun 2017
READ NEXT
The ruins of Mosul have exposed the future of high-tech warfare
The ruins of Mosul have exposed the future of high-tech warfare
By JOHN BECK
Outlined in a blog post, the Forum's work is said to "formalise and structure" how the companies work together. It will also see the group work with smaller tech companies.
The announcement follows four terror attacks in the UK and calls for companies to do more when they find extremists sharing material on their networks.
Prime minister Theresa May has called for the digital world to be regulated and fines issued to companies that don't deal with extremist material online. Germany has already started working on legislation to fine companies up to $55 million (£43m) if they don't quickly remove hate speech once it has been reported to them.
READ NEXT
This nonprofit gets volunteers to emergency scenes in 3 minutes
This nonprofit gets volunteers to emergency scenes in 3 minutes
By JOÃO MEDEIROS
In its blog post, the Forum says it will work on the tech problem of terror-related content being shared online. This will be done through a hash database, which was previously announced in December 2016. The scheme sees images and videos of known terrorist content given a unique identifier (a hash) that can be automatically searched for and recognised when material is uploaded to the internet. By sharing hashes, the companies can easily spot material that has already been identified as terrorist in nature. A similar system is used by the Internet Watch Foundation for child abuse images.
SUBSCRIBE TO WIRED
The tech giants will also share best practices for how they use machine learning to identify images and create a standard for reporting how many pieces of terrorist material they remove from their services. "We will commission research to inform our counter-speech efforts and guide future technical and policy decisions around the removal of terrorist content," the group says. It will work closely with governments, non-governmental organisations, and groups looking at online extremism.
Google's using a combination of AI and humans to remove extremist videos from YouTube
Google's using a combination of AI and humans to remove extremist videos from YouTube
YouTube 19 Jun 2017
The companies joining together is rare but not unprecedented. Tech's biggest firms have previously teamed-up to research the dangers of artificial intelligence, chip technology and more.
The Global Internet Forum does, however, add to the work each of the technology firms is doing on their own. On June 23, Facebook launched its Online Civil Courage Initiative in the UK. The partnership with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue was created to offer "financial and marketing support" to groups in the country working against online extremism. It will include the ability to launch 'counter-speech' campaigns and the groups participating will get free advertising space on Facebook.
The Initiative from Facebook follows the company revealing how its artificial intelligence and machine learning is being used to spot terrorist material and accounts. Mark Zuckerberg's social network has said it is using an image matching system and analysing text posts to find extremist content.
(Last Updated On: October 1, 2017)
Google has been utilizing a new algorithm since June. The algorithm is designed to weed out “fake news”, and focus more on “authoritative” sources. Many Left-leaning websites assumed that this would mean Right-leaning sites would be hit the hardest and that Google and social media networks like Facebook would finally crack down on Conservative news sources for “fake news”. Well, it turns out that Google is cracking down on everyone, including websites that take on Social Justice Warrior stances by skewing the way the news is portrayed.
The website AlterNet is the latest anti-Trump, Left-leaning, “Progressive” website to complain about losing half their traffic since the implementation of the algorithm back in June. On September 28th, 2017 the editor-in-chief, Don Hazen, explained…
“It may be hard to imagine anything scarier than Donald Trump’s presidency. But this problem is actually bigger than Trump, and it is a situation that certainly helps him. This story affects you too, in ways you may not fully be aware of—in fact, it affects our whole media system and the future of democracy.
“The story is about monopoly on steroids. It is about the extreme and unconstrained power of Google and Facebook, and how they are affecting what you read, hear and see. It is about how these two companies are undermining progressive news sources, including AlterNet. […]
“But little did we know that Google had decided, perhaps with bad advice or wrong-headed thinking, that media like AlterNet—dedicated to fighting white supremacy, misogyny, racism, Donald Trump, and fake news—would be clobbered by Google in its clumsy attempt to address hate speech and fake news.”
The article goes on to explain how they used to average 2.7 million unique visitors a month, and after the implementation of the algorithm, they’ve lost an average of 1.2 million every month.
They even included a brief chart to show the decline.
AlterNet took the opportunity to beg readers for support for donations since they’ve lost so much traffic in such a short amount of time.
The comment section of the site is absolutely relentless in taking them to task. A majority of their commenters point out that AlterNet brought the decline on themselves by peddling the Russian conspiracy narrative and being so unabashedly anti-Trump.
AlterNet joins other left-leaning Social Justice Warrior sites such as WSWS who have also seen major drop-off in hits due to the new algorithm. This indicates that no site is safe and just about all alternative media across the board have been affected, seeing major drop-offs in hits and suppression of search engine results from organizations like Google and Facebook.
And yes, even we’ve seen a major drop-off in hits that coincide with the switch in the algorithm.
We saw the biggest dip (as indicated in the chart above) on July 2nd, where almost no traffic was getting through to the site. The domain host had no answers and we troubleshooted the problem over the course of a couple of weeks but couldn’t come up with an answer as to what was causing the problem. We eventually surmised it as “traffic throttling”.
Except, it’s a rather odd occurrence in our case because on average between Saturday and Tuesday the traffic is nominal, but between Wednesday and Friday there’s a major drop-off. The fluctuations pop up in various charts, with the inclines being the stats from Saturday to Tuesday, and the drop-offs being between Wednesday and Friday.
While it might be easy to assume that due to demographic fluctuations it’s just young people viewing more content on the weekend (and Monday and Tuesdays), the day-to-day real-time stats show that various articles just aren’t getting hits at all. This ties into what the other websites have been reporting about some pieces being suppressed on the engine or redirected so that the website simply does not see any traffic at all.
Google actually does reveal what content they have been removing from searches in the webmaster tools, and it synchs up perfectly with the real-time analytics on the site. In our case, majority of the content being removed from the feeds are the sociopolitical topics that used to be quite popular on the search engine but are being purposefully suppressed.
