British politician and broadcaster George Galloway has made headlines in the UK with his threat to press legal action against Twitter for designating his account “Russia state-affiliated media”, a label which will now show up under his name every time he posts anything on the platform.

“Dear @TwitterSupport I am not ‘Russian State Affiliated media’,” reads a viral tweet by Galloway. “I work for NO Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.”

Galloway argues that while his broadcasts have previously been aired by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, because those outlets have been shut down in the UK by Ofcom and by European Union sanctions he can no longer be platformed by them even if he wants to. If you accept this argument, then it looks like Twitter is essentially using the “state-affiliated media” designation as a marker of who Galloway is as a person, rather than as a marker of what he actually does.

Dear @TwitterSupport I am not “Russian State Affiliated media”. I work for NO #Russian media. I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament. If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) April 6, 2022

Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway’s argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people “state-affiliated media”. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.

In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to “secure” the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.

“ASPI is the propaganda arm of the CIA and the U.S. government,” veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh told Mintpress News earlier this year. “It is a mouthpiece for the Americans. It is funded by the American government and American arms manufacturers. Why it is allowed to sit at the center of the Australian government when it has so much foreign funding, I don’t know. If it were funded by anybody else, it would not be where it is at.”

Twitter has also coordinated its mass purges of accounts with a cybersecurity firm called FireEye, which this 2019 Sputnik article by journalist Morgan Artyukhina explains was “founded in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.”

[Thread] Twitter is partnering with a crazy, hawkish, US-govt & arms industry funded think tank to regulate false info online.

This should be alarming to anyone who cares about truth, free speech or peace, as my new @MintPressNews investigation explains:https://t.co/8Wi11qfpf3

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) January 20, 2022

It has been an established pattern for years that whenever Twitter reports that it has purged thousands of accounts which it suspects of inauthentic behavior on behalf of foreign governments, you know it’s never going to be accounts from US-aligned countries like the UK, Israel or Australia, but consistently from US-targeted nations like Russia, China, Venezuela or Iran. You can choose to believe that’s because the US only aligns with saintly governments who would never dream of engaging in unethical online behavior, but that would be an infantile position which defies all known evidence.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Twitter has been aggressively boosting US narratives about the war by frequently showing users a Twitter Topic without their having subscribed to it which is full of imperial spinmeisters, including The Kyiv Independent with all its shady CIA-affiliated origins.

Twitter also promotes US narratives about the war by keeping a “War in Ukraine” section perpetually on the right-hand side of the screen for desktop users, which runs stories that are wildly biased toward the US/NATO/Ukraine alliance. There was a full day last month where any time I checked Twitter on my laptop I was informed that “Russia continues to strike civilian targets in Kyiv and across Ukraine.” The claim that Russia had been “targeting” civilians during that time was dismissed as nonsense shortly thereafter by US military experts speaking to Newsweek.

This is the message desktop Twitter users are receiving at the top right of their screen. We talk a lot about Silicon Valley’s role in facilitating US government censorship, but we should probably talk a lot more about its role in facilitating US government propaganda as well. pic.twitter.com/PL9ms8gVU7

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 21, 2022

When the invasion began Twitter also started actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. It also began placing warning labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform.

Twitter also began placing the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of Russian media platforms, baselessly giving the impression that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not simply their own legitimate perspectives. This labeling has led to complaints of online harassment as propaganda-addled dupes seek out targets to act out their media-instilled hatred of all things Russian.

As more and more people find themselves branded with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label, Twitter has concurrently announced that it will be hiding the visibility of any account that wears it, announcing on Tuesday that the platform “will not amplify or recommend government accounts belonging to states that limit access to free information and are engaged in armed interstate conflict.” Which is a bit rich, considering the fact that the US does both of those things.

“This means these accounts won’t be amplified or recommended to people on Twitter, including across the Home Timeline, Explore, Search, and other places on the service. We will first apply this policy to government accounts belonging to Russia,” Twitter said.

This diminished visibility has been verified by people who’ve been slapped with the “Russia state-affiliated media” label. So you can understand why imperial narrative managers whose job is to quash dissent want that designation applied to as many critics of the US empire as possible.

So grateful to live in the liberal, democratic west, where I’m free to oppose the actions of my government… from behind a secret shadow ban that prevents anyone new from finding or hearing me pic.twitter.com/4GsrMBzVxY

— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) April 5, 2022

If you are curious why the “state-affiliated media” label has not been applied to Twitter accounts associated with government-funded outlets of the US and its allies like NPR and the BBC, it’s because Twitter has explicitly created a loophole to exclude those outlets from such a designation.

“State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” Twitter’s rules say.

Which is of course an absurd and arbitrary distinction. Whether you like George Galloway or not, I think anyone who’s familiar with his personality would agree that if anyone ever tried to take away his editorial independence and tell him what he is or isn’t permitted to say, it would take an entire team of surgeons to remove Galloway’s footwear from their personal anatomy. Many people who’ve worked with Russian media have said they’ve never been told what to say, and Galloway is surely one of them.

The audacity of a social media company which works hand-in-glove with the most powerful government on earth to go around branding people “state-affiliated media” is appalling. Twitter is state-affiliated media. It is an instrument of imperial narrative control, just like all the other billionaire Silicon Valley megacorporations of immense influence. Putin could only dream of having state media that effective.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Various commentators have suggested that I write something about recent events in Kazakhstan. I’ve been loath to do so since my knowledge of the country is very limited, but there are some interesting things to say about what others have been writing on the topic, particularly concerning how it all relates to Russia. Notably, a certain part of the online commentariat has been keen to express indignation that Russia has “invaded” Kazakhstan to suppress a “democratic revolution”.

The rapid spread of violence in Kazakhstan generated hopes in some circles that the mob would topple the “regime” and install a new government that would somehow or other distance the country from Russia. Alternatively, the hope was that “democracy” would arrive in Kazakhstan. With this, another brick in the wall of authoritarianism would collapse, bringing closer the day when it would collapse in Russia too.

All this was somewhat unspoken, but once the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which includes Russia, announced that it would send troops to help restore order in Kazakhstan, and once Kazakh forces took the offensive and began clearing away anti-government protestors, all these hopes were dashed. The Kazakh government isn’t out of the woods yet. Protests continue in several cities, and things could still go horribly wrong. But at the moment it’s looking like the regime will survive. The internet’s keyboard warriors and online regime changers are seriously annoyed and looking for someone to blame. The guilty party is obvious – Russia.

However, despite the headlines in today’s newspapers about Russia sending troops to “quell” the uprising, the Kazakh state’s survial has little to do with the Russians or the CSTO. It seems as if the CSTO contingent in Kazakhstan will amount to no more than about 2,500 troops, which for a country that size is a tiny quantity. The role of the CSTO is largely symbolic – it sends a message to protestors and Kazakh security forces alike that the government isn’t backing down and has powerful external support. That should deter some of the former while putting a bit of steel in the spines of the latter. Perceptions of strength matter in situations like this, and thus the CSTO’s support perhaps makes a slight difference. But the hard work of restoring order belongs largely to the Kazakhs themselves. Whatever the press tells you, “Russia” isn’t “putting down” the uprising.

Nor can it be said that Russia has “invaded” Kazakhstan, as so many have liked to claim this past week on Twitter. Take for instance all these Tweets from the likes of one-time US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul and former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves

Various themes repeat themselves in all these: invasion, occupation, the “crushing” of democracy, and comparisons of Russia with Nazi Germany. It is, to be frank, more than a little over the top. You can’t invade, let alone occupy, a country the size of Kazakhstan with only 2,500 troops. Furthermore, the troops are there at the invitation of the internationally recognized government – recognized by us in the West as well as by everybody else. That’s hardly an invasion.

Maybe it’s because I’m a total reactionary, but I’m not too fond of the mob, and I’ve never understood why street protest (accompanied by looting and burning) is associated with democracy. The thing is that all those complaining about the efforts to restore order in Kazakhstan aren’t too fond of the mob either, at least when it starts attacking things that they like. A year ago, McFaul and others were complaining loudly about the crowd that assaulted the Capitol building in Washington DC. And none of those whose Tweets I copied above were to be seen complaining when the Ukrainian military responded to protests in Donbass by firing rockets from aircraft and shells from multiple launch rocket systems.

Somehow, though, people are rather inclined to like the mob when it attacks somebody or something they don’t like. If it’s anti-American, that’s bad. But if rioting and looting damages Russian interests – they’re all for it.

But here’s what really gets me. Do the McFauls and Ilveses truly believe that it would be better for Kazakhstan if the Russians and CSTO didn’t help restore order and the state collapsed? There’s a very real danger of at best anarchy and at worst civil war. How would that help anybody? We’ve seen this scenario before. In Ukraine, revolution led to counter-revolution and bloody violence. In Syria, likewise. And so on. It tends not to turn out well.

But it seems like people don’t care. The attitude appears to be “The worse the better”, as long as the chaos is not at home but on Russia’s borders. Let Kazakhstan descend into anarchy – that’s to be preferred to an order backed by the Russians. Suffice it to say, I don’t agree.

irrussianality.wordpress.com

Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

Instagram just deleted all my posts (around 20 photos) of my tweets on General Soleimani, threatening to ban me. Unsurprising. This is really just Big Tech censorship at the behest of the government. pic.twitter.com/edIA0O9SJE

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) January 4, 2022

We don’t talk enough about how completely insane it is that a social media company with billions of users is censoring worldwide political speech about a major historical figure in alignment with US government decrees. Even if you were to accept the ridiculous justifications for designating a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, and even if you were to accept it as perfectly sane and normal for a communications company of unprecedented influence to take its marching orders on censorship from US government dictates, Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody, and yet they’re censoring people from voicing opinions about his assassination.

