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OPINION:

The last few weeks have not been good for the corporate media or anyone who values the principle of free speech on social media. From Hunter Bidens laptop to the bogus Russian dossier, to COVID-19 vaccines and transgender issues, glaring errors of journalism and stringent thought control have been proven, once again, to always flow in one direction.

The Washington Post became the latest media outlet to belatedly confirm the authenticity of Hunters laptop, nearly a year and a half after his emails and texts surfaced late in the 2020 presidential election. These materials had been derided by most media as Russian disinformation for 17 months.

The Post story followed The New York Times, which two weeks earlier inserted its own confirmation of the laptop into the 24th paragraph of a report about the ongoing federal investigation into Hunters lucrative, habitual selling of access to his powerful father, now-President Joe Biden.

But still unexamined by the media are the emails that link Mr. Biden to Hunters international business schemes.

Even so, the burst of reporting birthed a segment on CNN, previously unthinkable there, in which senior legal analyst Elie Honig intoned that the case building against Hunter represents a very real, very substantial investigation of potentially serious federal crimes, creating a realistic chance this could result in federal charges.

In the wake of this grudging journalism came news from the Federal Election Commission that Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee were fined a total of $113,000 for improperly disclosing how they paid for the infamous Steele Dossier. The fabricated opposition research document was central to the now-discredited Russian collusion hoax that most media and Democrats in Congress used to undermine the first two years of former President Donald Trumps administration.

Silicon Valley also got in on the action, and as a consultant to GETTR, a new free speech platform, I pay close attention to what happens on social media.

Twitter reminded us that it still wields unchecked power to stifle free speech by suspending journalist John Solomons account for linking to his own story about a peer-reviewed COVID-19 vaccine study.

Mr. Solomon reported on research from Swedens Lund University, which has worked closely with the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, examining how the Pfizer vaccine interacts with liver cells.

Despite the studys appearance in Current Issues in Molecular Biology, a respected medical journal, Twitter ruled that Mr. Solomon had violated its policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.

Apparently, Twitter is now staffed by expert molecular scientists who feel empowered to invalidate complex medical research.

To this point, defenders of the social media oligarchs have claimed that they run private companies, and so can enforce whatever rules they want. But what about when the government is the entity which instigates the censorship?

White House press secretary Jen Psaki has already admitted that the Biden administration flags selected social media posts and certain accounts for Facebook, identifying them as spreaders of COVID-19 misinformation. Its unknown if Mr. Solomons tweet was singled out by the White House, but at the very least, the executive branchs engagement in censorial activity emboldens tech companies and is precisely the sort of overreach the First Amendment is intended to prohibit.

And Twitter has been on a suspension rampage of late, targeting conservative accounts over the alleged misgendering of transgender people.

The satirical website Babylon Bee, commentator Charlie Kirk and Fox News host Tucker Carlson were all locked out of their Twitter accounts for various offenses involving tweets about Rachel Levine, an official in the Biden administration who is transgender.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a congresswoman from Missouri who is running for the U.S. Senate in that state, was suspended for tweeting her television ad about University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who has been dominating womens collegiate swimming.

At the end of this troubling period of overdue reporting and crackdowns on free expression all of which displayed bias against conservatives there was at least the chance for reporters to ask the White House about the revelations contained in the presidents sons computer.

Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield handled the White House press briefing on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, which was good timing since she had dismissed the laptop as Russian misinformation during the closing days of the 2020 presidential race.

Only, not a single reporter asked her about it.

But why would they? Most of them agreed with her back then and dont want to admit their error now.

But is a tiny bit of objectivity really too much to ask?

Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs, a communication consulting firm.

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Media and Big Tech censorship is alive and well - Washington Times

Google has told its Russian translators not to use the word "war" when describing the war in Ukraine, and instead to use vague terms including extraordinary circumstances, according to The Intercept.

The order was directed at contractors who translate Google products and communications into Russian. It's a clear concession to Russia's recently passed censorship law, which imposes up to 15 years of prison time for anyone who spreads what the Kremlin considers to be false information about the invasion. That law is what prompted TikTok and some news organizations to suspend operations inside Russia.

In a statement to The Intercept, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov said the company is working to ensure "the safety of our local employees."

Google has ample reason to believe its employees really could be targets they already have been. Last year, according to The Washington Post, Russian agents went to the home of one Google executive in Moscow and threatened her with prison time if Google didn't remove an app linked to opposition leader Alexei Navalny from the Play store. When Google moved the woman to a hotel, where she checked in under a fake name, the same Russian agents reportedly found her there and doubled down on their threats. Shortly after, both Google and Apple removed the app.

Google has since suspended operations of several of its commercial products, including Google ads, inside Russia. But it's continuing to offer information services, including search and YouTube, inside of the country. These products "provide access to global information and perspectives," Google president of Global Affairs Kent Walker wrote in a company blog post.

