Now that the election is here. Also, is the oh so dystopian term “Election Misinformation” (I heard that in my head while I was typing it in a loud announcer-like voice, E-LECK-SHIN MISS-IN-FUR-MAY-SHUNNNNNN)
So, where do we start….**Taps Pencil Against Desk in Deep Thought**
How about, here:
If Money is Free Speech, Are You Telling Me ‘Trolling’ Isn’t?
My headline if you don’t know is referring to “Citizens United V FEC”. This was the case that asserted the precedent that starting a Political Action Committee (PAC) that is funded by extremely wealthy donors and pays for all the heavy work, like ads, or venues, or attack commercials for a political candidate, and has led to the corruption of our electoral process and allows our elected candidates to be bribed by these corporations that fund the PAC. If that is protected by the 1st Amendment, then surely a meme is, right? What about a meme that trolls someone into thinking they voted by texting a number? It’s dick-Ish, but illegal?
Since the 2016 election, there has been literal prosecutions for what they called a “Voter Disinformation Campaign”. All under the guise of Election Misinformation! Check out this headline:
Social Media Influencer Charged with Election Interference Stemming from Voter Disinformation Campaign
Well, that sounds pretty bad, this was a Press Release from the Justice Department, after all.
“Defendant Unlawfully Used Social Media to Deprive Individuals of Their Right to Vote”
Jeez, he deprived them of their “Right to Vote” huh? Does that mean he held them hostage so they couldn’t leave their home? No.
Maybe they were in line to vote, and he ATTACKED them!? No.
Well, what did he do, this dirty rotten, vote-stealing, right-depriving scoundrel, umm, what’s his name, Douglas Mackie?!
“According to the allegations in the complaint, the defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one the of most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote,” said Nicholas L. McQuaid, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “This complaint underscores the department’s commitment to investigating and prosecuting those who would undermine citizens’ voting rights.”
Damn straight! So, what did he do?
“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote,” said Seth D. DuCharme, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes. They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Ok, cool. So, what did he do?
“Protecting every American citizen’s right to cast a legitimate vote is a key to the success of our republic,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office. “What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process – by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text – amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today will reveal an entirely different story.”
Ummmm…. What?
The complaint alleges that in 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Election, ranking his account above outlets and individuals such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt Gingrich (#141).
Okay, so he’s popular.
As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016, in the lead up to the Nov. 8, 2016, U.S. Presidential Election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates (the “Candidate”) to “vote” via text message or social media, a legally invalid method of voting.
Wait, he trolled them? He was arrested for trolling??? What was this notorious image?
Ah, yes, the dirty rotten scoundrel posted a meme, a troll meme no doubt, but a meme, and some people fell for it, and their response to this is prosecution. What. The. Fuck. So, this is a perfect example of overkill. If ever your response to something as trivial as this, let’s say we accept your premise, that he “deprived them of their fundamental right to vote” once, just one time, and your response is to “deprive him of his right to vote”—because felons can’t vote—ever again, and not just that, you would infringe on his right, which is actually “one the of most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution:” Freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to not be held prisoner. You have lost the fucking plot! Maybe the response to this is teaching internet literacy? Obviously, not to the people who fell for this, they’ve now learned their lesson, but others so when they see shit like this, they won’t fucking fall for it, but you won’t, because they benefit off of the illiteracy if the populace. They pull all the same tricks, so they need us as gullible as possible.
It says in this press release, “What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process – by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text – amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes…”
No, Mr. Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s NY Field Office, Attacking free speech, infantilizing the people who pay your bills, intervening in their ability to live their life and make a mistake here and there, but doing it with the force of the state is not the “contributor” to the erosion of “Public Trust”, it’s the WHOLE thing! Like “The Coddling of the American Mind”, just at a dystopian statist level.
And this is only the beginning.
