The Ukraine-Russia-USA Conflict, Part 13c: Western Censorship via Big Tech and Social Media
After having covered Western censorship via 1) (corporate owned) states (part 13a, sections 15.0–1) and 2) mainstream media, 3) fake factchecking and anti-disinformation bodies and de facto political lobbying groups as well as 4) education and academia (the previous part 13b, sections 15.2–4), this part and section concludes the trilogy with a discussion of Western censorship via 5) big tech and social media. The focus will be on Twitter censorship (section 15.5.6) that was also directed against myself. I furthermore address why Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is unlikely to improve its censorship regime.
15.5 Censorship via Big Tech and Social Media
As pointed out by the independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone, it is also censorship via big tech and social media that serves the same purpose of manufacturing consent, in this case by preventing Orwellian wrongthink (i.e. actual, good and critical thinking) about the parasitic 1% and their insane agendas:
So to be clear: Much of the current online censorship is pro-war censorship which serves the purpose of erecting an “intellectual no-fly zone”, as Alan McLeod so adequately put it. Certain truths or potentially truthful narratives about the USA and Ukraine must simply not be allowed to ‘fly’ into or out of the minds of the 99% from the perspective of the parasitic 1% in the West and Ukraine since that would severely undermine and destroy the parasitic 1%’s manufacturing of consent for war against Russia:
From one of Glenn Greenwald’s articles:
So prolific and fast-moving is this censorship regime that it is virtually impossible to count how many platforms, agencies and individuals have been banished for the crime of expressing views deemed “pro-Russian.” On Tuesday, Twitter, with no explanation as usual, suddenly banned one of the most informative, reliable and careful dissident accounts, named “Russians With Attitude.” Created in late 2020 by two English-speaking Russians, the account exploded in popularity since the start of the war, from roughly 20,000 followers before the invasion to more than 125,000 followers at the time Twitter banned it. An accompanying podcast with the same name also exploded in popularity and, at least as of now, can still be heard on Patreon.
Yet there is little to no censorship — either by Western states or by Silicon Valley monopolies — of pro-Ukrainian disinformation, propaganda and lies. The censorship goes only in one direction: to silence any voices deemed “pro-Russian,” regardless of whether they spread disinformation. The “Russians With Attitude” Twitter account became popular in part because they sometimes criticized Russia, in part because they were more careful with facts and viral claims that most U.S. corporate media outlets, and in part because there is such a paucity of outlets that are willing to offer any information that undercuts what the U.S. Government and NATO want you to believe about the war.
Their crime, like the crime of so many other banished accounts, was not disinformation but skepticism about the US/NATO propaganda campaign. Put another way, it is not “disinformation” but rather viewpoint-error that is targeted for silencing. One can spread as many lies and as much disinformation as one wants provided that it is designed to advance the NATO agenda in Ukraine (just as one is free to spread disinformation provided that its purpose is to strengthen the Democratic Party, which wields its majoritarian power in Washington to demand greater censorship and commands the support of most of Silicon Valley). But what one cannot do is question the NATO/Ukrainian propaganda framework without running a very substantial risk of banishment.
Concerning his explanation for why this big tech censorship is happening:
It is unsurprising that Silicon Valley monopolies exercise their censorship power in full alignment with the foreign policy interests of the U.S. Government. Many of the key tech monopolies — such as Google and Amazon — routinely seek and obtain highly lucrative contracts with the U.S. security state, including both the CIA and NSA. Their top executives enjoy very close relationships with top Democratic Party officials. And Congressional Democrats have repeatedly hauled tech executives before their various Committees to explicitly threaten them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more in accordance with the policy goals and political interests of that party.
And as already pointed out by others, it is also supposedly progressive Democrats such as AOC from the nominally progressive “#fraudsquad” who effectively support that overall censorship effort by doing little more than lip service against it:
Some critical replies:
15.5.1 Google/Youtube Censorship
Among big tech and social media, Youtube and its parent company Google (or Alphabet) are among the most prominent silencer or censorers of progressive voices. The main cause for that, once again and as with all the other sources of propaganda and censorship, is that Youtube/Google is likewise well-connected to the US national security state and hence supportive of US attempts to manufacture consent for its wars and other insane agendas of that empire. Hence Youtube/Google censorship such as the following and Orwellian terms such as “trusted news sources” (as in sources of the US empire which are totally untrustworthy):
The entirety of that March 11 statement by Youtube/Google:
As for why such censorship is being done (“narrative control”):
It is worth taking a look at how the US national security or deep state embedded itself in Google from its very beginning in the 1990s. To quote from the following 2020 documentary by ColdFusion who currently have 3.4 million subscribers on Youtube:
5:28–6:04: In 1994, two PhD students — Sergey Brin and Larry Page [the Google co-founders] —began working on their automated web-crawling and page ranking application as part of their research project. They had bet on making the exploding internet easy to access, and it paid off enormously [Brin is currently estimated to be the 8th richest person in the world]. Sergey Brin’s part of the Stanford research was funded by the NSA and CIA. Brin would often report progress to non-Stanford individuals, one of whom was Dr. Rick Steinhauser. Steinhauser represented the CIA’s office for research and development to oversee their research funding in a joint NSA-CIA program.
And it is not just Google which was and is deeply involved with the US national security state:
6:07–7:26: It wasn’t uncommon at the time for research projects to be funded by the intelligence community. Government intelligence agencies had set up programs and often seed-funded projects. Roughly three to four million dollars of funding flowed through the intelligence community programs into universities, and while both Google and the intelligence community deny that the CIA directly funded the start of Google, it’s evident that the intelligence community’s research funding helped not only Google but Silicon Valley as a whole. There are many ways this relationship is built and preserved.