I think I’ve been failing to appreciate the madness of this situation over the last two years because it’s simply too crazy to take in all at once. You have to really sit with it a minute and let it absorb. This is a person who shaped the world, whose impact on human civilization will be studied for generations. And the largest social media company on earth is actively censoring discussion about him because the US government said it’s not allowed.

Whenever I talk about the dangers of online censorship I always get a bunch of propagandized automatons bleating “It’s not censorship! Censorship is when the government restricts freedom of speech; this is just a private company enforcing its terms of service!”

This line of argumentation is plainly born of sloppy analysis. All the largest online platforms have been working in conjunction with the US government to censor speech, and doing so with greater and greater degrees of intimacy. A monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporation censoring political speech about an important historical figure because the US government says he was a terrorist is about as brazen an act of government censorship as you could possibly come up with. The fact that that censorship is outsourced to a putatively private company is irrelevant.

Despite being 100% factually accurate, Facebook censored my video on how Soleimani led Iran’s fight against ISIS and demonetized @IntheNow_tweet‘s account. Apparently the truth violated “Community Standards”. For now, you can watch the segment here: https://t.co/Z1qz11Ro9T pic.twitter.com/0qOCYKHq6E

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) January 15, 2020

The outsourcing of censorship to private corporations is just one more iteration of the way neoliberalism privatizes duties that would otherwise be done by the government. That’s all we’re seeing here. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is government censorship.

The US government is the single most tyrannical and oppressive regime on this planet. It terrorizes entire populations and works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates, it has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions to preserve its unipolar domination of the planet, it imprisons and tortures journalists for exposing its war crimes, and it aggressively censors political speech around the world.

Every evil the US accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself. It just does it under the pretence of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management. It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness. The US government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The problem is finding a way to shield the vulnerable, particularly the youth, from adverse influences without restricting personal freedoms.

For centuries, Russia has been open to adopting popular Western traditions, but as the invasive cultural weed known as progressive liberalism enters the scene, Moscow is now forced to rethink the level of its engagement. With the internet and ubiquitous social media, however, such a cultural distancing will not be easy.

Russian Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725), from the vantage point of his newly built capital of Saint Petersburg, encouraged his fellow Russians to emulate particular Western styles that he believed were civilized and cultivated. One of his less popular pro-Western reforms involved an edict that forbade beards among government officials and nobles.

“Peter, beardless himself, regarded beards as unnecessary, uncivilized and ridiculous,” wrote Peter Massie in his biography ‘Peter the Great’. “They made his country a subject of mirth and mockery in the West … Within a week of his return [from a trip around Europe], he went to a banquet given by [Army Commander Alexis] Shein and sent his court fool, Jacob Turgenov, around the room in the role of barber. The process was often uncomfortable; shaving long, thick beards with a dry razor left many gouges and cuts where the sharp blade had come to close. But no one dared object…”

Eventually, Tsar Peter relaxed his edict, allowing anyone who paid a hefty ‘beard tax’ to keep their beloved facial hair.

Fast forward about three centuries and we find Russian President Vladimir Putin starting to apply the emergency brakes on Russia’s import of Western ideas and traditions, many of which are far from innocuous.

During his annual end-of-year Q&A press conference, Putin was asked about issues that have obsessed the Western mind, like transgenderism and the rejection of traditional concepts, such as mother, father and gender – one-time unquestionable biological facts that are now open to a variety of interpretations according to the personal whims of each individual.

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.https://t.co/SyxFnnboM1

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 12, 2021

“I adhere to that traditional approach that a woman is a woman and a man is a man. A mother is a mother, a father is a father,” Putin responded with a frankness that would make a modern liberal faint. “And I hope that our society has the internal moral protection dictated by the traditional religious denominations of the Russian Federation.”

Comparing the proliferation of such dangerous ideas to the spread of a pandemic, the Russian leader, hinting at the moral strength provided by Orthodoxy, argued that all Russian citizens enjoy “a certain internal moral protection against this obscurantism that you’ve just mentioned.”

Putin then alluded to a criminal case in the United States where a criminal serving time for rape declared that he was female and, after being transferred to a women’s prison, committed the same crime in his cell.

“It is necessary to fight [progressive liberalism] not with direct orders and shouts and accusations but with the support for our traditional values,” he asserted.

@RT_com presents a manual on just how one should (might) celebrate Christmas in 2021/22. In the eye of the beholder.

RT reminds -> in the age of new ethics and cancel culture all things conservative turn progressive. Or should they?#ThinkForYourself & #MerryChristmas! pic.twitter.com/BkSIAYRAb7

— MFA Russia (@mfa_russia) December 25, 2021

Here is the tremendous quandary now confronting Russia: since most people these days are more likely to be holding a smartphone and checking their social media accounts than reading Tolstoy, Bulgakov or Dostoevsky, ‘closing the window’ on dubious Western values is not so straightforward. The problem for Russia, and many other countries, is finding a way to shield the vulnerable, particularly the youth, from such adverse influences without restricting personal freedoms.

To get an idea exactly how popular social media has become, this year the Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok dethroned the behemoth Google – with all of its myriad services, like Maps, Translate, News, etc – from the top spot, while Facebook took third place. Meanwhile, Netflix, with its not-so-subtle programming on behalf of half-baked woke ideas, grabbed seventh place.

A one-minute scroll down TikTok’s main page tells a person everything they need to know about the platform’s content, which could be summed up in three words: lewd, vulgar and repulsive. There is literally no sign of intelligent life forms whatsoever. Indeed, the majority of the content creators appear to be very young and, shockingly, in various hedonistic stages of disrobing and debauchery.

That must be of no small concern when it is considered that over 29 million Russians use TikTok, and the largest share of the audience was represented by female users at nearly 56 percent as of May 2021 (12-24 year olds make up 26 percent of its audience). Many psychologists attribute this heavy social media usage to a dramatic uptick in adolescents – particularly females – expressing early confusion about their gender.

In one peer-reviewed academic study, it was found that “86.7% of parents reported that, along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, their child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar timeframe, or both.”

While TikTok is not the only social media company with a formidable footprint in Russia (Russia’s very own VKontakte, a popular alternative to Facebook, is the most popular social media site in the country, with some 70 million monthly users), it certainly ranks as one of the most disruptive in terms of its ability to shape the soft minds of predominantly young users. Yet to date it seems that Russia is content to merely mimic the Chinese platform. In September, Gazprom-Media unveiled a new platform called Yappy, which, like TikTok, enables users to record 60-second videos. The main target audience is for those people in the 14-34 age range.

Nevertheless, signs of a Russian pushback against the messaging are on the horizon. Twitter, for example, received a warning in March by the Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor that it could be blocked from the country if it refuses to “remove content that incites minors to commit suicide, contains child pornography or information about the use of drugs.”

The Russian watchdog demanded the removal of more than 28,000 posts, links and publications, which reportedly included more than 2,500 calls for children to kill themselves and 450 involving child pornography.

The problem with social media and its inherently negative influence is not limited to Russia, of course. In January, Italian regulators forced TikTok to block underage users from using its app, after a 10-year-old girl from Palermo died attempting to perform a dangerous social media challenge that involved participants cutting off their oxygen supply to experience a high.

These types of peer-pressure challenges affecting children, which oftentimes do not make themselves known to parents (and the authorities) until the damage has already been done, can be described as a direct threat to national security, and perhaps more so for Russia than other countries.

As the vapid Western gospel of wokeness is widely disseminated from every social media pulpit, brainwashing children about strange new creeds, like transgenderism, this places the nuclear family unit under direct attack. And for a country like Russia, suffering as it is from low demographics amid a pandemic, such an attack cannot go unanswered forever.

“From both a humanitarian and geopolitical perspective, bearing in mind the people of the country – 146 million for such a vast territory is absolutely insufficient,” Putin told the assembled journalists. “We now have around 81 million people of working age – we have to seriously increase that by 2024 and 2030. It’s one of the factors of economic growth,” he added.

Clearly, woke ideology, with its marked tendency to assist in the impregnation of the mind – not the womb – has absolutely no place in modern Russia, and not just from a moralistic point of view. The question that now faces Russia at this critical juncture in its turbulent history, amid tumbling population rates, is how to keep these corrosive Western ‘values’ at bay, while allowing for the exchange of respectable ideas and technology. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that nothing less than Russia’s survival hinges on the right answer. 

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has resigned as CEO of the company, leading anyone who’s been paying close attention to the rise of Silicon Valley internet censorship to voice concerns that the platform’s relatively lenient attitude toward speech compared to other major social media services may be drawing to a close.

“Hard not to see this as bad news,” tweeted Glenn Greenwald in response to Dorsey’s announcement. “I don’t think it’s been fully appreciated that on key SV issues — including decentralization, transparency and free speech — @Jack has been far better than most, and way more responsive to critiques. We’ll see what happens but it seems not great.”

