The suppression of statements or information for ideological reasons. It is ancient and global in origin in which the term ‘censor‘ can be traced to the office of censor established in Rome in 443 BC. The censor was the title of the Roman official who conducted the census and supervised public morality. Federal and state government officials, together with their cronies in the major media and tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Microsoft, have ganged up to crush the upstart alternative media that are challenging (and have already surpassed, by some important metrics) the MSM Fake News monopoly that has protected and projected the globalist agenda for decades. Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, InfoWars, Natural News, and dozens of other Internet-based news providers have recently been banned/censored by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies.
A famous example in fiction is George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the main character works as a civil servant in the department responsible for altering or destroying historical information which the government wishes to keep secret. The rationale behind political censorship is that the political party in power can protect itself from revolution if the public is kept uninformed.
We’re watching the evolution of Newspeak right before our very eyes as the Internet strives to silence any voices that oppose their carefully crafted stories of how guns are bad, there are 291 genders, and anyone who isn’t a liberal is an evil Nazi racist. If you aren’t familiar with the term “Newspeak,” it’s from George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thought-crime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
There are hundreds of examples of Facebook censoring alternative news with investigative journalists exposing the lies of mainstream (fake news) media as well as conservative media. Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. In March 2014, Facebook began censoring pro-gun speech on its social media site in partnership with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who hates self-defense and the Second Amendment. After Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action pressured Facebook to censor gun-themed fan pages, the company finally agreed to do so on both its namesake site and its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram. Facebook enacted this censorship through various policy changes which effectively treats gun-related content no different than pornography, such as restricting users under 18 from seeing the official Facebook pages of their neighborhood gun shops. In July 2013, evangelical Christian and actor Kirk Cameron alerted his 650,000-plus Facebook fans that the links to his latest film, Unstoppable, had been blocked by Facebook, which went on to label the links as “abusive” and “unsafe.” Only a couple months after Facebook threatened to shut down “Chicks on the Right” for what the conservative fan page’s administrators said were posts critical of the Obama administration (Facebook later apologized), a few other Facebook accounts were visited by the so-called “Facebook police” for what some users think are politically charged reasons.
Twitter has also become increasingly stringent on policing content, censoring search results and deeming certain tweets “low quality,” a completely subjective definition. Numerous prominent conservatives have been banned by Twitter in recent months (example). This is all part of the effort to segregate Internet content into social media ghettos and then censor that content, as Matt Drudge warned about during his 2015 appearance on the Alex Jones Show.
Fast forward to 2018 and several of the biggest “conservative/libertarian” figures on the Net—Alex Jones, Dennis Prager, Stefan Molyneux, among others—were been banned/censored by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies. These social media corporations are fulfilling desperate pleas from major news outlets, who have been losing audience, in massive chunks, to the alternative media. The deep state controlled newspapers and TV news networks came to the end of their rope and had no solutions to their problem—so the dinosaur media went to Google, Facebook, and others, and said, HELP US. Meaning: Censor our competition. (source)
On one level, understanding censorship is that simple. But then you have to ask yourself this question: Why would Google, Facebook, and other social media giants bend to the needs of mainstream news outlets? These social media operations are richer and bigger than mainstream news. They could easily have said: “No, we like open forums and a wide variety of opinion, and we think people should be able to deal with ideas they don’t like. We stand for an open society, and we vigorously defend the 1st Amendment.” (source)
But they didn’t say that. Instead, they’re enacting bans and censorship. Why? The obvious answer staring us in the face is: Google and Facebook and YouTube, for example, the largest social media corporations, are not “free companies.” They’ve been in bed with the intelligence community for a long time, and they favor wall to wall surveillance of the population. They favor the “liberal” version of a policed State, where correct opinions are let in the door and incorrect opinions are shut down (source)… even over the almighty dollar! These companies lost billions by censoring conservatives, but they ALL did it and did it in unison because they are controlled by hidden evil forces whose priority is a new world order tyranny.
