Biden FBI to resume colluding with Big Tech after Supreme Court rejects free speech case

From LifeSiteNews

The most dangerous aspect to the issue is the extent to which the government actively encourages private companies to censor disfavored speech, something in which emails, public statements, congressional investigation, leaked documents, and even open admissions have implicated the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s FBI intends to resume meetings with social media companies on content decisions, a month after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid to stop such coordination as infringing on free speech.

National Review reports that U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s July 2024 report on the DOJ’s “Efforts to Coordinate Information Sharing About Foreign Malign Influence Threats to U.S. Elections” contains a memo stating that the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential FMI [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”

Horowitz’s report “make[s] two recommendations to ensure that DOJ takes a public and strategic approach to sharing information with social media companies in a manner that protects First Amendment rights to combat foreign malign influence directed at U.S. elections,” ostensibly to build trust with the general public.

The first is to “[d]evelop an approach for informing the public about the procedures the Department has put into place to transmit foreign malign influence threat information to social media companies that is protective of First Amendment rights.” The second is to “[d]evelop and implement a comprehensive strategy to ensure that the Department of Justice’s approach to information sharing with social media companies to combat foreign malign influence directed at U.S. elections can adapt to address the evolving threat landscape.”

For years, conservatives and other dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy have criticized the world’s largest online information and communications platforms, including Google, Facebook, and (until ownership changed hands in late 2022) Twitter, for using their vast influence to slant the news, sources, ideas, and arguments their users see and share through their services. One of their chief rationales for doing so was to prevent “misinformation” from influencing elections, which critics denounce as merely a pretext to sway elections in their favor.

The most dangerous aspect to the issue is the extent to which the government actively encourages private companies to censor disfavored speech, something in which emails, public statements, congressional investigation, leaked documents, and even open admissions have implicated the Biden administration.

Starting under the Trump administration and continuing into the Biden White House, the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) have factored heavily into these activities, working with Stanford University and other entities to establish the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), through which requests to censor “thousands” of conservative posts could be laundered so as to keep the government’s fingerprints off censorship decisions.

The news of the FBI resuming meetings with Big Tech follows the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in June’s Murthy v. Missouri, which concerned whether the federal government “asking” platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to delete objectionable content constitutes government censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Rather than answer that question, the Court’s majority decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled that the plaintiffs – the states of Louisiana and Missouri as well as social media users themselves – lacked standing to bring the case.

The court’s three most conservative justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented, writing that “[w]hen the White House pressured Facebook to amend some of the policies related to speech in which [one plaintiff] engaged, those amendments necessarily impacted some of Facebook’s censorship decisions. Nothing more is needed.”

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Brownstone Institute

The Curious Case of Mark Zuckerberg

Published on September 7, 2024

Todayville

From the Brownstone Institute

By Andrew Lowenthal

On August 27, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming what the Twitter Files, Murthy vs. Missouri, and many others had long claimed – that the Biden administration aggressively pushed to censor First Amendment-protected speech on social media, in particular relating to Covid-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop.

In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg writes that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including “humor and satire.”

Zuckerberg also notes that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of. The laptop was not “disinformation”, it was real and Twitter and Facebook wrongly suppressed the New York Post story that exposed it.

But Zuckerberg’s statement missed a key detail – at least three Facebook staff members participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden table-top exercise that game-planned how to suppress the story two months in advance of the New York Post story.

The Aspen Institute “table-top” brought together a host of media and Big Tech including Facebook, the New York Times, Twitter, the Washington Post, and “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft, to create their very own disinformation operation, literally planning day-by-day how they would respond to the leak.

Zuckerberg, however, writes, “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”

You can almost see the fall maple leaves feathering their way innocently to the forest floor.

“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.”

But there was no surprise, as Facebook had participated in the Aspen exercise two months before the story broke.