“Anyone who harbors concerns that social media have already grown too intolerant of dissenting opinions — too inclined to silence viewpoints that depart from liberal orthodoxy — should be worried about Dorsey leaving,” writes Reason’s Robby Soave. “That’s because the long-serving CEO has occasionally articulated an ideological commitment to the principles of free speech; of all the tech industry pioneers who have been hauled before Congress to answer absurd questions, he was by far the most hostile to the idea that the government should serve as the internet’s speech police.”

not sure anyone has heard but,

I resigned from Twitter pic.twitter.com/G5tUkSSxkl

— jack (@jack) November 29, 2021

Dorsey’s resignation comes the year after it was reported that his removal was being pursued by virulent neoconservative billionaire Paul Singer, whose Elliott Management Corp had just purchased a significant share of the company.

Twitter has been far from perfect when it comes to refraining from interfering with free expression on its platform; it just banned multiple accounts supporting the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea against US-backed militants on what appears to be no legitimate basis mere hours ago after censoring trends in Ethiopia earlier this month, and has a longstanding pattern of censoring the speech of empire-targeted populations.

Still, Twitter has been a free speech paradise compared to other major platforms like Facebook or YouTube, largely because unlike those outlets it doesn’t tend to participate in the large-scale algorithmic suppression of unauthorized perspectives and the artificial uplifting of authorized ones.

And we are seeing some indication that that may be one of the changes we’ll see in the platform going forward. Twitter users are sharing around a 2020 quote by Dorsey’s replacement Parag Agrawal (emphasis added):

“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”

A lot of the commentary we are seeing on this paragraph tends to focus on the bit at the beginning about having no commitment to free speech, and not nearly enough attention is going to the latter half. Agrawal’s notion that it is Twitter’s place to “recommend content” and implement “recommendation systems” sounds far too similar to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s comments earlier this year when she admitted at a World Economic Forum summit that the platform had been elevating mainstream news sources on important political issues and hiding “borderline” content.

“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera,” Wojcicki said. “And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”

Here’s @YouTube‘s CEO openly admitting to:

1) Ranking corporate news higher in YT’s algorithim
2)Suppressing independent news/politics channels
3)Suppressing people creating content “from their basement” (THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE of YT)

This is scandaloushttps://t.co/B8G2AYvBul

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) April 22, 2021

This is a kind of censorship that Twitter has been relatively free from, and it is by far the worst kind. While you will routinely see Twitter posts going viral from people with peripheral political perspectives like communism or antiwar activism, you will virtually never see this occur on outlets like Facebook or Youtube because their algorithms are stacked in favor of “authoritative sources” like The New York Times and CNN which hardly ever give voice to such perspectives.

So we could soon be looking at a Twitter where communists, anarchists, conspiracy analysts, Covid skeptics, antiwar activists, supporters of empire-targeted governments, and other perspectives considered “borderline” by Silicon Valley narrative managers could receive very little visibility on people’s feeds, while authorized opinion-havers like blue-checkmark reporters from mainstream media outlets are given greater amplification.

This is the most pernicious form of internet censorship because unlike permanent bans it goes unseen and unacknowledged, and if you point out that your account isn’t getting the kind of traction it used to you can be dismissed as just paranoid and told that your content probably just hasn’t been as good lately. On a platform like Twitter where high-profile influencers tend to congregate to share ideas and information, this can lead to a dynamic where unauthorized thought becomes far more marginalized than it previously was.

It should be obvious to everyone that humanity is headed down a dark path if worldwide public speech is regulated by monopolistic oligarchs with a vested interest in preserving the status quo and a steadily increasing alignment with government institutions. If every platform people flock to in large numbers becomes subjected to iron-fisted establishment narrative management, it will greatly hinder humanity’s efforts to become a conscious species that has a truth-based relationship with the world.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Gleichschaltung is a German word with a rich history. It stands for the coerced harmonisation of all forms of public expression with the official line. That concept is currently undergoing a renaissance, but not in the “captive nations” of the East.

Every morning after arriving in his office at the Propaganda Ministry, Dr. Goebbels would devote himself to the important task of disseminating a directive to all German media outlets, outlining what position on principal issues they were expected to take on that particular day. The media were instructed not only on what to say but – of equal importance – what not to mention. The system Goebbels set up worked like a charm. Under his meticulous supervision, in public discourse an imposing harmony of opinion reigned from one end of Germany to another, undisrupted by discordant voices.

One wishes that this mechanically imposed harmony, admired as it may have been by some, had come to an end in 1945. But a YouTube bulletin disseminated a few days ago reminds us that it did not.

YouTube users were curtly informed of the prevailing “Community Guidelines” on a topic which currently is at the top of the list of public concerns: The Covid-19 crisis. Here are the highlights of that guidance:

“COVID-19 medical misinformation policy

“YouTube doesn’t allow content about COVID-19 that poses a serious risk of egregious harm.

“YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19. This is limited to content that contradicts WHO [about the utter corruption of WHO, see here] or local health authorities’ guidance on:

“Treatment,

“Prevention

“Diagnosis

“Transmission

“Social distancing and self-isolation guidelines, and

“The existence of COVID-19.”

Sceptics are encouraged to go directly to the source if they have doubts about the authenticity of these appalling prohibitions:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785

YouTube then goes on to specify:

“What this policy means for you if you’re posting content:

“Don’t post content on YouTube if it includes any of the following:

“Treatment misinformation:

“Content that encourages the use of home remedies, prayer, or rituals in place of medical treatment such as consulting a doctor or going to the hospital.”

Notably, no definition of “egregious harm” or “home remedies” is given, nor is any rationale provided for prohibiting such remedies being recommended by persons who may have had a positive experience after using them. Nor is it explained to millions of religious people throughout the world why prayer and procedures condescendingly termed “rituals” are also on the prohibited list. Will members of the Christian Science religious denomination, who since long before the appearance of Covid have relied exclusively on prayer for therapeutic purposes and avoided medical cures, now be required to alter their beliefs? Not even in the Soviet Union were believers ever made to face such a stark choice. To even the least sophisticated it should now be obvious that the thrust of YouTube’s guidelines is not to promote health but to steer patients toward the extremely expensive solutions that have enabled the pharmacological industry to make a financial killing from Covid-19.

That impression is strongly reinforced by the nauseatingly repetitious proscriptions that follow:

“Content that recommends use of Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19

“Claims that Hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID-19

“Categorical claims that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19

“Claims that Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine are safe to use in the treatment COVID-19

“Content that recommends use of Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of COVID-19

“Claims that Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine are safe to use in the treatment COVID-19.”

What evidence is there that they are unsafe? No indications are given. The governments of India, Japan, and the municipal authorities of Mexico City, among others, are quite happy with the results of the application of these treatments. So are their cured citizens who, however, are now prohibited by YouTube from telling others about their successful recovery.

If YouTube were merely a media platform, what possible interest could it have in disparaging cheap and effective alternatives to outrageously expensive, untested, and harmful pharmaceutical preparations of undisclosed composition, for the ill effects of which companies that produce them refuse to accept any tort liability?

The YouTube guideline goes on to disqualify questioning of masks or of their effectiveness and “claims that an approved COVID-19 vaccine will cause death, infertility, miscarriage, autism, or contraction of other infectious diseases,” although it is an amply documented fact that it will do all those things. Also forbidden are claims that “an approved COVID-19 vaccine will contain substances that are not on the vaccine ingredient list, such as biological matter from fetuses (e.g. fetal tissue, fetal cell lines) or animal products.” Never mind that several manufacturers have already admitted that it does, albeit using the weasel concept of “fetal cell lines” to mask the morally objectionable use of material from aborted babies, and so on and so forth, in dreary detail that even Dr. Goebbels would have felt too embarrassed to put in one of his directives.

Readers are again urged to go to the link provided above to confirm for themselves the extent to which a private virtually monopolistic media corporation such as YouTube (along with other similar concerns, such as Twitter and Facebook) is willing to go in dictating to citizens what opinions they are prohibited from expressing.

And now we come to the nitty-gritty: What happens if posted content violates YouTube policy:

“If your content violates this policy, we’ll remove the content and send you an email to let you know… If you get 3 strikes within 90 days, your channel will be terminated.

“We may terminate your channel or account for repeated violations of the Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. We may also terminate your channel or account after a single case of severe abuse, or when the channel is dedicated to a policy violation.”

There is no disclosure of who makes these determinations or any hint of due process or appellate procedure.

The perceptive reader must by now entertain the logical question: by what right does a private corporation, chartered to make its services available to all members of the public on a non-discriminatory basis, presume to dictate to its users what they may or may not think or post? The same question, of course, can be put to other private corporations which are also abusing their privileged position in order to impose ideological tyranny. Twitter and Facebook come to mind.

And where are the public authorities to reign in these unhinged private tyrants? The state, indeed, seems to have withered away, exactly as Marx predicted, or it may simply have merged with private corporations to lay the foundations of fascism, as Mussolini is alleged to have said. The state’s unsavoury role in this assault on freedom of expression is of particular concern. While passively subcontracting the dirty work to private corporations, it can perfidiously claim that no formal curtailment of personal liberties is taking place. The First Amendment remains technically intact since it is not the government that is undermining it.

The Covid-19 social control experiment has been running for almost two years. It cannot be denied that it has accomplished some of its objectives, but in important respects it has also been an unmitigated failure. YouTube’s offensive list of “don’ts,” issued after two years of intense global indoctrination, is irrefutable proof of that. In spite of unwavering support by politics, media, finance, and corrupt “science,” the Covid narrative has fallen apart under relentless battering by competent and informed partisans of truth and liberty.

