Boycott Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Here’s Why:
By Eric Zuesse.
washingtonsblog.com
Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
NATO the neoconservatives, the marketeers for firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE has taken over the social-media giants and much of online international news-reporting, including that of virtually all independent news-sites and blogs.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google, in recent days, delivered what might be the death-blows.
NATOs main PR agency, think-tank, and lobbying organization, is non-profit a legal tax-dodge thats financed by donations from those weapons-making firms and their supporting firms and their non-profits, so that the taxes that it doesnt pay will need to be paid instead by the general public. Billionaires know how to avoid taxes, and they hire politicians who write the laws with all the right loopholes for them and only for the very richest to use. This PR agency is called The Atlantic Council, and it was set up in 1961, the exact same year that U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower left office warning that the military-industrial complex might take control of the U.S. Well, it did so, with The Atlantic Councils help; and, now, it is finally lowering the boom against democracy itself at least among the U.S. and its allied nations (the governments whose weapons-manufacturing firms are in, and sell to, NATO governments). The aim is to drive up the percentage of government-expenditures there that go to pay those firms, and so to reduce the percentages that go to pay everything else. The aim, in short, is the permanent-warfare-economy. After all, firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE sell only to allied governments. They have virtually no consumers except those governments. So: their (and their charities) basic message is austerity except on defense or realistically called aggression. This is national defense such as against Iraq in 2003, and against Libya in 2011 it is instead sheer aggression. George Orwell predicted Newspeak well, here it is. Its todays norm, so normal that the public think its just natural, and conservatives and even many liberals think its the way that a free market ought to be.
Here was Facebooks announcement, on October 11th:
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/10/removing-inauthentic-activity/
11 October 2018
Removing Additional Inauthentic Activity from Facebook
Today, were removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. Given the activity weve seen and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action. Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.
Those 559 and 251 werent identified; none of them were. Facebook wants them to need to scream in order for them to be able to be noticed at all by the public. The announcement didnt even say by what criteria they were measuring Inauthentic Activity versus legitimate political debate. Their announcement did say we look at these actors behavior such as whether theyre using fake accounts or repeatedly posting spam rather than their content when deciding which of these accounts, Pages or Groups to remove, but unless they make public what the actual algorithms are by means of which they remove sites, no one should trust them, at all, because they can remove whatever NATO or The Atlantic Council (neither of which their announcement even mentioned) want them to remove.
The background for this act by the war-economys billionaires had already been reported at Mint Press on May 18th, Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to Protect Democracy , where Elliott Gabriel opened:
Facebook is hoping that a new alliance with the Atlantic Council a leading geopolitical strategy think-tank seen as a’de facto PR agency for the U.S. government and NATO military alliance will not only solve its fake news and disinformation controversy, but will also help the social media monolith play a positive role in ensuring democracy on a global level.
The new partnership will effectively ensure that Atlantic Council will serve as Facebooks eyes and ears, according to a company press statement. With its leadership comprised of retired military officers, former policymakers, and top figures from the U.S. National Security State and Western business elites, the Atlantic Councils role policing the social network should be viewed as a virtual takeover of Facebook by the imperialist state and the councils extensive list of ultra-wealthy and corporate donors.
Then, on October 12th, Mint Presss Whitney Webb bannered Facebook Purges US-Based Independent Media For Political Disinformation , and reported that,
Notably, Facebooks statement on the mass purge of pages was co-authored by Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher, who is a former White House National Security Council director of cybersecurity policy.
Twitter also banned many of the pages targeted for deletion by Facebook on Thursday, suggesting a coordinated censorship effort between the two most popular social media platforms.
Many of the pages banned had millions of likes, such as the Free Thought Project (3.1 million likes), Antimedia (2.1 million), Cop Block (1.7 million), and Police the Police (1.9 million). Several of the pages that were deleted on Thursday had been targeted by Facebook in recent months, both through new censorship algorithms and Facebooks controversial team of fact checkers.
For instance, the Free Thought Project had been flagged earlier this year as fake news by Facebook fact checking partner organizations, including the Associated Press (AP) and Snopes. In one case, a story published by the Free Thought Project was flagged as false by the AP. That story, which detailed the documented case of Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) being forcibly removed from a DHS migrant detention center that had once been a Walmart, was marked false because the AP asserted that the article made the claim that Walmart was housing immigrants for DHS. However, the article does not make the claim, instead accurately noting that the facility used to be a Walmart.
Censorship algorithms had also greatly affected traffic to the recently deleted pages for much of the past year. In the case of Antimedia, its traffic dropped from around 150,000 page views per day in early June to around 12,000 by the end of that month. As a reference, in June of last year, Antimedias traffic stood at nearly 300,000 views per day.
Also on October 12th, heavy dot com bannered Facebook Purge: List of Some Deleted Accounts on Left & Right and listed a few dozen sites that the article’s writer had seen online screaming about having been removed.