Digital rights advocates have emphasized the importance of continuing to allow information and communications to flow in and out of Russia, putting pressure on the Biden administration to ensure sanctions don't interfere with the ability of the Russian people to share and get information about the war that hasn't been filtered through the Kremlin. But ultimately, some of that is out of U.S. tech companies' hands. Last week, a Russian court deemed Meta an extremist organization, outlawing both Facebook and Instagram inside the country.

See the rest here:
Google ordered translators to censor the word 'war' in Russia - Protocol

ABC bleeped out the expletive-ridden exchange that followed Will Smiths blow to Chris Rocks face during Sunday nights Academy Awards but it didnt matter since unedited footage of the incident leaked onto social media just minutes later.

As is customary for broadcasts of live shows, ABCs feed was on a 20-second delay to enable producers to cut or bleep foul language or any other display that potentially violates Federal Communications Commission guidelines.

But while the audio was cut and censored for several seconds, closed captions indicated that the King Richard star said, Keep my wifes name out of your fking mouth.

International broadcasting crews, meanwhile, were beaming the raw feed of the awards show to global audiences. Audio from the uncensored Australian broadcast appears to confirm this, including Rocks stunned reaction: Will Smith slapped the st out of me.

So while ABC may have momentarily spared American viewers the tense Rock-Smith exchange, it quickly went viral on their mobile devices.

Rob Mills of ABC, who was in the networks production trailer during the show, told Variety that it quickly became apparent that the incident was not scripted.

Before Smith smacked the comedian, Rock had made a joke about Smiths wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, being in the fake action film because of her bald head. She had previously spoken about having a hair loss condition, alopecia.

Chris Rock came on and he was doing, I think, material based on what happened that night, as any comedian will do, Mills told Variety. He made the [G.I. Jane] joke. Obviously, you could see the joke did not land with Jada. And then you see Will start to get up and walk up.

Mills added: There have certainly been unpredictable moments where people have gotten up and done things, so we thought this was one of those.

Once Rock and Smith both used expletives in their reactions, it dawned on the ABC producers that this was real.

You started to realize this is real once Chris, who certainly knows the limits of broadcast standards, said, Will Smith slapped the st out of me, Mills said. Thats when it became obvious that this was not a joke.

Due to strict FCC guidelines on the use of profanity during domestic broadcasts, Mills said, he and his team erred on the side of caution in censoring the aftermath.

When youre on the button, which I wasnt but our standards people were, I think you obviously go towards overcorrection than letting something get through, Mills said.

American viewers instead relied on clips from overseas, which do not apply the same rigorous requirements against profanity.

Americans can be a bit more puritanical and outraged by these things, a radio producer for BBC told the Washington Post.

Read the rest here:
How ABC tried -- and failed -- to censor Will Smith slap of Chris Rock - New York Post

On March 27, YouTube removed the entire archive of six years of Chris Hedges On Contact from its platform without any notice or explanation. Even though very few of Hedges shows referenced Russia or Vladimir Putin directly, his association with RT America as well as his opposition to NATO warmongering was all that was required for YouTube to delete hundreds of hours of interviews on a range of political subjects that were critical of both the Democrats and Republicans.

The World Socialist Web Site denounces the malicious and anti-democratic suppression of the archive of On Contact and demands that full public access to it be immediately restored.

As reported previously by the World Socialist Web Site, the Russian state-funded cable news network RT America was shut down in the US on March 3 and all 120 of its employees were laid off at offices located in New York City, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and Miami.

Although the management of the news channel said the network had experienced unforeseen business-interruption events, the abrupt shutdown of RT America was no doubt part of the anti-Russian offensive mounted by corporate media outlets and governments aligned with the US and NATO in the proxy war being fought in Ukraine against the regime in Moscow.

Among the RT America programs terminated were several popular left-wing and anti-war TV shows including Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp and On Contact with Chris Hedges. These programs were specifically targeted for censorship because they adopted an anti-war standpoint that was opposed to the narrative developed by the ruling political establishment in the US and Europe.

This campaign to silence voices critical of the role of imperialism in provoking the war in Ukraine has been extended to the removal of video content from YouTube, podcasts from Spotify and other censorship measures by the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter.

Hedges had denounced as a war of aggression the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. But he went on to explain the war in historical context and suggested that the betrayal of agreements with Moscow, which he covered as a reporter in Eastern Europe during the dissolution of the USSR, as well as the expansion of NATO on the perimeter of Russia likely baited Putin to invade Ukraine.

In a statement published on Substack, Hedges wrote of the censorship by YouTube, The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you dont.

Hedges went on to explain that the lack of oppositional content in the mainstream media was one of the reasons he was on RT in the first place, I was on RT because, as a critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted.

Hedges denounced the Democrats for being the biggest advocates of online political censorship in the US, The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Democrats in the U.S. Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion.

He also drew broader conclusions about the meaning of the removal of his programs from YouTube, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed the truth about the criminal inner workings of power. Look where they are now. This censorship is one step removed from Joseph Stalins airbrushing of nonpersons such as Leon Trotsky out of official photographs. It is a destruction of our collective memory. It removes the efforts to examine our reality in ways the ruling class does not appreciate. The goal is to foster historical amnesia. If we dont know what happened in the past, we cannot make sense of the present.