A quick example of articles removed from the Google News feed during September and end of August are below, along with the reasons for the removal.
Have you noticed the pattern in the articles removed from the feed? If not, it’s quite simple: The pattern centers around SJWs, censorship, or #GamerGate.
The other information-only articles we produce don’t appear to be affected, and anything non-political appears to be indexed without suppression.
In fact, our walkthroughs still appear to be indexed and even available in the news feed without any problems, such as FIFA 18, despite the fact that it’s about four times as long as the articles that Google removed for being “too long”. A perfect example is the Bungie Kekistan article, which is only 417 words.
Of course, we wouldn’t feel the hammer of Google’s social justice quite as hard as politically motivated websites because politically-oriented topics only pop up on this site infrequently, and they aren’t the main bread and butter of our pageviews. For sites like AlterNet, the issue is a lot more severe and readily pronounced since they rely on politically motivated content, and thus they are seeing major drop-offs in pageviews due to suppression just like WSWS.
Both Google and Facebook have mentioned in the past that they would be cracking down on fake news and “hate speech”, and we’re certainly beginning to see the results of that. Many, however, suspect that this could be Google and Facebook’s way of weeding out alternative news sources and helping keep established, mainstream media outlets front and center.
Spread The Anger _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
A 3D plastic representation of the Facebook logo. (Photo illustration by Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
In the past month, we learned that Russian operatives spent at least $100,000 on Facebook advertisements. We also learned that Russian actors used Facebook to organize offline anti-immigration protests. Just last week, a study estimated that political posts by a Russian troll factory (the Internet Research Agency) had an “organic reach” of between 340 million and several billion views. This study has received enormous attention, including an article at The Washington Post’s Switch blog.
These are big numbers. But it can be easy to misinterpret them. The $100,000 in advertisements was a drop in the bucket compared to the $70 million directly spent by the Trump campaign. Barely anyone actually showed up to the anti-immigration protests. It turns out that the widely cited metrics for organic reach have a botnet problem.
Studying Facebook interactions is hard
The study arguing that Russian posts got billions of views comes from Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Albright relied on CrowdTangle, a popular social media analytics tool for monitoring Facebook interactions and surfacing viral content. This is a novel and creative application of the CrowdTangle toolset, and not the purpose that CrowdTangle was designed for. Unfortunately, that may have led to problems in the analysis.
I studied CrowdTangle in my 2016 book, “Analytic Activism.” Here’s how the tool works:
“The logic of CrowdTangle’s model is relatively simple (even if the underlying math and software code gets complicated). CrowdTangle tracks clusters of Facebook pages and specific keywords. It gathers historical data on how stories, posts and images tend to perform on these sites, and then highlights the stories, posts and images that are doing best against their own expected baseline performance rate. [The] company then packages this information into a daily email, alerting [its] clients to the content which is likely to perform best on a day-to-day basis.”
CrowdTangle plays a crucial behind-the-scenes role in the social sharing optimization strategies of digital media producers like Upworthy, Vox and Buzzfeed. CrowdTangle was not designed to combat, weed out or even study botnets. It was designed to identify stories and content that performs better-than-average within a company’s peer network.
Albright’s study focuses on a pair of metrics that CrowdTangle generates on the basis of the data it gathers: “interactions” and “organic reach.” The trouble with digital indicators like these is that they are easy to inflate. We have seen this on Twitter, where nearly half of President Trump’s Twitter followers are fake accounts and bots. This may be a particular problem when studying Russian influence activities. Adrien Chen’s reporting has documented that Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) specializes in creating fake social media accounts to magnify the impact of its activities. These fake accounts can warp these sorts of simple metrics of online opinion.
The ‘Blacktivists’ page shows how this can work
The “Blacktivists” Facebook page is an instructive example. This page was created by the IRA. Donie O’Sullivan and Dylan Byers have previously reported that the Blacktivist page “had 360,000 likes, more than the verified Black Lives Matter account on Facebook, which currently has just over 301,000.” We cannot tell based on public data how many of these likes came from IRA-created Facebook accounts. But it is highly likely that the reason IRA’s page had more likes than the actual Black Lives Matter account was because the IRA also fabricated several thousand Facebook profiles, then used those accounts to give its content a veneer of legitimacy.
The Albright study highlights the 6.18 million “interactions” (reactions, comments, and shares) the Blacktivist page received across 500 posts. The single most-shared post from the Blacktivist page received 344,209 interactions, which is less than the page’s total number of likes.
This could indicate massive viral spread among socially-conscious Facebook users. Or it could just be repeat sharing echoing across a botnet. The study also estimates the “organic reach” by counting the sum total of followers of all Facebook pages that shared a Blacktivist post. That sum is rife with overcounts though — if two fake Facebook profiles each have the same 5,000 fake friends, and both share the fake Blacktivist post, CrowdTangle’s “organic reach” will record it as visible to 10,000 people.
The headline from Albright’s study is that Blacktivist posts had a total “organic reach” of 103.8 million. Combined with five other IRA-created pages that have been made public, Albright counts 340 million. Since Facebook has deleted 470 pages, he reasonably concludes that the total “organic reach” of all these sites is likely in the billions. That math is correct, but misleading. We have no way of knowing what portion of these views are attributable to actual human beings living in the United States of America.
The larger difficulty here is that Facebook has quasi-monopolistic power in the social sharing economy. We encounter news content through the black box of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms, and no one besides Facebook’s own engineers can say precisely how these algorithms operate. Facebook’s internal data might be able to sort through these questions, but even that is uncertain. Facebook’s publicly-available data is extremely limited. This makes it hard to sort out the scale of Russian digital propaganda activity in the 2016 election.
We know that foreign actors expended substantial time and money in an attempt to inject digital propaganda into the 2016 election. We know that they did this in an attempt to undermine trust in democracy and buttress the efforts of the Trump campaign.
