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Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024

Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”

When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.

According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”

The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.

Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”

“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.

Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”

“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”

These latest revelations come as other entities ramp up their own efforts to target purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) and TikTok announced a new partnership to promote “science-based information.” Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a Big Pharma lobbying group, this month urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products.”

‘Red-carpet treatment’ for government to ‘silence critics and manage dissent’

Calling it a “fast lane for speech suppression,” Reclaim the Net reported that Facebook “built a slick ‘end-to-end workflow’ tailored to the White House’s censorship needs,” which provided CDC staff with a four-step process to flag COVID-19 “misinformation” for removal.

“This was the red-carpet treatment for anyone in the Biden Administration looking to silence critics and manage dissent,” Reclaim the Net reported. “The system could handle up to twenty censorship requests simultaneously.”

The Facebook document stated, “We empower and safeguard users with policies that are: Principled, Operable, Explicable.” These policies were aligned with Facebook’s “community standards” and adopted “a multi-pronged approach to combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.”

The policies — aimed at “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” — included the removal of “false information that has been debunked by public health experts.”

Other types of content Facebook explicitly targeted include claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous to people than the common flu or cold, and content discouraging “good health practices” — such as wearing a face mask, social distancing, getting tested for COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against COVID-19.

Claims about the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, side effects and efficacy also were targeted for removal, as were “widely debunked vaccine hoaxes” — including claims that vaccines cause autism.

The document also revealed that as of 2021, Facebook and Instagram had removed “more than 16 million pieces of content … for violating our COVID-19 and vaccine policies.”

Repeat offenders faced restrictions, including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations, or “removal from our site.”

The platform also allowed government officials to bypass federal transparency laws.

“By using this specialized portal, and not email, the government could skirt those pesky federal record-keeping laws. FOIA requests? Public oversight? Forget about it. The new system made sure government actions were neatly tucked away in proprietary software,” Reclaim the Net reported.

‘The closest thing to a Ministry of Truth’

According to Reclaim the Net, Robert Flaherty, then-White House director of Digital Strategy and now a member of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, was “barking orders at Facebook to tighten the leash.”

“Twitter Files” documents have shown that Flaherty pressured social media platforms to censor the accounts of public figures such Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then-chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense (now chairman on leave). Kennedy was one of the figures named in “The Disinformation Dozen” report.

“The bureaucratic whims of entrenched CDC personnel and leadership determined what Americans could and could not say — the closest thing to a Ministry of Truth you can imagine in the United States,” Hamilton said.

Author Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of DailyClout, told The Defender, “This shocking new revelation of still more unlawful pressure by the U.S. government on social media companies to strip Americans of First Amendment rights, also fails to shock as it is evidence added to a mountain of documentation of such collusion.”

According to Hamilton, these and other documents may affect several ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration on First Amendment grounds.

“As more records are uncovered through our lawsuit and other open records requests, as well as discovery in litigation, we are confident that courts will have the definitive links necessary to show the government’s facilitation of an unconstitutional censorship enterprise,” Hamilton said.

The latest revelations came just a month after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram — admitted that Biden administration officials pressured Meta to censor content related to COVID-19 during the pandemic.

“If the government can exert that much pressure on one of the largest platforms and its CEO, then it can do it to anybody,” Hinchliffe said.

In an interview earlier this month on “The Kim Iversen Show,” former U.S. State Department official Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. government coerced social media platforms to use “weapons of mass deletion” to censor content and as a workaround to the First Amendment.

According to Benz, this includes government coercion obliging these platforms to adopt automated censorship tools which employ artificial intelligence to sweep platforms for specific keywords or narratives. Benz said many of these tools were initially developed a decade ago for the fight against ISIS.

Benz said the U.S. government urged authorities in the United Kingdom and European Union (EU) to pass censorship laws, in order to then sidestep the First Amendment at home by obliging social media platforms to comply with more restrictive foreign laws.

Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender the EU uses legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) “to stop free speech outside EU borders.”

“According to the EU, the DSA prevents illegal and harmful activities online and protects fundamental rights,” Terhorst said. This means that the EU Commission can decide what is right and what is wrong, including ‘harmful disinformation.’”

TikTok ‘a propaganda arm’ of the United Nations?

TikTok and the WHO on Sept. 26 announced a new collaboration targeting health-related “misinformation.” The year-long partnership is “aimed at providing people with reliable, science-based health information.”

