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Alan MacLeod has a new article out with Mintpress News showing how most of the supposedly independent “fact-checking” organizations which Facebook has partnered with to police the information people are allowed to see on the platform about the war in Ukraine are, in fact, funded by the United States government.
“Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED),” MacLeod writes.
NED is indeed notorious because, as MacLeod explains, it was set up to do overtly many of the operations which the CIA used to perform covertly, like circulating propaganda in empire-targeted nations, funding foreign uprisings, and facilitating the 2014 coup in Ukraine which set in motion the events that would eventually lead to Russia’s invasion of the nation this past February.
Macleod shows how US government money is funneled into Facebook’s “fact-checking organizations” through NED and other channels, the result being a US government-funded narrative management operation in a social media platform which has almost three billion active users.
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Most of fact-checking organisations Facebook uses to police content on Ukraine are directly funded by the US government— either by the US embassy or through notorious CIA front group, the NED.
My new investigation exclusively at @MintPressNews:https://t.co/FH4R0HKs1s
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) August 3, 2022
This article is just the latest installment in a series of pieces MacLeod has been putting out with Mintpress over the past few months documenting the many strings you can see between major Silicon Valley platforms and the US-centralized empire, which are becoming clearer and more numerous by the year.
Last month MacLeod released a report on the many veterans of the CIA and other branches of the US intelligence cartel who are being hired to high-level positions within Facebook’s parent company Meta which help determine what kinds of information get visibility on the company’s social media platforms. Meta’s “senior product policy manager for misinformation” was hired straight out of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2019 and now helps Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp sort out information from misinformation.
Last month MacLeod also put out an article on the many CIA veterans who have been hired to help Google decide what information gets seen in its searches and on Google-owned platforms like YouTube. Google is easily the single most influential corporation on earth when it comes to public access to information.
In June MacLeod penned an article titled “The Federal Bureau of Tweets: Twitter is Hiring an Alarming Number of FBI Agents,” reporting 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.”
Even TikTok, MacLeod documents, has begun hiring a bizarre number of former NATO employees to police its content at the same time it has begun aligning with other Silicon Valley platforms in its censorious policies toward content from Russia.
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1551905373799563266?s=20&t=AWkW-r_IWnIMMKXUA1qgZg
MacLeod’s important work adds to that of other reporters like Yasha Levine, whose book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet describes the way humanity’s unprecedented access to information has been intertwined with US imperial power from its very inception.
Silicon Valley is at least as fundamental a component of US imperial narrative control as the legacy media and Hollywood, and is becoming even more so. Together they comprise the empire’s narrative control apparatus, which is just as essential to the functioning of the empire as its military or economic might.
The expansion of human consciousness on issues of political and social justice has brought with it a growing public intolerance for tyranny and oppression, which has made it necessary for the world’s current empire to rule over us by providing us with the illusion of freedom. We are told that we live in a democracy where the people control their own fate, but in reality we are inundated with propaganda from the moment we are born that is designed to psychologically manipulate the way we think, act and vote. As Noam Chomsky said, “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
Silicon Valley is filled with spooks and liars for the same reason the mainstream news media support every US war and continually normalize the freakish injustices of our society: because whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Perception is reality, and if you can control how people perceive reality then, as far as their behavior is concerned, you control reality itself.
We will remain trapped with the abuses of the status quo oppression machine until we awaken to this fact.
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37 responses to “New Media Are As Intertwined With Imperial Power As Old Media”
The US public is the most docile public in existence. It just repeats verbatim what the owners of the nation (MIC) tell it and then it prides itself for having a free press, freedom of expression etc. Having been fed from the fountain of freedom and democracy for decades there is precious free thinking left and that has been delegated to the fringes of society. Mob think rules….
The fact that the CIA has a physical presence at Google and “ex-CIA agents” manage “disinformation” functions on FaceBook should not surprise us. Both were CIA-funded startups at Stanford and Harvard universities.