SOMEBODY, SHUT THEM UP! Stanford said, “I Will…”
In case this isn’t clear, I should say at the outset, whether you like it or not, the constitution protects your right to not tell the truth. I’m sorry, it’s just true. I do believe you shouldn’t lie, but the Government has zero say in what happens to you whether you lie or tell the truth. It’s a personal thing, lying, I’ve been a liar before. Been wrapped up in some doozie’s, and no matter how hard I tried those lies always came to surface, and I was never better off for telling those lies. And the person I lied to—this is the important part—they trusted me less, in some cases will never trust me again, and if they do, I had to work hard and long to earn that trust back, that’s the punishment for lying, but lies are not illegal, they’re protected speech.
If it was illegal to lie Rachel Maddow would be in Bedford Hills Correctional and Sean Hannity would be in fucking Alcatraz! Nobody has the right to silence you, especially not the Government, directly or by proxy. What we’re dealing with is by-proxy, and that is illegal.
“—where courts find that the government speech implicitly threatened retaliation, rather than simply exhorting or encouraging third parties to block speech, that's unconstitutional. The Supreme Court case on that is Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963), where a state commission threatened to prosecute stores that sold books that it viewed as pornography (including books that were actually protected by the First Amendment). And lower court cases have applied that even absent express threat of prosecution, for instance:
[1.] The mayor and a trustee of a New York town sent a letter to a newspaper demanding to learn more about who was involved in an article critical of local officials. Potentially unconstitutional, the Second Circuit held in Rattner v. Netburn (1991):
Though the district court characterized the Netburn letter as simply a plea to the Chamber to rid itself of political affiliations, that letter stated that the recent Gazette "raises significant questions and concerns about the objectivity and trust which we are looking for from our business friends," and it asked "[w]ho wrote" the questions and requested "a list of those members who supported the inclusion of this 'article'." Further, the record includes evidence that, when questioned about the letter, Netburn also stated that he had made a list of the local businesses at which he regularly shopped. The district court's ruling that the language of the Netburn letter, either standing alone or in all the circumstances, is not a veiled threat of boycott or reprisal does not view that language in the light most favorable to Rattner as the nonmoving party….
[And] a threat was perceived, and its impact was demonstrable. Several Chamber directors testified at their depositions that they viewed the letter as reminiscent of McCarthyism, threatening them with boycott or discriminatory enforcement of Village regulations if they permitted the publication of additional statements by Rattner; the Chamber member who had been "in charge of" the Gazette testified that following receipt of the Netburn letter, he had actually lost business and had been harassed by the Village.
Since the 2020 election, thanks to a lot of investigations from high places and low places there have been a lot uncovered about the censorship of political speech that happened during that time. It was something akin to Stalin’s Gulag in the 20th Century. They might be a little nicer at the outset, but their actions are vicious.
The Election Integrity Partnership, no matter how much they try to deny it as they do in a blog post on the website for University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, was created at the request of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which— if you’re not clear on this—was an agency that gained steam post-9/11 to protect us from terrorism domestically. Matt Taibbi documented this extensively in his piece Big Brother is Flagging You.
He describes it as “State censorship in a ski mask” and I must agree.
As I mentioned above, they shamelessly denied being “founded, funded, or otherwise controlled by CISA”. The post is mostly useless bullshit, addressing claims that are just like, whatever, typical addressing-my-haters-type bullshit, then halfway down you get to the interesting part:
False impression: The EIP operated as a government cut-out, funneling censorship requests from federal agencies to platforms. This impression is built around falsely framing the following facts: the founders of the EIP consulted with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) office prior to our launch, CISA was a “partner” of the EIP, and the EIP alerted social media platforms to content EIP researchers analyzed and found to be in violation of the platforms’ stated policies. These are all true claims — and in fact, we reported them ourselves in the EIP’s March 2021 final report. But the false impression relies on the omission of other key facts. CISA did not found, fund, or otherwise control the EIP. CISA did not send content to the EIP to analyze, and the EIP did not flag content to social media platforms on behalf of CISA.
If you don’t get what they’re talking about, it is The Long Fuse (Sounds like a code word for Chris Brown’s leaked dick-pic). The Long Fuse is a 292-page document that analyzes election Misinformation on the internet in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Its conclusion was that this misinformation led to the events that happened on January 6th. I believe reports like this, crushing the peoples trust and hiding the truth is what leads to unrest and events like January 6th, not to mention Agent Provocateurs that are placed in every riot. As there no doubt was on J6.
