Suppression/Propaganda in Media

[Belligerent Savant]

Preach, Brother Malcolm. He knew all too well, so many years ago, at a time when the tech (and methods) were far less advanced than today.

Of course, since Malcolm's time, 'the oppressed' have expanded well beyond outward color, to include anyone that challenges status quo narratives, particularly with respect to individual agency* and/or bodily autonomy.

*for those that may be triggered by the phrase 'individual agency': I've yet to meet anyone in the real world who values individual agency that is against earnest and worthwhile collective good as well.
Speaking for myself, I would happily volunteer for the front lines of any collective good that actually achieves such aims.
Not a single policy, initiative or mandate enacted over the last ~two years in response to this health-related event we collectively endured qualify for sound 'collective good' criteria.
To the contrary, they were all egregiously detrimental to the collective.
The sooner this is more broadly acknowledged, particularly by those that subscribed to some or most of these draconian policies, the sooner the policies -- affronts to human rights -- can all be firmly sunset, never to return.
I've minimal confidence this will occur anytime soon, however.
Too many remain too proud, too arrogant, and too ignorant.

[stickdog99]

Here's what I don't understand.

How does anything Musk is, think, does or doesn't do impinge one iota on the real story of the Twitter files he has released, which is clear, unambiguous proof that many US federal agencies were directing state censorship by micromanaging Twitter employees? And, of course, the exact same applies to Google, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, and every other major online platform.

It's like saying that Assange's supposed untoward sexual proclivities and political allegiances somehow negate everything ever released by Wikileaks.

How does anyone still fall for this shit?

That is not an either / or thing. That was my whole point.
Of course the government meddling is true.

Now we just have a modern day billionaire emerald miner anti-union Henry Ford also using a large media platform to push his personal agenda while claiming to be a free speech warrior, while he is banning and suppressing anyone he does not like, and allowing doxxing of trans people and minorities and hate against them.
How does anyone fall for that?

And fuck all billionaires. They should not exist at all.
And fuck the US government as well.

Are you seriously comparing Musk to Assange there? That is really something.

No. Not even close. I am comparing your response to the Twitter Files to Hillary Clinton's response to Seth Rich's Wikileaks dump.

[Gnomad]

I am sorry, but there is no way I can see the previously-worlds-wealthiest person, who is currently building a satellite internet system for DARPA and Pentagon to use for global war, while playing around with Russian agents and kissing the asses of the Qanon and far right fascists of the US after buying Twitter with Saudi oil money, as any kind of a philanthropist leaker of Important Information.

Nope, just can not do it.

If those leaks were any kind of threat for the powerful, Musk would have been Assanged already. Or Chelsea Manninged. Or Reality Winnered. Or Edward Snowdened. You get the picture.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... cup-final/
Some friends he keeps, too. Jared Kushner and the Saudis, Erdogan and Russian propaganda presenters (Nailya Asker-Zade). What a friend of humanity!

[stickdog99]

I get your point. Obviously, I do not consider Musk an ally, and I certainly question his motives.

But if the Twitter File revelations of the US government's undeniable micromanaging of the clear shredding of the First Amendment are so non-threatening, why haven't they been aired by any establishment media source other than to dismiss them as an "old news nothing-burger" and to denigrate their source, just as you are?

[Harvey]

Don't see any problem simultaneously holding in mind that Musk is not our friend, that the releases are probably a fairly limited selection, that they do in fact prove collusion of state agencies and government officials with big tech to illegally limit freedom of speech and de facto, a grand conspiracy.

[stickdog99]

Don't see any problem simultaneously holding in mind that Musk is not our friend, that the releases are probably a fairly limited selection, that they do in fact prove collusion of state agencies and government officials with big tech to illegally limit freedom of speech and de facto, a grand conspiracy.

Right. It's a classic limited hangout, but that doesn't mean that we should ignore the facts revealed.

[Gnomad]

I get your point. Obviously, I do not consider Musk an ally, and I certainly question his motives.