According to the WHO, the new collaboration will promote “evidence-based content and encourage positive health dialogues.”

The WHO quoted Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, who said, “This collaboration can prove to be an inflection point in how platforms can be more socially-responsible.”

Farrar collaborated with Dr. Anthony Fauci and key virologists to draft “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published March 2020 in Nature Medicine. The paper has been used by media and the U.S. government to debunk the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 outbreak and accuse its proponents of being “conspiracy theorists.”

According to public health physician Dr. David Bell, partnerships like the one between the WHO and TikTok are inappropriate. He told The Defender :

“WHO, as an organization subject to member states and with no direct standing over their citizens, should not be involved in such direct messaging. This is a clear infringement of the rights, role and sovereignty of the states themselves.

“WHO acts increasingly like a tool of colonialist corporate interests as it pushes their messages over the top of legitimate authorities and interferes in the running of health systems within countries.”

According to Hinchliffe, this is not the first TikTok partnership with the United Nations (U.N.). As part of a previous project, Team Halo, “the U.N. trained scientists and doctors on TikTok and worked with TikTok to boost their profiles in an effort to combat ‘misinformation’ while promoting ‘authoritative sources’ during the pandemic.”

“This latest partnership shows that TikTok is honored to once again be a propaganda arm for the U.N.,” Hinchliffe said.

The WHO previously established similar partnerships with other social media platforms, including YouTube, which last year revised its “medical misinformation” policy to allow for the deletion of content that contradicts WHO guidance.

The announcement of the TikTok partnership with the WHO — a U.N. agency — comes just days after U.N. member states passed the Pact for the Future.

The pact’s “Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief addresses “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation,” calling for the promotion of “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge” — without clarifying how this “consensus” would be determined.

The TikTok partnership with the WHO also comes before the January 2025 legislative deadline for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations or face shutdown in the U.S.

Pharma wants expanded powers to ‘correct misinformation’

In another related development lobbyists for Big Pharma earlier this month asked the FDA “to expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products, including by allowing them to respond to opinions, value judgments or personal experiences and communications made offline,” Fierce Pharma reported.

The call was a response to the FDA’s draft guidance on “Addressing Misinformation About Medical Devices and Prescription Drugs.” Released in July and now open for public comment, the guidance would allow pharmaceutical companies to issue “tailored” responses to internet-based posts about their products, and “general medical product communications” that would address “misinformation.”

According to Fierce Pharma, “The FDA proposed prohibiting companies from posting tailored responsive communications in response to misinformation spread offline and in response to an individual’s posts about their own experience, opinion and value judgments. PhRMA wants the FDA to lift those restrictions.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 30, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

First COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit in U.S. Targets U.S. Government, Social Media Giants

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 23, 2023

Five people injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with a father whose 16-year-old son died from vaccine-induced cardiac arrest, are suing the Biden administration and top U.S. public health officials.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, the plaintiffs — including Brianne Dressen who suffered severe nerve damage after taking the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine — allege the U.S. government colluded with social media companies to censor them when they posted stories about their personal vaccine injury experiences.

Defendants include President Biden and top-ranking White House officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This is the first lawsuit brought by U.S. citizens injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.

Dressen — a preschool teacher from Saratoga Springs, Utah — volunteered to participate in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial for its COVID-19 shot. Now, she says, she is “collateral damage of the pandemic.”

Dressen co-chairs React19, a “science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from longterm COVID-19 vaccine adverse events globally.”

After receiving the AstraZeneca shot, Dressen experienced extensive adverse effects — including doubled and blurry vision, severe sensitivity to sound and light, heart and blood pressure fluctuations and intense brain fog — that worsened over time.

She said Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, GoFundMe, Reddit and Instagram removed content she posted about her injuries.

According to Dressen, the plaintiffs’ experiences of censorship “pale in comparison to the thousands of Americans we know who all have experienced the same thing.”

“There is nothing scarier than reaching out for help only to be silenced,” Dressen told The Defender. “It was as scary as the vaccine reaction itself.

“Our constitutional freedoms must be protected, regardless of whether or not we are in a national emergency,” Dressen added.

Dressen — who now experiences “permanent disability” with “ups and downs” — said she and the other plaintiffs are “not fighting this fight for a select few” but are fighting on behalf of the “tens of thousands who are experiencing the same kind of censorship.”