But, in the Long Fuse, they compile giant files of tweets and posts, like hundreds of thousands, that they flagged as misinformation to send to the platforms for them to “take-down”, or label, or ban, what isn’t said is they are doing this on behalf of the Government, at the threat of losing their Section 230 (c)(1) immunity. If you don’t know “Section 230(c)(1) prevents users and providers from being treated as the publisher of information provided by another content provider. This protects platforms from being held liable for defamatory content they passively host.” This is a necessity for any platform to survive without getting sued out of existence. Let’s say, X.com loses their 230(c)(1) immunity, that means they can be sued for every defamatory thing that is said on X, it’s the difference between being the publisher and the platform. I am a publisher on
, Substack is my platform. They lose Section 230, then Dick Cheney could sue Substack for me calling him a Baby-Killer last week (if it wasn’t true).So, something else to understand, CISA—the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure-Security Agency—is the cyber wing of the Department of Homeland Security. With that being said, you know—” CISA did not found, fund, or otherwise control EIP”—here’s what they uncovered in Matt’s piece (Linked above):
“We just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA,” wrote Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council on July 31, 2020, according to a devastating new House report:
Good God! Hard to say that one is mis- or dis- information. I guess that would be the infamous “mal- information”, which means true but inconvenient. Isn’t it inconvenient when you flat out lie and get caught in that lie? It is for me. I’ve learned the hard way to tell the truth first, it’s much easier and sounds much better from you than from secondary sources after the lie. Let’s continue:
Nominally run by Stanford University, the EIP is really government censorship in a ski mask, a creature of the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Despite media protestations to the contrary, this has never really been in doubt. Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos told the world EIP was formed because CISA “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do its “necessary” work:
See, that’s how you do it! Wasn’t that easier. They hired y’all to help them censor election misinformation, why? Because, the DHS/CISA, being a government agency lacked the “legal authorization” to censor free speech. This was also supposed to be kept quiet because the Government is also not allowed to coerce or pay—or in this case both—anyone to censor free speech on their behalf. It is fucking illegal and unconstitutional.
Listen to what they said of this criticism in their Blog Post:
The criticism of the CIP’s research and team members is part of a larger effort that seeks to undermine work to understand and address online misinformation, disinformation and other forms of strategic manipulation. This effort aims to equate work to understand and address these challenges with “censorship” — functioning to cast doubt on research investigating mis- and disinformation and to undermine interventions that attempt to create more trustworthy information spaces. The rhetoric is similar to that employed in support of attempts to reframe the events of January 6, 2021, and to counter the findings of the U.S. House’s select committee that investigated what led to the violent attack that day on the U.S. Capitol.
These motherfuckers are Shame-Less! It’s kind of interesting though, because the “U.S. House’s select committee” that they cited had a lot more to say…
Here’s thanks to the cited above, U.S. House’s Select Committee for Weaponization of the Federal Government and their excellent report, it’s 104-pages, it’s combined what we’ve learned from the Twitter Files, and Missouri v. Biden, sorry, it’s now Murthy v. Missouri, (but it’s against the Biden Administration) and what they—as a committee in Congress—have been able to subpoena themselves, on “THE WEAPONIZATION OF “DISINFORMATION” PSEUDO-EXPERTS AND BUREAUCRATS: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTNERED WITH UNIVERSITIES TO CENSOR AMERICANS’ POLITICAL SPEECH (That’s it’s title)
The House’s Executive Summary (and more…)
Following the 2016 presidential election, a sensationalized narrative emerged that foreign “disinformation” affected the integrity of the election. These claims, fueled by left-wing election denialism about the legitimacy of President Trump’s victory, sparked a new focus on the role of social media platforms in spreading such information.1 “Disinformation” think tanks and “experts,” government task forces, and university centers were formed, all to study and combat the alleged rise in alleged mis- and disinformation—
—these efforts to combat so-called foreign influence and misinformation quickly mutated to include domestic—that is, American—speech.