I also have long-held suspicions about Microsoft. First, why did IBM give the contract for the operating system for its new PC line to the son of well-connected IBM employees with no track record in the industry? This was out of character for IBM. Second, why did the USG decide to make Microsoft’s offerings the official operating system for the US Government with the knowledge that this would force all US Government contractors to do the same for compatibility purposes? This allowed Microsoft to achieve a USG-subsidized monopoly on PC operating systems that eventually achieved a global footprint.
Indeed, a number of foreign governments forbid the use of Microsoft products in their offices based on the presumption that their software includes a number of “backdoors” conveniently left open for the CIA to exploit.
The point is, given the culture of “spy-vs-spy” games around the world and the amount of intelligence that GOOGLEFACEBOOKMICROSOFT gives the CIA on a daily basis, the CIA would have been negligent to have not created, subsidized, and exploited them.
I do hope Alan McCloud has more coming in this series to cover Apple, MS, Amazon.. Plenty has already been revealed about them by others, but some need reminders.
Many of us have ditched all these companies years ago and only use FOSS(Free and Open Source Software). The reboot can be difficult for some to make. After achieving the freedom, I could never go back.
This is a classic. The inimitable Senator Lindsey Graham, on how thrilled he is with our strategy in Ukraine (11 seconds).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MSWezIB06g
The propaganda can be so thick at times you couldn’t cut it with chainsaw, but almost as often it seems, there is no propaganda going on at all.
It’s just in your face facts. We are in a proxy war. We are going to fight it to the last Ukranian. The goal is to eliminate Putin, then carve up the Russian nation and sell its pieces off to the highest private bidder.
NEXT.
We are going to trick China into doing something stupid, what exactly we’re not sure and to what purpose who the fuck knows. But we need to do something now, because China already bestrides our rapidly declining nation like a colossus, and if we wait any longer, shit could get really out of hand.
Surprise surprise… (Colonel) Lindsay Graham, who’s got seven military bases in his state which depends heavily on aerospace, with more than 400 contractors carrying out manufacturing activities related to it would fight to the last Ukrainian?
According to Wikipedia, on March 7, 2015, at a “Politics and Pies” forum, Graham advocated the reversal of defense spending cuts and quipped: “If I were President of the United States, I wouldn’t let Congress leave town until we fix this. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to”, which positions him within the political heritage of Idi Amin Dada.
He’d probably fight to the last Congress critter too in order to protect his country, which gives the full measure not of the threats his country is under but of his own paranoia. IMHO, he should be inducted in the Guinness Book of Records as the creepiest guy on Earth by a very long shot – even if Bolton, Brennan and Pom Pom are doing their best to compete!
Graham … “should be inducted in the Guinness Book of Records as the creepiest guy on Earth …”
Agree. Lindsey and Mitch “the turtle” McConnel are at the top my all-time creepster list, which is saying something, considering the many dozens of extremely creepy American politicians I’ve had the displeasure of watching parade through my life.
Biden too is up there. The hair sniffing thing alone makes him a legitimate candidate for the Beltway Creeper Award.
And if he never could top all those wackjobs in the GOP in any given year, at minimum he deserves a BCA statue for lifetime achievment.
Fire the media. All you have to do is avoid facebook, twitter, and corporate news. They will go the way of the dinosaurs if we find something else to look at.
Thank You for the Mint Press Link. I am trying to pass it around. It is the big red link in what I wrote today on my website.
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https://chasingthesquirrel.com/
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I like your independent voice.
I don’t understand the very odd title given to Caitlin’s article. Nobody cconsiders self-proclaimed “fact-checking organisations” to be part of the new media. The new media is something entirely different.
When I was editor-in-chief, a friend asked me once to meet a guy who published monthly magazines and looked for tips to increase his readership. He gave me a few of those mags to flip through and I found them borderline criminal in that their total absence of interesting content and style made you consider suicide as a possible easy way out.
So I went to meet this guy with a vengeance but soon realized I wasn’t at all the person he wanted to see. He asked me what I thought of his stuff and I replied that I wasn’t surprised he didn’t have more ads because why would anybody bother to read that shit in a strong competition and little spare time world? I advised him to find good texts first. His readership would increase naturally by word of mouth, which would bring advertisers. This seemed to me common sense.
I was wrong. His view was that he had this very small operation consisting essentially of himself making DTP mock ups on a computer by using cheap piecework and then sending them to a publisher/distributor.