One of the biggest is perhaps the Highlands Forum. There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of this forum [I had not], but it connects the wider Department of Defense and the intelligence community to the tech startups. This keeps the military and the intelligence community at the cutting edge of tech. Many executives on the Highlands Forum hold positions in the CIA, NSA and many other agencies. Movements from these agencies into Silicon Valley is common. For example, in 2012, the Highland co-chair [Regina Dugan], who also worked at DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], left the agency to accept a senior executive position at Google [from her wikipedia: “She later moved to Facebook, joining a team called Building 8”].
In an email thread made public, Sergey Brin discussed information sharing for the purposes of ‘national security’ with the head of the NSA.
From a 2014 Al-Jazeera article about those meetings and emails:
Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.
But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.
On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour-long “classified threat briefing” on Aug. 8 at a “secure facility in proximity to the San Jose, CA airport.”
“The meeting discussion will be topic-specific, and decision-oriented, with a focus on Mobility Threats and Security,” Alexander wrote in the email, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the first of dozens of communications between the NSA chief and Silicon Valley executives that the agency plans to turn over.
[…]
“I think the public should be concerned about whether the NSA was really making its best efforts, as the emails claim, to help secure enterprise BIOS and mobile devices and not holding the best vulnerabilities close to their chest,” said Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s digital civil liberties team.
He doesn’t doubt that the NSA was trying to secure enterprise BIOS, but he suggested that the agency, for its own purposes, was “looking for weaknesses in the exact same products they’re trying to secure.”
The NSA “has no business helping Google secure its facilities from the Chinese and at the same time hacking in through the back doors and tapping the fiber connections between Google base centers,” Cardozo said. “The fact that it’s the same agency doing both of those things is in obvious contradiction and ridiculous.” He recommended dividing offensive and defensive functions between two agencies.
Two weeks after the “60 Minutes” broadcast, the German magazine Der Spiegel, citing documents obtained by Snowden, reported that the NSA inserted back doors into BIOS, doing exactly what Plunkett accused a nation-state of doing during her interview.
Moving back to the documentary and the CIA-funded beginnings of Google Earth:
7:27–8:26: “In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA launched In-Q-Tel (IQT), a Silicon Valley venture capital fund. Its mission was to invest in startups that aligned with intelligence agencies needs. In 2003, the CIA, through In-Q-Tel, would invest in Keyhole [also see their “Key Hole” and “Corona” spy satellites]. Keyhole was a startup that built 3d global mapping software. One of its first uses was to support US troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The next year, Google bought Keyhole whose team now included CIA personell. Google would soon turn Keyhole into the basis for Google Earth. Only a year after the purchase, the director initially responsible for investing in Keyhole in the CIA investing firm In-Q-Tel moved to take a position at Google. During this period, Google would win contracts for different search applications for the NSA and CIA.
This is just to give you some idea of how deeply the US national security state has embedded itself in Google from its very beginning in the 1990s and why Google and now also Youtube effectively are and acts as highly biased and partisan extensions of the US national security state. For another such documentary, see the following one by Benjamin Norton:
As a consequence of Google and its daughter company Youtube effectively being an extension of the US empire and national security state, they censored and keep censoring just like that entity. One high-profile censorship victim among many was the anti-imperialist and leftist journalist Abby Martin who committed the ‘crime’ of Orwellian wrongthink or “promoting radical discontent” — something which is also felt by many US Americans who have never watched or heard of her show:
Some replies:
For identical reasons, the censorers of the US national security state at Google/Youtube also took down the years of the Emmy-nominated RT America show “On Contact” of the leftist and anti-imperialist Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Lynn Hedges who commented on these events as follows:
1:40–2:17: “There was no notice, there was no warning, there was no inquiry — it just vanished. […] It’s not surprising. If you go back and look at the 2017 Director of National Intelligence report, seven pages were devoted to RT. And while they accused RT of disseminating Russian propaganda, all the examples that they cited in that report were that RT was giving a voice to Black Lives Matter activists, anti-fracking activists, Occupy activists, third party candidates, uh, all of which was true.”
Yeah, very ‘un-American’ activities that, must clearly be a Russian conspiracy.
Among the victims of merely temporary US empire censorship on Youtube was the Indian WION (World Is One News) which has more than 6 million subscribers, with the basis for censorship being the following insane Western double standard:
Another pair of victims who I reported on in part 7 was the Russian prankster duo Vovan & Lexus:
Google/Youtube also not so subtly suggested that people should start to self-censor if they do not want to be hit with the US empire’s online ban hammer. This also concerns claims of false flag attacks by Ukrainian forces against Ukrainian civilians which fall under the provision of the last paragraph; this is something you are prohibited from uttering by the contemporary US empire “thought police” even if there is evidence to support that claim and despite the fact that they are routinely used in war (see parts 6 and 8):
From Caitlin Johnstone’s April 15 article “More Escalations in Online Censorship”:
YouTube has been deleting videos disputing the US government narrative about Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, validating concerns we’ve discussed previously that Silicon Valley platforms would begin censoring anyone who challenges the authorized version of events in this war.
“By the way, my video ‘Bucha: More Lies’ has been deleted [by] YouTube’s censors,” reads a recent tweet by Gonzalo Lira.
“My stream last night on RBN was censored on Youtube after debunking the Bucha Massacre narrative,” Revolutionary Blackout Network reports.