Dr. Goebbels’ inept disciples have overlooked the concept of gute Propaganda, paradoxically one of the key postulates of the doctor’s technique. It means that to be credible, successful, and ultimately persuasive, propaganda must be heavily laced with elements of truth. In their hubris and unremitting reliance on crude force, they failed to do their homework. “Good propaganda,” Goebbels wrote, “need not lie, in fact must not lie. Propaganda which makes use of the lie … cannot have success in the long run … but a right idea must also be set forth in the appropriate way.”

They have obviously failed to find the appropriate way to package Covid-19 for the hesitant and disbelieving masses. Hence, their inelegant solution is to try to ram it down everybody’s throat, which is a risky approach and likely to backfire. Schade … the doctor is probably muttering in his molten lake in hell.

When sociologists look back on how Woke Theology helped turn earth into a world of talking apes, they will discover the #MSWL. Hidden away on Twitter, this is one of the actual headwaters of all things woke, the way the mighty Mississippi begins as a shallow stream.

#MSWL is a hashtag on Twitter meaning “manuscript wish list.” For anyone interested in publishing fiction, the road to a book deal is complex. Publishers aren’t interested in reading manuscripts sent directly to them because most are truly horrible. They will only consider reading manuscripts from agents, who are forced to root in mountains of garbage to find something “good” so they can sell it to a publisher and claim a commission. The agents don’t want to read whole books submitted because they are mostly awful, so they ask instead for a query, a short summary in a prescribed format. But even these are so uniformly awful most agents want to be pitched with a tweet (it’s called #PitMad, pitch madness.) So for Harry Potter, the author might have written “Boy wizard and friends learn life lessons defeating evil with owls and a big fat guy helping.” The actual Harry Potter query was rejected by nearly ever publisher in the UK, so the system needs some work. It is a poor way to evaluate anything more complex than directions to 7-11.

So the agents now simply tell writers what to write about via the manuscript wish list. That way they would hopefully never see anything too original to fit into a tweet and they could shape the world of literature. That’s where we get to wakey-wakey time.

Big time agents do not need to troll Twitter like pedophiles offering candy in the park. Instead, if you are a recent or maybe not so recent AmLit grad who can’t work at the New Yorker because they stopped hiring Caucasians, you can be an agent. On Twitter, the mass of these agents are white, straight female or gay male, with a tendency toward pink or blue hair, and liberal to the point where it physically hurts. Their bios (here’s a typical one) seem to describe the same person, just switching Sarah Lawrence for Oberlin and favorite TV show from The Office or Friends to “anything with queer representation.” They love cats. They love coffee. They love pronouns. They just hate racism, you guys.

Just because their dreams were crushed when the trumpet player in high school band turned out to be just weird, not gay, they want to take it out on your kids. Through the #MSWL they demand only books with BIPOC characters, or LGBTQIA+ stories. They beg for marginal representation in tales, and often combine themes so the actual request is for a fantasy magical realism story featuring queer vampires who also excel on the school lacrosse team. Here’s one actual list: “anything set on an HBCU campus, all of the magical realism, mythological retellings, romance/love stories, all the millennial joy and adulting hardships.” They don’t like things, they “celebrate” them. They don’t promote women, they “champion” them. Oddly, often their comps — comparisons, things that they want to see more of — are based on TV shows and movies instead of actual books. So it is “send me the new Avatar” not “send me drama like Hamlet.” If they do list Hamlet as a comp, it’s only because some modern version appeared on Netflix with Lady Gaga playing the prince. One asks for books that will remind her of Nancy Drew computer games, seemingly unaware of the iconic book series.

Some agents don’t even get around to the actual subject for a couple of subtweets, instead leading with “First and foremost, I’m looking to partner with folks from traditionally marginalized groups to help elevate their voices.” Others call for books that no one would possibly want to read, based on this week’s buzzwords: “I’d love to see more urban fantasy/paranormal romance that doesn’t rely on traditional government bureaucracy or law enforcement structures!” Sometimes wanna-be writers will tweet from their mom’s basement at the agents seeking more details, as in “How do you feel about the unseelie taking the form of conservative Christian preachers to start the apocalypse?” The agent responded “I’m really, really picky about apocalypse stories to be quite honest” to which another would-be writer replied “Honestly, this was an element in an urban fantasy setting idea I was fleshing out. Vampires had just gotten out of a civil war where the old vampire patriarchs were toppled and a crop of women vampires were in charge now and trying to both figure out how to survive ethically.” Better to write to this prompt: “I want a story with this vibe: Three women discovered they were dating the same man. They dumped him and went on a months-long road trip together.” Just lean hard into sisterhood and you’ll hit most of the #MSWL requests.

They have no idea how shallow it is the say they “only want books that are compelling, with great characters and plotting” like they discovered that insight. They know nothing about hypocrisy, how demanding a narrow list of subjects is supposed to be supporting diversity, or how marginalizing white writers is a poor start toward championing others. Straight was boring until gay was scary and now that gay is dull it has to be trans.

So when you wonder how we got from Clifford the Big Red Dog to drag queens reading children’s books about anal sex out loud in public libraries, it starts with the #MSWL and its over-schooled and under-educated agents imaging their role is to be the shock troops of social justice. Never mind that most of what they do contributes little to social justice, that’s not even the point. The point is to win feel good points and prove you were sincere in that winter semester same-sex fling, not just experimenting. And make no mistake, yep, they’re coming for your kids.

wemeantwell.com

By Ben NORTON

Millions of Nicaraguans went to the polls on November 7, 2021, re-electing the leftist Sandinista Front and President Daniel Ortega by a large margin.

The Joe Biden administration refused to recognize the results, however. The United States and its allies in the European Union and the Organization of American States (OAS) have instead launched what essentially amounts to a new coup attempt against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

On November 10, President Biden signed the RENACER Act, which will impose more crushing sanctions on Nicaragua. Washington’s escalating campaign of economic war was supplemented by the OAS’ claim that the election was “illegitimate.”

This campaign of hybrid warfare aimed at overthrowing Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has many parallels with the ongoing US coup attempts against Venezuela and Cuba, as well as the military putsch the OAS oversaw against Bolivia’s elected socialist President Evo Morales in 2019. Indeed, it involves many of the same tactics and players.

Following the line of Washington and Brussels, international corporate media outlets have spread an array of demonstrably false claims about Nicaragua’s 2021 elections, incorrectly reporting, for instance, that the government banned anti-Sandinista parties, that is imprisoned opposition candidates, or that voter turnout was negligible.

Unlike the foreign reporters spreading these falsehoods from Florida, Costa Rica, or Spain, The Grayzone was on the ground in Nicaragua to observe the electoral process.

This reporter, Ben Norton, visited 4 different polling stations in various parts of Chinandega, one of the largest cities in the country.

There, I spoke to more than a dozen average voters, to hear their experiences and get their perspectives on the election. Everyone I interviewed said the process was clean, fair, and transparent, and that they were able to vote without any difficulties.

There is so much propaganda and fake news in the corporate media trying to discredit Nicaragua’s elections. I visited 4 voting centers, and there were a lot of people voting in a very efficient, quick, and transparent process.

Don’t believe me? Well, I interviewed voters. Watch: pic.twitter.com/62lBFBywah

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 9, 2021

Myth: the opposition was barred from participating in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections

Although its correspondent Natalie Kitroeff was reporting from Mexico, not Nicaragua, the New York Times leveled several baseless accusations against the Sandinista government in an attempt to discredit its electoral victory.

Among the most absurd of these claims is that Nicaragua prevented opposition parties from participating and closed voting stations.

This is simply false. There were a total of seven different alliances participating in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections: five national opposition parties (all of which were right-wing), another regional opposition party on the Caribbean Coast, and finally the leftist Sandinista Front-led alliance, which itself consists of nine parties.

The following parties competed in the November 7 elections:

National opposition parties

• Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC)
• Independent Liberal Party (PLI)
• Alliance for the Republic (APRE)
• Nicaraguan Christian Way (CCN)
• Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance Party (ALN)

Regional opposition party on Caribbean Coast

• Yapti Tasba Masraka Nanih Aslatakanka (YATAMA)

FSLN alliance

• Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)
• Nationalist Liberal Party (PLN)
• Christian Unity Party (PUC)
• Alternative for Change (AC)
• Nicaraguan Resistance Party (PRN)
• Multiethnic Indigenous Party (PIM)
• Yapti Tasba Masraka Raya Nani Movement Party (Myatamaran)
• Autonomous Liberal Party (PAL)
• Progressive Indigenous Movement Party of the Moskitia (Moskitia Pawanka)

Today is election day in Nicaragua. I visited 4 voting sites, interviewing voters (video coming soon)

Things are very calm, and the voting process is totally open and free, with 7 options on the ballet (6 opposition)

The onslaught of corporate media propaganda is so ridiculous pic.twitter.com/SDroqtdVWn

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 7, 2021

The Sandinistas created a system of political autonomy for Nicaragua’s eastern Caribbean Coast, responding to requests for self-determination by the large Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities there.

This meant that, in the two separate zones of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCN) and South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCS), there were seven options on the ballot in the election for regional lawmakers.

Everywhere else in Nicaragua, there were six options on the ballot, five of which were anti-Sandinista opposition parties.