What he expected from me were tips on how to find bulk subscriptions, so that he could boast a good size readership to advertisers. What was written in the mags didn’t matter because nobody was gonna read it anyway. But the world was full of companies who sent this kind of shit to listings of people, like old-age pensioners or credit card clients, as PR because, being published on glossy paper, it was good for their image. And the size of the captive readership attracted advertisers who thought their ads would be seen, without even asking themselves whether anybody actually opened those magazines. Can’t make that stuff up!
Was this guy an isolated loony?
Apparently not. He was a precursor in fact for CNN is now doing the exact same thing. Their audience is plummeting but the new boss says he will “generate revenue by pitching advertisers on the network’s ‘pristine brand’, not just sheer audience size”. That’s the equivalent of the glossy paper – even though of course glossy paper is a palpable commodity whereas “pristine brand” is a fantasy entirely made of wishful thinking.
And then he plans to sell the CNN+ stuff that tanked their bottom line because nobody was interested in it to… other branches of their flagship company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCXIwRNG2VE&t=3s
Real journalism in all that? Forget it in a society run by the CIA (aka Mammon) whose “mission will be complete”, according to former director William Casey, “when all that the American people believe is false.”
That’s the goal. We must never lose sight of this on penalty of getting off track. And let’s face it, nobody’s ever gonna make one billion dollars profit a year, as CNN does, by telling folks the truth! CNN’s audience actually started tanking when telling lies about Trump went out of fashion because he’d lost the presidency. Brave new world…
Our brain can adjust to seeing the world upside down in just two weeks, really.
Of course if we see and hear nothing but lies, we would never even know it.
Reading classics is our only hope.
Apparently, European brain size has been declining over last 10,000 years.
People even a couple of thousand years before us were more intelligent.People 5000 years ago were civilised. 10000 years ago people used to recite their epic poems by memory only.
CNN is the disgrace of humanity. CIA is definitely morally and mentally deficient.
I am going to guess that the billionaires and trillionaires are actually the scourge of our society, and not supremely gifted people that the MSM portraits them to be. Google search reveals that trillionaires actually do jot exist – I wonder if this search result is edited.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-human-brain-has-been-getting-smaller-since-the-stone-age
Very interesting. Thanks for the link. There’s never been any question for me that the VIth century BC philosophers (Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Siddharta Gautama, Lao Tzu, Confucius…) stood head and shoulders above anything we have been producing since – which are essentially minute analyses and refutations of details of their global perceptions of the cosmos, in the Greek sense of order of the universe, including its people.
Isn’t Russia’s impending victory in Ukraine putting the lie to the supposedly unlimited power of propaganda, to the belief that whoever controls the mass narrative controls the world? Isn’t Russia demonstrating that physical reality trumps virtual reality, that what actually happens overcomes what is said about it? I wonder whether Russia is in the process of doing from the outside what so many like Caitlin have been trying to do from the inside: burst the bubble of verbal and visual manipulation in which we have grown accustomed to live…if you can call it living. Are we relearning the truth of an old saying forgotten since the video screen mesmerized us, that sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me? Just juxtapose the aggression in Ukraine with the micro-aggressions so many have become obsessed with.
You’d be surprised to see how here in Spain, where Mockingbird has obviously never been in better shape, Putin, according to the media, has a terminal cancer and is preparing an escape from Ukraine while Prime minister Pedro Sanchez says that we must accept austerity because “we are at war” – the last Nato meeting took place in Madrid…
Alan MacLeod had better issue a statement far and wide that he is not suicidal at this time.
The true facts of history, of which all sides are selective, is that all wars are fought for power. But power is an illusion and every empire eventually has to face the conflict it is trying to avoid: its own collapse. Unless that is accepted by all humanity is doomed, for certain, to fight WW III.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
Tried to read TL;DR.
You may be right, but so what?
Empires dont last, but hubris keeps those at the top, the actual decision makers, not the puppets, think they are so smart, so confident in their position, they are blind to the large truth:
all imbalances are unstable and will fail.
Could be science, could by building construction, could be empire building, could be climate disruption, it’s all the same dynamic.