It continues…
The First Amendment to the Constitution rightly limits the government’s role in monitoring and censoring Americans’ speech, but these disinformation researchers (often funded, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars) were not strictly bound by these constitutional guardrails. What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex.
Anyone who doesn’t follow
or Michael Shellenberger, this is the nefarious Censorship-Industrial Complex, I constantly rail on about. Didn’t know this was where this piece was going, but I guess it is.Enter the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of “disinformation” academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election. Created in the summer of 2020 “at the request” of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA),3 the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.
This interim staff report details the federal government’s heavy-handed involvement in the creation and operation of the EIP, which facilitated the censorship of Americans’ political speech in the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 election. This report also publicly reveals for the first time secret “misinformation” reports from the EIP’s centralized reporting system, previously accessible only to select parties, including federal agencies, universities, and Big Tech. The Committee and Select Subcommittee obtained these nonpublic reports from Stanford University only under the threat of contempt of Congress. These reports of alleged mis- and disinformation were used to censor Americans engaged in core political speech in the lead up to the 2020 election.
As this new information reveals, and this report outlines, the federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions. This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefitted one side of the political aisle: true information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as “misinformation” while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors.
I just want to say, that these are shapeshifters. I know I’ve been using that term a lot in my last few articles but, what are you to call an entity that goes out of business in one name (Stanford Internet Observatory), when shit gets hot and opens up shop under another name (Stanford Cyber Policy Center). Because Renee DiResta, Queen of the Deep State, has gone nowhere, her name is attached to everything I click, on this Cyber Policy Center Website. It’s early and
with the have already uncovered some of their shenanigans as I’ll get into later in this piece, so what kinda shit will be uncovered by 2028?! Back to the report:The EIP’s operation was straightforward: “external stakeholders,” including federal agencies and organizations funded by the federal government, submitted misinformation reports directly to the EIP. The EIP’s misinformation “analysts” next scoured the internet for additional examples for censorship. If the submitted report flagged a Facebook post, for example, the EIP analysts searched for similar content on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other major social media platforms. Once all of the offending links were compiled, the EIP sent the most significant ones directly to Big Tech with specific recommendations on how the social media platforms should censor the posts, such as reducing the posts’ “discoverability,” “suspending [an account’s] ability to continue tweeting for 12 hours,” “monitoring if any of the tagged influencer accounts retweet” a particular user, and, of course, removing thousands of Americans’ posts.
Regardless of what they’ll admit they sent a file compiled with 2.2 million posts from hundreds of thousands of Americans with every viewpoint imaginable, and as was admitted in a Congressional Hearing as somewhat of a mitigating factor, Jamie Raskin said, “Only 60% received any form of punishment”, to this Matt Taibbi replied, “Does the first Amendment only cover 60% of speech?”
Just saying, all of this from the Report, is just the first 5 pages.
Here CISA affirms that they don’t seek the ability to remove or edit any information made available on social media platforms, but they also state that it may be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies and no fucking telling what they’ll do with it! Don’t that just make you feel all warm inside!
Here’s a page on another tool for reporting election misinformation courtesy of the DHS/CISA:
Oh, and remember when
tried to get sent to prison for contempt of Congress because he mixed up CIS and CISA and Mehdi asserted that this mattered because CIS was a non-profit, not a censorship mechanism of the government like CISA, here’s all three of them working together, CIS, CISA, and EIP:If you missed this here’s that interview:
It was horrific if you are a fan of Matt’s reporting and know the story.
I’m gonna move on from that report for now but I have so much more to write about it, but not enough time, SOON.
Here’s what was asserted in The Long Fuse Report, it was basically their conclusion, and blame-game of what evil free speech led to, page 233 of this Long Fuse, it says:
Doing nothing is not an option. A government by and for the people depends on the people coming together around trustworthy information in order to make informed decisions—including around electing leaders. There is no doubt of the causal impact mis- and disinformation about the 2020 US elections played in the violent insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Maybe it did, but you can’t take that choice away from us.