Even for Aspen’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the exercise, things went even better than planned:

Regarding Covid-19, Zuckerberg says the government “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor.” Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, he only mentions they were “warned” “about a potential Russian disinformation operation.” There is no mention of pressure to censor. Did the federal government push Facebook to attend the Aspen Institute exercise? It seems they attended of their own volition.

Attending the Aspen suppression planning for Facebook was Nathaniel Gleicher, “head security policy at Meta,” who continues in his position to this day. The Twitter Files show Gleicher also met regularly with the Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI, and participated in a Harvard-led pre-election tabletop with the DoD whilst the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed on Facebook.

Surely someone as senior as Gleicher, tasked as he was with such sensitive and high-level contacts, would have told his boss about his attendance? After all, the laptop story could have a real impact on the outcome of a presidential election.

Twitter’s Yoel Roth also attended the Aspen exercise and played a critical role in suppressing the Hunter Biden story on that platform. Did Gleicher play the same role at Facebook? Gleicher’s participation has been known publicly since Michael Shellenberger first broke that story, 18 months and more than 100 million impressions ago.

If Zuckerberg believes suppressing the story was wrong, why has he kept Gleicher in such a senior role? If he knew of Gleicher’s participation in the Aspen exercise, why didn’t he blow the whistle at the time? Instead, he places all the blame at the foot of the federal government. No doubt they exerted pressure, but that does not appear to be the whole story.

Is Zuckerberg attempting to absolve himself of responsibility?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Andrew Lowenthal

Andrew Lowenthal is a Brownstone Institute fellow, journalist, and the founder and CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties initiative. He was co-founder and Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific digital rights non-profit EngageMedia for almost eighteen years, and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

Censorship Industrial Complex

Canada wants to add DEI measures to globalist WHO pandemic treaty

Published on September 6, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Canada is suggesting measures to counteract ‘misinformation’ and promote ‘marginalized’ groups are included in the WHO pandemic treaty, an initiative which experts have warned will undermine national sovereignty.

Canada wants to add misinformation and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures to the World Health Organization’s controversial global pandemic treaty.

According to a July summary report from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), Canada is suggesting measures to counteract “misinformation” and promote “marginalized” groups be added to the WHO global pandemic treaty.

“Comprehensive prevention strategies, inclusive surveillance practices, and addressing challenges for marginalized communities are essential for effective pandemic prevention,” it said.

“Data ownership, privacy, inclusivity, race-based data and cultural sensitivity are important issues which could be given greater consideration,” the report continued.

“Data collection can be a challenge, compounded by strained relationships between Indigenous people and the health system, marked by trust deficits and ingrained power differentials,” it claimed.

The report discussed Canada’s participation in the WHO global pandemic treaty. Formally known as the Pandemic Accord, the agreement would give the WHO increased power over Canada and other countries in the event of another “pandemic” or other so-called emergencies. 

The PHAC report further discussed the importance of countering so-called “misinformation” in the event of another pandemic.

“Countering misinformation and disinformation is critical to pandemic response efforts, as seen by its impact on vaccination and immunization rates around the world,” the report said.

However, it seems unlikely that those “countering misinformation” would work to safeguard opinions that differ from the globalist narrative, considering Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy which protested COVID regulations.

In addition to using violent police force to drive the protestors out of Ottawa, the Trudeau government froze the bank accounts of Canadians who donated to the protest.

In addition to potentially suppressing legitimate opinion, Conservative MP Colin Carrie has warned that the treaty could “institutionalize” freedom-throttling COVID “pandemic mistakes.”

Similarly, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis has repeatedly warned that the new International Health Regulations (IHR) contained in the treaty will compromise Canada’s sovereignty by giving the international organization increased power over Canadians.   

Lewis also gave her endorsement of a petition demanding the Liberal government under Trudeau “urgently” withdraw from the United Nations and its WHO subgroup, due to the organizations’ undermining of national “sovereignty” and the “personal autonomy” of citizens.    

The petition warned that the “secretly negotiated” amendments could “impose unacceptable, intrusive universal surveillance, violating the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Canadian Bill of Rights and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”