Wikipedia also censors as made evident by two trusted Wikipedia officials who were exposed running businesses that covertly edited Wikipedia for PR clients. Interests for Sony, the CIA, the Vatican, Barack Obama and John McCain all reportedly have been caught secretly editing their own Wikipedia pages to their advantage.
Anyone can edit the site, but reverting people’s edits is easy, and so is blocking users or IP addresses. Not everyone can do that. Who decides who can and who can’t? Wikipedia editors are kept in line with what has been called “a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere”, one which gives special permissions to a very select group of editors – privileges that can be revoked if someone’s decisions are deemed ‘out of line’ with the official narrative . Wikipedia is not as radically unbiased and fair as it purports to be, and increasingly reflects the agendas of those with deep pockets who have invested in shaping it to suit their commercial purposes.
By destroying biographies of celebrities, scientists, inventors, whistleblowers, journalists, activists and dissidents of mainstream politics and social movements, this COINTELPRO style disinformation campaign degenerates society, stifling innovation and progress in every field. Complaints that the Wiki-companies, and Wikimedia Foundation, has provided criminal cover for CIA/FBI counter-intelligence operators have been issued by dozens of organizations, journalists, and activists in recent years. The Wiki-editors have abused their public platform to control information, issue propaganda , discredit reputable authorities, degrade legitimate intelligence, suppress social movements, and generally confuse people.
In 2016, Facebook was forced to admit that it was manually gaming its ‘trending’ section algorithm to stifle conservative topics. Facebook suspended 30,000 accounts in France a mere ten days before its national election in 2017, in censorship of supporters of the right-wing, eurosceptic Marine Le Pen who is anti-establishment in France. Another example of how Facebook censors is the case of Jason Fyk.
Today, as in all times of crisis, to be a Patriot, to take a stand for Truth, is dangerous business. To host a news website or blog that challenges the ruling powers, entrenched corruption, and the forces of darkness is a perilous thing. We are beginning to see just how perilous. We are not yet suffering the types of outright censorship and iron-fisted persecution of politically incorrect thought that already befall our brethren in banana republics or in communist tyrannies such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea, or in Muslim dictatorships such as Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia. Nor are we yet experiencing the levels of intimidation, prosecution, fines, and imprisonment being meted out in the European Union and Canada for daring to speak truth to power. But anyone who doubts that similar oppression is in the works for America is deaf and blind to the onrushing statist steamroller that is smashing the First Amendment — and all other treasured rights as well.
During the eight-year reign of President Barack Obama, the advocates of Orwellian controls for the ostensible purpose of combating “hate speech” and “thought crimes” made frightful progress. Federal and state government officials, together with their cronies in the major media and tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Microsoft, have ganged up to crush the upstart alternative media that are challenging (and have already surpassed, by some important metrics) the MSM (mainstream media) Fake News monopoly that has protected and projected the globalist agenda for decades. Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, InfoWars, Natural News, and dozens of other Internet-based news providers have already been targeted and are feeling the impact of the corporate-government jack-booted heel on their jugulars.
Will things change for the better in this regard now under the new Trump administration? There was good reason to hope so, but we have no guarantee. On February 17, 2017, President Trump tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” The list he mentioned was abbreviated, of course, and could have included many additional genuine enemies of freedom among the so-called elite media. The outrage that followed from the Fake News organizations the president lambasted was as hypocritical and hollow as it was predictable. En masse, they attempted to misrepresent Trump’s attack, which was directed at them specifically, as an attack on the First Amendment and journalism in general.