It would seem that this clears up what YouTube meant when it said last month, “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events. We are now removing content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy.”
There has as yet been no investigation into what happened in Bucha by any international body and there are plenty of arguments to be made questioning aspects of the Official Story that westerners are being aggressively force fed by the narrative control machine of the US-centralized empire. Which would mean that YouTube is defining “well-documented” as “unproven assertions by the US government.”
Another instance of censorship by the security state through Google/Youtube:
An update:
Some more (financial) censorship by (the US empire security state on) Google/Youtube includes the following:
15.5.3 TikTok Censorship (2020-)
In more recent years, big tech and social media censorship for the US empire and national security state also occurred on other well-known platforms such as TikTok. To extensively quote from the following article on how the US empire also embedded itself there and how this led to propaganda but more so censorship such as the following:
With the app estimated to have around 70 million U.S. users, the White House is keenly aware of its impact. “We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest … so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source,” President Joe Biden’s director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, told 30 top TikTok influencers.
TikTok itself has taken steps to align itself with U.S. government policy, deleting more than 320,000 Russian accounts and removing at least 41,000 videos peddling misinformation about the war. In addition to this, it has placed warning labels marked “Russia state-controlled media” on 49 accounts linked to the Russian government. Like other big social media platforms, it has not done the same to Western state-owned outlets such as the BBC, RTÉ, or the CBC.
As for how Tiktok came under the sway of the US national security state:
High-placed NATO recruits
Since 2020, there has been a wave of former spooks, spies and mandarins appointed to influential positions within TikTok, particularly around content and policy — some of whom, on paper at least, appear unqualified for such roles.
For example, while simultaneously being the Content Policy Lead for TikTok Canada, [1] Alexander Corbeil is also the vice president of the NATO Association of Canada, a NATO-funded organization chaired by former Canadian Minister of Defense David Collenette. In order to join TikTok, Corbeil left his job at the SecDev Foundation, a U.S. State Department-funded security think tank. Corbeil’s work focused on Middle Eastern security and in particular on the war in Syria and what NATO’s role should be.
Another NATO-linked new recruit is [2]Ayse Koçak, a Global Product Policy manager at the company. Before joining TikTok last year, she spent three years at NATO. Like Corbeil, Koçak had special expertise in Middle Eastern politics, including a year’s tour in Iraq as the organization’s deputy senior civilian representative.
[3] Foard Copeland, who works on TikTok’s trust and safety policy, is also an ex-NATO man. Copeland previously worked as a desk officer for NATO, as well as for the Department of Defense. Between 2011 and 2021, he also worked for U.S. contractor Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI), spending much of that time in Afghanistan. DAI has long been accused of being a CIA front group, perhaps with some justification. In 2009, for example, DAI agent Alan Gross was arrested in Cuba and sentenced to 15 years in prison for spying, espionage, and his part in efforts to destabilize the government.
Perhaps the most worrying NATO alumnus, from a public perspective, is new Feature Policy Manager [4] Greg Andersen. According to his own LinkedIn profile, until 2019, Andersen worked on “psychological operations” for NATO. This fact, according to MintPress contributor Lowkey, was removed after his tweet raising concerns about the relationship between big tech and the national security state went viral. Lowkey wrote:
Andersen’s profile continues to identify him as a former NATO employee, but there is no reference to “psychological operations” or “soldier-system lethality.” Lowkey provided MintPress with a screenshot of what he said was Andersen’s pre-tweet profile, which has been included below.
And this just gets worse and worse, because Tiktok has also recruited at least two people with CIA ties for, ironically, the Global Lead of “Integrity and Authenticity”(!) as well as for “Trust and Safety”(!!):
Not just NATO
NATO, however, is far from the only organization newly connected to TikTok. The company’s new Global Lead of Integrity and Authenticity, [5] Chris Roberts, is a former senior director of Technology Policy at the Albright Stonebridge Group (ASG), a powerhouse strategy and consulting firm started by late-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The ASG has been perhaps the major staffing source for President Biden’s administration, with at least 10 ASG employees appointed to key positions in national security, state and foreign policy positions.
Before ASG, Roberts worked, in his own words, on “special projects” for the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The NDI was founded by the Reagan administration after a series of CIA scandals necessitated the creation of a network of front groups to take the heat off the agency. The NDI exists to channel U.S. government money, training and support to political and social groups around the world. This could charitably be described as “democracy promotion,” although cynics might label it “overthrowing governments.” As Roberts himself said, “The nature of democracy promotion is that the most important countries to work in are also the ones where the government may not want your ‘help.’”
At TikTok, Roberts’ role is to “Lead the Integrity and Authenticity policy team. This team covers misinformation, synthetic and manipulated media, covert influence activity, and spam and inauthentic engagement.”
One group infamous for peddling misinformation and carrying out covert operations is the CIA. Yet rather than identifying operations, they might be conducting, TikTok has instead recruited a former agent to serve in an important position. Since January, [6] Beau Patteson has been working as a threat analyst for TikTok’s Trust and Safety Division. Between 2017 and 2020, however, Patteson was a targeting analyst for the CIA, after which he joined the State Department to become a foreign service officer. In addition to his role at TikTok, Patteson is also, according to his social media profile, a military intelligence officer in the United States Army.