But if the Twitter File revelations of the US government's undeniable micromanaging of the clear shredding of the First Amendment are so non-threatening, why haven't they been aired by any establishment media source other than to dismiss them as an "old news nothing-burger" and to denigrate their source, just as you are?

I think we are speaking a bit past each other here. I don't deny the info that relates to governments meddling at all.
It is just that I don't think they are anything at all related to what Snowden revealed - and that led to no change at all either, practically. Except to make Snowden a pariah and forcing him to live in Russia.

It is just that I think Musk is only releasing that data, solely, for his own benefit. Not the benefit of anyone else. And in my opinion it will not change anything at all - there have been way worse revelations about the US gov and those led to nothing of consequence either. That is all.

And at the same time, Musk is happy to do business in China, and use the chinese government to control his workers or even use Uighur forced labor for his benefit -
https://www.workersliberty.org/story/20 ... sla-amazon

The Tech Transparency Project had already raised concerns about one of the companies last year: Lens Technology, a major supplier of iPhone cover glass as well as Amazon and Tesla. Apple claimed that it found no Uyghur workers transferred to Lens. But this new investigation found multiple Chinese state media reports directly contradicting Apple’s denials.

The report flagged that Apple still has not publicly disclosed all its hundreds of suppliers. One demand the Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK (USC) raises is for new laws to force big capitalists to open the books: to audit their supply chains right back to source (not just in China, but worldwide) and publish everything. This information would help empower workers and rights groups to organise and act.

So he is perfectly happy with totalitarian worker control when it suits the production of his companies.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... rk-culture

How do you become the richest man in the world? In Elon Musk’s case, part of it involves making workers in China put in hours that would be unacceptable according to labor norms elsewhere.

On Tuesday, the Tesla boss praised Chinese factory workers for pulling extreme hours while taking a shot at American workers. “There is just a lot of super talented hardworking people in China who strongly believe in manufacturing,” the billionaire said. “They won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they will be burning the 3am oil, they won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

Musk’s comment comes as Tesla’s massive Shanghai “Giga-factory” pushes its workers to the limit to meet production targets amid an ongoing pandemic lockdown.

In April, Tesla restricted its Shanghai workers from leaving the factory under a so-called “closed-loop” system originally developed by Chinese authorities to contain Beijing Olympics participants. While locked inside, the workers were reportedly made to work 12-hour shifts, six days in a row, and to sleep on factory floors. Production at the plant was forced to halt this week due to parts shortages, the company said.

This is who he really is. He is totally fine with locking his workers, in his factories, forcing them to work. In a totalitarian system.

But also -
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... eiss-covid

Why the Twitter Files actually matter

Twitter’s previous management made some controversial political decisions. Some of them haven’t held up.

Many inclined to distrust what they see as Big Tech’s liberal leanings have cried vindication. The documents show in detail how Twitter made key content moderation decisions that disadvantaged Trump, conservatives, and people who broke with the public health consensus on Covid-19. They say the evidence proves that, again and again, Twitter intervened to squelch speech that the liberal establishment didn’t like.

Meanwhile, others — including most liberals and many mainstream journalists — are unimpressed. They say Twitter’s policies here were already known and that the specific decisions in question — blocking a story they feared stemmed from a foreign hack, banning the account of President Trump after he incited an insurrection, and deboosting accounts spreading public health misinformation — generally seem at least defensible.

The discourse has quickly become one of us versus them — perfect for Twitter. The journalists to whom Musk gave the documents — most prominently, Substackers Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss — are outspoken, unsparing critics of what they believe is the “woke” liberal groupthink that pervades mainstream American media institutions, making them now effectively allies of the right in the culture war. Musk’s behavior since buying Twitter has made him a villain to the left, too.

The Twitter Files has not featured a full installment about Covid-19 yet, but Musk has promised, “It is coming bigtime.” In part two of the series, though, Weiss showed that Stanford School of Medicine professor Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a Twitter “Trends Blacklist” — preventing his tweets from showing up in trending topics searches.

