Dear Readers:
It is all over the internet and international media that Twitter has suspended my account.
This is not the case.
I do not use social media.Paul Craig Roberts
I discovered that a Twitter account was operating in my name.
I requested that the account be taken down.
The Empire Files is temporarily appealing for donations on a one-time and monthly basis to continue production in the midst of US attacks on the TeleSUR Network.
As a result of US sanctions against Venezuela, The Empire Files has been forced to completely shut down operations.
The Empire Files, which airs on TeleSUR throughout Latin America and on Free Speech TV and The Real News Network in the United States, has been funded through a contract with the TeleSUR network. As Abby Martin’s primary broadcast, it has released over 100 documentaries, interviews and on-the-ground exposés from battlefields in Palestine, Venezuela and beyond.
As a result of financial attacks by the US government on the primary source of TeleSUR’s funding, production was halted before the completion of Empire Files Season Two.
Season Three, contracted for 26 episodes, was scheduled to begin on July 1. But with the US government blocking wire transfers that originate in Venezuela, the ability to receive funding has not been possible.
For over a year, funding has been sporadic and often delayed. The Empire Files has been operating by alternating between waiting for late payments and funding production out-of-pocket.
However, with US attacks and sanctions intensifying, the ability to receive funds appears to have been cut-off completely.
Contract TeleSUR journalists elsewhere, including at Empire Files, have had funding blocked by the US government for over 6 months. Even wire transfers not originating in Venezuela, but ally countries which also fund TeleSUR, have been severed.
There appears to be no solution, and no end in sight, to this ongoing financial attack.
The Empire Files officially halted all production on May 27, and had to cut all staff prior to that. But we have been holding-off on an official announcement in hopes that the wall put in place by the Trump Administration would be overcome.
We are making this announcement now because, after numerous attempts and constant rejections of all types of fund transfers, we do not believe this barrier will be removed in the near future....Media Roots
“Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.......” the president tweeted.
“.....Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all.”…
The president later added: “....Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”...
This raises major questions, in their statement that the deleted data was ‘administered by Russia and Iran’. It also contradicts their own official rationale. Given that these countries with combined populations of over 220 million people, it is unclear therefore if the specific allegation, and subsequent action, was based on these pages, groups, and accounts being literally run by government offices of the governments in question. That much appears very much unlikely to be so.
Rather, this appears as a case of bias, discrimination, and national chauvinism – activists from Russia and Iran are apparently not allowed to administer Facebook pages and groups, is what we can deduce at this time, in the absence of evidence to corroborate Facebook’s claims.
FRN itself has long been the subject of Atlanticist attacks, Julian Assange noted that attacks identical to those made upon FRN by Facebook are coordinated by militarized vectors of Atlanticist power.FACEBOOK COMMITS MASS CENSORSHIP & DISCRIMINATION; removes 652 ‘inappropriate’ accounts ‘linked’ to Russia and Iran
The criteria of a ‘coordinated network’ appears to contradict allegations of being ‘administered by Russia and Iran’. Are Facebook page administrations, who agree on a range of subjects, disallowed from sending each other inbox messages and ‘coordinating’ messages? Isn’t that what activists do?Fort Russ
But, seeing as we're getting towards September when the EU Parliament will again be voting on the big Copyright Directive proposal there, including Article 13, which will require mandatory filters or other automated tools for preventing copyright infringement, I thought it was important to do a separate post calling out one of the other pages taken down by Symphonic Distribution's out of control Topple Track. And that was that it got Google to de-index an article by Julia Reda, a member of the EU Parliament who has been leading the charge against the problematic provisions in the Copyright Directive proposal.
Specifically -- and it would be hard to make this up if we tried -- Topple Track's automated filter got Google to de-index this blog post by Reda, in which she details the problems in Article 13 and how it will create mandatory censorship machines, that would likely lead to massive internet censorship of perfectly legitimate content....TechDirt — Free Speech
The algorithms that drive the bizarre universe of these videos are used to “hack the brains of very small children in return for advertising revenue,” says Bridle. “At least that what I hope they’re doing it for.” Bridle soon bridges the machinery of kids’ YouTube with the adult version. “It’s impossible to know,” he says, who’s posting these millions of videos, “or what their motives might be…. Really it’s exactly the same mechanism that’s happening across most of our digital services, where it’s impossible to know where this information is coming from.” The children’s videos are “basically fake news for kids. We’re training them from birth to click on the very first link that comes along, regardless of what the source is.”
High school and college teachers already deal with the problem of students who cannot judge good information from bad—and who cannot really be blamed for it, since millions of adults seem unable to do so as well. In surveying YouTube children’s videos, Bridle finds himself asking the same questions that arise in response to so much online content: “Is this a bot? Is this a person? Is this a troll? What does it mean that we can’t tell the difference between these things anymore?” The language of online content is a hash of popular tags meant to be read by machine algorithms, not humans. But real people performing in an “algorithmically optimized system” seem forced to “act out these increasingly bizarre combinations of words.”
Within this culture, he says, “even if you’re human, you have to end up behaving like a machine just to survive.” What makes the scenario even darker is that machines replicate the worst aspects of human behavior, not because they’re evil but because that’s what they’re taught to do. To think that technology is neutral is a dangerously naïve view, Bridle argues. Humans encode their historical biases into the data, then entrust to A.I. such critical functions as not only children’s entertainment, but also predictive policing and recommending criminal sentences. As Bridle notes in the short video above, A.I. inherits the racism of its creators, rather than acting as a “leveling force."
As we’ve seen the CEOs of tech companies taken to task for the use of their platforms for propaganda, disinformation, hate speech, and wild conspiracy theories, we’ve also seen them respond to the problem by promising to solve it with more automated machine learning algorithms. In other words, to address the issues with the same technology that created them—technology that no one really seems to understand. Letting “unaccountable systems” driven almost solely by ads control global networks with ever-increasing influence over world affairs seems wildly irresponsible, and has already created a situation, Bridle argues in his book, in which imperialism has “moved up to infrastructure level” and conspiracy theories are the most “powerful narratives of our time,” as he says below....Open Culture
Unfortunately, Facebook immediately used this new precedent to switch its sights on the left, temporarily shutting down the Occupy London page and deleting the anti-fascist No Unite the Right account (Tech Crunch, 8/1/18). Furthermore, on August 9, the independent, reader-supported news website Venezuelanalysis had its page suspended without warning.…
Facebook recently announced it had partnered with the Atlantic Council in an effort to combat “fake news” on its platform (FAIR.org, 5/21/18). An offshoot of NATO, the Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of neo-conservative hawks, including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and James Baker; CIA directors like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden; retired generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus; as well as senior tech executives.
Forty-five percent of Americans get their news from Facebook. When an organization like the Atlantic Council decides what news we see and do not see, that is tantamount to state censorship.FAIR — Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
Facebook donated an undisclosed amount to the lab in May that was enough, said Graham Brookie, who runs the lab, to vault the company to the top of the Atlantic Council’s donor list, alongside the British government.…
The [Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research] Lab was founded by Brookie, a National Security Council advisor in the last four years of the Obama administration. Ben Nimmo is a co-founder. He joined after stints as a journalist covering the Baltic states as they sparred with Russia a decade ago and as a spokesman for NATO on Russia and Ukraine.Well, what did you expect?
Facebook Inc. FB, +0.59% has asked big U.S. banks to share financial information on their customers that includes checking account balances and card transactions, as it seeks to expand its own service offer and stem slowing growth, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.…MarketWatch
Last December Congress passed a new law, promptly signed by then-President Barack Obama, that enacted an Orwellian amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of 2017. Called the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, this measure tasks the State Department, in consultation with the Department of Defense, the director of national intelligence and an obscure government propaganda organization called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, to establish a “Center for Information Analysis and Response.” The job of this new center, funded by a $160 million, two-year budget allocation, would be to collect information on “foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts" and "proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests."
This might all seem laughable, but as a journalist who has worked in this field for 45 years, in both mainstream newspapers and television and in the alternative media, and as a long-time freelancer who has written for publications as widely varied as Business Week, the Nation, the Village Voice and a collectively run news site called ThisCantBeHappening.net, I have watched as this obsession with “fake news” has turned into an attack on alternative news and alternative news organizations.…
There is certainly fake news all over the internet, and baseless conspiracies run rampant on both the left and the right. But all too often, articles like mine cited by PropOrNot (a genuine purveyor of fake news!) are being labeled as propaganda in what Naureckas says is simply “the use of irony as a defense mechanism” by news organizations that themselves are actually guilty of publishing really fake news, as the Post did with its PropOrNot blacklist “scoop.”