And there are even more US national security state personell from, insanely, the US Ministry of Truth-housing Department of Homeland Security (see part 13a) and the State Department in, insanely, TikToks ‘trust’ and ‘safety’ department:
One step closer to the halls of power is [7] Victoria McCullough, who previously worked for the Department of Homeland Security and for the White House itself. Like Patteson, McCullough now works on trust and safety at TikTok. Another trust-and-safety TikTok staff member, [8] Christian Cardona, spent nearly 13 years in senior roles at the State Department across the Middle East and Europe before seamlessly moving to the social media giant.
As for what to make of that:
Virtually every former spook or state official this investigation found works in very specific (and highly politically sensitive) fields such as trust, safety and content moderation, rather than in banal areas like marketing, customer service or sales. Yet TikTok’s new recruits come from some of the least trustworthy organizations anywhere in the world — organizations that should not be anywhere near the levers of power of such a popular platform.
[…] Yet individuals from many of these institutions are now in charge of deciding what is real and what is fake, and which content to promote or suppress.
In this light, the 2020 pandemonium about TikTok being a national security threat looks increasingly like a power play from the national security state. These dire warnings, and even the threat to completely shut down its platform, subsided only after TikTok began appointing Western officials to important positions within its organization, thereby giving the state considerable influence over the content and direction of the app.
15.5.3 Facebook Censorship (2018-)
The US national security state also embedded itself on Facebook/Meta for the same purpose of manufacturing of consent for its agenda. From the same article:
In 2018, Facebook came under enormous pressure from the U.S. government, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself being hauled in front of both the House and the Senate to face hours of grilling over the platform’s role in privacy, content moderation and spreading Russian disinformation. Only weeks after this, Facebook announced a new partnership with the Atlantic Council, whereby the group would serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” taking considerable control over its content moderation, supposedly in an effort to weed out fake news and disinformation. The Atlantic Council, however, is NATO’s think tank and serves as its brain trust, with no fewer than seven former CIA directors on its board. Since then, Facebook (or Meta, as it is officially known), appointed former NATO Press Officer and current Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Ben Nimmo to serve as its head of intelligence. In addition, Facebook’s new global director of content policy, Mark Smith, was formerly employed by NATO as an advisor to its deputy commander.
As reported in part 5 of my Israel-Palestine series of 2021, Israel has a similar arrangement with Facebook and the other big tech and social media giants. To quote:
Israeli Cyber Unit has their inside man Emi Palmor sitting within Facebook’s oversight board since 2016 — something which in turn helps to explain how Facebook/the Israeli apartheid regime manages to rubberstamp censorship requests of Palestinian content that goes against its propaganda narrative or that threaten the advancement of its completely illegal settler-colonizer project:
The Israeli national security state likewise being embedded in Facebook in turn explains why the Palestinian victims of Israeli settler-colonialism get censored on that and other platforms as follows:
15.5.4 Reddit Censorship (2017-)
Reddit, a famous messaging board, is yet another platform which has been censoring in favor of the US national security state after its agents managed to get into key positions there. From Alan McLeod’s article:
The Atlantic Council has also found its way into Reddit’s management. In 2017, Jessica Ashooh went straight from being deputy director of Middle East strategy at The Atlantic Council to director of policy at the popular news aggregation service — an unusual career move that drew few remarks at the time. Like Corbeil, Koçak and others, Ashooh was a Middle East specialist and was intimately involved in the West’s war in Syria. For years, Reddit took a free-speech absolutist position, even defending hosting clearly illegal sexual content. However, Ashooh’s arrival coincided with a new era of far more forceful moderation. Reddit recently took the decision to not only ban links from Russian state media outlets, but all websites with a Russian (.ru) domain.
15.5.5 DuckDuckGo Search Engine Censorship
One of the main points of search engines other than Google is to not feed the US national security state which already controls much of US-centric big tech and social media. That’s why I also used the search engine DuckDuckGo in the past. The announcement by and genius idea of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg to join the US empire’s censorship efforts by skewing algorithms similar to Google was consequently met with incredulity, stiff resistance and masses of users ceasing to use that search engine, myself included:
Critical and sometimes satirically humourous reactions to that announcement included the following:
Once again, people were correct in pointing out DuckDuckGo’s likewise absurd understanding of what supposedly constitutes “quality information” which is little but “US empire and national security state sanctioned (mis- and dis)information”:
15.5.6 Amazon Censorship
What is not as consequential on the global stage but more extreme in terms of taken measures is internal Amazon censorship on its worker chat app. In implementing the following measures, Amazon and Jeff Bezos demonstrate once again that technology can not only be used to make work easier but that it can also be used and abused to control human workers in a very unhealthy and undesirable manner:
The following Tiktoker compiled a list of the terms that cannot be used on the internal chat app which, unsurprisingly, includes “restrooms” (workers are routinely forced to pee in bottles to meet their quotas):
On a semi-humorous note and due to existing precendents, you may wish to take a look at the results of what happened when Amazon’s Alexa got asked if she works for the US government:
15.5.7 Twitter Censorship
For the remainder and as the focus of this article, I will focus on censorship by Twitter, a social media giant into which the US or US-aligned ‘empire security state’ has likewise embedded itself and through which it likewise exerts the manufacturing of consent for the parasitic 1% and their insane agendas. From the earlier Alan McLeod article:
Likewise, a number of key Twitter personnel raise eyebrows. Chief among them is Head of Editorial for Europe, the Middle East and Africa Gordon MacMillan, who, in addition to his duties at Twitter, is an officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade — a notorious unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. Like Facebook, Twitter has partnered with some highly questionable state-linked organizations, giving them considerable influence over its content moderation.