Gathering clear data on the scope of these activities is both phenomenally important and phenomenally difficult. Albright’s effort to shed light on this activity is to be applauded. Still, readers need to be cautioned not to overhype the topline findings, which may inadvertently be highly misleading.
Dave Karpf is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Facebook is apparently clamping down on the distribution of political advertisers using the social media platform. Buzz60
Serious legislation is required to combat the countless abuses of power by 'The Web Trust.'
Policy makers are beginning a long overdue reappraisal of the giant website and social media companies (“edge” providers) that dominate the Internet today — or as they might have been called a century ago, "The Web Trust."
Facebook spread lies for money, grossly distorting our elections. Google has been hit with a whopping $2.7 billion dollar fine in Europe for biasing its search results towards pay-for-play favorites. Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods suggests its stranglehold on online shopping is targeting the brick and mortar world. And consumers are starting to understand how relentlessly they are tracked and their identities probed by The Web Trust’s omnipresent advertising machine. Even the edge companies’ usual boosters are asking if they should have “non-discrimination obligations consistent with our traditional concepts of common carriage” — the strictest form of regulation we’ve seen in this sector.
More: We're studying how to restore trust in U.S. democracy. Stay tuned.
More: Wozniak & Copps: Ending net neutrality will end the Internet as we know it
Our society has always protected itself from monopolists, be they utilities, railroads, oil companies, or financiers, acting against abuses while preserving innovation and economic growth. Most of those early monopolies followed the same pattern as The Web Trust — after an initial burst of competitive activity, the landscape quickly became dominated by a handful of monopolistic giants.
That problem is repeating itself in force within the Internet system, largely because so many of these platforms — Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like — are really “networks” that connect users to each other. The larger they get, the more indispensable they become to users seeking to reach each other — they are “natural” monopolies. That scale allows them to insinuate themselves into other markets as Google has done, morphing from a core search business into YouTube videos, Android smartphones, and, most perniciously, data mining and digital advertising.
Meanwhile, other industries and businesses become little more than grist for the monopolists’ mill. The edge giants dwarf the cable, telco and satellite companies who spend billions on faster networks that the edge companies then commandeer, free riding off the value created by this ever-improving connectivity. Features like home assistants, 4K television and virtual/augmented reality exist not because Google or Apple invented them — they’ve been science fiction staples for years — but because ultrafast wired and wireless infrastructure has been built to support them.
The creative industries are also victims of The Web Trust’s expanding power. Newspapers, film and music companies and artists now provide the raw material that companies like Google and Facebook scrape and reassemble for the consumer, hijacking most of the economic value of their work, whether legally or illegally. Why report news, check facts and pay serious editors and writers when it all simply becomes fodder for Facebook’s indiscriminate newsfeed? Why make recordings if they will show up on YouTube’s “free” economy, helping Google sell more ads but generating scraps for artists and musicians?
And while these abuses all cry out for remedy, federal policymakers seem stuck on a hamster wheel litigating and re-litigating the “net neutrality” rules for broadband providers (who support neutrality), while dodging the problems created by the giants on the edge.
More: Readers sound off: Trump bypasses the news media to get ‘truth’ out
POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media
The FCC is right to revisit the illogical “public utility” rules imposed on broadband companies by former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler, who seemed eager to do The Web Trust’s bidding. Unlike search or social media, connectivity is an innovative, fluid market with competing wired and wireless options that have continually improved consumers’ ability to reach anybody or anything, anywhere. We now have not just companies, but whole systems and technologies like cable, fiber, satellite, cellular, DSL and other options that compete for your attention. The FCC is right to reject obsolete Ma Bell era regulation that denies this basic fact.
But the more pressing question is: What obligations should be imposed on the Web Trust giants as they embed themselves ever further into our lives? How do we assure ourselves that the “users” they connect us to are human or that the search results they feed us are based on merit — not pay for play (or worse, algorithmic racism).
It’s time to consider whether to break up the Google search and advertising functions, or to deny safe harbors that protect the tech platforms if they turn a blind eye to sex trafficking or commercial piracy. We need a new privacy Bill of Rights to demystify the algorithms that track and tag you and shape your on-line experience.
In 1858, the British Crown bailed out and nationalised the most powerful company in human history. A company that had a standing army of 280,000 men, which it used to enslave a sixth of humanity and rule over an area in excess of 5 million km2. In fact, such was the power and influence of the British East India Company that even the Acts of Union of 1707 that merged the Kingdoms of England and Scotland was only made possible by bribing Scottish MPs with company shares. The East India Company was a behemoth – its power stemming from its legislated monopoly over all international trade to and from India, culminating in 15% of all British exports having to go through the Company. However, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which was caused by the Company’s bigoted policies, almost brought down Britain’s colonial experiment in South Asia, and served as a warning to halls of Westminster. It was then understood the danger of an all-powerful corporation controlling the levers of power and the need for legislative oversight. Therefore, the Government of India Act of 1858 represented the first major corporate monopoly crackdown.
Whilst we do not have a direct equivalent to the East India Company anymore, in an increasingly digital world we have allowed newer overlords to creep in: is Amazon an online retailer, cloud storage provider, or a media production house? Is Google a search engine, an advertising platform, or a consumer electronics developer? These leviathans of the IT world have stretched far beyond their initial roles, and are now integral parts of all walks in life. This is just one example of the concentration of wealth occurring in all sectors of industry, but nowhere is this happening more, or more quickly, than the in tech sector. In many ways, the likes of Facebook and Google are the heirs of the East India Company in the power and influence they hold. Facebook may not have an army or the power to tax millions of people like the East India Company, but nonetheless, subconsciously we have voluntarily created an Orwellian Big Brother, one which knows every aspect of our lives. Civil-libertarians have been quick to cry out over the overreach of government surveillance, yet the same intensity of response is rarely applied to social-media. A few billionaires can control where we go, what we watch, and even how we think. The truth is there is no need for big government anymore; the silent assassin to our privacy is not involuntary search and seizure by government bureaucrats, because everything that there is to know is already out there.