The actions of YouTube, which is owned by Googles corporate parent Alphabet Inc., are part of a coordinated effort by the big social media platforms to silence anyone who does not adopt the political line of the White House and US State Department and label them as Russian propaganda.

Other recent developments include the decision by Twitter as of February 28 to label the tweets of those who worked at RT America with a message that says, Russia state-affiliated media. Absurdly, this includes the Twitter account of Ed Schultz, the former host of MSNBCs The Ed Show and, starting in 2016, the host of News with Ed Schultz on RT America. Schultzs Twitter account now has the Russian state media label even though he died of natural causes on July 5, 2018.

Also reported previously on the WSWS, comedian and activist Lee Camps 500 hours and eight years of video archive of Redacted Tonight was removed from YouTube and his podcast Moment of Clarity was removed from Spotify. In a recent post, Camp called the anti-Russian censorship McCarthyism, We live in a world of immense censorship that is increasing every day. America claims to be this is the place where we have freedom of press or freedom of speech and yet they are deleting everything that is possibly anti-war and anti-imperialist.

On Saturday, Facebook deleted a popular anti-war video produced by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) without explanation. The video, No Third World War! Against Ukraine war, NATO aggression and German rearmament! resonated with the public and had been viewed over 20,000 times within a few days before it was removed.

The video gained a following because it presented a fundamental truth about the present danger of a world war with nuclear weapons. The SGP both condemned the Putin regimes war in Ukraine and explained how the conflict was provoked by the encirclement of Russia by NATO and the wars conducted by the US and its European allies over the past thirty years.

The new round of online censorship is a continuation of the campaign mounted by the tech monopolies under the direction of the intelligence state apparatus that began in 2017 to prevent anti-capitalist and revolutionary socialist political ideas from reaching wide layers of the working class. With the development of the Internet, and especially social media, over the past three decades, the ruling elite fears that its grip on information and political analysis through traditional corporate media channels has been significantly undermined.

The World Socialist Web Site views as a basic responsibility the defense of all progressive and left-wing individuals and political tendencies against government instigated censorship and repression. We therefore urge all supporters and readers to circulate this statement as widely as possible in order to build public support for the restoration of access to Hedges On Contact archive.

Foreword to the German edition of David Norths Quarter Century of War

Johannes Stern, 5 October 2020

After three decades of US-led wars, the outbreak of a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons, is an imminent and concrete danger.

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Six years of Chris Hedges' On Contact program erased by YouTube - WSWS

There has been much in the news lately about censorship. The major media have been reporting on Vladimir Putin's efforts to keep the Russian people from hearing the truth about his war against Ukraine and what President Biden has called war crimes.

Dictionary.com offers this definition of a censor: "an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds." That "official" can be a head of state, like Putin, the head of a news operation, or even an individual reporter. Anyone who chooses to suppress a story or fails to investigate one because it does not conform to their worldview could be labeled a censor.

Which brings me to the Hunter Biden laptop storyby The New York Times that his laptop and its contents are real, after all. Not only did the Times and other major and social media ignore the story, in some cases the story was deemed fraudulent and blocked on several platforms.

I think the more accurate explanation as to why the story was censored by these entities is that it was broken by The New York Post, which the mainstream media deem a "conservative" newspaper and, by their standard, unreliable. The line favored by much of the suppression press was that the laptop story was Russian "disinformation."

The real unreliable purveyors of disinformation (or no information) are those who failed to do their journalistic duty and investigate. That the story was not followed up on during the 2020 presidential campaign adds to the suspicion, especially among many conservatives, that the information suppression was deliberate. NPR last year "corrected an online article that falsely asserted that documents from first son Hunter Biden's laptop had been 'discredited by U.S. intelligence.'" The correction came after the election. It took the Times and others until this year to fess up. According to the NY Post, 51 intelligence officers who signed a public letter claiming the laptop story was Russian disinformation have so far refused to apologize.

"Fact-checkers" published what they said were lies told by Donald Trump. The Washington Post calculated Trump had lied or uttered misleading statements 30,573 times during his four years in office. No such diligence has been conducted by the major media of Hunter Biden and his family's alleged business and personal relationships with nefarious individuals and corrupt governments.

For years the legacy media has seen itself as the only "legitimate" source of news. In a type of "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it still make a sound?" scenario, if The New York Times, The Washington Post, broadcast and some cable news networks don't report it, is it still news? Yes, it is and the source whether it be The NY Post, UK Daily Mail, or talk radio should not matter so long as the story can be independently verified.

That The New York Times failed to do so until now is a dereliction of newspaper's journalistic duty. Had the information been known before the election, it conceivably might have changed votes in some states where Joe Biden won by narrow margins.

The tardy tacit admission by the Times that the NY Post was right will add to the view of many that today's journalism is driven mostly by agendas and not facts and when information goes against the worldview of reporters and their bosses it is to be ignored.

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Hunter Biden and the many forms of censorship - theday.com