Due to such infiltration, Twitter was ready to censor anyone that deviated from the Western propaganda narrative about the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict from day one (I would not normally quote from alt-right sources but find myself agreeing with Paul Joseph Watson in this case):
The use of the term “emerging narratives” suggests that Twitter will begin censoring certain perspectives on the conflict in the context of their policy on “misinformation.”
These problematic “narratives” are almost certainly likely to be ones that question narratives being put out by the Biden White House and NATO sources.
Similar rules were applied to skepticism expressed towards COVID vaccines as well as the lab leak theory, which was once deemed to be ‘harmful misinformation’ but is now widely accepted as the most likely explanation for the pandemic.
The potential for the Russian attack on Ukraine to be exploited to push for further censorship and blacklisting of free speech in the west is a clear danger.
For weeks, [liberals] have been trying to smear Tucker Carlson as being guilty of “treason” over him accusing the Biden administration of exploiting tensions between Russia and Ukraine to distract from the president’s dreadful handling of domestic issues.
The word “traitor” also trended on Twitter yesterday in response to Nigel Farage suggesting that NATO should share some blame for Putin’s actions.
In a related story, the official Twitter Ukrainian government also lobbied Twitter to ban the official Russian government Twitter account.
So the Ukrainian extension of the US empire begged Twitter, another extension of the US empire, to give Ukrainian officials side total propagandistic superiority through censorship. And that is what happened and keeps happening on Twitter to a considerable extent:
Note that Daniel Charbonniere who posted the following critical tweet about Zelenskiy that I used in part 10 was suspended in the second half of March, back for some time, and then suspended a second time at the end of May:
Now you also have the explanation for why I keep screenshotting every single Tweet throughout this article series instead of just linking or embedding Tweets like so many other journalists: That is because Twitter keeps censoring and disappearing people who post information that contradicts Western-Ukrainian mainstream propaganda.
More examples: You post videos of Ukrainians torturing Ukrainian civilians or Russian prisoners of war that go against the Western-Ukrainian narrative (see part 5 for my respective reporting)? Enjoy your suspension from Twitter! [edit: After many weeks of being suspended, Juan Sinmiedo is back for now]
Even Kyle Kulinksi, the host of the very successful Secular Talk politics show with close to one million subscribers on Youtube, got his Twitter account locked temporarily in this still ongoing Western censorship frenzy for the silliest of reasons:
A particularly heavy and much lamented censorship blow by the US empire security state was dealt when Twitter permanently suspended the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter when he, like myself, proposed an evidence-based theory that the beginning of April 2022 Bucha massacre (see part 8) possibly to probably was a Ukrainian false flag operation (see part 6 for a more general discussion of false flags):
According to the propaganda of the US empire security state on Twitter, the official reason for Ritter’s suspension was that he supposedly committed “abuse and harrassment” by using the scientific method of proposing an evidence-based hypothesis about what had happened in Bucha:
But it is clear that Ritter, a high-profile figure, was simply censored and punished for contradicting the official US empire security state narrative; for “speaking (likely) truth to power” and for disrupting the US-Ukrainian propaganda narrative which is likely false and which cannot stand up to such critique and scrutiny. Hence the censorship of Ritter:
One rather certain way of knowing that the official Ukrainian-Western narrative about Bucha is propagandistic bullshit is that, as usual, those manufactureres of consent and very much interested and biased parties jumped to the conclusion of Russian (or, some years ago, Syrian) perpetratorship before any serious investigation has occurred and in willful ignorance of the contradictory evidence:
And this brings us to my own censorship by the US empire security state affiliated medium of Twitter for identical reasons. I gradually became aware of those censorships efforts when the following message appeared in my emails on March 29, 2022 in relation to a tweet to Max Blumenthal where I dared to share my own evidence-based article (part 5) on Ukrainian war crimes against Russian prisoners of war:
While Twitter censorers still ruled in my favor this time, they did not do so when my likewise evidence-based and scientific-methods-adhering part 8 about Bucha came out. In that case, my Twitter account got locked for exactly the same reasons as former UN weapon inspector Scott Ritter’s — disrupting the 1%’s propaganda and manufacturing of consent — and by giving the exact same bullshit excuses that were given to others for their suspension: Alleged “hateful conduct” which supposedly consisted in the sharing of an evidence-based theory about Bucha with journalist Glenn Greenwald:
My appeal against this transparent censorship by the US empire security state on Twitter quickly gets rejected and with no reasons given. But they do not have to and even cannot: First, the ongoing censorship of dissenting voices is obvious, and second, they would have a very hard time arguing or justifying how my sharing of an evidence-based theory about Bucha with another journalist is supposed to constitute “hateful conduct”:
I am consequently required to self-censor by deleting that tweet to get my Twitter account back which I unwillingly do — a treatment and choice that others are also subjected to.
The following is a reply to the well-known Ukrainian propagandist I. A. Ponomarenko of the Kyiv ‘Not So’ Independent (see part 11, section 13.2.5) that was made when the latter once again whitewashed Ukrainian Banderite Nazism (see part 3). That reply does not constitute hate speech either but is rather yet another “thought crime” in the eyes of the insane US empire security state:
One day later, and my Twitter account once again gets locked on April 8 when I engage in more Orwellian “badthink” and “thought crimes” by linking my now finished evidence-based article eight about Bucha and by presenting my respective research to interested parties. The transparent(ly ridiculous) excuse that the Twitter censorers use this time to censor me and my research is now identical to the one that was used against Scott Ritter — alleged “abuse and harrassment”:
Once again, my appeal quickly gets rejected by the US empire security state censorers on Twitter without giving any reasons for doing so and without addressing my protests that I, in my function as a journalist, am being subjected to transparent censorship:
I am once again forced to self-censor by deleting the tweets which had garnered a for me unusually high amount of likes and retweets.
