Will Elon Musk Turn Twitter’s Tide Against Censorship?
- November 23, 2022
Story at-a-glance
- Within weeks of Elon Musk taking over Twitter, information gatekeepers and controllers are panicking about rising engagement on posts from people accused of spreading misinformation
- According to NewsGuard, the Mercola Twitter account saw the largest increase in likes and retweets out of those that have previously been most heavily censored
- Two weeks before Musk’s takeover, we had 932 engagements in a seven-day period. During the first week after Musk’s takeover, we had 19,259 engagements, a 1,966.4% increase, which NewsGuard claims is proof that dangerous falsehoods are again proliferating
- Even if Twitter allows free speech, censorship stakeholders span every major media conglomerate, online payment provider, college and university, hundreds of think tanks, NGOs, international regulators and watchdog groups. Censorship is also the policy of the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence services
- What we face is a corporate stronghold over media combined with a state-run propaganda machine. Countless private-public partnerships between government and corporations bind the two camps together in a pact to dictate “truth” to the public, and they’re on the same page, because their interests are identical. The goal is a One World Government
With Elon Musk now behind the wheel at Twitter, will the platform become a safe haven for free speech? Time will tell, but for now, things seem to be moving in the right direction. Of course, information gatekeepers and controllers are already going into convulsions over the fact that engagement on posts from sites like mine have gone up from near-nonexistent to negligible.
NewsGuard in a Panic
November 11, 2022, self-proclaimed arbiter of truth, NewsGuard, wrote:1
“In the week following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the most popular untrustworthy accounts enjoyed a 57.04% increase in engagement in the form of likes and retweets, according to a survey undertaken by NewsGuard ...
In the week after the acquisition (Oct. 27, 2022-Nov. 3, 2022), tweets posted by the 25 most-followed Twitter accounts that are tracked by NewsWhip, a social media monitoring company, and linked to publishers that NewsGuard has assessed as repeatedly spreading false information garnered 3,115,664 likes and retweets ...
Two weeks prior to the acquisition, Oct. 13-Oct. 20, 2022, those same accounts received 1,983,953 likes and retweets. (Likes and retweets constitute overall ‘engagement.’) That accounts for a 57.04% cumulative increase post-Musk. (Note: These 25 accounts are in the top-50 most followed NewsGuard-rated untrustworthy accounts ...)
For example, the interactions of the Twitter account linked to Mercola.com — a website of healthcare hoax purveyor Joseph Mercola that has published numerous false claims about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic — rose from 932 to 19,259, a 1966.42% increase in engagement and the largest increase measured by NewsGuard. At the same time, the account’s tweet volume rose from 6 to 23.”
A Fragile House of Cards
Oh boy, a rise in engagement from 932 likes and retweets to 19,259! Nineteen thousand people engaged with my articles, and the roof is caving in on propaganda headquarters. That’s how fragile their house of cards is. To be clear, 19,000 engagements in a week are nothing compared to the reach and engagements we used to have.
Even more ridiculous is NewsGuard’s panic over the “explosion” of exposure of Dr. Christiane Northrup, whose weekly engagement tally rose from 63 to 704 after Musk’s entry into the wheelhouse. Just incredible. How are they ever going to keep the brainwashing going when 700 people are exposed to the likes of Northrup?! In a single week!
Sarcasm aside, this just goes to show how desperate the propagandists are. To top off their indignation, Musk has not replied to the emails and calls made by NewsGuard in November “asking about its handling of untrustworthy accounts and the boost in engagement for misinformation spreaders.” The nerve.
Forces Driving Internet Censorship Are Formidable
That said, some analysts predict Musk’s Twitter takeover will have little effect on censorship, on or off Twitter. Writing for Townhall in early May 2022, columnist Mike Benz noted:2
“As a former State Department diplomat in charge of the ‘Big Tech’ portfolio, I have had a privileged glimpse into the myriad forces driving modern Internet censorship.
Having seen what Musk is up against first-hand, I feel little elation at the arrival of the Deus Ex Muskina. From 2006 to 2016, censorship was an act. In the five years that followed, censorship became an industry.
Its powerful stakeholders now span every major media conglomerate, every major online payment provider, every major US and UK college and university, hundreds of think tanks, NGOs and pressure groups, international regulatory and watchdog commissions, and is now firmly interwoven with the policies and operations of the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence services ...
Last week [end of April 2022], tech investor and Facebook board member Marc Andreesen tweeted that online censorship will become increasingly standardized, moving ‘up the stack’ into cloud platforms, email clients, browsers, and operating systems.
It’s already happening. Just this week, Google embedded AI censorship into its Google Docs word processor to add friction for users engaged in wrongspeak.
Microsoft already changed its Windows terms of service in 2019 to ban PC users engaged in undefined ‘hate speech’ ... Inevitably, the censorship industry will promote rule-of-law pretexts to force Musk to crush a free speech Twitter.”
A Global Web of Players Promote Censorship
In addition to those listed by Benz, additional censorship stakeholders and promoters are detailed in “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth.” A key hub within this vast network are PR firms that represent the corporatocracy (the economic, political and judicial systems controlled by corporations).
The role of the free press is to counter industry propaganda. Over time, that role was subverted through advertising. This is why news outlets rarely, if ever, touch on anything that might damage their advertisers.
In addition to that already powerful incentive to censor the truth, there’s the fact that the U.S. government legalized the use of state propaganda against American citizens in 2012.
So, what we face now is a corporate stronghold over media combined with a state-run propaganda machine. Countless private-public partnerships between government and corporations bind the two camps together in a pact to dictate “truth” to the public, and they’re on the same page, because their interests are identical.
The goal is to sacrifice United States’ sovereignty to a One World Government, using the need for global biosecurity and the impending threat of climate change as justifications for doing so.
The Role of PR Companies
To that end, we have centralized propaganda hubs like the Publicis Groupe, one of the largest PR firms in the world, which represents a long list of major companies within the technology, pharmaceutical and banking industries AND is a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Google,3,4 AND funded the startup of NewsGuard.
Those connections alone give Publicis the ability to direct and control censorship through fact checkers and online search engines.
NewsGuard, in turn, is partnered with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, the World Health Organization5 and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a dark money group with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that is calling for the weaponization of intelligence and national defense against citizens who see through the propaganda.
The WEF, meanwhile, is leading the call for a “reset” of the global economy and a complete overhaul of our way of life, and its partner Publicis appears to play an important role, coordinating the suppression of information that runs counter to the WEF’s technocratic, transhumanist narrative.
Incidentally, Publicis began investing in artificial intelligence technology in 20176 and partnered with Microsoft in 2018 to develop a global AI platform.7 It also purchased the data firm Epsilon in 2019,8 thereby establishing ownership of first-party data — a crucially valuable resource when it comes to the use of AI. Of course, AI is an indispensable tool in the digital surveillance and control structure the globalist cabal is trying to erect.
While it’s easy to dismiss Publicis as just another ad agency, I believe it would be foolish to underestimate its power to organize the kind of coordination required to shut down vaccine concerns, anti-lockdown proponents and people trying to educate their fellow man about the dangers of The Great Reset, which is being brought forth as a “necessary” post-COVID step.
While these things may seem unrelated, they’re really not. The Great Reset involves all aspects of society — including health, education, government, economics, business practices, environmental “protections” and much more.
Fighting for Transparency and Free Speech
With forces this formidable against us, is it even possible to rein in the tyranny, push back the censorship and reclaim our rights? I don’t know, but we have to try, and using what power remains within the judicial system is the first option.
So, in late 2021, I filed a lawsuit against U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both in her official and personal capacities, for violating my First Amendment rights. In early September 2021, she had sent a letter9 to Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.com, demanding an “immediate review” of Amazon’s algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation,” stressing that Amazon’s sale of such books was “potentially unlawful.”10,11,12
She specifically singled out my book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” co-written with Ronnie Cummins, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), as a prime example of “highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures” that she wanted banned.
There’s no doubt our book is constitutionally protected speech, and that Warren’s letter was calling on Amazon to suppress protected speech. As a government official, it is illegal for Warren to violate the U.S. Constitution, and pressuring private businesses to do it for her is not a legal workaround.
Then, in September 2022, I sued YouTube, Google and Alphabet Inc. for breach of contract. September 29, 2021, Google deleted my YouTube account for “violating community guidelines” they’d implemented that same morning. YouTube unilaterally amended the contract without notice, which is a violation of its own terms, and then used this last-minute amendment to remove my content.
YouTube’s terms of service also include a “three strikes” policy, where users are supposed to be given three warnings and opportunities to remove content that violates the guidelines before being banned. I had no “strikes” against my channel on the day I was deplatformed and deleted, which is, again, a breach of contract.
I’m also suing YouTube for unjust enrichment, as for the last 16 years, my video content, having generated in excess of 50 million views, has been of great financial benefit to YouTube, allowing them to increase advertising revenue on the site. Both of these lawsuits are still winding their way through the corridors of justice.
Window Into Government’s Illegal Censorship Is Opening
Others have also taken the fight to court. The New Civil Liberties Alliance and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) sued the federal government in May 202213 for violating Americans First Amendment rights by colluding with social media companies to censor on the government’s behalf.
In early October 2022, 47 additional defendants were added to the lawsuit, bringing the total number of named defendants to 67.14,15 As reported by the New Civil Liberties Alliance September 1, 2022:16
“... scores of federal officials ... have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful.
Under the First Amendment, the federal government may not police private speech nor pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. But that is precisely what the government has done — and is still doing — on a massive scale not previously divulged.”
Identifying and Exposing ‘The Swamp’
Discovery documents obtained have identified upward of 70 federal employees across more than a dozen federal agencies, engaged in illegal censorship activities, including officials from:
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Election Security and Resilience team |
Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis |
The FBI’s foreign influence taskforce |
The Justice Department’s (DOJ) national security division |
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence |
White House staff (including White House lawyer Dana Remus, deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty and former White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt) |
Health and Human Services (HHS) |
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) |
National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) |
The Office of the Surgeon General |
The Census Bureau |
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) |
The State Department |
The U.S. Treasury Department |
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission |
Emails from the strategic communications and marketing firm Reingold17 also reveal outside consultants were hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media to violate Americans’ Constitutional free speech rights.
Notable tech participants in the censorship meetings include Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Pinterest, LinkedIn and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Biden Administration Denied Executive Privilege
Not surprisingly, the White House has not cooperated with discovery and have fought to keep communications secret — especially with regard to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s correspondence — claiming all White House communications as “privileged.”
However, executive privilege does not apply to external communications, so the plaintiffs called on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to “overrule the government defendants’ objections and order them to supply this highly relevant, responsive and probative information immediately.”
September 6, 2022, Judge Terry Doughty rejected the Biden administration’s claim of executive privilege and ordered the White House to hand over any and all relevant records,18,19 including correspondence to and from Fauci, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and many others.
DOJ Begging for Depositions To Be Sealed
October 21, 2022, the court also authorized20 expedited depositions of eight key federal officials named in the AGs case: Fauci, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, director of White House digital strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, CISA director Jen Easterly, FBI supervisory special agent Elvis Chan, chief of the digital media branch of the CDC Carol Crawford, and principal deputy coordinator of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department Daniel Kimmage.21,22
The DOJ, clearly worried about the fallout, asked the judge for a protective order to keep videotaped depositions under seal. With that, the DOJ has tipped its hand, proving it is onboard with these unconstitutional activities. As of this writing, there’s no word as to whether the judge will grant the DOJ’s request to keep the depositions secret.
“This case has garnered substantial attention from the media and the public,” the DOJ wrote.23 “Some of the individuals whom Plaintiffs intend to depose are career civil servants who did not sign up to become public figures when they joined the federal ranks.
Other deponents who have served in more public-facing roles have already experienced, and continue to experience, significant threats and harassment directed at them and their families because of their public positions; those harms are very likely to increase if recordings of their depositions may be publicly circulated and then misleadingly edited by third parties.
Under these circumstances, all these individuals have legitimate privacy interests in limiting public dissemination of audiovisual recordings of their depositions.”
Support Legislation to Penalize Government Censorship
While the U.S. Constitution guarantees certain rights, including the right to free speech, this inviolable law of the land has not been able to prevent encroaching tyranny, thanks to the fact that those charged with adhering to it and upholding it aren’t doing their jobs. They’re blatantly snubbing their noses at it, pretending as though it doesn’t exist.
In response, three Republican House Representatives on the House Oversight and Reform, Judiciary, and Commerce committees — Reps. James Comer of Kentucky, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington — have introduced the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act24 (HR.8752), specifically aimed at preventing federal employees from using their positions to influence censorship decisions by tech platforms.
The bill would create restrictions to prevent federal employees from asking or encouraging private entities to censor private speech or otherwise discourage free speech, and impose penalties, including civil fines and disciplinary actions for government employees who facilitate social media censorship.
While the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids government censoring and restricting free speech, HR. 8752 could be a helpful enforcement tool — and we clearly need enforcement — as people might tend to think twice when they know there’s a price to pay, both personally and financially.
What Can You Do?
The Great Reset is moving full speed ahead, and those who disagree are being silenced for the simple reason that if people knew what was in store, the plan would get thwarted. They need the cooperation of the masses, or else it won’t work.
The answer, then, is to continue exposing the machinations that allow this agenda to be pushed forward. Understand, each and every one of us has an important role to play in this process. We must expose their plans, goals, networks and battle strategies, and we do that by sharing what we know in whatever capacity we can, be it through social media posts, emails, texts, phone calls, face-to-face encounters, groups, clubs or at church.
Share articles such as this one with everyone you know so that people can start to understand how and why they are being manipulated. This will effectively “immunize” them against the propaganda.
Secondly, encourage your friends and family to subscribe to this and other newsletters to keep abreast on the next steps that will be necessary to defeat the tyrants who are hell-bent on global control. Right now, that would include calling on your representatives to back HR. 8752.
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