The MSM’s distortions are nowhere more apparent in their rendering to Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, one of the bigger Fails in US diplomatic and a big Win for China. Except of course in the MSM’s Alternative Universe. https://julianmacfarlane.substack.com/p/fortress-taiwan-failk-fall-fallacy
…imperialist totalitarianism at its worst, disguised as the world’s model democracy. This is rottenness to the core. It brings to mind Idi Amin’s Uganda.
Jackson Hinkle interviews Col. Douglas Macgregor (roughly 40 minutes). A must watch, methinks, if you have even the slightest bit of interest in the continuance of carbon based life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O71K8GpNNNg
Hinkle is an impressive young man. Whatever you think of his politcs (I like em! lmao …), one thing is for certain, he has already established himself, at 22 years of age, as one of the most prepared and insightful interviewers in the English speaking world.
To bad he’s been demonitized by the American Deep State and can no longer earn an honest living.
My country is such a counter-productive nation-state. We identify our best and brightest early, and then we eliminate them.
Unless they are both bright, AND pathologically twisted, then we methodically groom them for high positions.
And so it begins.
A “pre-hostilities” CGTN video with missles soaring, jets flying, warships blockading and martial music playing in the background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRwHayNsHDo
Gonna miss CGTN. I learned a lot watching that channel. I’m gonna miss it all. One of the reasons I’ve binged on China videos the last 5 months, I knew time was running out for me if I wanted to see China for what it really is, before the ultimate blackout descends.
The best case scenario that I can envision going forward? The US will become … the loniest country ever.
I would be extremely surprised if Jackson Hinkle was only 22. I checked in Google and a site says he was born 15 September 1999, which confirms but you don’t have these crow’s feet when you smile at 22, nor do you have this white hair discreetly appearing on the temples. I would say most likely about 35. Apart from this detail. it’s true that he’s extremely knowledgeable about geopolitics and a very likable guy.
Revealing that social media is hiring intelligence agents to shape what we see and hear is very important information. Thank you for the wake-up call.
I like it. Or maybe have T-shirts that ask, “Are you awake?” and matching caps that answer, “Because I am!”
Or, as I happen to be a profane and semi-literate type of fellow, the lid might read, “Cuz I am you sheep admirin’ motherfuckers.”
Oops, a reply Max Girard below. Apologies.
It will take decades of a continuous Pavlov strategy propaganda to make people forget about what is to believe is what is not but they will make it as they did before, or not.
Millions of us have known for years that GACC(Government AI Corporate Controlled) media is irredeemable and only going to get worse. I am puzzled why some cling to hope that GACC media can be fixed.
There is a clear solution that I wish MintPressNews and others would mention and participate in. The fediverse is thousands of independent yet connected servers running around the world. Many run on microcomputers on our desks tunnelled through VPN’s making them very difficult for governments to find or shut down. Millions of people are on it, but more would come experience the freedom if you creators would add one more follow button linking to a Mastodon or other fediverse account. You can have an account on my server if you want one. You can easily move your account to a different server at any time which is another brilliant design.
BTW. This site is full of Google trackers. WTF?
Good idea, we have to think outside the box as the box has been our prison.
Every electronic message you send, put a random collection of letters and numbers at the bottom, but all exactly the same length. Just gibberish. It will drive their AI crazy trying to break the hidden “code”. Less bandwidth to surviel us.
I think we need hats or some other identifier so we can find each other when going about our day. Like “I’m Awake” hats. What do you think?
Or maybe a social media site owned operated in the public interest, democratically run. Something beyond Twitter, something that allows users to find other local users to plan events etc. Maybe there is something out there ready made for us. Any ideas?
Marxists.org?
“We will remain trapped with the abuses of the status quo oppression machine until we awaken to this fact.”
And just exactly WHAT will “we” do after we awaken that will free ourselves from the abuses of the status quo? For example, will we continue to vote for Rs and Ds?
That’s a very good question. What would you suggest?
I know it’s none of my business but I guess his answer would be no :o)
Watch How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary (it’s not what you think) and read From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by the late Dr Gene Sharp.
Thanks.