But there are at least some good things to come out that censorship. We for instance gain a better understanding of the Orwellian principles of the US empire security state’s propaganda and censorship. The Orwellian reversal in this case is that they accuse people and journalists such as myself of hate, abuse and harrassment while it is actually us who are the targets of hate, abuse and harrassment through such censorship:
Other victims of Twitter censorship who were all given the same lame excuses of supposed “hateful conduct” or “abuse and harrassment” include the following:
Soft twitter censorship and warnings about potential thought crimes now also happen when you want to post something that Twitter algorithm’s rank as “offensive.” I encountered that for the first time when replying to the following poster:
Twitter graciously allowed me to tweet that, and others also informing Ford why his assessment of “no more Ukrainian Nazis since 2017” is incorrect:
And the funny thing is the US empire security state censorers at Twitter seem to be ever so slightly politically biased about what political “content” is and is not “offensive”: After clicking “show” so that I can see the supposedly “offensive content” in some thread…
…I strangely enough find the following non-offensive and truthful content which I had also reported on before (part 5) labeled as offensive:
Other anti-imperialist Tweeters also do not think highly of Twitter’s softer live censorship that wants you to pre-emptively self-censor especially when being a thought criminal about the USA and its criminal allies:
To make matters even more absurd, one of the very worst US deep state and national security state figures in existence — Victoria Nuland of the neocon Kagan clan who also was a leading figure in the 2014 US backed coup in Ukraine—is currently “working with tech companies to take down fake stories” (i.e. truths which run counter to the big lie narrative of the US empire):
From Pedro Gonzalez’ article “Servant of the Corrupt”:
Nuland is an interventionist married to arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan. She’s been called “the architect of American influence in Ukraine,” was instrumental in regime change, and has served in every presidential administration except Trump’s since Bill Clinton’s days. People like Nuland are why presidents come and go, but interventionist foreign policy always remains.
And one of the weird consequences of letting a neocon and deep state figure like Nuland determine truth and falseness about Ukraine is that evidence which very clearly implicates Nuland in implementing the US backed 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine got taken down:
Glenn Greenwald comments, including on the significance of that call:
That removal of evidence might admittedly have been due to a copyright issue, and there are also still other versions of that phonecall and evidence on Youtube:
But the fact still remains that the US empire security state-affiliated Google/Youtube deleted evidence which implicates a person within that US empire security state of plotting and implementing a US-backed coup in Ukraine.
Another McCarthyite absurdity of Twitter censorship occurred when they labeled the anti-war public political figure and former British Labor parliamentarian George Galloway a “Russian state-affiliated medium” — a move against which Galloway threatened and took legal action:
Twitter soft censorship apparently also applies to retweeting from these very evil “Russian state-affiliated media” which it also wants to discourage its users from doing:
And this got even more ridiculous later on when Twitter branded critics of the Zionist apartheid regime “Iran state-affiliated media”:
And there is an ever so slight irony, hypocrisy and double standard in this, because
The independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone clarifies and sheds some further light about the US empire security state bodies that have embedded themselves in the “US state-affiliated medium” Twitter:
Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway’s argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people “state-affiliated media”. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.
In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to “secure” the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.
“ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government,” veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh told Mintpress News earlier this year. “It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”
Twitter has also coordinated its mass purges of accounts with a cybersecurity firm called FireEye, which this 2019 Sputnik article by journalist Morgan Artyukhina explains was “founded in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.”
On the right, many such as Ben Shapiro get the political coloration of that type of political censorship of Twitter and consorts very much wrong through their completely false equation of establishment “liberals” and centrists, who are the driving force of that censorship, with the “left” or progressives who are the victims of that censorship:
I should also mention MacLeod’s as usual great article about that subject:
In the meantime, expect more censorship such as the following:
15.5.7a Twitter Censorship of Pro-Palestinian Accounts
Just like Facebook, Twitter was also used to censor pro-Palestinian voices by the settler-colonialist oppressor Israel, an ally of the US empire. What is also interesting in this regard is the new tactics of censorship that they used to trigger Twitter algorithms:
On April 29, Inès Abdel Razek woke up to 80 new Twitter followers.
“These accounts were following the exact same people that were tweeting about Palestine, but from France or Francophone accounts that work on Palestine,” Razek said of her new followers.
The advocacy director of Rābet, the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy’s digital platform, became wary of the issue after Abier Khateb, a grants manager at Open Society Foundations, reported mass followings as well.
Razek told MintPress News that she began individually reporting each account as fake but kept her own account open — lest she let the alleged bots win. But after a few days, Razek made her profile private. At the peak of the mass following, Razek had accumulated 400 fake followers.
From the end of April through the first few weeks of May, more than 40 pro-Palestine Twitter accounts reported mass followings. Digital-rights experts say acquiring huge amounts of fake followers triggers Twitter’s algorithm and can lead to the tech giant suspending an account, effectively censoring users by forcing them to make their accounts private.
These accounts included those belonging to human rights and activist organizations Adalah, Combatants for Peace, Breaking the Silence, and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. They also included news publications and journalists, like The Palestine Chronicle, Ali Abunimah and Hind Al-Eryani; and politicians, such as Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom. Twitter did not respond to MintPress inquiries on the source of the suspicious accounts.
