More details are emerging about the federal government’s wide-ranging censorship enterprise. The 19th release of Twitter files shows the federal government conspired with outside actors to censor information about COVID, the vaccines, and natural immunity. The files document an effort by the Stanford Virality Project, federal agencies, and a number of organizations often with taxpayer funding to monitor and suppress billions of social media posts with COVID-related content. At least six social media platforms participated, sending millions of posts to the enterprise every day for review. “Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging,” an observer said.
The enterprise attempted to control what was to be considered true and not true for all – which the government is not supposed to do. Even worse, it concocted and pushed narratives – phony stories – disregarding the truth and the facts which were cast aside. They didn’t follow the science; they followed their inner lights about what citizens should be allowed to hear. They suppressed “true stories that could fuel hesitancy” like “celebrity deaths after vaccine” or the closing of a school because COVID vaccination did not prevent illness. These true stories were considered “misinformation” that shouldn’t be allowed out there. It is truly stunning to read about these censors openly discussing how the truth is “misinformation”. The federal government didn’t want you to have the truth, so it shelled out a billion dollars to media outlets and social media companies to try to make sure you didn’t get it and to give grief to anyone trying to bring you the truth. The truth about natural immunity, lab leaks, and failures of vaccines to stop illness was suppressed. The enterprisers also suppressed information about COVID really not being very lethal (relatively speaking) and criticism of vaccine mandates and passports. Instead, they pushed the phony narrative about the vaccines being ‘safe and effective’ on us any way they could. In this alternate universe, true stories of vaccine side effects were deemed “actionable’ by a federal government determined to suppress the truth.
This Stanford-led effort was only a part of the federal government’s wide-ranging censorship enterprise. I’ve described other parts in previous commentaries, like the Global Engagement Center, a State Department-led censorship exercise involving the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, DHS, and other agencies. Now comes news that “NewsGuard”, an Internet so-called fact-checking service, was getting Defense Department dough to harass conservative news outlets, sending inquiries demanding the outlets justify their reporting. NewsGuard is the Left in action, having been founded by Steve Brill, a longtime Democrat operative and campaign donor. NewsGuard issued unfavorable ratings that damaged the outlets’ ability to get ad revenue. See how the game is played?
There’s more. Other new stories describe the 18th release of Twitter files giving more details about how Twitter and other social media platforms regularly met with the FBI and DHS. They also set up a system to receive thousands of reports from government agencies about accounts and posts the agencies deemed objectionable. Numerous accounts were deleted upon receipt of these reports. Some were not accused of misinformation; they just ran afoul of government narratives about the war in Ukraine and other matters. Again, taxpayer-funded outside groups played a large part in the scheme. They saw themselves as the anointed ones, a self-appointed Truth Squad that would save humanity from itself. The groups recommended the tech companies be forced to turn over all their data, that speech the groups deemed offensive be placed in a “holding area”, and the government root out disinformation even if it costs us our freedom. Gee whiz!
One more little story to show you just how bad things have gotten. Two FBI agents showed up at a person’s job in New York to interrogate the person about the person’s Tweets criticizing Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that sells one of the COVID vaccines. Apparently, the FBI doesn’t have anything better to do these days than terrorize ordinary citizens about not conforming to phony government narratives.
This is fascism – the unholy merger of Big Government and Big Business in a previously unimaginable concentration of power to deny you your rights. Where is Antifa when we need them? We sure could use some fascism-busters right about now.
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