Recent events have shown how powerful these handful of social media apps can be: platforms like Facebook and Twitter have helped overthrow brutal dictators in Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab Spring, but also provided Russia’s propaganda arm in sewing the rise of far-right politicians in the West. If the radio paved the way for Franklin Roosevelt to enter the White House and television produced John F Kennedy, then TV’s successor was not so generous. Social media’s Frankenstein’s monster is Donald Trump, with a recent Bloomberg study finding that Twitter would lose $2 billion of its value were Trump to leave the platform. Scarily, the FBI have confirmed that the Russian government purchased over USD $100,000 in Facebook ads during the last election, a fact initially denied by Facebook, who were even unwilling to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s investigation into foreign influence in the election – a clear example of a tech monopoly devoid of social responsibility.
When Apple refused to assist the FBI in hacking into the iPhone of the terrorist couple in San Bernardino in 2015, many saw it a defence of civil liberties, but it was also an example of big business being above the law. These tech plutocrats are acting like the banking, railway, and oil barons of the gilded age in creating an atmosphere where they are above the legal system. We are at a fork in the road: should the the status quo continue by letting our tech overlords get bigger and stronger, or should take stronger anti-trust measures be taken.
It is important to remember that we have been down this road before. In the waning decades of the 19th century, with the recognition that the Industrial Revolution was here to stay, almost all sectors of the economy were dominated by tycoons of industries. In America, the financier JP Morgan created the bank that would fund governments on both sides of the First World War, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie helped the US leapfrog the UK as the world’s largest steel producer, with his own company producing over 2,000 tons a day, and finally the oil baron John D Rockefeller, who founded Standard Oil, revolutionized oil refining – at his peak he controlled 90% of all oil produced in the United States.
The monopolies that grew in the late 19th century in America forced a realignment in the spectrum of American politics. From the end of Reconstruction till the 1902, when Teddy Roosevelt assumed the Presidency, governments from both parties employed non-interventionist policies and let the plutocrats run roughshod on the economy. Public sentiment, however, did not correlate with government policies. Mass resentment amongst the masses almost propelled anti-trust crusader William Jennings Bryan to the White House in 1896. Jennings’ meteoric rise sent shock waves – not only did he run a surprisingly close race against the Republican nominee William McKinley, but he also ran against his own party’s record on allowing big corporation getting bigger. Thus when Teddy Roosevelt succeeded McKinley as President, the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era.
Roosevelt aggressively used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up the likes of Standard Oil (precursor of Exxon Mobil) and the railway monopolies of the Northern Securities Corporation. By the end of his presidency, Roosevelt had brought 44 anti-trust suits, far surpassing the 18 anti-trust violations under the Sherman Antitrust Act filed by his predecessors Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and McKinley combined. The trust-busting legacy was cemented by Roosevelt’s two immediate successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. In many ways Taft’s Justice Department went even further, filling over 70 anti-trust suites in just four years, most notably breaking up United Steel. In fact, the political spectrum had moved so far that in the election of 1912 that even the Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs won over 6% of the vote.
Corporations are not immoral, but amoral. They are not living entities with a conscience on the environment, social justice, or workers’ rights because they are not designed as such. They have a singular fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and their drive for ever increasing profits can actually helps the economy in a truly competitive market to reduce prices and increase competitiveness. The Gilded Age, however, was not a period of free and open markets. Such concentration of wealth as seen during the Gilded Age were intrinsically anti-democratic, and resulted in mass social and urban upheavals. Monopolies prevented the establishment of unions as workers were left with no choice but to accept the conditions set out by management. When only one company dominates any sector, workers have little bargaining power as they can’t threaten to leave and join a competitor. We have, as a result, the iconic images of cities in the 19th century where children worked in dangerous coal mines for 18 hours at a go. Titans of industry seemed to care little about the public good, with William Henry Vanderbilt responding to the journalist John Dickinson Sherman’s question on this topic by saying “Public be damned”.
§
In the age of Trump, the trust-busting legacies of the 1910s provide progressives and liberals their own populist avenues. The vast small business of America, such as retail stores, have not closed-down because of immigrants, but as a result of the rise of the likes of Amazon. Their decision to buy Whole Foods earlier this year should have frightened US Government regulators. Through that acquisition, and if more are allowed to happen, Amazon could literally control the entire supply chain in a given sector: from the farm to the supplier to the retailer. The rise of Amazon, which operates on a slow-burn model, rendering short-term profits meaningless, and promoting reinvestment into the company, have given an unfair advantage over its traditional peers. In the last fiscal year, although Amazon’s UK sales revenues totaled £1.46 billion, its UK corporate Tax Bill was only £7.4 million. Due to archaic taxation laws and lobbying pressures on local governments, as well as a zero profit margin, they have started to eat away at local small businesses. In a report published by the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, it was estimated that Amazon has resulted in a net-loss of 149,000 retail jobs.
This may be a David and Goliath battle, but there will be no underdog victory, with an open and free market making way to a privately controlled one with the lever of power in the hands of an ever shrinking few. The business model of the 20th century may have encouraged oligarchical tendencies, with the rise of multinationals due to globalization, but it nonetheless still ensured some measure of internal competition. Intrinsically, the industries of yesterday did not revolve around the necessity of exclusiveness. Take the automobile industry as an example: through consolidation and mergers the global field is dominated by a handful of firms – but the success of Toyota doesn’t depend on the complete elimination of Ford or Mercedes. On the contrary, even with the limited competition, firms have had to innovate, and in doing so have increased their profit margins. However, in the tech world today, the entire model is structured on a ruthless Darwinian survival of the fittest. The reason Facebook is such an effective platform is because everyone is in it. The success of Facebook is predicated on its universal use, and directly correlated to the extinction of Myspace. If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest by population, with 2 billion active users as of June 2017, not including its subsidiaries like WhatsApp.