Dr. Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad bin Khalifa University, conducted an analysis that found more than 1,150 fake accounts. Twitter deleted approximately 1,090 of these accounts, according to Jones. His analysis determined that the average account-creation time was one to three per minute, suggesting these accounts were created using an automated process.
The profiles were in various languages, including French, Spanish, English and German, but usually had Arabic bios. They often had strange names — like Noble Betty Thomas — and zero followers.
“They had clearly made-up names,” Sarah Leah Whitson, who also experienced a large influx of new followers, told MintPress. “The vast majority of them had Israeli names and Israeli addresses. Some of them had made-up Arab names, which were mangled. It’s clear that they’re [using] stolen images of people.”
[…]
Another area of particular concern is how a flood of fake followers may cause Twitter to shut down an account. “When you see such a dramatic increase in followers, it’s usually somebody manipulating the system for commercial gain,” Easterman said. “So that could trigger Twitter to automatically flag that as suspicious activity and suspend the activist’s account.”
Using Twitter to target human rights defenders and journalists isn’t unusual. In 2017, journalist Iona Craig and others who report on Yemen were spammed with thousands of fake followers. Many speculated the culprits were state entities belonging to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The reason behind this particular mass following campaign remains unknown. Jones hypothesized it’s acting as a form of social media suppression, writing on Twitter:
Some suggest it’s a means to degrade the algorithmic quality of a Twitter account so that it possibly gets suspended; some suggest it’s others trying to boost popularity of an account. When it’s unsolicited, as in this case, I tend to think it’s more of a targeting operation. I am naturally cynical, but most people who get a sudden influx of fake followers feel unnerved and uncomfortable. If that fact is widely known, it functions as a tool of surveillance and potentially intimidation (e.g., you are being watched). It also makes many people mute their accounts for a bit which has a censorship effect.”
I am also reporting this since I myself, who had already experienced Twitter censorship earlier, noticed about a dozen suspiciously similar and very much bot-like Tweeter profiles liking a tweet of mine:
15.5.7b Elon Musk, the Oligarch Savior of Twitter Free Speech?
And things are not necessarily becoming better with the self-proclaimed free speech oligarch Elon Musk buying up Twitter for $42 billion in April 2022. That’s because Musk in an oligarch who does what oligarchs usually do — screwing over the 99%:
It would be nice to see Elon Musk restore the accounts of censorship victims such as Scott Ritter, but that is unlikely to happen since his ‘free speech’ act is currently little more than “Republican partisan bullshit”:
Musk might have some good points against deluded liberal censorship maniacs:
But it is strange and contradictory how, as an alleged free speech absolutist, he is in favor of censorship that only goes somewhat “beyond the law.” More importantly and by openly stating that he would vote Republican as a result of being anti-union, Musk later confirmed that his ‘free speech’ act indeed was little but “Republican partisan bullshit” garnished with some (perhaps intentionally) pretty bad and ridiculous mischaracterizations and ‘gaslightings’ of various things such as, coincidentally, “unions” and what is supposedly in “the best of interests of the people” (clearly not unions but, presumably, exploitation at Tesla for the benefit of man-child billionaire Elon Musk):
Musk: “And I would classify myself as a moderate, and neither a Republican or Democrat. And, in fact, I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, historically. […] I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear. Now this election, I will. [audience laughs]
The Democratic Party is overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, in particularly the class action lawyers. And generally, if you, if you’ll see something that doesn’t, that is not in the interest of the people, on the Democrat side it’s gonna come because of the unions, which is just another form of monopoly. And the trial lawyers. That’s where the actions will be happening from the Democrats side. They’re not in the interests of the people.
[…]
So in the case of Biden, he is simply too, too much, ah, captured by the unions, uhm, whereas which was not the case with Obama [who bailed out banks, not people in 2009]
So according to the oligarchic man-child Musk who can here be seen collecting Republican credentials with the destroyer of rainforests and our collective future, fascism admirer Jair Bolsonaro…
… free speech exercised for the benefit of workers or by unions is clearly not the type of free speech that falls under his version of pseudo free speech. Instead, tt would rather be the type of free speech that Musk would like to see censored and given that censorship which only ‘goes somewhat against the law’ is okay in his view:
The ‘poor’ man-child Elon — officially the richest man in the world at the moment — then even stooped low enough to cast himself as victim of the “far left” in what is somewhat reminiscent of Ben Shapiro’s false equation of (Democratic establishment) liberals with (Democratic establishment-despising) leftists:
Critique and rebuttals from the ‘far’ left (not liberals) came promptly and for instance looked as follows:
A clarification of the distinction between “liberalism” and “leftism” is also required due to the videos of Twitter employees published by Project Veritas which require such a clarification. In these videos, one a) pro-censorship Twitter employee (Siru Murugesan, Senior Engineer) who b) described himself and Twitter as “very socialist” and “commie as fuck” and some colleagues as “super left-left-left-left” can be seen c) objecting to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. But by actual leftist standards such as my own, Murugesan qualifies as a left-flirting self-deluded liberal and not as socialist, communist, leftist or progressive. Here is why:
Murugesan: “Twitter does not believe in free speech.”
Leftists do, also because they/we are routinely censored by establishment liberals. It would be self-protection to be pro free speech. Twitter employee Murugesan being opposed to free speech is a classic trait of a censorship-happy liberal.
Murugesan: “we’re actually censoring the right, and not the left”
Censored leftists, including myself, would beg to differ.
Murugesan: “The left will be like ‘No, I’m not gonna tolerate it. I need it censored or else I’m not gonna be on the platform.”