Meanwhile, in UKs very mainstream Daily Mail (the second-largest-circulation of all UKs newspapers), columnist Michael Burleigh headlined on October 13th Putin’s taking over Libya by stealth in order to point a new weapon at the West millions of desperate migrants and he opened:
So bloody and extensive is President Putins record of aggression, not least in Syria and Ukraine, that an incursion into the empty deserts of North Africa might hardly seem worth noting.
Yet the discovery that Russia is moving troops and missiles into war-torn Libya has rightly caused alarms to sound throughout the capitals of Europe.
It is a step of huge significance, and one with potentially disastrous results for Western nations.
The discovery that Vladimir Putin, above, and his government is moving troops and missiles into war-torn Libya has rightly caused alarm. Russia this time in the form of Rosneft, the huge oil company controlled by Putins sinister crony Igor Sechin is interested in a slice of Libyas vast oil reserves, the largest in Africa
Libya has both oil and Mediterranean ports, and Russia is hungry for both.
But was it Russia that in 2011 had invaded and destroyed Libya, or was it U.S., UK, and France, who invaded and destroyed Libya a country that like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and others which The West has destroyed, had never threatened nor invaded any of them?
Burleigh continued:
cause enough for concern, perhaps. Yet the real fear for European governments is this: Libya, with its porous southern borders, has become the main jumping-off point for the hundreds of thousands of African migrants now seeking to cross the Mediterranean to the shores of the EU and, in particular, Italy.
So, his own country, UK, had helped with the bombing of Libya that had caused all those migrants (actually refugees) into Europe, but now hes trying to blame Putin for it, as if Russia and not UK, U.S., and France were the cause of it. Doesnt that mislead people ?
But is the Daily Mail being strangled by Facebook, Twitter, and Google; or is it instead being done to the small-fry political sites, which arent owned and controlled by the aristocracies of the U.S., UK, France, and their allied aristocracies all the aristocracies that are in NATO and promoted by The Atlantic Council?
Here is yet more from Elliott Gabriels excellent news-report at Mint Press on May 18th, providing background to the present purges and censorships:
The announcement, made last Thursday in a Facebook Newsroom post, explained that the social networks security, policy and product teams will coordinate their work with the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to analyze real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.
DFRLab employees include pro-war media activist Eliot Higgins (of Bellingcat fame) and Ben Nimmo a senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council, who earned infamy for his groundless accusations that actual Twitter users are Russian trolls.
Read more on Facebook
Continuing, Facebook global politics and government outreach director Katie Harbath explained:
This will help increase the number of eyes and ears we have working to spot potential abuse on our service enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.
We know that tackling these problems effectively also requires the right policies and regulatory structures, so that governments and companies can help prevent abuse while also ensuring that people have a voice during elections. The Atlantic Councils network of leaders is uniquely situated to help all of us think through the challenges we will face in the near- and long-term.
The think-tanks Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions will also be tapped by the social network during elections and other highly sensitive moments to allow Facebook the ability to zero in on key locales and monitor alleged misinformation and foreign interference.
Who is the Atlantic Council?
Hillary Clinton at the 2013 Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards (Photo: Atlantic Council)
The Atlantic Council was recently in the news for receiving a donation of $900,000 from the U.S. State Department for a Peace Process Support Network program to promote non-violent conflict resolution in support of Venezuelas scattered opposition, with which the council enjoys very close ties. The council also advocates the arming of extremist militants in Syria (a National Stabilization Force ) and a hard-line policy toward Russia.
Established in 1961 by former U.S. Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter, the Atlantic Council of the United States was originally conceived as a means to drum up support for the Cold War-era NATO alliance, which had formed in 1949 as the basis of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture during the post-WWII competition with the Soviet Union. Dozens of similar Atlantic Councils were eventually established throughout the NATO and Partnership for Peace states.
The council is a part of the Atlantic Treaty Association, a NATO offshoot that claims to unite political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats in an effort to further the values set forth in the North Atlantic Treaty, namely: democracy, freedom, liberty, peace, security, and the rule of law.
In general, groups such as the Atlantic Council are meant to secure the legitimacy of U.S. policies and neoliberal economics in the eyes of world audiences and academia, whether they live in the advanced democracies (the imperialist center) or developing democracies (the post-colonial and economically exploited nations).
Mint Press a real news-operation, instead of the fake-news operations that are being boosted by Facebook, Twitter, and Google apparently hasnt yet been removed by Facebook, but the permanent-war-economy is only just starting to lower the boom. And, who knows whats next, in American democracy, now?
The way to boycott Facebook, Twitter, and Google, is to NOT respond to their ads, but instead to blacklist their advertisers and all media that rely upon those giant social-media sites. There are competitors, and those need to be aggressively favored by anyone who doesnt want to be mentally strangulated by these three giant corporations.
These media-giants want to strangle the public; so, the public needs to strangle them first.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of Theyre Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRISTS VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
View the original article at Washingtons Blog