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed the suit on behalf of Dressen and the other plaintiffs, who include Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, Suzanna Newell and Ernest Ramirez.

All but Ramirez experienced COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries. Ramirez received the Moderna vaccine with no adverse effect  — but his 16-year-old son died of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

Newell is a former triathlete from St. Paul, Minnesota, who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after she got the vaccine and who now relies on a walker or cane to get around.

Case challenges ‘shocking’ government mass-censorship

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs experienced “heavy and ongoing censorship” on social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and GoFundMe — “when they attempted to share “ their personal experiences after they, or a loved one, were medically harmed after taking the vaccine.”

For instance, TikTok on multiple occasions removed Holland’s video posts in which she shared her personal experiences related to her COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries and recovery process.

TikTok said the videos violated “Community Guidelines” for posting “violent and graphic content” and for “integrity and authenticity” concerns.

According to the complaint:

“This case challenges the government’s mass-censorship program and the shocking role that it has played (and still plays) in ensuring that disfavored viewpoints deemed a threat to its agenda are suppressed.

“This sprawling censorship enterprise has involved the efforts of myriad federal agencies and government actors (including within the White House itself) to direct, coerce, and, ultimately, work in concert with social media platforms to censor, muffle, and flag as ‘misinformation’ speech that conflicts with the government’s preferred narrative — including speech that the government explicitly acknowledges to be true.”

Kim Mack Rosenberg, the Children Health Defense’s (CHD) acting outside general counsel, said the new lawsuit is important because it exists “at the intersection” of COVID-19 vaccine injury and COVID-19 censorship.

“The complaint here alleges — as have other cases — a massive censorship program to control the narrative and promote the government’s COVID-19 propaganda,” Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.

She added:

“Silencing those who have been injured, like the plaintiffs in this case, by the very product promoted — and in some cases mandated — by the government is particularly egregious and causes further, albeit, different injury to those individuals, whose First Amendment rights have also been violated.

“Moreover, censoring these injured individuals injures the public, depriving them of important information and discourse on these issues.”

Missouri and Louisiana in May 2022 filed a landmark lawsuit against top-ranking Biden administration officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants to suppress free speech on topics like COVID-19 and election security.

Former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt alleges the Biden administration led “the largest speech censorship operation in recent history” by working with social media companies to suppress and censor information later acknowledged as truthful.”

In March, CHD Chairman on Leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD filed a class action lawsuit against Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech, including facts and opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Commenting on the new lawsuit, Peggy Little, senior litigation counsel for NCLA, said in a statement:

“Americans injured by experimentally approved Covid vaccines are being deplatformed, silenced, suppressed, defamed and cancelled by their own government for reaching out to others simply to share and receive information critical to their physical and mental well-being.

“Government actors have bullied, threatened and coerced social media companies to strip these plaintiffs of their First Amendment rights of association and speech. Suppression of speech critical of the government by the very government actors mandating the vaccine is frightening.

“NCLA’s lawsuit seeks to restore these plaintiffs’ civil liberties and the free flow of information guaranteed by the First Amendment for all Americans. We must never again lose our constitutional bearings in a pandemic.”

Casey Norman, one of the NCLA lawyers representing Dressen and the other plaintiffs, agreed. He said that the government claims it suppresses “so-called misinformation” for the sake of “public safety and welfare.”

“Fortunately,” Norman added, “the First Amendment says otherwise: the government may neither censor our clients nor induce others to do so.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

May 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

‘Tucker Twitter Files’ Reveal How WHO Helped Twitter Censor Tucker Carlson

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 28, 2023

Tucker Carlson made headlines this week for being suddenly ousted by Fox News — but in the latest release of the “Twitter files” the former news commentator made headlines for a different reason.

The documents, titled the “Tucker Twitter files,” released Thursday by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, show that in June 2021, Twitter sought to censor Carlson after he published an op-ed for Fox News saying that the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous for children.

Carlson’s op-ed cited information that was, up until that point, publicly viewable on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website. However, after Carlson’s op-ed was published, that information disappeared from the site.

The files released Thursday also reveal that Twitter executives held internal debates over how best to censor the content in Carlson’s op-ed — an initiative that was led by a former press secretary for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

In an exclusive interview with The Defender on Thursday, Thacker expounded on the significance of these findings — and hinted at what the next “Twitter files” dump might reveal.