The Long Fuse was 292-pages of shaming platforms for not enough censorship! It’s fucking ridiculous. Maybe one day I’ll write about it extensively, hopefully not,
has done really excellent reporting on this. I’ll leave it right here for you to check it out any time.I want to talk about what makes this so nefarious to me. Not just the government censorship, we all know that’s bad, but these think tank/research labs, that aren’t attached to any kind of STEM course of any kind. In order for these places to exist, they must make up reasons to exist. This report was done by the Atlantic Council, Graphika, The Stanford Internet Observatory (now Stanford Cyber Policy), etc. This is the new industrial complex! Wait, no it’s not; I think I’m just now totally wrapping my mind around this, I hope whoever is reading this is following me. This is the censorship-industrial complex. Of course it’s CISA and DHS and FBI, but more than that it’s these think tanks, and research labs, and just like American Enterprise Institute needs war, and the Department of Health and Human services needs homelessness, the Harris-Walz Administration needs her to win, and Trump-Vance needs him, the NHS needs disease, and the EPA need pollution, Planned Parenthood needs abortion, these people need “hate speech”, they need election misinformation, just like a doctor needs sick people the Censorship-Industrial Complex needs speech, that needs censoring, without these motherfuckers are on their tail, out of business! These people need censorship to exist. It’s the reason that Renee DiResta goes from podcast to podcast, confidently feeding us this bullshit, fearmongering about Russian troll farms. As recently as this week Joe Rogan, who I love, still repeats propaganda that she fed him 5 years ago, “19 (or 17 I don’t remember) out of 20 top Christian accounts on Facebook are Russian troll farms”, the same type of shit that the GEC said, that was debunked from every level, claiming regular Americans accounts were Russian trolls, it’s infuriating but she needs this to stay in business. This was created as an excuse to destroy freedom of speech. By the way, every western country has a version of this, like Matt Taibbi said at Rescue the Republic, “The end game is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.”
Which by the way, everything I’m saying here Matt has already said 5 times! He’s a fucking National treasure, we’ve got to protect that guy at all costs.
This video by the “esteemed” Atlantic Council, opened with these words:
“The director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and this event is hosted by the Election Integrity Partnership which is a coalition of top-tier research institutions that worked together throughout the 2020 US Elections to detect and mitigate election-related mis- and disinformation the partnership or EIP comprised of Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika, The University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public and the DFR Lab and served as this independent body that worked together with nearly everybody involved in election integrity, on this collective challenge and that includes election officials, state, federal, local government officials, large, and small social media platforms, media, social/civil society organizations, and the wider research community in general”
This was basically a plan to enact policy for censorship. It was completely funded by the Federal Government, to expose “problematic citizens” who need to be censored, who need to be silenced. They call it a “Whole-of-Society” Problem that calls for a “Whole-of-Society” Approach. By the way, Alex Stamos and Kate Starbird, in the above video are the lead censors just like Renee DiResta.
The very best person to listen to on this is Mike Benz, that dude has done the research on everything. I can only hope I can get my point across as well as him. Please take 10 minutes to watch the following video if you care about freedom of speech in the Western world, it’s directly related to this subject:
What just took me 1500 words to explain, he ran through in 13 minutes in front of an audience.
So, now it’s 4-years-later, in time, as it did before, what they have planned for this election, and how they’ll use it to their advantage, we will see, but we do know what’s been exposed very recently. The first I had seen of it was a post from Tucker Carlson, remember this part at 7:25 in the Mike Benz video above he talks about this:
I just want to note here just a few things quickly, which is that this USA primer from 2021, mentions 31 times in 91 Pages how to cut financial support, to cut off Advertiser Revenue, to news media organizations, and to put financial pressure on the tech Platforms in order to kill mis- & disinformation. This is something I really want to stress…
Now a week before the 2024 election we see this:
It’s important to understand that Google—maybe because they were missing money or maybe because they seen the error in their ways—passed a policy last year, a principled policy, where they decided to stop censoring posts denying the 2020 election, here’s what they said:
We first instituted a provision of our elections misinformation policy focused on the integrity of past US Presidential elections in December 2020, once the states’ safe harbor date for certification had passed. Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today's changed landscape. In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm. With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections. This goes into effect today, Friday, June 2. As with any update to our policies, we carefully deliberated this change.