Like Ben Shapiro, Murugesan is confusing generally more right-wing and highly authoritarian imperialist liberals with anti-authoritarian anti-imperialist leftists. We disagree by argument — or simply don’t watch right-wing content, hence no issue with right-wing presence — , whereas liberals disagree by censorship, including of leftists.
Murugesan: “It’s true. There is bias.”
Yes, there is bias, but it’s liberal bias.
Murugesan: “I don’t know the two parties can truly exist on one platform”
This is another genuinely liberal statement. Murugesan behaves like a liberal Democrat party hack. Leftists, by contrast, are done with both parties which are in many ways one and the same party (for the 1%, for wars, for empire, etc).
Murugesan: “I started working for Twitter and became left”
Translation: “I am blisteringly clueless about a) what being left even means and about b) how the presence of the reactionary right US empire security state in Twitter means that Twitter cannot possibly be or function as a genuinely left entity.”
Similar not leftist but liberal authoritarian pro-censorship views could also be observed in other Twitter employees and technocratic know-nothing twats such as Alex Martinez who was basically saying that “free speech” is “bad for the planet” while also ridiculing people making their own decisions:
Alex Martinez: “These are the policies we [Twitter] put in place for misinformation or mislabeling media or whatever.” […]
“And it’s gonna be hard for him [Elon Musk] to be like *puts on dumb voice* ‘uh, because people should make their own decisions.’” It’s like, no, but people don’t know how to make a rational decision if you don’t put out correct things that are supposed to be out in the public.”
What these liberals are saying is so ridiculously idiotic — the US empire security state in Twitter supposedly “putting out correct things that are supposed to be out in the public” about Ukraine and other things— as to give the impression that these covert recordings might be staged to make ‘leftists’/liberals look bad. Then again, we are talking about the USA where idiocy, ignorance and stupidity reign supreme, meaning that the above are probably the genuine opinions of authoritarian liberals who are under the delusion that they are leftists.
Ironically and amusingly, the above footage of Martinez was obtained during a fake date with a covert Project Veritas videographer during which Martinez revealed an internal Twitter memo about Project Veritas using fake dates to obtain indemning information about Twitter and its employees:
The frictions between Twitter employees and Elon Musk can therefore be disregarded as frictions between liberals and a Democrat-turned-Republican man-child oligarch as two parties out of which neither is interested in free speech:
Censorship by Twitter can consequently be expected to continue especially against the leftist or progressive targets of the US empire security state, also in light of Elon Musk’s connections with that entity:
Musk, whose estimated $230 billion fortune is more than twice the gross domestic product of Ukraine, has garnered a great deal of positive publicity for donating thousands of Starlink terminals to the country, helping its people come back online after fighting downed the internet in much of the country. Starlink is an internet service allowing those with terminals to connect to one of over 2,400 small satellites in low Earth orbit. Many of these satellites were launched by Musk’s SpaceX technologies company.
However, it soon transpired that there is far more than meets the eye with Musk’s extraordinary “donation.” In fact, the U.S. government quietly paid SpaceX top dollar to send their inventory to the warzone. USAID — a government anti-insurgency agency that has regularly functioned as a regime-change organization — is known to have put up the cash to purchase and deliver at least 1,330 of the terminals.
Starlink is not a mass-market solution. Each terminal — which is, in effect, a tiny, portable satellite dish — has a markedly limited range, and is useful only in hyper-local situations. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, estimated that the 10,000 Starlink terminals were allowing around 150,000 people to stay online.
Such a small number of people using the devices raises eyebrows. Who is important enough to be given such a device? Surely only high-value individuals such as spies or military operatives. That the Starlinks are serving a military purpose is now beyond clear. Indeed, in a matter of weeks, Starlink has become a cornerstone of the Ukrainian military, allowing it to continue to target Russian forces via drones and other high-tech machinery dependent on an internet connection. One official told The Times of London that he “must” use Starlink to target enemy forces via thermal imaging.
“Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favor. Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol,” one Ukrainian soldier told journalist David Patrikarakos.
The reference to Mariupol alludes to the infamous Nazi group, the Azov Battalion, who have also reportedly been using Musk’s technology. Even in a subterranean cavern beneath Mariupol’s steelworks, Azov fighters were able to access the internet and communicate with the outside world, even doing video interviews from underground. In 2015, Congress attempted to add a provision to U.S. military aid to Ukraine stipulating that no support could go to Azov owing to their political ideology. That amendment was later removed at the behest of the Pentagon.
Dave Tremper, Director of Electronic Warfare at the Pentagon, sang SpaceX’s praises. “How they did that [keeping Ukrainian forces online] was eye-watering to me,” he said, adding that in the future the U.S. military “needs to be able to have that agility.”
Conclusion
So much for a conclusive analysis of big tech and social media censorship during the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict in which I discussed US empire security state censorship in or by Google/Youtube, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit and especially Twitter, while also briefly touching on the company-internal censorship of Amazon that is directed against its employees.
To circumvent censorship via algorithms, an increasing number of social media users do not write key words such as “Israeli occupation” but instead something like “Isr*eli occ*pation.” This can be observed relatively frequently on political TikTok.
The overall analysis of censorship by the five major sources of manufacturing consent — the (corporate owned) state (part 13a), mainstream media, fake factchecking and anti-disinformation bodies as well as education and academia (part 13b), and lastly big tech and social media — is thus complete. This means that we can now move on to the discussion of the “Western hypocrisy and double standards” that lie underneath all of the previously mentioned things.