But however much the Fake News hypocrites tried to camouflage themselves and misrepresent President Trump’s accusation, many, if not most, Americans recognized the truth in it. We had witnessed, during the 2016 election cycle, a year-long spectacle of some of the most egregious media mendacity, bias, and propaganda in our nation’s history. In addition to day-after-day fawning pro-Clinton “news” coverage glaringly juxtaposed to malicious anti-Trump coverage, we saw over and over again blatant examples of outright violence against Trump and his supporters being censored or even justified by the “objective” elite media. Even before being subjected to that deceitful onslaught, the American public had already passed verdict on the MSM and found it disreputable. A Rasmussen poll in 2013 found that only six percent of Americans considered the major media to be “very trustworthy.” Surveys by Pew, Gallup, and other polling groups have likewise documented the ill repute in which the media are popularly held. That was child’s play compared to what we saw in 2020.
Add to that the fact that millions of Americans have abandoned the establishment corporate media and now get their news elsewhere. Many have fled to Fox News, which at least puts up a semi-credible façade of being politically/socially/morally conservative, even while, in the main, presenting the globalist line from a “Republican” perspective. Similarly, most of the talk-radio universe is dominated by “conservative” hosts who, for the most part, toe the establishment GOP party line. But the past decade has seen the burgeoning of a host of independent Internet-based news sources that defy the liberal-left elites and their globalist agenda (as well as defying any neat categorization): the Drudge Report, Alex Jones/InfoWars, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, WorldNetDaily, Zero Hedge, LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, Vdare.com — and many, many more.
As we have reported online and in these pages many times previously, the globalists have been pushing for many years to transfer control over the Internet to the United Nations, which would mean total evisceration of freedom of communication and expression over the Net. After all, that dictators club is filled with regimes that already are infamous for rigidly prohibiting access to “unapproved” sites and for punishing netizens who dare to express views that conflict with official dogmas of the state. However, the most immediate threat comes not from this type of direct interference of government agencies (whether global, national, or local) but from left-wing so-called watchdog groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Media Matters, working in collusion with the MSM monopolists, international corporations, Deep State intel operatives, and statist politicians. Their multi-pronged attack on the vibrant, independent American media is currently focused on cutting off advertising revenue and denying access on various platforms and search engines.
On October 6, 2015, Matt Drudge made a surprise visit to InfoWars.com for an in-studio televised interview with Alex Jones to warn of the coming oppressive censorship. “I had a Supreme Court justice tell me to my face it’s over for me,” the legendary recluse and owner of the very influential Drudge Report revealed. “He said, ‘Matt, it’s over for you; they’ve got the votes now to enforce copyright law, you’re outa there. They’re going to make it so that you can’t even use headlines.’” “To have a Supreme Court justice say that to my face,” warned Drudge, “means time is limited.”
“You had Justice Stephen Breyer saying we had to look at a global law, you remember, just recently, so they’re getting ready for these decisions to come,” he continued. “You thought ObamaCare was shocking; you thought some of these other decisions were shocking. Wait until these copyright laws work their way up, and the Supreme Court decides you can’t have a website with news headlines linking across the board.” The effect will be, he noted, to push everyone into cyber “ghettos” of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where no diversity of thought is tolerated.
If Matt Drudge, an Internet visionary and considered by many to be the T-Rex of independent media aggregators, is that alarmed, everyone else also had better be concerned. Although no longer the one-man operation it was when starting out as a simple e-mail news-and-rumor letter 20-some years ago, his still-small organization boasts a very large footprint. In 2015, Politico reported that during the previous year, “DrudgeReport.com was the No. 1 site of referral traffic to the Daily Mail, CNN, Fox News, Roll Call, Breitbart, the New York Times, National Journal, USA Today, Associated Press, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and POLITICO.” His website has had as many as a billion page views in a single day and claims millions of devoted followers. The New York Times reported in 2007 that presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, were cooperating with Drudge and “working harder than ever to get favorable coverage for their candidates — or unfavorable coverage of competitors — onto the Drudge Report’s home page, knowing that television producers, radio talk-show hosts, and newspaper reporters view it as a bulletin board for the latest news and gossip.”
Yet Matt Drudge sees that his days are numbered if the Big Brother plans of the Big Government advocates are not stopped. One of the threats mentioned by Matt Drudge and Alex Jones in their InfoWars exchange concerned the dangerous copyright elements in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaties negotiated by the Obama administration. Although President Trump has apparently scuttled those agreements (at least temporarily), that danger is far from over.