The power and influence of platforms like Facebook haven’t yet reached their peak, however. Facebook has become pivotal in modern culture and communication, and it is slowly becoming a vital aspect of employment as well. Facebook will cease to be a luxury and become a necessity in the job market. What protections will there be if Facebook then decided to introduce a monthly subscription fee? Moreover, Facebook’s writ is ever expanding, such that employers regularly check their social media activity of applicants. Any small mistake an individual might have privately done will now adversely affect their job prospects for decades said incident were to be captured on Facebook.
The risk of no alternative choices was seen earlier this year in the online video sharing sector, which YouTube controls over 75% of the global market share. Therefore, when YouTube decided to demonetize videos with “controversial titles” as per its new algorithm, video creators were left with little option than accept their reduced revenues. Whilst YouTube’s intent may have been genuine in protecting advertisers from the perception that they are associated with racist videos, the absence of human judgment in algorithms meant most of the creators that were punished were innocent. Scarily those most affected were serious but small and independent YouTube news and current affairs shows that may have ‘controversial’ titles in their videos like war, religion, and death but discussed them in a somber manner. More young people get their news from YouTube than any TV Channel, so what protections will there be if in the future YouTube decides to impose censorship for a more nefarious reasons? What if YouTube decides in the future to demonetize videos critiquing YouTube or its corporate management? To have so few regulations in this important aspect of society places us on a dangerous slippery slope.
§
Silicon valley and its international brethren are no longer ecosystems of genius ideas created in the back of a garage as they were till the early 2000s. If current trends are not halted, there will only be 30 major technology firms in 2030, and that too will shrink to 10 by 2050. Increased consolidation not only cannibalizes capitalism in restricting choices – it perpetrates a vicious cycle that prevents new and fresh ideas from developing. For example, had in the 1990s Yahoo been as powerful as Google is today, would Google have had the air to breath, within a few years leapfrogging its older and stronger rival?
Thus, if there is a realization of the dangerous power these tech firms wield, why then are they allowed to get even bigger? With ever increasing mergers, take-overs, and consolidation in the tech industry, where the Internet was once considered a fair and open environment it is increasingly dominated by a handful of firms. The few social media apps that manage to slip through the reach of Facebook – namely Snapchat or Instagram – soon find themselves being engulfed by it.
Whilst the politics of the early 20th century was dominated by anti-trust sentiments and a realization of how dangerous they were, in the present day tech oligarchies aren’t viewed with suspicion, but admiration. The recent insurgent campaigns of both Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders had a shared theme of breaking up the ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions, but while progressives have in recent times rightly cautioned against big pharma or big oil, the silence on big tech has been deafening. Firm like Google, with slogans like “don’t do evil” or the relaxed working environment with special perks like free food, have fostered immense good-will. Computer scientists and engineers are held at a higher pedestal than bankers by society, and as a result tech firms are given a incredible leeway compared to other industries. For decades, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch has intimidated Prime Ministers from both parties into acquiescing his takeover and domination in print journalism. However even Murdoch has still been unable to increase his ownership share in Sky beyond the current 39% due to governmental antitrust reviews. This is the polar opposite to the attitude of governments to far more lucrative tech mergers.
// Raymond Yip
In part, the lax enforcement of antitrust regulations all around the world has been a change in attitude since the 1980s, from preventing concentrated market power with a balanced perspective of suppliers and consumers to a neoliberal system of maximum efficiency. Under this model, cheap is always good – the belief is that the economy works better when the prices are the lowest for consumers. If consumers are able to purchase their products at price lower than ever before, then what is there to fear? To some extent, this thesis holds up: how could these tech giants practice predatory capitalism if most of their services are free? Both in the UK and in America the so called “center-left” political parties have morphed into centrists and are almost embarrassed to be called members of the left. With Reagan and Thatcher’s electoral success and their policies of de-unionization, the Democrats and the Labor party lost their chief source of funding. As a result, the American political scientist Dr Thomas Frank points out the shift in priorities both political parties have witnessed: the neo-liberal belief in meritocracy lies hand in hand with the faith in the free market, but more subtly a shift from economic equality. Thus both parties had to divert their voting base from the working class to the professional class.
The pre-Corbyn Labor Party lost the industrial midlands and the north to UKIP and the Conservatives. Similarly the Democrats have long since abandoned states like Kansas and Texas which decades earlier were considered swing states. Most of our tech giants like Larry Page, Elon Musk, or Steve Jobs did not inherit their wealth; they created it through their intellect. Intrinsically, the belief held by the neo-liberal ruling class is that tech tycoons are different to their predecessors in the gilded age. Technology is a noble endeavor, the utilization of the human mind in combining creativity with deep mathematical analysis, not like accidents such as finding oil or dirty processes like producing steel. Clement Attlee and Franklin Roosevelt had welcomed the hatred of the rich – Roosevelt had asked history to judge him by the enemies he had made. The likes of Roosevelt would roll over their grave if they saw how close Hillary Clinton was with big business like the banking sector. In fact, even Barack Obama, who never utilized the Sherman Act to limit the growth of tech oligarchs, received record campaign funds from our tech giants. Thus is it any wonder that the Democrats have become an increasingly coastal political party, where the professional class runs supreme, and in the process abandoning the vast stretches of Middle America?
§
The belief that tech’s wealth-creating ability means it should be allowed to run unchecked would be a dangerously short-sighted perspective – what happens when further consolidation occurs and in doing so eliminating their risks of a fresh alternatives ever coming through? Our current laws are out of date, with internet media platforms operating as if they were in the Wild West. Britain has been lucky till date because of the aggressive approach taken by Margrethe Vestager, the European Union antitrust chief. In June of this year, for example, Google was fined a record $2.7 billion for unfairly favoring some of its own services over those of rivals. As Brexit approaches we must create a regulatory mechanism and update our anti-trust laws. Critics may claim we shouldn’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg – after all, IT contributes 3% of the world economy – but if history is used as an indicator, trust-busting doesn’t destroy industry, but rather strengthens it.