Twitter ‘clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings’

Thacker, who wrote about his findings on his Substack, said that the “bird factory” — referring to Twitter — engaged in “clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings” via its attempted censorship of his op-ed.

Despite being “controversial and polarizing,” Thacker said, Carlson was “One of the few Americans to challenge the official framework of acceptable narratives” and, as such, was “hated by the mainstream reporters for daring to throw darts at liberal pieties.”

“Why did Twitter censor Tucker Carlson? Better yet, who helped Twitter do that?” Thacker asked.

Thacker noted that while he was “reading an endless sea of #TwitterFiles” pertaining to efforts to “censor alleged ‘COVID misinformation,’” he unexpectedly discovered documents detailing attempts to censor Carlson.

These efforts appear to have begun on June 24, 2021, when Elizabeth Busby, a policy communications specialist with “Twitter Comms,” sent an email to colleagues inquiring if an op-ed Carlson had written the previous day should be flagged for COVID-19 “misinformation.”

In her email, Busby inquired whether links to Carlson’s op-ed “violate our COVID-19 misleading information policy and qualify for enforcement under our URL policy.” She added, “We’ve seen some Tweets with the link … and some that contain counterspeech.”

In the same message, Busby noted that “in the past,” Twitter had applied a boilerplate warning “to sites containing COVID-19 misinfo” and “Given Tucker’s visibility, we anticipate there may be some press interest regardless of the enforcement outcome.”

Thacker discovered that Busby was not just an ordinary Twitter employee. She joined Twitter in 2020, after leaving the U.S. Senate, where she worked as the deputy national press secretary to then-Senate Majority Leader Schumer.

According to Thacker, “Busby’s work history includes a stint at SKDKnickerbocker, a PR and lobby shop closely aligned with the Democratic party. Busby now leads ‘trust and safety communications’ at Twitch.”

He also noted that Schumer was “a frequent critic of Tucker Carlson.”

WHO ‘stealth-edited’ its COVID vaccine guidance for children after Carlson’s op-ed

What was all the fuss about? Carlson’s June 23, 2021, op-ed for Fox News — “The COVID vaccine is dangerous for kids, Big Tech doesn’t want you to know that” — referred to language available on the WHO’s website that explicitly did not recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for children.

In that op-ed, which was adapted from Carlson’s opening commentary on that day’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he referred to then-new guidance from the WHO and also recommendations from medical experts.

Carlson said:

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, key pieces of medical guidance from the World Health Organization have proven to be disastrously false — false enough to cost lives. It was the WHO, you’ll remember, that told us COVID couldn’t be transmitted between people, even as the virus was spreading into the United States. It was the WHO that worked in stealth with the Chinese government to obscure the source of the outbreak at the beginning, and then hide its origins from the world. …

“… bureaucrats at the WHO published new vaccine guidance. Here’s what it says: Children should not take the coronavirus vaccine. Why? The drugs are too dangerous. There’s not nearly enough data to understand the long-term effects or to show that the benefits are worth the risk that they bring.

“This is terrible news, of course, for the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma has been planning to test the vaccine on 6-month-olds.”

According to Thacker, the WHO published an evaluation of vaccine safety and efficacy on April 8, 2021, for the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.

For children, the WHO issued the following recommendation:

“Children should not be vaccinated for the moment. There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

“Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults. However, children should continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.”

The information that Carlson appears to have referenced was still on the WHO’s website as of June 22, 2021, according to Thacker. However, after Carlson’s op-ed was published, the WHO “stealth-edited their page,” according to Thacker, and replaced it with new guidance, which stated:

“Unless they are part of a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them than older people, those with chronic health conditions and health workers.

“More evidence is needed on the use of the different COVID-19 vaccines in children to be able to make general recommendations on vaccinating children against COVID-19.

“WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has concluded that the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine is suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above.”

“In other instances where the WHO has updated their vaccine guidance, they note this change with a date at the top of the webpage,” Thacker wrote. “But no update exists for changes the WHO made the day of Tucker’s essay.”

Thacker added:

“While some of the language in Tucker’s piece could be viewed as inflammatory — the WHO did not say the vaccines were ‘dangerous’ — independent experts also were advising that children not receive the COVID vaccines, as rare but serious adverse events were not studied.”