Ad Spending Targeted
“Advertisers are telling right-wing website Breitbart News to ditch the hate speech and are withdrawing their campaigns until it cleans up its content,” reported the left-wing International Business Times (IBT) on November 23, 2016. “AppNexus, a company whose software helps deliver ads online, has told the conservative news and opinion site that it breaches its policies around hate speech.”
“This blacklist was solely about hate speech violation,”IBT quoted AppNexus spokesman Joshua Zeitz as saying. “We did a human audit of Breitbart and determined there were enough articles and headlines that cross that line, using either coded or overt language.”
IBT noted that “Breitbart has risen to prominence as President-elect Donald Trump appointed its former executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist after Bannon headed up his election campaign.” The organization takes its name from its founder, the late Andrew Breitbart, who got his start in the business working for Matt Drudge. According to IBT, AppNexus spokesman Zeitz said the company would ban Breitbart’s content as “quickly as a site that has pornography and violence.” The website is not being censored because it spreads misinformation or for its conservative editorial position, he insisted, but because of violations of “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is pliably defined and seems rarely to be applied to the detriment of those who are “progressively” inclined.
AppNexus reportedly handles about $2.5 billion in ad spending, and Breitbart is not the only conservative site being affected. Nor is AppNexus the only advertising company performing this ideological squeeze play. Omnicom and AdRoll are two additional huge advertisement buying networks that have joined the thought police. “The move comes,” notes the IBT article, “after other online platforms such as Google and Facebook have made efforts to stop ‘fake news’ being served, or spread by their users.” Yes, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google (which owns YouTube), and other enforcement-arm members of the emerging Orwellian Ministry of Truth are on a jihad against “hate” — unless, that is, it is real hate being spewed by politically acceptable/politically protected haters, such as real Islamic jihadists, LGBTQ militants, or enviro extremists.
Who’s Behind the Youtube Censorship? The very impartial (sarcasm) ADL and SPLC.
In Germany, for instance, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, in 2015, adopted the “code of conduct” implemented by Angela Merkel’s regime to squash the widespread opposition to her disastrous refugee program. It includes a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.
“Posts critical of Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can be categorized as ‘Islamophobia,’” notes the Gatestone Institute, a human-rights group, “and are often found to violate ‘Community Standards,’ while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s ‘Community Standards.’”
News that Google developed a new AI system that “identifies abusive comments” to clamp down on “hate speech” reminds us why mainstream media websites are censoring and removing comment sections altogether – because studies show they have more influence over the opinion of the reader than the article itself. Google’s new tool, Perspective, works by comparing comments left on news websites to comments left on Wikipedia and the New York Times that were deemed “toxic” by a team of human reviewers.
With trust in mainstream media plummeting, the real goal behind the censorship and in some cases entire removal of comment sections is to manipulate public opinion. As the Daily Tech revealed, Popular Science admitted that the decision to pull its comment section was in order to preach a “scientific doctrine” on global warming without being challenged. Popular Science acknowledged that their decision was based on a study by Dominique Brossard, a Life Sciences Communication professor at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, that appeared in the February 2013 edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications.
The study found that, “People reacted neutrally when comments were disabled, but even when comments were generally positive their reactions did not noticeably improve. However, when the reader feedback took on a “less civil” tone with people questioning the merits of nanotechnology, user perception of the publication itself (not just the topic discussed) took a decidedly negative turn.” In other words, the credibility of the article in question is largely dependent on the tone of the comments left in response. The more negative, uncivil and “toxic” the tone, the less likely the reader is to trust the article and the publication.
Once these “toxic” comments are removed, the reader is more likely to trust CNN, the New York Times, or whoever publishes the article. Any technology developed by Silicon Valley to combat so-called “hate speech” is inevitably going to have a liberal bias baked in.
Continued on next page…