Perhaps the most famous American antitrust action in recent years was United States vs Microsoft Corp. Before the age where web-browsers are free and open software, during the internet’s infancy, web browsers like Firefox and Opera required CD purchases. However, Microsoft was accused of altering and manipulating its application programming interfaces (APIs) within its flagship operating system (Microsoft Windows) to favor Microsoft’s Internet Explorer over third party web browsers. Despite Microsoft having to settle the case by promising government regulators with access and oversight on its systems and source code, as well as economists like Milton Friedman arguing that such government involvement would destroy the internet, in the 15 years since Microsoft is still growing strong. Oversight has not inhibited Microsoft’s growth, but enabled consumers with access to better technology. After all, who the hell uses internet explorer anymore?
Currently, 5 of the 10 richest men in the world as per Forbes owe their wealth to IT. The internet controls all aspects of our lives, and its influence will only increase. This is not an indictment of internet or big-tech – they have allowed us to live in a better world. The information age has enhanced democracy in giving citizens the tools to organize better and be more informed. Yet with such power comes new ills. Microsoft Windows operating system runs in 90% of all personal computers, and Google provided 55% of all search-engine uses. This model is far from sustainable. Lets protect the internet by making it more open, comparative, and free.
~~~
Words by Avirup Banarjee Illustrations by Raymond Yip
WebTrust.jpg
Description:
The Making Of A Modern Monopoly By Avirup Banarjee - Friday, 27th October 2017 http://felixonline.co.uk/articles/2017-10-30-the-making-of-a-modern-monopoly/
Profile picture for user Tyler Durden
by Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/11/2018 - 12:55
1.5K SHARES
TwitterFacebookRedditEmailPrint
In the latest of a series of undercover operations targeting the mainstream media and now Social Media, James O'Keefe of Project Veritas has just dropped a new undercover video which reveals Twitter "shadow banning" and creating algorithms that censor certain ideas.
The first clip features a former Twitter software engineer who explains how/why Twitter "shadow bans" certain users:
Abhinav Vadrevu: "One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don't know they've been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content."
"So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. I don't know if Twitter does this anymore."
Meanwhile, Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team explains on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “* people” is in the works:
“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the * people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”
In the full video (see below) Twitter Content Review Agent Mo Nora explains that Twitter doesn't have an official written policy that targets conservative speech, but rather they were following "unwritten rules from the top":
“A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state. You had to be… I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules.”
“There was, I would say… Twitter was probably about 90% Anti-Trump, maybe 99% Anti-Trump.”
Meanwhile, Pranay Singh reveals again just how creepy Twitter can be by digging into your profile and conversation history to determine whether or not you're a "redneck" and therefore worthy of being banned:
“Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.”
When asked if the majority of the algorithms are targeted against conservative or liberal users of Twitter, Singh said, “I would say majority of it are for Republicans.”
Twitter has been long accused of shadow banning and manipulating various metrics of user accounts. As Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars reported in August, 2016, Twitter was accused of suppressing tweets from then-candidate Trump in the home stretch of the US election, which some have construed as interfering:
Twitter is provably censoring Donald Trump in order to prevent him raising money for his presidential campaign.
A tweet sent out by Trump yesterday to promote his #MillionDollarMatch donation drive does not appear on Trump’s profile page nor did it appear on the feed of anyone following him.
You can check for yourself. Here is the tweet sent out by Trump yesterday and here is his main profile page – which doesn’t show the tweet. The tweet has been buried as if it never existed.
A Trump tweet in which he declared that “the establishment and special interests are absolutely killing our country” was also shadow banned by Twitter back in April.
While Twitter is censoring Trump, it has repeatedly been accused of gaming its algorithms in support of Hillary. Back in February, users were irate after the social media giant appeared to censor the anti-Hillary hashtag #WhichHillary after it started trending.
Then in October, 2016, Dilbert creator Scott Adams was "shadowbanned" by Twitter, which he noted on his blog:
This weekend I got “shadowbanned” on Twitter. It lasted until my followers noticed and protested. Shadowbanning prevents my followers from seeing my tweets and replies, but in a way that is not obvious until you do some digging.
Why did I get shadowbanned?
Beats me.
But it was probably because I asked people to tweet me examples of Clinton supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supporters in public. I got a lot of them. It was chilling.
Late last week my Twitter feed was invaded by an army of Clinton trolls (it’s a real thing) leaving sarcastic insults and not much else on my feed. There was an obvious similarity to them, meaning it was organized.
At around the same time, a bottom-feeder at Slate wrote a hit piece on me that had nothing to do with anything. Except obviously it was politically motivated. It was so lame that I retweeted it myself. The timing of the hit piece might be a coincidence, but I stopped believing in coincidences this year.
And in March of 2017, Twitter was caught by Ed Dowd - a politically active former BlackRock money manager who noted in early February that Twitter was both "un-retweeting" several of his politically charged posts.
In one instance, Dowd made a decidedly subversive tweet pointing out that the NSA and CIA are "wiretapping" the entire country via continuously archived data collection - a story which Wired magazine broke in 2006 and gained tremendous clarity through the acts of whistleblower Edward Snowden.
When Mr. Dowd checked his twitter feed hours after sending the tweet, he saw that it had accumulated 13 Retweets and 38 Likes. Given the subject matter, he decided to take a screenshot. Lo and behold, upon reloading the tweet five minutes later, Dowd discovered that 11 retweets had mysteriously vanished.
as
Another phenomenon Dowd noticed was that while he would gain followers throughout the day, there was a reliable "purge" of followers in the dead of night, all around the same time. He began keeping track, and though it wasn't happening every night, it penciled out to around half a percent of his followers each time it happened, effectively capping his audience. Ed had questions; why was it almost always the same number of people? Who un-follows someone in the middle of the night? Considering most of Dowd's followers are in North America, the un-followers were likely asleep when it was happening. The logical conclusion was that Twitter had been actively pruning Ed's audience to limit his growth on the platform.
This isn't the first time Twitter has throttled, censored, or banned conservatives who speak their mind. Documentarian, author, and noted Trump supporter Mike Cernovich (@cernovich) tweeted about his own fan base evaporating around the same time as Dowd began experiencing the un-follows:
Of course, only time will tell if Twitter will take steps to ban political targeting in light of these new embarrassing revelations from Project Veritas...we have our doubts.
59926
235 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
China has had one of these for a while Russia has one Iran has one Google’s ‘alt-media off button’ is all ready now, for the forthcoming war. says @MtylerTyler That’s right. If ain’t saying what we wanted, we’re going to turn it OFF so #BoycottGoogleSearchhttps://t.co/ZsF4okTrSY
That’s right. If ain’t saying what we wanted, we’re going to turn it OFF.
My site, like many other sites, blog, youtubers and other purveyors of ‘unique’ content felt the force of Google’s altered algorithms, robots and other nobs and whistles, as well as the hoards of employees sequenced to vet content and content makers responsible for publishing material not in the ‘public interest’.
Have no doubt this is the case.
Google censorshipApril 2016 Update (Hitler Update)
So Google drafted in a massive change with this update. ‘tuber’s, bloggers, non-MSM news sites. They all took a hit. And why?
Because they were publishing ‘controversial content’.
‘*’ journalism. Stuff with funny jpg’s. Bits and pieces about China. Talking about cabbage?! No really, talking about cabbage could have got your content banned. I did a post on it here, Google demonetized a number of youtube stars .
They hit popular content with massive penalties; demoting searches for the domain itself and banning images hosted on the domain from showing up on image-search.
What is know as ‘shadow-banning’, partially banning content, making it available for some users and not for others.
Non-MSM sites such as WSWG, altmedia hit. I did a list of the alt-media sites hit by the Google April 2017 algorithm crack-down here.
It was a big thing
For a while…
Now it’s gone away…..
Speaking personally. My rankings have recovered.
New content is being listed, my domain is back searchable, (under domain.co.uk) albeit at a lower position than it should be. My images are back too.
It points to the fact, in tandem with other sites, which were also censored, now also making less noise, that Google was testing something.
Testing something, making sure it worked.
Something like this –
off switch
China has had one of these for a while. Russia has one. Iran has one.
With the evaporation of ‘net-neutrality’, the throttling of Facebook and Google, we’re looking at the West’s answer to informational threats and counters to information warfare.
The switch is back on, for now. How long it will last, or what circumstances will lead to it being flicked again, remains to be seen. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, confirmed this weekend that the world’s largest Internet company is, in close coordination with the state, manipulating search results to censor sites critical of the US government.
Responding to a question about the “manipulation of information” on the Internet during an appearance at the Halifax International Security Forum, Schmidt announced that Google is working on algorithms that will “de-rank” Russian-based news websites RT and Sputnik from its Google News services, effectively blocking users’ access to either site.
Schmidt’s remarks at the gathering of military and national security officials confirm the World Socialist Web Site’s charges that Google has been deliberately altering its search algorithms and taking other steps to prevent people from accessing certain information and specific websites through its search engines. The WSWS has itself been a principal target of these efforts.
The statements expose as lies the company’s previous claim that changes to its search engine were aimed at “improving search results” and that these changes were politically unbiased.
Google’s efforts are just one part of a much wider government-corporate drive to assert control over the flow of information over the Internet, involving Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, as well as Internet service providers such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T. The FCC announced this week that it will eliminate “net neutrality” regulations, allowing service providers to limit which sites customers can access, either by throttling Internet download speed or charging extra fees.
Earlier this month, the US Justice Department forced RT to register as a “foreign agent” in a move aimed at delegitimizing the site as a news source and intimidating its journalists and guests. Google removed RT from its “preferred” channels on YouTube last month, and Twitter has blocked the news service from advertising.
Schmidt’s statements, however, are the most direct to date. He asserted that Google is “trying to engineer the systems to prevent” users from seeing content from RT and Sputnik.
Schmidt denied that this would amount to censorship while claiming that Google’s anti-RT algorithm would block information that is “repetitive, exploitative, false, [or] likely to have been weaponized.”
A campaign against “fake news” has now become a campaign against “weaponized news,” meaning true information that is critical of or damaging to the political establishment. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has claimed that when her campaign's emails and her Wall Street speeches were leaked by WikiLeaks they had been “weaponized.” Under Google’s new censorship rubric, any article written about the true information in the Clinton leaks would be a candidate for censorship.
As for “repetitive, exploitative, false and weaponized” information, by any objective measure this applies above all to the campaign over claims that Russia is “sowing divisions” in the United States. The endless and unsubstantiated stories in the media, channeling the intelligence agencies, are being used to prosecute a war against democratic rights.
The anti-Russian campaign that began as an effort by the Democratic Party to ensure that the Trump administration maintained a hostile position towards the Kremlin has been transformed into a general clampdown on free expression and the free exchange of information.
While RT and Sputnik are the immediate targets of this campaign, the real concern is any website that exposes the lies of the American government and promotes stories critical of the official narrative promoted by the American ruling class.
The WSWS first reported in July that Google’s new algorithm launched in April under the guise of combatting the spread of “fake news” was blocking access to a broad range of left-wing, progressive, antiwar and democratic rights organizations. Since April, search referrals from Google to the WSWS have fallen by 75 percent. Just last month the WSWS and other left-wing journalists were removed from Google News.
In an open letter to Schmidt and other Google executives published in August demanding an end to the censorship, David North, the chairperson of the WSWS International Editorial Board, stated:
“The facts prove that Google is rigging search results to blacklist and censor the WSWS and other left-wing publications. This raises a very serious question, with far-reaching constitutional implications. Is Google coordinating its censorship program with the American government, or sections of its military and intelligence apparatus?”
While Google has so far refused to respond to direct inquiries from the WSWS, we now have a definitive answer: Yes.
That Schmidt makes such a statement so openly is a warning that the campaign to censor the Internet is entering a new stage. An increasingly open and unrestrained attack on free speech and political expression is being prepared.
The crackdown on the Internet comes amid historic and ever-growing levels of social inequality. The American ruling class fears the growth of social opposition and anti-capitalistic and pro-socialist sentiments that are building beneath the surface of official life. Above all they fear the development of a conscious movement of the working class fighting for the overthrow of the rotten capitalist system.
We urge our readers and supporters to take up the fight to defend a free and open Internet. Join the thousands who have already signed the petition demanding that Google cease censoring the WSWS and other left-wing websites. Help take the fight against Internet censorship to all sections of workers and youth, in the United States and internationally, connecting the fight against the attack on democratic rights with the fight against war, dictatorship and social inequality.
Former Google and Facebook employees have launched a multi-million pound campaign to curb the worst effects of social media after becoming disillusioned.
The campaign, called The Truth About Tech, wants better protections for children using smartphones and more done by internet giants to curb addiction, reports The Daily Telegraph.
One programme will make teaching resources available to 55,000 schools across the US as part of an effort to explain the impact of social media.
Another will see adverts worth up to $50 million (£36 million) highlighting the dangers of overusing social media apps, such as depression.
The campaign will also promote two pieces of legislation: One commissioning research on how children's health is impacted by technology, another restricting the use of anonymous, automated accounts, often known as "bots".
Tristan Harris, who helped launch the campaign and was once an in-house ethics adviser for Google, told The Telegraph he was concerned by the influence internet companies now have.
"The thoughts of two billion people every day are steered by 50 people in Mountain View," said Mr Harris, referring to the Californian headquarters of Google.
"No one talks about that. It is a 100 per cent blind spot."
The campaign is being run by two groups: the Centre for Humane Technology, launched this week, and Common Sense, a non-profit group campaigning for safe technology for children.
The Centre for Humane Technology is supported by Roger McNamee, who used to advise Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former employees at tech firms such as Mozilla.
A blurb from the group's website reads: "Our society is being hijacked by technology. What began as a race to monetise our attention is now eroding the pillars of our society: Mental health, democracy, social relationships, and our children."
It goes on: "Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google have produced amazing products that have benefited the world enormously.
"But these companies are also caught in a zero-sum race for our finite attention, which they need to make money.
"Constantly forced to outperform their competitors, they must use increasingly persuasive techniques to keep us glued.
"They point AI-driven news feeds, content, and notifications at our minds, continually learning how to hook us more deeply—from our own behavior."
Concern about the impact of social media on children has increased recently after companies launched new platforms targeting the young.
Parents have criticised YouTube Kids, an app from the video-sharing platform aimed at children, after it emerged that violent videos were appearing on the service.
Facebook's Messenger Kids, an app which allows children as young as six to send messages to friends, has also gained attention since it was announced in December.
Corbie Kiernan, a spokesman for the Common Sense, said The Truth About Tech campaign was about tackling the "manipulation and exploitation" of some social media companies.
"Tech companies have created this attention economy and have ignored the consequences along the way," she told The Telegraph.
Ms Kiernan added: "We want to see the tech industry engage in more humane design that prevents digital addiction."
Executives at leading technology companies have argued they run platforms used by customers and are not publishers who have a responsibility for content.
Over last few weeks, unannounced, Twitter & Facebook (#ShadowBan) have followed Google (#WarAlgorithm @MtylerTyler & YouTube (#demonetisation @Lukewearechange) in betraying their users & founding social media principles. Now just an arm of the #DeepState
https://twitter.com/TonyGosling/status/991270198534647809
This site’s visitor numbers are currently around one third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause is not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook:
What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way. The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing – it shows you it is shared – and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you.
Twitter have a similar system known as “shadow banning”. Again it is secretive and the victim is not informed. I do not appear to be shadow banned at the moment, but there has been an extremely sharp drop – by a factor of ten – in the impressions my tweets are generating.
I am among those who argue that the strength of the state and corporate media is being increasingly and happily undermined by our ability to communicate via social media. But social media has developed in such a way that the channels of communication are dominated by corporations – Facebook, Twitter and Google – which can in effect turn off the traffic to a citizen journalism site in a second. The site is not taken down, and the determined person can still navigate directly to it, but the vast bulk of the traffic is cut off. What is more this is done secretly, without your being informed, and in a manner deliberately hard to detect. The ability to simply block the avenues by which people get to see dissenting opinions, is terrifying.
Furthermore neither Facebook nor Twitter contact you when they block traffic to your site to tell you this is happening, let alone tell you why, and let alone give you a chance to counter whatever argument they make. I do not know if I am blocked by Facebook as an alleged Russian bot, or for any other reason. I do know that it appears to have happened shortly after I published the transcript of the Israeli general discussing the procedures for shooting children.
———————————————————————
Finally, a change of policy on this blog.
For thirteen years now it has operated with a policy of not accepting donations, except for occasional legal funds. It has now reached a size and cost, not least because of continual attacks, that make income essential. It is also the case that due to change in personal circumstance I am no longer in a position to devote my time to it without income – the need to earn a living caused the blog to go dark for almost five months last year, and the last six weeks this journalism has stopped me doing anything else to pay the rent. So, with a certain amount of pride swallowed, here is your chance to subscribe: _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Get your Data! Make an Access Request at Facebook! According to European data protection law every individual has the right to get a copy of all personal data a company holds about him (right to access).
http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Chat
Usergroups
Calendar
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