The subtitle to Carlson’s op-ed read: “Even posting WHO guidance could get you censored.”

On April 10, 2021, WHO tweeted: “#COVID19 trials for children are under way. Following proven health measures is still the best way to keep everyone, including children, safe from COVID-19.” The tweet remains online to this day.

Twitter sought to censor Carlson while avoiding ‘political risks’

According to Thacker, the day after the WHO “stealth-edited” its vaccine guidance, Twitter officials began discussing Tucker’s essay — after Busby brought it to their attention.

Twitter employee Brian Clarke responded to Busby’s June 24, 2021, email that same day, writing, “We are going to proceed with labeling any Tweets linking to the article we detect that advance the claim that WHO has deemed the vaccine dangerous for children.”

However, Clarke said, “Given that this article’s narrative is related to ‘big tech censorship’, I want to be mindful that taking action on the URL level could lead to this particular article gaining more traction rather than mitigating the harm associated with it.”

“We’re going to keep an eye on any ongoing discussions related to the article and if it happens to gain traction we will review again under our URL guidelines,” Clarke added.

According to Thacker, “Twitter officials also discussed looping in top Twitter execs, such as the general counsel, due to the ‘political risks’ associated with such actions. Yoel Roth [then-head of Trust and Safety for Twitter] agreed with this approach to ‘escalate.’”

This included a recommendation that then-general counsel for Twitter Vijaya Gadde review any actions taken against Fox News, “given political risks,” while Roth stated that any action against Fox would be “escalated” internally within Twitter.

Joseph Guay, at the time Twitter’s senior policy specialist for “misinformation,” then shared an email with Busby, Clarke and other Twitter personnel, advising them on various options they had available to them to take action against tweets containing a link to Carlson’s op-ed, without directly censoring Fox News.

Thacker noted that Guay, who “seems to have made the [final] call on Tucker’s op-ed,” departed Twitter earlier this year for a position as TikTok’s “Global Policy Lead on Deceptive Actors & Behaviors.”

Upon departing Twitter, Guay, in a post on his LinkedIn page, referred to his work at Twitter policing “the bad guys”:

“Our teams worked tirelessly to ship bold new policies (such as the COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy, or the Crisis Misinformation Policy) to prevent virulent misinformation and cognitive manipulation from bringing harm to vulnerable people.

“I remain as committed as ever to building resiliency to weaponized information, and making it a little harder for the bad guys.”

Guay’s LinkedIn profile states he is engaged in “fighting information threats globally.”

Thacker also noted that Twitter’s apparent distaste for Carlson was evident in more than just this instance.

“Tucker Carlson would have never known this happened, but when Twitter held a meet and greet months, later, they wrote of Tucker’s producer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work,’” Thacker tweeted, referencing internal Twitter documents regarding a meeting between Twitter officials and Alex Pfeiffer, Carlson’s producer.

Thacker wrote:

“Months after Twitter took action against tweets advancing claims in Tucker’s essay, the company met with reporters in New York to strengthen ties with journalists covering social media.

“In their assessment of reporters, one Twitter official noted of Tucker’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work, this was mainly to relationship build.’”

In remarks he shared with The Defender, Thacker noted that Twitter was attempting to strike a balancing act between censoring Carlson’s narrative while not running afoul of Fox.

“They were trying to limit Tucker Carlson’s impact,” he said, “and they were doing it in a way that they would not be brought into direct conflict with Fox.”

According to Thacker, this balancing act nevertheless belied Twitter’s political bias.

“There’s this issue they had with conservative media, and they’re biased in one direction,” Thacker told The Defender. “The way you know this is that the person who brings it to their attention is the former deputy national press secretary of Sen. Chuck Schumer.”

Thacker said that while some of what Carlson had written in his op-ed was “inflammatory,” it nevertheless “wasn’t inaccurate.” He added:

“The WHO edited its website on the same day Tucker’s article came out, and the next day, Twitter starts to go after his story. What do you say about that? Who does Twitter work for?

“Apparently, you don’t question the WHO, or you don’t write what the WHO says. It shows you that you cannot trust these social media people. They are in the tank in one direction.”

Furthering this point, Thacker highlighted a potential conflict of interest between Twitter and one of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, J&J. In Thacker’s previous “Twitter files” revelations, he found that Twitter partnered with J&J on a COVID-19 vaccine “marketing strategy.”

