“We battled the algorithm and won”

Wednesday, 28 September 2022 — The Electronic Intifada

Omar Zahzah

Meta and Twitter have been accused of censoring Palestinian voices. alexskopje/Newscom

Social media juggernaut Meta Platforms lists “Give People a Voice” as one of the principles on its website.

“People deserve to be heard and have a voice – even when that means defending the right of people we disagree with.”

It seems that Meta employees should have added “fiction writing” to their job description, however. A number of damning recent articles exposing patently unjust experiences of censorship have revealed the company to be more concerned with silencing voices – particularly Palestinian ones.

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Ukraine: How British Intelligence Globalized Online Trolling

Tuesday, 6 September 2022 — Internationalist 360°

Kit Klarenberg

Since the conflict in Ukraine began, numerous commentators have drawn attention to the blatant weaponization of social media in service of the proxy war.

Legions of users on Facebook, Twitter, and other major platforms, many anonymous and recently registered, have relentlessly propounded pro-intervention, pro-Ukraine propaganda, viciously attacking all those deviating even slightly from established Western narratives. It has created an unprecedented situation, which writer Caitlin Johnstone calls “the most aggressively trolled war of all time.”

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How Capitalism—Not a Few Bad Actors—Destroyed the Internet

3 August, 2022 — Boston Review

Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.

AP Sandberg Facebook

The race to commercialize the Internet is over, and advertising is the big winner. This is excellent news if you are an executive or major shareholder of one of the handful of companies that dominate the $600 billion global digital advertising economy. For almost everyone else, advertising’s good fortunes have meant the erosion of privacy, autonomy, and security, as well as a weakening of the collective means to hold power accountable.

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US GOVERNMENT Funds Groups ‘Fact-Checking’ Ukraine Information On Facebook: Alan MacLeod

Tuesday, 9 August, 2022 — Rising

Staff writer at Mintpress News, Alan MacLeod, discusses the fact-checking organizations that Facebook uses to monitor information about Ukraine that are directly funded by the U.S. government. About Rising: Rising is a weekday morning show with bipartisan hosts that breaks the mold of morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before. The show leans into the day’s political cycle with cutting edge analysis from DC insiders who can predict what is going to happen. It also sets the day’s political agenda by breaking exclusive news with a team of scoop-driven reporters and demanding answers during interviews with the country’s most important political newsmakers.

National Security Search Engine: Google’s Ranks are Filled with CIA Agents

Monday, 25 July 2022 — MintPress News

Cia facebook

Google – one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world – is filled with ex-CIA agents. Studying employment websites and databases, MintPress has ascertained that the Silicon Valley giant has recently hired dozens of professionals from the Central Intelligence Agency in recent years. Moreover, an inordinate number of these recruits work in highly politically sensitive fields, wielding considerable control over how its products work and what the world sees on its screens and in its search results.

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The Federal Bureau of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring an Alarming Number of FBI Agents

tuesday, 21 June 2022 — MintPress News

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.

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PayPal Blocks Multiple Alternative Media Figures Critical Of US Empire Narratives

Friday, 29 April 2022 — Caitlin Johnson

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article:

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.

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Just Beyond the Pale

Sunday, 13 March 2022 – The New Dark Age

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”.

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Umm… Are We The Baddies?

Friday, 11 March 2022 — Caitlin Johnson

by Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article:

Reuters reports that Facebook and Instagram are now allowing calls for the death of Russians and Russian leaders in exemption from the platforms’ hate speech terms of service due to the war in Ukraine:

“Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.”

Twitter has also altered its rules against incitement and death threats in the case of Russian leaders and military personnel, as Ben Norton explains here for Multipolarista.

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‘Russian Propaganda’ Is The Latest Excuse To Expand Censorship

Sunday, 27 February 2022 — Caitlin Johnson

by Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article:

“I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda,” US Senator Mark Warner tweeted on Friday.

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Is it already too late to say goodbye?

Saturday, 22 January 2022 — Jonathan Cook

It seems we may have reached the moment when it is time to say goodbye. It has been fun, educational and sometimes cathartic – for me at least. I hope you got something from our time together too.

I am not going anywhere, of course. Not for now at least. I love to write. For as long as I feasibly can, I will continue to rail against injustice, call out corporate power and its abuses, and demand a fairer and more open society.

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ASPI – The Gov’t-Funded Conspiracist Think Tank Now Controlling Your Social Media Feed

Thursday, 20 January 2022 — MintPress News

ASPI Twitter Feature photo Think Tank-Social Media Axis

That ASPI is now partially in charge of Twitter’s moderation, influencing what hundreds of millions of people see daily, is a grave threat to the free flow of information, as well as to the chances for a peaceful 21st century.

The political economy of the podcast and the rise of the left entrepreneur

10 December 2021 —  Ephemera Journal

Pasts, presents and futures of critical publishing
anniversary note

Joshua Sperber

It may seem like another world, but it was only a little over a decade ago that scholars were engaged in an energetic debate over the liberatory nature of the internet. Today, as millions of people spend hours a day on Zoom meetings, navigate their children through ‘online learning’, and write work emails late into the night, the notion that the internet was ever going to liberate us from capitalism seems naïve if not farcical. On the contrary, it has been the internet that has allowed, in the most troublesome sense, the world to go on amid ecological, epidemiological, economic, social, and political crises as we are told to wait out a pandemic by eradicating any remaining distance between work and home or public and private while wrecking our backs, necks, eyes, and sense of peace, autonomy, self-knowledge, and control.

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Golden age or collapse? Snowden teases future without Big Tech after trolling Facebook throughout disastrous six-hour-long outage

4 October 2021 — RT

Golden age or collapse? Snowden teases future without Big Tech after trolling Facebook throughout disastrous six-hour-long outageFile photo: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks at a conference in Moscow, Russia September 2, 2021. ©  REUTERS/Olesya Astakhova
While millions were wailing and gnashing their teeth over the outage affecting Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was having a bit of fun – daring to suggest the world would be better without them.

Evening Standard – “I will not let police be subjected to trial by social media” says Priti Patel

10 June 2021 — Big Brother Watch

Big Brother Watch Team

Home Secretary Priti Patel has supported plans for police to publish more bodycam footage of events to tackle “misleading” social media videos.

She told the annual Police Federation of England and Wales conference “I will not let the police be subjected to trial by social media.”

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Watch Panel Discussion: Israeli Intelligence Colludes with Facebook, Google to Censor Palestinian Voices

24 May 2021 — Mint Press News

MintCast is joined by Mickey Huff, Suhair Nafal, and Jessica Buxbaum to discuss censorship and Israel’s collusion with Google and Facebook.

by Mnar Muhawesh Adley

The ongoing assault on Palestine has captured the world’s attention. The latest violence was sparked by an attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by Israeli security forces, resulting in over 300 casualties, as Muslims had gathered to celebrate Ramadan in the region’s holiest place of worship. Outside, far-right groups cheered as the mosque was damaged, and launched pogroms against non-Jews inside Israel.
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Twitter Deletes QAnon to Protect US from Upheaval; Russia May Delete Twitter for the Same Reason

17 March 2021 — MintPress News

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter has taken action against the QAnon movement, deleting more than 150,000 accounts that promoted the conspiracy theory. This follows a similar crackdown by YouTube. The impetus for the decision was the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6, led by many adherents who believeDonald Trump was leading a fightback against a satanic cult of cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic Party and the national security state.

Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents

17 March 2021 — The Rutherford Institute

“Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”—Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

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Social Media Microtargeting and the Evolving Ministry of Truth

5 March 2021 — Mint Press News

What You Can’t See Won’t Hurt You

As social media replaces actual social interactions, our thoughts and opinions are increasingly coming under the purview of the cybersecurity industry and national security interests that want to regulate what and who can see, talk to and hear in the U.S. cognitive space.