Okay, that’s a solid position. Although they already censored “tens of thousands of videos”, it’s like condemning the Iraq war in 2007. At least they did it. Obviously, some people don’t like that, hence the Tucker Carlson text. In case you don’t believe anything, Tucker says, consider this:
In case you don’t know, Ben and Tucker do not like each other. They might both be Republicans, but due to Tucker’s isolationism and Ben’s neoconservatism, they are not friends. So, this isn’t a collaboration.
It’s very obvious what’s going on here. The New York Times is being used by one of these deplatforming entities to push Google back to their original position of censoring Election Misinformation. maybe even leading to a prosecution like with Mr. Mackie. That’s why they want to know about the YouTube Partner Program. Oh, and Tucker got this one today, I think it could go down in history, especially if it makes it into the piece:
So, what became of the first two text messages?
So, by the way, the Washington Post just published the identical twin to this piece 26 minutes ago from the time I pulled this up but, the NYT came first, and I am subscribed to the NYT. I can only justify paying for one “propagandists” at a time. So, New York Times it is!
If you’d like to read this yourself, click here for an Un paywalled Version
The first line they jump right to the point, Mr. Nico Grant doesn’t waste no time:
In June 2023, YouTube decided to stop fighting the most persistent strain of election misinformation in the United States: the falsehood that President Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald J. Trump.
Just like that, your bias is clear. Them dummies at YouTube—the largest video platform in history—are ruining everything!!!
Not because they’re hosting something nefarious or evil on their platform like child porn, or ISIS Propaganda videos. The problem is election misinformation.
The problem isn’t that they are suppressing free speech, the problem is too much free speech.
During four tumultuous months of this year’s presidential campaign, researchers from Media Matters for America, a group that monitors information from conservative sources, examined the consequences of YouTube’s about-face.
While Media Matters is a progressive organization that regularly criticizes conservatives, reporters and academics frequently cite it as a source on YouTube misinformation because it devotes significant resources to tracking the vast platform.
Media Matters, the Queens of censorship. Useful idiots for the Deep State, their entire goal as an organization is deplatforming people, just like them, that have different views then them. The people who they try to destroy are just like the people at Media Matters, the difference is they don’t want to silence Media Matters for their point of view. Media Matters does. Maybe we’ll find out down the road that these people are funded by CISA too, which is funded by the Federal Government, just as we found out the Election Integrity Partnership was funded by CISA. Remember, CISA is the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, and they justify this with the premise that the American mind is infrastructure.
The New York Times independently verified the research, examining all of the videos identified by Media Matters and determining whether YouTube placed ads or fact-check labels on them
So, in this article, it’s the same old bullshit we’ve been used to for years. It’s not like everyone in the world hasn’t heard all this tired shit. These people didn’t do anything new.
A YouTube spokeswoman said that the company reviewed eight videos, identified by The Times, and that those did not violate its community guidelines.
“The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial, is an important value — especially in the midst of election season,” she said in a statement.
“Most” of the 30 tracked channels are “ineligible for advertising,” and some had previously violated the company’s content policies, the spokeswoman added. “This report demonstrates our consistent approach to enforcing our policies.”
YouTube said it removes videos that mislead voters on how to vote, encourage election interference or make violent threats.
According to this MMA/NYT collaboration, they monitored 286 videos with election misinformation. This is the Partisan/Corporate Press version, I think they’re the same thing.
& did a piece on this showing how the Center for Countering Digital Hate, CCDH teamed with the Washington Post on their hack job on the same subject, the same way that Media Matters of America, MMA teamed with the NYT for this piece. They’d swap back and forth like middle-aged swingers with a meth addiction, MMA/POST to CCDH/POST to NYT/MMA to MMA/CCDH whenever convenient to fill their needs. and wrote:As Grant’s story roared across social media, eliciting outrage from Democrats and Republicans alike, a trio of Washington Post reporters published a similar piece: “Elon Musk says X users fight falsehoods. The falsehoods are winning.” Instead of a Media Matters report, the Post worked off new “analysis” by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Labour-connected advocacy group featured last week in Racket and The Disinformation Chronicle.
Musk created “Community Notes” on X/Twitter as a crowdsourced alternative to censorship, but CCDH was not happy with its results:
X is poised to play a prominent role in the U.S. presidential election, a race in which Musk is a major backer of Republican nominee Donald Trump and spreading unfounded claims of voter fraud — most of which go unchallenged by his fact-checking program… The CCDH’s analysis… tracked how Community Notes responded to 283 posts that contained election claims identified as false or misleading by independent fact-checking organizations.
CCDH’s annual priority this year is “Kill Musk’s Twitter” through “Advertising focus” to drive away X’s corporate advertising revenue, the chief weapon being shrieking reports claiming “hate” proliferates on the platform. This now-exposed contempt for Musk and free speech was evident in the Post conclusions:
The Times/MMA “studied” 286 videos, while the Post/CCDH analyzed 283 Notes. Yet each outlet used a format so common in the “anti-disinformation” era, it now reads more like spam or clip-art than journalism. A DNC-aligned group produces a “report” documenting a sciencey-sounding quantity of “misinformation” incidents, then passes the scary number to a politically willing mainstream news outlet, which trumpets the new “facts” while publicly and privately pressuring platforms to remove offending material. Welcome to the new “accountability journalism.”
The problem with the Times piece is it defines “false claims” and “election misinformation” so broadly that legitimate questions or analyses and even jokes get wrapped in with far-out conspiracy tales. The MMA report denounced content that could “undermine confidence in the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast,” which apparently didn’t include its own headline, “YouTube let right-wing figures undermine the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast.”
Carlson made it for a clearly sarcastic crack: “I don’t think we’re allowed to talk about voter fraud on YouTube, which tells you that it’s real.” Shapiro made it for saying opposition to a Voter ID proposal suggests Democrats were fine with not showing ID, “which suggests they are fine with the possibility of voter fraud.”
Tim Pool was approached by Grant and mentioned in the Times piece seemingly as a way to get in a line about his work for Tenet media, through which Russia Today “allegedly funneled… money.” Neither the Times report nor the MMA version cited an instance of election misinformation by Pool, however. “The New York Times piece was remarkably tame,” Pool said. “There was nothing substantive in it.”
Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch made the list of 286 bad videos by referring to criminal indictments of Trump and saying that if he loses, “people are rightly going to say, well, they had their thumb on the scale, so it’s no surprise.” Again, you can disagree, but is that an issue of fact? Asked if the purpose of the piece was to get him removed from YouTube, Fitton said “probably,” and noted the Post had already sent him queries about yet another article seemingly calling for censorship of podcasts.
Even comedian Greg Gutfeld somehow made the list for saying Democrats would win with “votes, legal or illegal,” though there’s “very little evidence on that, but that hasn’t stopped me before.” This is a self-owning joke and could be interpreted almost as the opposite of a charge of voter fraud. “It’s almost hilarious how desperate they are for content,” Gutfeld said. “They now report on jokes!”
It’s no accident Media Matters and CCDH worked this “censorship two-step” to America’s two papers of record at the same time. They have a history of tag-team action with these papers. In fact, some of the more embarrassing moments in our recently obtained CCDH papers involve the Times and Post.
And here we have 2 more entities that need censorship to survive. I’d love to hear that they were also taking cues from CISA, but I don’t think this is the case. If there was no more hate could there be a Center for Countering Digital Hate? And who out there projects more hate than Media Matters of America?! They are like a nuclear-powered hate machine! It only makes sense that these two are teamed up, by the way, what’s more hateful than Kill Musk’s Twitter! This has been a fun ride down Election Misinformation Lane, we’ve already learned so much and the election hasn’t even happened yet! Imagine what we’ll know by 2028, about the deviltry behind the scenes!
Remember, these people are cockroaches, they’ll always return, and where there’s one there’s a hundred. Never underestimate desperation, and these people are desperate, every expose that comes out about them another door shuts and they start to tremble, keep them trembling, that’s all I got. Have a great Election Day! Remember to vote your conscience! Whatever that means today! Thank you for reading!
, Editor-in-Chief,