Such efforts were not limited to COVID-19 vaccines. “By the summer of 2021,” Thacker wrote as part of his previous “Twitter files” release, “Johnson & Johnson began a full court press to market a ton of their products on Twitter, including a controversial antidepressant.”

“I don’t know what else is influencing Twitter,” Thacker told The Defender. “Johnson & Johnson was one of the vaccines mentioned on the WHO site, and that was a client of Twitter’s.”

Remarking on the revelations made in the “Tucker Twitter files,” Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender :

“This installment of the Twitter files proves that not only the government but also international governance bodies like the WHO established direct censorship channels within Twitter — to censor information that contradicted the narrative of vaccine safety, even when ‘the science’ contradicted the narrative.

“No doubt we will learn that international NGOs like the World Economic Forum also had such channels.”

Rectenwald was a guest on the final “Tucker Carlson Originals” broadcast on Fox News before Carlson was let go by the network.

WHO partnered with social media platforms to combat ‘misinformation’

Indeed, in several instances, the WHO has partnered with social media platforms such as Twitter to police alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” pertaining to COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures — and has also previously expressed misgivings about Elon Musk’s plans to allow more “free speech” on the platform.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, stated on April 26, 2022 — when Musk was contemplating purchasing Twitter — that Musk will have a “huge influence” over the curbing and potential spreading of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, and that Twitter and all social media platforms must address “misinformation.”

Thacker: Twitter attempted to ‘manufacture consent’

Thacker compared Twitter’s actions to what Noam Chomsky once described as “manufacturing consent.” Chomsky described manufacturing consent in a 2018 interview, during which he said:

“The myth is that the media are independent, adversarial, courageous, struggling against power.

“That’s actually true of some. There are often very fine reporters, correspondents. In fact, the media does a fine job, but within a framework that determines what to discuss, not to discuss.”

However, in an Oct. 24, 2021, interview, Chomsky suggested that unvaccinated individuals should be isolated, claiming they were placing the public at risk.

Chomsky said at the time:

“If people decide ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing the vaccine’ they should then say, ‘well, I also have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want a vaccine but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.’

“That should be a convention. Enforcing is a different question. It should be understood, and we should try to get it to be understood. If it really reaches the point where they are severely endangering people, then of course you have to do something about it.”

In a follow-up interview, Chomsky doubled down on his previous remarks. “How can we get food to them? Well, that’s actually their problem.”

On his Substack, Thacker noted that the media’s response to the recent news that Carlson was ousted from Fox News is characteristic of what Chomsky had once warned about. He wrote:

“The majority of reporters have shrugged aside their colleagues’ reporting fiascoes and the damage done to their own reputations, and continue to blame most failures in journalism on one person: Tucker Carlson.

“So it was not surprising that reporters began a week-long celebration this Monday when Fox fired Tucker.”

Referring to the latest Twitter files revelations about Carlson, Thacker told The Defender, “I can’t believe this is not everywhere, that everyone is not reading this right now.”

He said he will soon release more documents as part of the “Twitter files”:

“There are more stories. I had another story that I was working on, and I pushed that aside to work on this one.

“There’s probably another 10 stories, with more examples of the way they were working with the media, especially the media they favored.”

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

EU demands more online censorship

RT | April 25, 2023

The European Commission has designated 19 online platforms under its Digital Services Act, a move that opens them up to hefty fines if they target advertisements at certain users, publish illegal content, or fail to “address the spread of disinformation.”

In an announcement on Tuesday, the commission named 17 “Very Large Online Platforms” and two “Very Large Online Search Engines,” defined as those reaching at least 45 million monthly active users. Among the platforms cited are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, while Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the two designated search engines.

The decision means that as of August, these platforms must be in compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that came into force in November.

To avoid fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover, the commission stated that these platforms must label all advertisements as such and avoid targeting ads at users based on “sensitive data” such as their ethnicity, sexuality, or political orientation.

Targeting ads toward children will no longer be permitted, and platforms will have to “redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety of minors,” the commission said.

Regarding content moderation, platforms will be required to restrict the “dissemination of illegal content” and “address the spread of disinformation.” The entire text of the DSA mentions the word “disinformation” 13 times without defining it. Free speech activists have argued that the term is often used by governments to silence factually correct yet politically inconvenient narratives.