Myth: voter turnout was negligible

Another unfounded accusation spread by foreign corporate media outlets to attack the integrity of Nicaragua’s elections is that voter participation was supposedly very low.

According to official results from Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), the Sandinista Front won 75.87% of the total of 2,921,430 votes, with 65.26% turnout.

The main opposition party, the PLC, got 14.33%. The other four opposition parties each got 3% or less.

Western governments sought to discredit these electoral results by claiming the CSE is unreliable. But anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of recent Nicaraguan politics can see that this 2021 outcome is highly consistent with both polling and past results.

In Nicaragua’s 2016 elections, which were observed by the OAS, the FSLN got 72.44% of the vote, and the PLC garnered 15.03%, with 68.2% participation – figures very similar to those of 2021.

And in the 2011 elections, which were monitored by the Carter Center, European Union, and OAS, the Sandinista Front won 62.46% of the vote.

Moreover, the results in the 2021 election are unsurprising when one considers the months of opinion polling before the vote. The most respected, and really only credible, apolitical polling firm in Nicaragua is M&R Consultores. (CID-Gallup did an extremely inaccurate study on behalf of the right-wing opposition, which was plagued with problems and heavily criticized for its bad methodology.)

In the lead-up to the November 7 vote, M&R Consultores’ surveys consistently found that 60 to 70% of Nicaraguans supported the Sandinista Front and the government of President Ortega.

The latest poll from Nicaragua’s top firm shows the leftist Sandinista Front remains by far the most popular force, while support for the right-wing opposition is tiny

69% approve of President Daniel Ortega’s gov’t

73% say it gives them hope

76% feel the country has progressed pic.twitter.com/jpviNSmHQ6

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 26, 2021

When considering these polls in combination with past elections, the 2021 results appear utterly unsurprising. But the cold, hard data did not interrupt the wave of disinformation flowing from corporate media across the world.

Several major news outlets published the dubious claim that only 18.5% of Nicaraguans participated in the vote. In each case, the source was a shady, little-known organization called Urnas Abiertas, which appears to have fabricated the figure out of whole cloth.

Indeed, Urnas Abiertas has not published any raw data publicly, and scarcely exists as an organization.

Urnas Abiertas calls itself a “citizen observatory,” but has no technical credentials to speak of. Its official website and social media pages contain no concrete information about the group and do not even disclose the identities of its staff members.

The report it published after the election is totally anonymous and is just four pages long (in both Spanish and English). The document does not include any of the raw data it supposedly collected. It vaguely describes its methodology in two brief paragraphs, without identifying any of the people who purported to run a massive secret monitoring operation.

The organization’s previous reports are also anonymous, not naming any authors or researchers, and, once again, do not contain raw data or detailed information about methodology.

Moreover, the logos at the bottom of these past reports show that Urnas Abiertas collaborates with a series of right-wing opposition groups in Nicaragua that are funded by CIA cutouts.

In fact, only two people have been publicly identified with this shadowy organization, and both are partisan right-wing activists who work in the Western government-funded nonprofit-industrial complex, without any technical background or experience in election monitoring.

The man most closely linked to Urnas Abiertas is Pedro Salvador Fonseca Herrera, an anti-Sandinista activist sponsored by the European Commission – a clear conflict of interest, given the EU’s refusal to recognize the election and its role in openly funding and supporting the extremist opposition in Nicaragua.

Fonseca Herrera previously worked in Washington, DC as a “consultant” for the Organization of American States (OAS) in 2017 and 2018, during the violent OAS-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua.

Before that, Herrera organized with the regime-change lobby group Techo, which also happens to be the former employer of the only other known person associated with Urnas Abiertas, Olga Valle López.

Valle López’s LinkedIn profile shows that she, too, has worked with Techo, which is funded by Latin American governments and major Western multinational corporations, and pushes their interests in Latin America by destabilizing left-wing states.

Fonseca Herrera and Valle López were identified as “researchers” with Urnas Abiertas in an event in October organized by the US government-funded Wilson Center and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), a Western state-backed lobby group.

The event, a panel discussion titled “Nicaragua 2021 elections: A painful plan to end with democracy,” did not even pretend to be impartial; it explicitly aimed to discredit the country’s vote weeks before it even took place. The host, from International IDEA, referred to the forthcoming vote as an “electoral farce.”

Fonseca Herrera and Valle López spoke alongside US government-funded right-wing Nicaraguan and Venezuelan opposition figures, and their inflammatory comments made it extremely clear that these two anti-Sandinista activists are political operatives, not impartial electoral observers. They had already established their conclusion that Nicaragua’s election was supposedly illegitimate weeks before it even took place.

The panel discussion was in fact the presentation of a report of the same name that Urnas Abiertas published in a joint effort sponsored by International IDEA and Venezuelan right-wing activists at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB).

Unlike the other reports published by Urnas Abiertas, this document named the authors: three foreigners from International IDEA, two Venezuelan anti-Chavista activists, and just two Nicaraguans: Olga Valle y Pedro Fonseca.

In other words, this document that purported to inform people about the situation on the ground in Nicaragua was almost entirely written by non-Nicaraguans outside of the country. And it had the support of a Western government-funded lobby group and Venezuelan right-wing activists at UCAB, a key hub for the anti-Chavista opposition.

UCAB, one of the most elite private universities in Venezuela, is run by the Catholic Church, which has played a major role in coup attempts in both Venezuela and Nicaragua. At the beginning of the US-sponsored putsch in Venezuela in 2019, UCAB hosted coup leader Juan Guaidó. The university is directed by Francisco José Virtuoso, an ultra-conservative priest who openly supported the coup attempt and Guaidó.

In short, Urnas Abiertas is a tiny fringe group run by two young anti-Sandinista activists with no expertise in election monitoring. It is not even clear if they are physically in Nicaragua or outside of the country – although they do have the support of Western governments and the right-wing Venezuelan opposition.

These clear conflicts of interest and Urnas Abiertas’ flagrant lack of credibility did not however stop the Los Angeles Times from publishing a puff piece praising Urnas Abiertas and claiming without a shred of evidence that it secretly mobilized 1,450 volunteers at 563 voting centers across Nicaragua to observe the election.

Considering Urnas Abiertas has fewer than 1,300 followers on Twitter, it seems extremely implausible that such a miniscule outfit could secretly mobilize 1,450 electoral observers, especially without attracting attention from the government. But this did not stop corporate media from printing the absurd claim.

US government-funded opposition media outlets in Nicaragua also amplified the shadowy group’s unsubstantiated allegations of 81.5% abstention in the 2021 election. But once again, they presented absolutely zero evidence to back up these claims.

All indications show Urnas Abiertas to be nothing more than an opposition front group posing as a monitoring organization – and with the stated intent of discrediting the Nicaraguan election results before the vote even took place.

Myth: Nicaragua arrested opposition presidential candidates

An even more common accusation made by Western capitals and corporate media outlets to discredit Nicaragua’s 2021 election is that the Sandinista government arrested seven “presidential hopefuls” from the right-wing opposition.

The figures who were detained have been variously described in the international media as “precandidates” or “possible challengers.” But in reality, not a single one was an actual registered candidate.

On the November 7 election, there were indeed six different presidential candidates to choose from. President Ortega was not even the first name or face on the ballot. (Number one was Walter Espinoza Fernández, the presidential candidate from the PLC.)

As for the opposition figures who were detained several months before the election, The Grayzone documented how they were arrested for conspiring with a foreign government (the United States), taking millions of dollars from Washington in a large money-laundering scheme to organize a violent coup attempt in 2018, in which hundreds of Nicaraguans were killed and the country was destabilized, and in which right-wing extremists hunted down, tortured, and murdered Sandinista activists and state security forces, even setting some on fire.

That the opposition leaders who were detained received millions of dollars from the US government to carry out these operations is an undeniable matter of public record, confirmed by documents from CIA cutouts such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

In any other country on Earth, these figures would have faced similar, if not more severe legal consequences. Accepting millions of dollars in funding from a foreign state as you attempt to violently overthrow your elected government is illegal everywhere on the planet.

But when Nicaragua enforces its laws – even when they are laws modeled after long-existing US legislation – Washington condemns the country as “repressive” or “authoritarian.”

The United States, European Union, and OAS habitually refer to violent criminals as “political prisoners” after they are arrested in Nicaragua. People arrested for murder and rape have ended up on US-sponsored “political prisoner” lists.

In one high-profile case that caused a national scandal in Nicaragua, a charged murderer who had been active in the violent tranque barricades in the 2018 coup attempt was arrested, but later dubbed a “political prisoner” and released under pressure by the US, EU, and OAS. It was not long before he returned to his violent ways, stabbing his pregnant girlfriend to death.

Another US-designated Nicaraguan “political prisoner” was let out of jail, only to be caught again with explosives and guns, planning a terrorist attack on a pro-Sandinista mayor’s office.

.@BenjaminNorton traveled to Jinotepe, Nicaragua to report the shocking story of how the US and OAS lobbied for the release of violent criminals behind a 2018 coup attempt

One man they called a “political prisoner” stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to deathhttps://t.co/6fA6TZOgmO

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) February 28, 2020

If an opposition figure is arrested for violating a law in Nicaragua, in an offense that would be punishable in any country, Washington often reflexively responds by dubbing that person a “political prisoner.” If they are wealthy and powerful, the US claims they were a “presidential hopeful,” even if they made no effort whatsoever to go through the legal process of officially registering as a candidate.

