The Ruse of Disinformation Part 2
Censorship Industrial Complex: Covid-19
Censorship Industrial Complex: Covid-19
There is a reason that the truth surrounding vaccine efficacy, potential vaccine side effects, and covid lockdown policies was so merky and highly contested throughout the covid 19 pandemic. We now know that it was not due to lack of knowledge on the topic. Although we had a lot to learn about the virus, its mutations and how to combat it during the initial outbreak, the real battle was taking place online in the modern day public square.
On social media platforms, not just Twitter, (also Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Medium), Stanford Institutes Virality Project which consisted of a network of organizations including highly regarded think tanks and NGOs such as DARPA, Global Engagement Center, Homeland Security Information Network etc., conducted widespread censorship, blacklisting of accounts and politically orientated algorithmic governance over what covid information is deemed acceptable and what is deemed misinformation/malinformation.
(I encourage everyone to visit
in order to see the list of each organizations involved as laid out by the lead investigative reporter Matt Taibbi.)
In June journalist Lee Fang also sat down with Winston Marshall of SpectatorTV to discuss his discoveries from the Twitter Files. In this short clip, Fang details the curious funding sources of a particularly active censorship organization named The Public Good Projects (PGP).
PGP according to their website “is a public health nonprofit specializing in large-scale media monitoring programs (and) social and behavior change interventions…”, and therefore primarily occupy themselves with online censoring of what they see as “disinformation” in order to precipitate social and behavior changes surrounding public health.
Big Pharma lobbyist groups and the vaccine manufacturers themselves were able to fund organizations that exclusively worked on erasing negative (and true) comments about their product from the public discourse. A conflict of interest this grave should be illegal, and it should call into question the current public health apparatus we have in place in the United States.
Journalist David Zweig’s reporting on the Twitter Files detailed how the government controlled the covid debate. They discredited doctors, in some cases almost ruining their reputations, for example in the case of Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who recently won a lawsuit against the Biden administration for violating his First Amendment rights. Ordinary users who posted about the CDC’s “own data” were also censored. This obfuscation of truth led to an epistemological instability that encouraged people to follow orders out of confusion, and it rendered those who pushed back as ‘misinformation peddlers’ or conspiracy theorists.
For example, the debate around the use of ivermectin perfectly exemplifies this government control of the narrative. Associate professor at University of Malaysia Perlis, Murray Hunter, wrote about this suppression of ivermectin and the financial incentives behind it. With over 2.5 billion doses administered to patients over the last 30 years, studies have shown time and again that ivermectin is effective in combatting RNA viruses “namely, Dengue, Zika virus, Yellow fever virus, and others”. The World Health Organization even has Ivermectin listed as one of the essential medicines for humans. However, throughout the pandemic, the reputation of ivermectin was tarnished in the mainstream media, being labelled disingenuously as horse dewormer, with the FDA going so far as to make ivermectin related posts with the caption “you are not a horse”.
Hunter alludes to the enormous financial implications of discrediting ivermectin as a valid treatment for Covid-19. “One strongly suspects that ivermectin stood in the way of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines. In order for these products to be given EUA, there must be a sound medical necessity, and no adequate, approved, and available alternatives to the candidate products for the diagnosing, preventing, or treating of a disease or condition. Putting this in short; with ivermectin as an acceptable treatment for Covid-19, there would be no reason for the mRNA vaccines to be granted EUA.”
Furthermore, given the fact that government health organizations such as the National Institute of Health (NIH) share vaccine patenting rights with manufacturers like Moderna, one must be radically skeptical of the aggressive government censorship of those that criticized this egregious conflict of interest. The skepticism is especially warranted knowing that Moderna received $10 billion in taxpayer money for development and testing of the vaccine, in addition to $36 billion in revenue from vaccine sales worldwide.
Unlike with the FBI’s deception surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop story, which had more to do with the Security State’s election interference as I previously discussed here, this covid censorship is the financial incentive side of the censorship coin, showing that this apparatus allows the government to control narratives in a way that is unprecedented in the U.S. context, whether for sociopolitical control or immense financial gain.
Facebook Files:
Next we will dive into more examples of the Censorship Industrial Complex, this time with leaks from Facebook.
These documents subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee beginning from July, 2023, have been coined the “Facebook Files”. They illuminate the relentless pressure platforms (in this case Facebook) were under from government agencies and administration officials to steer the Covid-19 narrative in favor of government policy.
An email from a Facebook employee to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg highlights the internal concerns some Facebook staff had over the extent to which the Biden administration was controlling the platforms censorship mechanisms.
Although the top 100 vaccine related posts were dominated by “authoritative information”, White House staff pressured Facebook to remove a “humorous meme” (below) for its vaccine discouraging potential.
The pressure to take this post down was being amplified especially by Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Biden’s Covid-19 response coordinator Jeffrey Zients. Slavitt “was outraged” that Facebook did not remove this post as stated in an April 2021 email from Facebook president of Global Affairs Nick Clegg to fellow Facebook staff members. Again, this was a meme that was satirical in nature, and it was met with this response. This censorship strategy to push the public towards government policy is outlined by a Facebook employee below.
In the Facebook Files on September 5TH 2023 these disinformation tactics by government agencies appear on an international level. In April 2021, The UK based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 11 others, whom they coined the “Disinformation Dozen”, were responsible for “65% of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media” and 73% on Facebook alone. No methodology or data collection methods were released with this figure, which at a glance is nearly impossible given the sheer number of posts on a daily basis. In fact, “Facebook knew the actual number was 0.05%” and a lot of these accounts were “completely benign”. Nonetheless this untrue statement was presented as fact to the American public by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
The accounts were seen by Facebook as not having violated their terms of use as they consisted of Americans expressing “vaccine hesitancy which is often or mostly not misinfo”.
Despite this fact, Facebook continued to “see pressure from partners and policymakers, including the White House” to remove these accounts. The White House even pressured Facebook to ban users simply because they were banned on other sites like Twitter. This was essentially an effort to completely erase the digital footprint of these accounts on social media, simply for their stances on the vaccine and covid policies.
Facebook had to push back against the White House’s aggressive requests asserting that they “only do cross-platform disables for child safety and dangerous organization violations”. Unfortunately, the relentless government pressure won out, as Facebook took what they called “aggressive action” against 11 of the 12 ‘Disinformation Dozen” including removing RFK Jr.’s Instagram account and implementing the removal of or demotion (in some cases 80% demotion) of the other related accounts. The 12th account posted “mainly about internet censorship” and to appease the White House Facebook claimed to be “Watching his profile closely”.
Of course, the primary concern when it comes to the “disinformation question” is what exactly it is, and who decides what it is. If you are a believer in the governments ability to conduct censorship of what they deem to be disinformation transparently and in good faith, simply watch newly elected House speaker Rep. Mike Johnson interrogate DHS secretary Mayorkas about the “disinformation question” here.
The evasion displayed by Mayorkas when confronted by a brilliantly prepared Constitutional Lawyer in Johnson epitomizes the farcical and deceptive nature of disinformation experts and disinformation panels as a concept. Regardless of your political or ideological orientation this should concern you, it is clear that our government agencies which are tasked with protecting U.S. citizens are in fact manipulating the discourse in a way that benefits their interests and ostracizes almost anyone that criticizes government policies.
What Next?
On September 8th 2023 the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed these First Amendment violations by upholding an injunction against the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI. The injunction will limit these entities’ communications with social media companies to suppress protected free speech. However, the scope of the injunction is limited given that it does not restrict communications from the DHS, State Department or any other NGO’s implicated in the leaks from Twitter and Facebook in the past year.
The court found that these government entities “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints.”
From the court ruling “The Plaintiffs maintain that although the platforms stifled their speech, the government officials were the ones pulling the strings—they “coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them]” through private communications and legal threats.”
It is now clear from these recent Facebook Files and the original Twitter Files coverage originating with Matt Taibbi in October 2022 how government critics, political opponents and ordinary citizens can be removed from social media discourse and therefore maligned in the mainstream media with no pushback. Worst of all, this illegal censorship is done at the behest of a political party or law enforcement agency. It is the kind of Censorship apparatus we’ve come to associate with the autocratic regimes of Russia or China. They too have similar mechanisms in place within their media and intelligence communities to intentionally misinform their citizens and to portray dissenting voices as foreign propagandists.
Within this article I have selected just a handful of important examples of the declassified information from the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. More examples of this exact type of government overreach, unprecedented in the U.S. context are out there to be read and investigated from the reporters that dealt with the information first hand. It should be clear now to the reader that these stories filtered through legacy media outlets will not be portrayed in good faith and with journalistic integrity. For this you must go to the reports of those who worked on the leaks themselves and make your own assessment. Regardless, this story is one which has enormous historical significance for Constitutional law and Free Speech in the United States, and it won’t go away easily.