The commission also warned that platforms and search engines will need to address “negative effects on freedom of expression,” a requirement that could clash with the demand to tackle “disinformation.”

While the DSA was being drafted last year, EU officials singled out Twitter as a company that would be forced to comply with its requirements. Immediately after billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform and set about rolling back some of its restrictive speech policies, EU industry chief Thierry Breton declared that “in Europe, the bird will fly by our European rules.”

Two months later, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova warned that Twitter would face “sanctions” if it breached the DSA. Jourova cited Musk’s banning of several prominent journalists – who shared information on his whereabouts – as potential DSA violations.

April 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Germany and France want Tiktokers deployed against Russia – Bloomberg

Samizdat – August 30, 2022

TikTokers and YouTubers could help the EU drive a wedge between the Russian government and the people, Germany and France have reportedly told other members of the bloc.

Ideas on how its members could influence Russian citizens were formulated in a document circulated ahead of this week’s high-level EU meeting in Prague, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The plan is meant for discussion behind closed doors, but the news agency said it had studied the document.

Berlin and Paris suggested enrolling popular video bloggers on platforms including YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram, and VK to help disseminate EU-funded teaching courses on “media literacy,” according to Bloomberg. The courses will supposedly explain to Russians why they should dismiss “Russian propaganda” and trust “independent information” that counters what the Russian government says.

The EU should also target Russian-speaking minorities in other nations with content that serves the same goal, the report says. There is also a proposal for an “Internet Censorship Circumvention Hub” for Russians.

After Russia attacked Ukraine in late February, the EU significantly ramped up its efforts to silence Russian media within the bloc. Government-funded outlets RT and Sputnik were banned from broadcasting, while US-based tech giants such as Facebook stopped showing content from the news organizations on their platforms to EU residents. Brussels justified the censorship by the need to counter ‘Russian propaganda’.

Moscow also imposed restrictions on media, blacklisting some Western outlets in retaliation and introduced punishment for slander against Russia’s armed forces.

August 30, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mystery of the ‘magnetic vaccines’

By Sally Beck | The Conservative Woman | July 19, 2021

FACT checkers at the BBC, Reuters and Snopes have been busy debunking the Covid vaccine ‘magnet challenge’. Social media including TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have been awash with videos showing people with magnets sticking to the exact spot on their arms where they had received a Covid jab. See some independently verified examples here. 

All three companies went to great lengths to explain why a magnet cannot possibly cling to your skin, without experimenting on a single vaccinated person to see what would happen.

BBC fact checker Jack Goodman spoke to many who said the magnet challenge worked for them and ‘were genuinely curious as to why’. He didn’t provide them with answers; instead he focused on one TikTok prankster called Emily who admitted she’d licked a magnet as a joke and stuck it to her arm.

It has been left to independent associations, doctors and journalists to test the phenomenon. Not On The Beeb founder and award-winning director Mark Playne tracked down a woman called Lorraine whose Instagram post of a magnet sticking to the Pfizer vaccine site on her left arm went viral. The fact checkers said the video was a fake but none of them bothered to visit her and test for themselves.

Playne told me: ‘Lorraine’s son Carl demonstrated the spot of magnetism on his mother. Even though I was inches away, I asked Carl to take the camera so I could try for myself. Feeling a magnet being tugged out of your hand, by a subtle yet defined magnetic force from under the skin of a living human being, is quite a shock.

‘Sensing the magnet being repelled and trying to flip so that the correct polarity was in contact with the skin was mind-blowing.’

A group called the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance (EFVV) representing 25 European countries, took the magnet challenge to the Belle-Étoile shopping centre in Strassen, Luxembourg. The organisation represents over 100,000 medical professionals and scientists, from pro-vaccine choice groups, who are fighting for the 258 million people in Europe who have no freedom of choice when it comes to vaccination.

EFVV randomly interviewed 30 vaccinated and 30 unvaccinated people between June 1 and June 5. There were 15 men and 15 women in each group.

Their published report says: ‘In the non-vaccinated group, the number of people showing attraction to the magnet was zero. In the vaccinated group, 29 of the 30 individuals showed attraction to the magnet. The magnet adhered to their skin without difficulty.

‘Two individuals, a nurse who was one of the first to be vaccinated, and a financial analyst, showed abnormal electric field emission. It seems that people who were vaccinated earlier are more electromagnetic than people who were vaccinated more recently. The magnet adheres faster and holds better than in freshly vaccinated people.’