After this, Bhattacharya tweeted that, during a visit to Twitter headquarters at Musk’s invitation this week, employees told him he was placed on that blacklist the first day he joined Twitter, in August 2021 and that he believes it must have been because of this tweet:

Mortality from #COVID19 differs more than a thousand-fold between the old and young. Focused protection is the compassionate approach that balances COVID risks and collateral damage to public health.https://t.co/63I0hcZK1J
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) August 23, 2021

The link there was to the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial October 2020 open letter by Bhattacharya and two other professors arguing that only those people most vulnerable to the virus should continue to lock down and distance, while everyone else should “resume life as normal,” which would result in them getting the virus and, hopefully, “herd immunity” in the population. Shortly afterward, 80 other public health experts responded with their own letter calling their herd immunity theory “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.”

When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, Twitter again grappled with the topic of “misinformation.” As with Trump (and with hate speech), Twitter executives likely believed lives could well hinge on their decisions. So by May 2020, the company announced it would remove or label tweets that “directly pose a risk to someone’s health or well-being,” such as encouragements that people disregard social distancing guidelines.

But the company essentially defined “misinformation” as whatever went against the public health establishment’s current conventional wisdom. And as time passed, Covid quickly became another issue where conservatives and some journalists came to deeply distrust that establishment, viewing it as making mistakes and giving politically slanted guidance.

The situation took another turn when President Biden took office. By the summer of 2021, his administration was trying to encourage widespread vaccine adoption in the hope the pandemic could be ended entirely. (The omicron variant, which sufficiently evaded vaccines to end that hope, was not yet circulating.) Toward that end, administration officials publicly demanded social companies do more to fight misinformation, and poured private pressure on the companies to delete certain specific accounts.

All that is to say that there is a thorny question here about whether the government should be trying to get individual people who have violated no laws banned from social media. And from the standpoint of 2022, when the US has adopted a return-to-normal policy without universal vaccination or the virus being suppressed, and when there’s increased attention on whether school lockdowns harmed children, some reflection may be called for about what constitutes misinformation and what constitutes opinions people may have about policy in a free society.

I am NOT saying they are inconsequential, I AM saying Musk uses Twitter only, solely, to "own the libs" he has come to hate. He has no issues at all treating people like slaves - in fact, he would like to treat his US workers as slaves as well, if he could. And his companies are well-known for mistreatment of workers, union-busting and blatant racism. He was furious when he was forced to close his US factory for a while, and he would have loved to do the same as in China - lock the workers in the factory.

This is why I have such a low view of Musk.

He has done everything that he dislikes the government for, himself, after buying Twitter. Banned and suspended people for merely criticizing him, while allowing armies of Qanon and right-wing fascists back on the platform, and enabling hate against marginal groups. All the while he said he would not do that, but did anyway.

I strongly oppose the view that "an enemy of my enemy must be a friend". That is dangerous. It is usually much more nuanced than that.

[stickdog99]

The Mother of All Limited Hangouts

The Mother of All Limited Hangouts has begun. Yes, I’m talking about the “Covid Twitter Files,” which are finally being released to the public, in almost textbook limited-hangout fashion. I’ll get into that in just a minute, but first, let’s review what a “limited hangout” is, for those who are not familiar with the term.

The way a limited hangout works is, if you’re an intelligence agency, or a global corporation, or a government, or a non-governmental organization, and you have been doing things you need to hide from the public, and those things are starting to come to light such that you can’t just deny that you are doing them anymore, what you do is, you release a limited part of the story (i.e., the story of whatever it is you’re doing) to distract people’s attention from the rest of the story. The part you release is the “limited hangout.” It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole story. You “hang it out” so that it will become the whole story, and thus stop people from pursuing the whole story.

Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA who went on to become a critic of the Intelligence Community, described the tactic this way in 1978 …

“… a favorite and frequently used gimmick of clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

All right, so, you’re probably asking, if the “Covid Twitter Files” are a limited hangout, what’s the whole story that they’re distracting us from?

Let me try to refresh your memory.

In March and April of 2020, in the course of roughly five to six weeks, the majority of societies throughout the world were transformed into pathologized-totalitarian police states. A global “shock-and-awe” campaign was conducted. Constitutional rights were suspended. The masses were locked down inside their homes, where they were subjected to the most massive official propaganda blitzkrieg in human history. Goon squads roamed the streets of Europe, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, beating and arresting people for being outdoors without permission and not wearing medical-looking masks. Corporate media around the world informed us that life as we knew it was over … a “new normal” was coming, and we needed to get used to it.

The entire official pandemic narrative was rolled out during those first few weeks. Everything. Masks. Mandatory “vaccines.” “Vaccination” passports. The segregation of “the Unvaccinated.” The censorship and demonization of dissent. Everything. The whole “New Normal” package. It was rolled out all at once, globally.

If your memory of what happened is a little hazy … well, have a look at this 257-tweet Twitter thread of corporate-media articles compiled in March and April of 2020, documenting the initial “shock-and-awe” campaign …

That is the story. How that happened. Why that happened. And who or what made it happen. It isn’t a story about a virus, or our governments’ reactions to a virus. It is the story of the radical restructuring of society based on lies and official propaganda, executed, globally, through sheer brute force and systematic psychological conditioning. It is the story of the implementation of our new totalitarian global-capitalist “reality” … the “New Normal” that was announced in the Spring of 2020. It is not a story the global-capitalist ruling classes can permit to be told, except by “crazy conspiracy theorists,” “science deniers,” and other “crackpots” and “extremists.”

All right, so … the “Covid Twitter Files,” or the “Fauci Files,” or whatever we’re calling them. If you wanted to bury the actual story (i.e., the story I just outlined above) with a limited hangout and discredit those of us who have been trying to report it for nearly three years, you couldn’t do any better than Elon Musk is doing. Instead of a story about how the entire global-capitalist power apparatus coordinated with global IT corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., to conduct a global Gleichschaltung op the scale of which Goebbels could have never dreamed of, censoring and visibility-filtering dissent and enforcing the official pandemic narrative, not just in the USA, but in countries all throughout the world … instead of that monumental story, we are getting The Alex Berenson Show!, starring Alex Berenson as Alex Berenson, with a special guest appearance by Alex Berenson, written and directed by Alex Berenson, and so on.

...

For the rest of you, I will do my best to point out how this phase of the PSYOP works, because it’s going to last for quite a while. The “Covid Twitter Files” are not The Mother of All Limited Hangouts; they’re just one part of it. There are many more limited hangouts to come. The New Normal having been successfully implemented, the history of its implementation is now being written (or, rather, rewritten) to conform to the official Covid narrative, a process which will likely continue for years.

Those of you who are old enough might recall this phase from “The War on Terror.” It started around April 2004, when the Abu Ghraib torture photos were released, and continued until the Summer of 2016, when The War on Terror was abruptly cancelled and replaced by The War on Populism, which prepared us for the implementation of the New Normal in the Spring of 2020. All of which is part of an even larger story, i.e., the story of the evolution of the first globally-hegemonic power system in history, which, lacking any external adversary, has nothing to do but go totalitarian, eliminating all internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity throughout the territory it occupies, which, in this case, means the entire planet.

Sorry … I know, history is boring, and complicated, and not nearly as fun (and cathartic) as the shit-slinging circus that Musk is making of the Twitter Files. Personally, I can’t wait to find out which official “bad apple” they’re going to offer us in today’s edition of the Two Minutes Hate, and who’s going to be released from “Old Twitter Prison,” and, whatever, anyway, don’t worry about all that evolution-of-global-capitalism stuff. It’s probably just a bunch of fancy-sounding nonsense I made up to try to sell you my books, or to make myself sound smart, or something.

Forget that I even mentioned that stuff. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!

[Gnomad]

Well ok, for that role Musk is actually perfect.
I get what you are saying.

[Gnomad]

https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/twi ... t-question

Musk enlisted the help of several journalists, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang. Apparently, his one request was that any information found must first be revealed on Twitter.

On 2 December, the first instalment of the Twitter files was released with the most recent, ninth part, published on Christmas Eve.

So, what have we learnt so far?

Benjamin Carlson provides a good summary:

History changed because of this:

Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption censored;

Covid 19 lockdown debate stifled;

Trump silenced.

You may agree with each decision. But there is no denying that halting information flow and free debate had real consequences.

Many things called conspiracy theories were true:

FBI was working with Twitter and paid them million of dollars;

Blacklists and shadow bans were real;

US intel lobbied to censor accounts;

Covid-19 conversation was heavily manipulated;

Twitter rules changed and enforced by whim.

Censorship is being cloaked in the language of safety:

‘Safety, harm, violence’ redefined to apply to ideas;

Opinions and information deemed ‘unsafe’ subject to silencing;

Jokes, memes, questions about the origin of Covid off limits.

The government is policing opinion:

FBI has 80 staff monitoring speech;

Small accounts on left and right flagged;

FBI held frequent meetings with Twitter;

Facebook, Youtube and Instagram = similar?

Private censors & police control what you say and to whom.

Social media executives lie freely:

Twitter execs repeatedly and publicly denied shadow bans;

In reality, bans were in place as “visibility filtering”;

Ultimately, no accountability to public.

Free speech is controlled by a small group:

Biggest decisions in Twitter Files made by 3-4 individuals;

Despite misgivings and doubts, once made, decisions stuck;

Now it’s Musk.

One difference: his embrace of public polls to set policy.

The slippery slope is real:

Staff rebellion led to Trump ban;

Staff called for mover covid-19 censorship;

2021-22 saw increase of bans and ‘one-offs’.

This is how you get Billy Baldwin in the crosshairs.

Once you silence a president, who has a right to speak?

This is all massive stuff but nothing most of us didn’t already know or suspect. And the Fauci files that Musk keeps saying he will release haven’t been published yet.

But the important question is, why have the Main Stream Media barely reported on it? If we had learnt that the secret services in another country had meddled with elections in their country, it would be everywhere. But happens in the West and nothing.

[DrEvil]

I am sorry, but there is no way I can see the previously-worlds-wealthiest person, who is currently building a satellite internet system for DARPA and Pentagon to use for global war, while playing around with Russian agents and kissing the asses of the Qanon and far right fascists of the US after buying Twitter with Saudi oil money, as any kind of a philanthropist leaker of Important Information.

Nope, just can not do it.

If those leaks were any kind of threat for the powerful, Musk would have been Assanged already. Or Chelsea Manninged. Or Reality Winnered. Or Edward Snowdened. You get the picture.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... cup-final/
Some friends he keeps, too. Jared Kushner and the Saudis, Erdogan and Russian propaganda presenters (Nailya Asker-Zade). What a friend of humanity!

He has in a sense already been Chelsea Manninged. Rough timeline:

- Musk and Grimes break up
- The Babylon Bee is banned from Twitter over their transphobic "man of the year" joke (Musk has already been a guest of their podcast at this time)
- Grimes starts dating Manning, a trans woman
- Musk decides to buy Twitter

I'm not saying this is why he bought Twitter, but it would be hilarious if it was. World's richest man pisses away his fortune over a bad joke.

[Gnomad]

I would not be surprised if that is the reason. Would fit perfectly...And with this https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/articl ... r-AA12Pi6y

As well as the guy who was following the location of Musk's private plane - he got booted too even though Musk claimed he would allow it. And it being public information too, available freely to anyone, anyway.

[DrEvil]

I'd heard about his daughter telling him to fuck off, but not that she was transgendered. It all makes sense now.

It's pretty obvious he almost immediately regretted his decision to buy Twitter and that it was a spur of the moment thing. He spent the next six months doing everything in his power to wiggle out of it, but since he waived his due diligence rights (which, holy shit, is monumentally stupid on a 44 billion dollar purchase) he had to pony up the cash and go through with it.

His only hope now is that AT&T buys it for 100 billion.

[stickdog99]

https://twitter.com/org_scp/status/1616509559366901761

[Harvey]

Pro-War Propagandists: How Bloodthirsty Media Push US Toward Every New War

Glenn Greenwald

https://rumble.com/v28kp4k-system-update-35.html