This is a way to try to maintain impunity for US-backed coup-plotters and money-launderers. It is the geopolitical equivalent of the strategy that Washington-sponsored insurgents in Hong Kong openly espoused in the New York Times: “use the most aggressive ‘nonviolent’ actions possible to push the police and the government to their limits,” and then frame that state’s self-defense against foreign aggression as a form of “repression” and “authoritarianism.”

One of the reasons the United States was particularly furious about Nicaragua arresting the coup leaders it had cultivated is because Washington clearly had made plans to repeat the putschist strategy that saw it appoint Juan Guaidó as so-called “interim president” of Venezuela.

US government officials and their right-wing Central American allies not-so-subtly hinted that they planned to recognize right-wing oligarch Cristiana Chamorro as the unelected “interim president” of a parallel Nicaraguan coup regime. When she was arrested for money laundering in June, it foiled their new destabilization plot.

Nicaragua has an election in November and concerns are growing the US may try to impose a fake “interim president” like Juan Guaidó

The US State Dep’t special envoy and right-wing Central American leaders recently referred to opposition oligarch Cristiana Chamorro as “president” pic.twitter.com/MmGIquS2dC

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 24, 2021

Myth: there were no foreign electoral observers and journalists

Another myth spread by foreign media outlets is that there were no foreign observers and journalists in Nicaragua for its 2021 elections. This is yet another massive distortion.

The Nicaraguan government did prevent the Organization of American States (OAS) from sending observers, given the US-funded group’s well-documented role in orchestrating a right-wing military coup in Bolivia in 2019.

But there were hundreds of foreigners accredited to accompany the elections, from more than two dozen countries, including:

• United States
• Canada
• Spain
• France
• Germany
• Britain
• Ireland
• Italy
• Belgium
• China
• Russia
• Argentina
• Peru
• Puerto Rico
• Dominican Republic
• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Mexico
• Uruguay
• Venezuela
• Cuba
• Panama
• Brazil
• Chile

In total, there were 232 foreigners accredited from 27 countries, 165 to accompany the election and 67 as journalists.

They monitored voting centers in all 10 departments of Nicaragua (Managua, Masaya, Estelí, Chinandega, León, Granada, Matagalpa, Rivas, Chontales, and Carazo), as well as both Caribbean Coast autonomous regions (RACCN and RACCS).

The Nicaraguan government chose to use the term acompañante (meaning someone who accompanies) to refer to these international monitors, rather than “observer,” because of the history of so-called observers from the OAS and EU meddling in the country’s internal electoral process on behalf of the anti-Sandinista opposition.

225 people accredited to accompany Nicaragua’s election have visited voting centers in 10 departments; Esteli, Chinandega, León, Rivas, Chontales, Matagalpa, Masaya, Granada, Carazo and Managua, and two Autonomous Regions; RACCN and RACCS. pic.twitter.com/YlGX04euG4

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) November 7, 2021

The final misleading charge spread by the New York Times and other corporate media outlets to delegitimize the 2021 elections is that Nicaragua barred parties from holding large public rallies. This is technically true, but not because of political reasons, but rather due to Covid-19 health restrictions.

In fact, the Sandinista Front itself has not held an official rally since March 2020, before any cases were discovered in the country. Many foreign nations have imposed much harsher restrictions, while banning protests and attacking demonstrators with no outrage from the self-declared “international community.”

Latin American left warns of US-OAS coup attempt in Nicaragua

The United States has a long history of blood-soaked meddling in Nicaragua. The US military invaded and occupied the Central American country numerous times in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then Washington helped install the right-wing dictatorship ruled by General Anastasio Somoza, which it subsequently propped up until the Sandinista Revolution of 1979.

In the 1980s, the CIA waged a terrorist war on Nicaragua, arming and training far-right Contra death squads that, as one of their former leaders admitted, “burn down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas build them.”

Since the violent coup attempt failed in 2018, the US government has been escalating its economic warfare on Nicaragua. Late that year, the Donald Trump administration implemented the NICA Act, which imposed aggressive sanctions on the small Central American nation.

Several more rounds of US sanctions on Nicaragua followed in the next two years. Then, on November 3, in a flagrant form of election meddling, just four days before the 2021 election, the House of Representatives voted 387-35 to pass the RENACER Act, which will hit Nicaragua with a new round of economically punishing sanctions.

The Grayzone reported on a September Congressional session hosted by neoconservative lawmakers, where participants made it clear that Washington had been preparing a brutal campaign of economic warfare against Nicaragua, while also planning to expel the country from the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and Organization of American States (OAS).

On November 9, the OAS officially announced that it had rejected the results of Nicaragua’s elections, branding them “illegitimate.”

This declaration was published almost exactly two years to the day after the OAS did the same in Bolivia, spreading false accusations of “fraud” in order to justify a military coup against the country’s democratically elected president, Evo Morales.

We reject the results of the illegitimate elections in #Nicaragua.

I urge countries of the OAS to respond to this clear violation of the Democratic Charter during its #OASassembly.

Report of the Secretariat for Strengthening of Democracy: @Almagro_OEA2015 https://t.co/8CBUz303Dp

— OAS (@OAS_official) November 9, 2021

In a clear reflection of its ulterior motives, the OAS held a neoliberal “Private Sector Forum” calling on foreign corporations to invest in Latin America on the same day it denounced Nicaragua’s elections.

The conference perfectly encapsulated the corporate priorities of the coup-sponsoring OAS. Among its most notorious participants was the far-right president of Colombia, Iván Duque, who only came to power thanks to the illegal vote-buying scheme of a drug lord named Ñeñe Hernández, at the orders of political kingpin and US asset Álvaro Uribe.

Palabras del Presidente de Colombia @IvanDuque en el XIII Foro del Sector Privado de las Américas en #AsambleaOEA

“Por una América renovada: el rol del sector privado en la recuperación económica y social”

https://t.co/CenV5VdCJp
https://t.co/YOgQAQjAOY pic.twitter.com/Bas8vZLdvj

— OEA (@OEA_oficial) November 9, 2021

As a victim of US-OAS meddling, Evo Morales immediately recognized the warning signs in Nicaragua, and cautioned about the coming coup.

In statements on Twitter after the vote, Morales congratulated “the honorable people of Nicaragua, which in a demonstration of courage and democratic maturity chose brother Daniel Ortega as constitutional president, despite a campaign of lies, blackmail, and threats by the US.”

The former Bolivian president said the United States is attacking “the democratic will and sovereignty of Nicaragua,” and, “The victory of Ortega is the defeat of yankee interventionism.”

When US President Joe Biden demonized Nicaragua’s 2021 vote as an “electoral pantomime,” Morales retorted, “The only ‘pantomime’ is acted out each day in the White House, where so-called ‘presidents,’ instead of serving their people, follow the orders of transnational corporations, the weapons industry, and the CIA.”

While Cuba, Venezuela, and other leftist leaders in Latin America congratulated the Sandinista Front and Ortega for their victory, warning of US destabilization efforts, there is a new generation of young, NGO-cultivated, liberal reformist leaders in the region who are much softer on imperialism.

In Chile, Gabriel Boric – the face of the liberal nonprofit-industrial complex – condemned the Sandinistas and affirmed his “solidarity” with right-wing oligarch Cristiana Chamorro, a scion of the most powerful dynasty in Nicaragua, and the daughter of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the first neoliberal president to take power after the Sandinista Revolution thanks to a massive CIA meddling campaign.

Similarly, the foreign ministry of Peru issued a statement denouncing Nicaragua’s elections. It was the latest sign of the debilitation of the country’s newly inaugurated left-wing President Pedro Castillo, whose proudly anti-imperialist Foreign Minister Héctor Béjar was forced by the military to resign just weeks after entering office.

Béjar warned the forced resignation and the right-wing takeover of Castillo’s foreign ministry was “a soft coup, or the beginning of it.”

So while progressive forces enjoy a resurgence in parts of Latin America, the left is also divided between an older generation of revolutionary anti-imperialists and a newer generation of NGO-backed, media-friendly social democrats who acquiesce to US empire.

President Ortega vows resistance against US meddling

For his part, President Daniel Ortega has vowed to continue resisting US and European attempts to meddle in his country’s internal affairs.

The Nicaraguan leader delivered a fiery speech on November 8, the day after the elections, commemorating the 45th anniversary of the killing of Sandinista Front founder Carlos Fonseca Amador by the US-backed Somoza dictatorship.

“It is impossible for Nicaraguans – and I would say for Latin Americans and Caribbeans – it is impossible to stop talking about the interventionist policies, the expansionist, colonialist policies of the United States of America and the European countries,” Ortega said.

“We are under the threat of the yankee empire, under the aggressions of the yankee empire, and under the threats of the European colonialists. And I’m not the one saying that; they’re saying it,” the Nicaraguan president added.

“They believe that we are their colony, and they want to tell us how to behave, and they want to decide what type of democracy we should practice,” Ortega continued. “They continue with their colonialist practices, to dominate these lands. But not for good, but rather to subjugate them and exploit them, and involve them in their expansionist and warmongering policies.”

Reflecting on his country’s long history of resistance, the Nicaraguan leader declared that its people would not give in to another foreign conquest.