Some participants were shocked and upset at the results. EFVV said: ‘It was an extremely disorienting experiment for some. One lady cried and said that she had not wanted to be vaccinated but was forced to by her employer because she was in contact with customers.’

The obvious questions are: what is in the vaccine to cause magnetic pull and what are the consequences for the magnetised?

A former GP who prefers to remain anonymous hypothesises, and she stresses that it is a hypothesis, that graphene oxide, a synthetic form of carbon which is being studied as a vaccine delivery method, is the culprit. Graphene oxide is magnetic.

Dr T said: ‘They want to say it is crazy for us to consider that such a thing could be in the vaccinations and yet the literature points to research being exactly in this area for years. And we have magnetic people after vaccination.’

None of the Covid vaccines used in the UK (Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna) lists graphene oxide as an ingredient and all three companies deny its inclusion. So far, independent researchers have not managed to obtain empty vaccine vials for analysis, although international lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, whose Coronavirus Investigative Committee Corona Committee Foundation (corona-ausschuss.de) is gathering evidence surrounding the pandemic response, says some vials they have tested contain graphene oxide while others do not.

Chemical engineering researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, have studied whether superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) could improve the efficiency of vaccine gene delivery, and Chinese scientists have studied graphene oxide for the same purpose.

The Graphene Flagship Project, a collaboration of 150 academic and research groups in 20 countries, is studying the safety of graphene oxide for many uses, including vaccines. The tests began in 2013 in the lab, and in animals, and are ongoing. The researchers warn that ‘there needs to be sound, science-based assessment of the potential impact on human health’ after they found it settled in the lungs, causing asbestosis-like illness. It also settled in the liver, caused cell death, mitochondrial dysfunction, changed the diversity in the gut and caused blood clots in mice after 15 minutes. We know that one of the few adverse reactions that has been accepted by the establishment are blood clots that can form in the brain and body, known as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT). Last week AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson both announced they are studying their vaccines to see whether they can be modified to reduce blood clots.

Dr T, who has tested the magnet challenge on vaccine recipients herself, believes that graphene oxide is in the vaccine, and that it crosses the blood/brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is there to protect the brain from toxins, but scientists have been trying to breach it to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. They discovered that polyethylene glycol (PEG), which is in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA covid vaccines, can cross it and so can polysorbate 80, which is in the AstraZeneca vaccine. Both substances could allow graphene oxide through too.

Dr T thinks graphene oxide could be the ingredient affecting the 12 cranial nerves emerging from the mid-line structure in the brain and the brain stem. These nerves govern our mood, heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, sight, taste, pain, touch, hearing, balance, muscles inside the major organs, neck muscles and speech.

She said that damaged cranial nerves could account for the many serious neurological and physical adverse reactions reported to the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the government body responsible for regulating all medicines in the UK.

The Yellow Card Scheme to July 9 shows 100,564 reports of headache and 9,649 of migraine. Eye disorders are 16,980 with blindness at 327. Psychiatric disorders stand at 20,856 and hallucinations at 1,183. Facial paralysis, including Bell’s Palsy, are 1,310, nervous system disorders 212,708, strokes and haemorrhages 2,207, Guillain-Barré syndrome 377, tremors 10,565 and dizziness 30,715. Pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, seizures, paralysis, nosebleeds, all types of haemorrhage, vertigo, and tinnitus account for another 23,907 reactions. That’s on top of the 1,440 reported deaths.

Maddie de Garay, 12, from Cincinnati, Ohio, who took part in Pfizer’s vaccine trial for 12-15-year-olds, suffered a serious adverse reaction with neurological and physical symptoms that include seizures, loss of bladder control, loss of memory and heavy menstrual cycles. She is now in a wheelchair and she is fed through a tube.

Dr T said: ‘Maddie’s mum Stephanie said her symptoms worsened after she received an MRI scan. MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. If there are magnetic nanoparticles in the vaccine, and someone has an MRI those microscopic particles will be attracted to the scanner – it’s the biggest magnet you can get. They will act like shrapnel, ripping through the brain, damaging everything in their path.’

If patients who believe they are vaccine-damaged experience worsening symptoms post MRI, that should surely be a red flag for doctors?

July 18, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment