SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.
I wondered why readership, according to my WordPress stats, has plummeted since March of this year and it’s because the Google ‘search’ engine is filtering out searches that include ‘williambowles.info’ as part of the address. It’s no doubt connected to my coverage of events in the Ukraine, given the date, March 2022, when the Russian military operation began. It also implies that these censoring tools were already in place!
Using Startpage instead of Google, results in just a handful of additional results but because Startpage uses the Google engine, this was to be expected.
The best so far have been DuckDuckGo and Ecosia which both return actual links to articles on this site. Google, by comparison, returns just 2 hits, the home page and the About page, that’s all I get! So that explains why I’m now getting so few visits, censorship. I might add, that there are over 27,000 stories on this site and no doubt, people doing specific searches would be denied access to any hits on this site!
And another thing about Google; it’s insinuated itself into the essential elements that make the Internet work, making it de facto indispensible to its functioning. I proved this to myself a couple of months ago by canceling my Google subscription and a lot of things I did normally on the Internet, no longer worked!
Corporate capitalism at work, creating an effective monopoly out of what was meant to be a shared, collective resource.
I might also add that it’s only because I have around 1000 subscribers, possibly a lot more via my old Google Feedburner feed that I no longer have access to, that I get the readership that I do. But of course, what the Google censor does is deny access to alternative views of events that people might be searching for. It’s insidious and apparently legal! Isn’t democracy wonderful.
I have since discovered that virtually all independent news and information sites are getting the same treatment! This is blanket censorship across a vast range of sources!
Journalists and staff of civil society groups in the UK could be sentenced to life imprisonment for offences committed under the government’s proposed new National Security Bill.
Priti Patel leaves St Paul’s Cathedral with other ministers after the Platinum Jubilee service on Friday. (Photo: Andrew Parsons / No 10)Journalists who receive some funding from foreign governments are at risk of committing offences under a bill that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The risk also applies to individuals working for civil society organisations such as human rights groups.
Caitlin Johnstone
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We’re in the final countdown to British Home Secretary Priti Patel’s decision on the fate of Julian Assange, with the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition to the United States due to be approved or rejected by the end of the month. Joe Lauria has a new article out with Consortium News on the various pressures that Patel is being faced with from both sides of this history-making issue at this crucial time.
Caitlin Johnstone
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Twitter has published what it calls a “crisis misinformation policy” announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to “situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters.”
No citizen journalist, who values their life, should go anywhere near Ukraine’s Nazi psychotics, Declan Hayes writes.
After first citing the Armenian Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking to gain historical context, this article examines the recent Ukrainian arrest of citizen journalist Gonzalo Lira López and the smear campaigns against Patrick Lancaster and Graham Philips to explore the role of citizen journalists in NATO’s ongoing wars, Ukraine’s included. In concluding by examining the matrix NATO uses to weaponize their work, the article allows readers to evaluate the charges NATO lays against this website and its other citizen journalist targets in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria and domestically as well.
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by Juan Bordera
Antonio Turiel (Spanish National Research Council)
Fernando Valladares (Spanish National Research Council)
Marta García Pallarés
Javier de la Casa (Ecological and Forestry Applications Center)
Fernando Prieto (Sustainability Observatory)
Ferran Puig Vilar (engineer and climate expert)
Originally published in CTXT – Contexto y Acción, translation published by MR Online.
The Summary for Policymakers for the April 2022 Working Group III Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the third part of the IPCC’s 2021-2022 Sixth Assessment Report addressing Mitigation , is according to UN Secretary General António Guterres, “a litany of broken climate promises.… Simply put, they [the vested interests] are lying,” denying the science, present in the report as a whole but excluded or downplayed in the Summary for Policymakers.
Caitlin Johnstone
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In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.
BY KIT KLARENBERG
Defense and Security Media Advisory Commitee members from 2021 (Photo from DSMA’s government website and in the public domain)This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.
On April 20, a British judge approved the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the U.S., to face trial under the Espionage Act. Home Secretary Priti Patel will now decide whether to sign off on the decision.
By Mnar Adley
By Ekaterina Blinova
There are only a handful of Western journalists on the ground in Donbass, while the Western mainstream press is rubber-stamping fake news about the Ukrainian crisis using the same templates it previously exploited in Iraq, Libya and Syria, says Dutch independent journalist Sonja van den Ende.
Sonja van den Ende, an independent journalist from Rotterdam, Netherlands, went to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as an embedded reporter with the Russian army to see how the special operation is unfolding with her own eyes.Listen to a reading of this article:
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YouTube has been deleting videos disputing the US government narrative about Russian war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine, validating concerns we’ve discussed previously that Silicon Valley platforms would begin censoring anyone who challenges the authorized version of events in this war.
We artists, musicians and other public figures and organisations are deeply concerned by the coordinated campaign against rapper and campaigner Lowkey.
On 18 March 2022, I received a letter in my e-mail box from a certain Edward O’Reilly, an analyst for NewsGuard, a sort of international Decodex (which awards green or red stickers to news sites, i.e. justifies the censorship of such and such a site), linked to the CIA, NATO and the White House, concerning their analysis of the Donbass Insider site. After having sent them packing when they saw the obvious bias of this site, they insisted and sent me a week later a series of questions, which contradict each other, and written in such a way that one has the impression that the author is writing to a 10 year old girl. Since they are so keen to have me answer them, while giving themselves the right to publish only part of my answers in their analysis (as they indicate in their e-mail), I will do so publicly, so that all my readers can have the whole of the information, and not just the part that would suit NewsGuard.
NewsGuard, a site linked to the CIA, NATO and the White House.
Let’s start by analyzing who is behind NewsGuard, a site that claims to analyse and rate news sites according to nine criteria to determine whether or not they are reliable.
The media wants us to believe that Putin is solely responsible for tensions in Ukraine. But this narrative conveniently leaves out the decades of Western aggression towards Russia that got us here. BT’s Kei Pritsker explains why the only path to peace is ending NATO’s expansion along Russia’s border.
Author: Brian Berletic
The elimination of Russian media across the West and to a greater extent from across US-based social media platforms used worldwide, is a stark demonstration of the power the West still wields within global information space.
By Supratim Barman
In a Globalised World, when we see images of the conflict that is currently occurring in Ukraine on our News Feeds, Whatsapp Groups, Telegram Twitter and Instagram; as well as of course on our TeleVision sets; we tend to lose sight of the human element and how close it could have been us instead. We sit far away and analyse it, show our support for the Corporation side by posting stickers and flags on our social media profiles and we feel good; as if we have done something worthwhile with our day. As if we have somehow “helped”.
The New Dark Age 