“In the end, they could not defeat Sandino,” he declared. “Whichever [US] president came to power, whether Democrat or Republican, he came to try to oppress Nicaragua. But he always was met with resistance, with heroism, with the fighting spirit of the Nicaraguan people.”

thegrayzone.com

By Ben NORTON

Just days before Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, top social media platforms censored top Nicaraguan news outlets and hundreds of journalists and activists who support their country’s leftist Sandinista government.

The politically motivated campaign of Silicon Valley censorship amounted to a massive purge of Sandinista supporters one week before the vote. It followed US government attacks on the integrity of Nicaragua’s elections, and Washington’s insistence that it will refuse to recognize the results.

The United States sponsored a sadistically violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, which resulted in hundreds of deaths in a desperate effort to overthrow the democratically elected government of President Daniel Ortega.

Since the putsch failed, both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations have imposed several rounds of devastating sanctions on Nicaragua. The US Congress plans to levy new heavy-handed sanctions against Nicaragua following the November 7 elections.

Silicon Valley’s crackdown on pro-Sandinista journalists and activists was part and parcel of the US government’s political assault on Nicaragua.

Facebook and Instagram – both of which are owned by the newly rebranded Big Tech giant Meta – suspended 1,300 Nicaragua-based accounts run by pro-Sandinista media outlets, journalists, and activists in a large-scale crackdown on October 31.

Days before, Twitter did the same, purging many prominent pro-Sandinista journalists and influencers.

On November 1, Sandinista activists whose accounts were suspended by Facebook and Instagram responded by posting videos on Twitter, showing the world that they are indeed real people. But Twitter suspended their accounts as well, seeking to erase all evidence demonstrating that these Nicaraguans are not government bots or part of a coordinated inauthentic operation.

Twitter’s follow-up censorship was effectively a double-tap strike on the freedom of speech of Nicaraguans, whose apparent misdeed is expressing political views that challenge Washington’s objectives.

Insane! Facebook/Instagram falsely claimed left-wing Nicaraguans are govt-run bots, censoring them. So they posted videos on Twitter showing they’re real. But now Twitter is suspending them too!

This is a coordinated purge of Sandinistas, days before Nicaragua’s Nov. 7 election https://t.co/sB7COoxl7Q pic.twitter.com/E2EPVAK5tx

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

The thousands of accounts censored by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter collectively had hundreds of thousands of followers, and represented some of the biggest and most influential media outlets and organizations in Nicaragua, a relatively small country of 6.5 million people.

US Big Tech companies suspending all of these accounts mere days before elections could have a significant, tangible impact on Nicaragua’s electoral results.

The purges exclusively targeted supporters of the socialist, anti-imperialist Sandinista Front party. Zero right-wing opposition supporters in Nicaragua were impacted.

Facebook published a report on November 1 claiming the Sandinistas it censored were part of a “troll farm run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party” that had engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

This is demonstrably false. In reality, what Facebook/Instagram did is purge most high-profile Sandinista supporters on the platforms, then try to justify it by claiming that average Sandinista activists are actually government-run bots.

Facebook implicitly admitted this fact by conceding in the report that there were “authentic accounts” purged in the massive social media crackdown. But Facebook refused to differentiate between the authentic accounts and the alleged “inauthentic” accounts, naming none and instead lumping them all together in order to justify erasing their digital existence.

Unlike Facebook’s investigators, this reporter, Ben Norton, is based in Nicaragua and personally knows dozens of the Nicaraguans whose accounts were censored, and can confirm that they are indeed real people organically expressing their authentic opinions – not trolls, bots, or fake accounts.

I interviewed more than two dozen Sandinista activists whose personal accounts were suspended, and published videos of some of them below, to prove that Facebook’s claims are categorically false.

Facebook’s security team is run by former high-level US government officials

The Facebook report falsely depicting average Sandinista activists as government trolls was co-authored by Ben Nimmo, the leader of Meta’s “Threat Intelligence Team.”

The Grayzone has exposed Nimmo as a former press officer for the US-led NATO military alliance and paid consultant to an actual covert troll farm: the Integrity Initiative, which was established in secret by British military officers to run anti-Russian influence operations through Western media.

Nimmo has served as head of investigations at Graphika, another information warfare initiative that was set up with funding from the US Defense Department’s Minerva Institute, and operates with support from the Pentagon’s top-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Nimmo, who is also a senior fellow at the Western government-funded Atlantic Council, meddled in Britain’s 2020 election by smearing leftist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as the vessel for a supposed Russian active measures operation.

The latest Nimmo-engineered pseudo-scandal highlights Facebook’s role as an imperial information weapon whose security team has been essentially farmed out of the US government.

The head of security policy at Facebook, Nathaniel Gleicher, promoted Nimmo’s report, echoing his false claims.

Before moving to Facebook, Gleicher was director for cybersecurity policy at the White House National Security Council. He also worked at the US Department of Justice.

Gleicher clarified that when Facebook accused Nicaragua of running a supposed “troll farm,” it “means that the op is relying on fake accounts to manipulate & deceive their audience.”

According to this definition, Facebook’s report is completely wrong. Many of the accounts it suspended were run by everyday Nicaraguans, and The Grayzone has interviewed them and posted videos below.

1/ Today we shared the removal of a domestic CIB network in Nicaragua that was run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party.https://t.co/505nHhgljV

— Nathaniel Gleicher (@ngleicher) November 1, 2021

Facebook’s “director of threat disruption,” David Agranovich, also shared Nimmo’s false report.

Like Gleicher, Agranovich worked at the US government before moving to Facebook, serving as director of intelligence for the White House National Security Council.

1/ Today we shared our latest monthly CIB report, which includes a deep-dive into a network in Nicaragua that was run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party. https://t.co/2S36MInjeh

— David Agranovich (@DavidAgranovich) November 1, 2021

Both of these US National Security Council veterans actively promoted Facebook’s coordinated purge of pro-Sandinista Nicaraguans.

If you want to know why Facebook/Instagram is purging average Nicaraguans, falsely claiming they’re gov’t “trolls,” this might explain why:

This is Facebook’s director of “threat disruption.” He was formerly director of intelligence for the White House National Security Council https://t.co/L8vtdX5kkv pic.twitter.com/7quffeeo5l

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

The Grayzone contacted Facebook with a request for comment. The head of security communications, Margarita Z. Franklin, replied without any comment, simply linking to Nimmo’s report.

When The Grayzone followed up and asked Franklin about Facebook suspending many real-life Nicaraguans who support their government but are very much not bots, she did not respond.

Meet the Nicaraguans censored by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

The Grayzone spoke with more than two dozen living, breathing Sandinista activists, whom this reporter knows and has met in person, and who were purged in the social media crackdown.

Many said this was the second or third time their accounts had been censored. Several had their Facebook and Twitter accounts removed during a violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in 2018.

Multiple activists said they are afraid Washington will sponsor another coup attempt or destabilization operations following Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, and because they were banned on social media, the Sandinista supporters will be unable to inform the outside world about what is actually happening in their country.

Ligia Sevilla

Here is Nicaraguan Sandinista activist Ligia Sevilla @ligiasevilla_, who was censored by Facebook@Meta falsely claimed she’s a “fake account,” part of a government-run “troll farm”

Will Facebook retract its false claims and restore her account?@benimmo@DavidAgranovich@olgs7 https://t.co/mDx9QvvtlU pic.twitter.com/wpykMeFon7

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Sandinista influencer Ligia Sevilla, who had more than 5,500 followers on her personal Instagram account, which was suspended along with her Facebook profile, proclaimed, “I’m not a bot; I’m not a troll. And my social media accounts were censored. Maybe Facebook doesn’t allow us to be Sandinistas?”

After Sevilla shared this video to verify her authenticity, Twitter suspended her account as well – a sign of a coordinated censorship campaign targeting Sandinistas on social media.

Franklin Ruiz

And here is Nicaraguan Sandinista activist Franklin Ruiz G. @ElChequelito, whose personal account was censored by Facebook, which falsely claimed he is a government-run bot/troll.

Still no comment on this political censorship by@Meta@benimmo@DavidAgranovich @ngleicher@olgs7 pic.twitter.com/KTthCikmgi

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Sandinista activist Franklin Ruiz, whose personal Facebook page was suspended, published a video message as well: “I want to tell you that we are human beings; we are people who, on Facebook, are defending our revolution, defending our country. We are not bots, as Facebook says, or programmed trolls.”

After Ruiz shared this video on Twitter, the platform purged him too.

Hayler Gaitán

This is another Nicaraguan Sandinista activist, Tyler Moreno Diaz @AlexdiazTyler, who was falsely dubbed a government-run bot by Facebook and had his account suspended.

Why won’t @Meta admit its “troll farm” report is totally bogus?@DavidAgranovich@olgs7@benimmo@ngleicher pic.twitter.com/bDS3E5ngre

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Hayler Gaitán, another Sandinista activist censored by Facebook, published a video explaining, “”I am a young communicator. I am not a troll, as Facebook says, or a bot.”

“I am a young communicator who shares information about the good progress in Nicaragua,” he continued. “We enjoy free healthcare, free education, and other programs that benefit the Nicaraguan people, and that we have been building throughout our history. And they have wanted to take that from us, but they will never be able to.”

After Gaitán posted this video on Twitter, it suspended his account as well.