"What the government and the corporate media are trying to do, with the help of the big internet corporations,” argues Mickey Huff, director of the Project Censored organization in California, “is basically to shut down alternative news sites that question the media consensus position on issues.”….
The real answer, of course, is for readers and viewers of all media, mainstream or alternative, to become critical consumers of news. This means not just looking at articles critically, including this one, but going to multiple sources for information on important issues. Relying on just the Times or the Post, or on Fox News or NPR, will leave you informationally malnourished -- not just uninformed but misinformed. Even if you were to read both those papers and watch both those networks, you'd often be left with an incomplete version of the truth.
To get to the truth, we need to also check out alternative news sources, whether of the left, right or center -- and we need to maintain the critical distinction between unpopular or unorthodox points of view and blatant lies or propaganda. Without such a distinction, and the freedom to make such decisions for ourselves, maintaining democracy will be impossible.
Whether preplanned or inadvertent, one of the most likely and far-reaching consequences of the fake news RussiaGate scandal is that Facebook and other social media giants might soon come under strict regulation by the state.Oriental Review
The artificially contrived and “deep state”-driven RussiaGate scandal has been inflated to epic proportions and has already resulted in the unexpected suicide of the US’ soft power, but this never-ending conspiracy theory is now poised to affect the rest of the world in a completely different way due to the likely “regulation” that Washington might soon impose on social media giants like Facebook. “Traditional” media has long been clamoring for the American government to do something about the astronomical rise of social media, which has poached millions upon millions of people away from newspapers and TV stations and redirected them to their smartphones instead. From the perspective of social media and many of its users, however, these people weren’t “poached”, but liberated from their prior status as a captive audience to conventional influence techniques and allowed to roam freely in cyberspace as they searched for alternative non-mainstream interpretations of current and past events....
The Federal News Agency has announced political censorship by Google ..Fort Russ
Brian Becker and John Kiriakou of Sputnik Radio's Loud & Clear spoke to journalist and author Max Blumenthal and former Assistant Attorney General of the United States Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer, to discuss Twitter's announcement....Sputnik International
It is a slippery slope and we have just entered a fast descent into Deep State censorship.This is a test case. If public pushback in the US in not significant, the process will be gradually ratcheted up until the bipartisan establishment regains control of the narrative. TPTB have realized that there is no alternative.
Pinterest, the social media website known for bookmarking recipes or fashion ideas, was used to spread Russia-linked political posts during the 2016 presidential election.Digital media execs running scared?
Pinterest became a repository for political posts created by Russians actors after other users on the web "pinned" the content to the scrapbook-like site, the company acknowledged to The Washington Poston Wednesday.
It does not appear that the Russian operatives posted directly on the site, but their presence on Pinterest grew as users unknowingly bookmarked the Russian propaganda to their online boards.
“We believe the fake Facebook content was so sophisticated that it tricked real Americans into saving it to Pinterest,” Pinterest head of public policy Charlie Hale told the newspaper. “We’ve removed the content brought to our attention and continue to investigate.”
The mobile game app Pokémon Go was reportedly used by a Russian-linked campaign to meddle in U.S. politics.
CNN reported that a Russian-linked campaign called "Don't Shoot Us," likely run by Moscow-linked "troll farm" Internet Research Agency (IRA), used Pokémon Go — among several other mediums including Facebook and Twitter — and posed as a part of the Black Lives Matter movement.The Hill
The Moscow-linked actors appear to be the source of the campaign that had a goal to raise racial tensions by bringing up incidents of police brutality.
In a furious tweetstorm this weekend, Facebook's Chief Security Officer warned interfering desperate politicians and triggered letfists that the fake news problem is more complicated and dangerous to solve than the public thinks.Everything changed after 9/11 and the suspension of constitutional rights and civil liberties. This is just another iteration in the slide down the slippery slope into tyranny.
They know at the very least they'll be spied upon and become permanently unemployable.
YouTube Rejects Appeal, Holds ‘Original Decision’ To Censor Southfront’s Channel