Darling Huete

This is a Nicaraguan journalist, Darling Huete @DarlingHHuete, who was falsely dubbed a “government-run troll” by Facebook and had her personal account suspended.@Meta refuses to comment on this clearly outrageous censorship scandal@benimmo@DavidAgranovich@ngleicher@olgs7 pic.twitter.com/nyjswjo1Fb

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Darling Huete is a Nicaraguan journalist whose personal Facebook account was also censored.

“I’m here to tell you that Facebook censored my account, according to it because my account is a troll account or fake account, something that is not true. My account has been active for more than seven years,” she said in a video she posted on Twitter.

“This is clearly political censorship,because I support the government of Nicaragua, so they have decided that my opinion, or my way of thinking, is not appropriate according to the absurd policies of Facebook,” Huete lamented.

After Huete shared this video, Twitter deleted her account, too.

Huete told The Grayzone this is the second time her Facebook and Twitter accounts were suspended. The first time was during the violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.

Daniela Cienfuegos

This is another Nicaraguan Sandinista supporter, Daniela Cienfuegos @dani100sweet, an activist in the Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, which Facebook/Instagram suspended and falsely claimed is a gov’t bot farm.

Any comment from @Meta?@benimmo@DavidAgranovich @ngleicher@olgs7 pic.twitter.com/md32dU6WZp

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Daniela Cienfuegos, an activist with the pro-Sandinista Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores (Network of Youth Communicators), posted a video on Twitter saying, “I wanted to tell you that, no, we are not trolls. We are people who dedicate ourselves to communicate from the trenches, to inform the Nicaraguan people, and on the international stage.”

After Cienfuegos published this, Twitter deleted her account as well.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter censor top pro-Sandinista Nicaraguan journalists and media outlets

The above are just a small sample of Nicaraguans who were falsely smeared as “government-run trolls” by Facebook and erased from social media.

But it wasn’t just individual Nicaraguans who were censored. Major Nicaraguan media outlets that provide a pro-Sandinista perspective were also removed.

On the night of October 31, Facebook removed 140 pages and 24 groups, 100% of which were pro-Sandinista. Among those deleted were:

• official Sandinista newspaper Barricada, which had more than 65,000 followers
• popular youth-run left-wing media outlet Redvolución, which had more than 81,000 followers
• the Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, or Young Communicators Network, which brings together journalists and media activists from the Sandinista Youth social movement, and which had more than 71,000 followers
• and the individual profiles of dozens of Nicaraguan journalists, activists, and influencers.

At the exact same time as the Facebook purge, its sister platform Instagram took down many of the same pages:

• Barricada, which had more than 9,500 followers
• Redvolución, which had more than 22,700 followers,
• Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, which had more than 12,600 followers
• and, once again, the personal pages of dozens of Nicaraguan journalists, activists, and influencers.

Instagram also suspended the account of the fashion organization Nicaragua Diseña, which is very popular in Nicaragua, and had more than 42,700 followers.

Unlike the other purged accounts, Nicaragua Diseña is decidedly not a political organization. It is run by Camila Ortega, a daughter of the president, but Nicaragua Diseña intentionally goes out of its way to avoid politics, trying to bring together opposition supporters and Sandinistas in apolitical cultural events.

Just a few days before the coordinated Facebook-Instagram purge, Twitter also removed the accounts of the most prominent pro-Sandinista journalists and influencers on the platform.

On October 28, Twitter suspended the accounts of media activists @ElCuervoNica, @FloryCantoX, @TPU19J, @Jay_Clandestino, and numerous others. Together, these pro-Sandinista communicators had tens of thousands of followers.

Many of them, such as @CuervoNica and @FloryCantoR, had been censored before. This was the second or third account they had created, only to be censored for their political views.

Twitter’s politically motivated censorship is again targeting Latin American leftists:

Influential Nicaraguan Sandinista supporters @ElCuervoNica and @FloryCantoX were suspended

This is the SECOND time the US government thought police at Twitter suspended @FloryCantoR‘s account pic.twitter.com/xlZJWVO9vt

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 29, 2021

Silicon Valley’s censorship of Nicaragua always goes in one direction: It is leftist, anti-imperialist supporters of the Sandinista government who are censored, while right-wing opposition activists, many of whom are funded by the US government, are verified and promoted by the social media monopolies.

Numerous Nicaraguan journalists whose individual social media accounts were suspended told The Grayzone they were upset and angry, as they had spent countless hours of work over years building their pages, doing journalism, and sharing information. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter deleted all of that labor in mere seconds.

Some said they fear this censorship will also harm them financially, as they had relied on their social media accounts as a source of income.

In addition to clearly infringing on their rights to freedom of the press and freedom of expression, the latest wave of Silicon Valley censorship has done concrete economic damage to working-class Nicaraguans who had relied on Facebook and Instagram to run small businesses. Several of those affected told The Grayzone they are now locked out of the Facebook and Instagram pages they had used to sell products like food, clothing, or homemade jewelry.

This Silicon Valley censorship thus not only greatly hinders these working-class Nicaraguans’ ability to do their work as journalists, given social media is an integral part of contemporary journalism, but also deprived them of extra sources of income they had relied on to support their families.

Given the US government’s hyperbolic claims of Russian meddling in its 2016 presidential election, the social media purge it has inspired in Nicaragua is stained with irony. After years of investigations, and billions of dollars spent, the only ostensible evidence Washington found of Russian interference was some Facebook posts, including absurd humorous memes.

If these alleged Russian Facebook memes constitute a Pearl Harbor-style attack on North American democracy, as top US government officials have claimed, then what does it mean for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to censor highly influential pro-Sandinista media outlets, journalists, and activists mere days before Nicaragua’s elections?

Aaron Mate discusses Russian troll farms’ dangerous Jesus masturbation memes that allegedly won Donald Trump the election. Full ep https://t.co/0izDspjRxX @aaronjmate @mtaibbi #UsefulIdiotsPod @RollingStone @RSPolitics #russiagate pic.twitter.com/XG2cH6NZ8F

— Katie Halper (@kthalps) May 18, 2020

Besides meddling in foreign elections, North American social media monopolies have systematically and repeatedly censored journalists, politicians, and activists in numerous countries targeted by Washington for regime change, such as Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Russia, and China. On numerous occasions, these Silicon Valley companies have admitted such purges were carried out at the request of the US government.

The Grayzone has documented the many ways in which these Big Tech giants collaborate with Western governments, while promoting US state media and silencing people in countries that Washington has deemed its adversaries.

For their part, the Nicaraguans censored by Facebook and Twitter have vowed to continue their work.

Redvolución wrote that it will keep struggling in the “digital trenches” to “defend the revolution.”

Quenri Madrigal, a prominent Sandinista activist and social media influencer, commented, “We have already witnessed the forms of online censorship targeting other countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. There is a tyranny of transnational technology and social media corporations. They are instruments that don’t belong to the peoples.”

thegrayzone.com

The very big picture is bad. Progressives woke up one morning to realize they controlled the media. People who thought like them made our movies, TV shows, and most importantly, owned the greatest propaganda tool ever invented, social media. They could significantly influence not only which breakfast cereal America liked best, but also which candidate America should vote for.

And none of it fell under the First Amendment. That old saw only protects people from government censorship, not corporate censorship or propaganda. The Founders never conceived we the people would want to have our media censored, or that companies would grow more powerful than the government to be able to do so, or that the age-old remedy for misinformation – truth – would become so reviled and feared. Of all the Founders’ omissions of issues unimaginable in the 18th century, this is the one which may prove fatal to the Republic.

The big picture is bad. Thanks to legal razzle-dazzle aimed at limiting corporate liability for the garbage they publish, Section 230 of the Communication Act was born. This removed the threat of libel to allow social media to become an even more powerful influence in our lives. They could shove anything up America’s nose or down the memory hole penalty free.

The law reads “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what is on their platforms. So if Twitter wants to only include false happy news about Hunter Biden, it can. If Twitter wants to enable those who spew out out-and-out lies about Trump, it can. They ran amok with Trump and Russia, willfully promoting lies that were part of a professional disinformation campaign Goebbels would have looked at in awe.

The Founders envisioned media as an essential element of democracy, affording it unique status in the Bill of Rights to inform the people. Social media repurposed that grace into an anti-democratic tool which works like this: a journalist “publishes” a falsehood on social media. The mainstream media then does a story about that tweet, cleverly using Twitter as the quoted source to cover themselves from any claims of libel or obligation to the truth. They are just reporting what was already on Twitter.

This legal and moral sleight of hand allows places like the NYT to whore out their credibility to front page the most atrocious gossip – see, we’re not saying it’s true, only that it was on Twitter. The power of the 1A protects the NYT, which becomes a front for the partisan work of so-called non-publishers on social media. Think of it as an 1A reach-around.

This willful journalistic malfeasance could not exist without the collaboration of the search engines to hide the truth. Search engines have become of the most politicized interactions of anyone’s day, shoving information and denying it in equal amounts, all driven by the views of, well, someone, no one is really sure who anymore.

What we do know for sure is in the end the massive global media infrastructure was recruited to drive Trump from office. Where the effort failed with Russia, Ukraine, January 6, and all the sideshow acts of Emoluments and Stormy Daniels, it finally got enough traction to matter with Covid. Trump killed your grandma. Today the guns are all reloaded, and the media is already declaring 2024 stolen if Trump wins.

The small picture is also bad. Journalists, who depend on the 1A for their jobs, no longer believe in its most foundational tenet: informing the public to enable them to participate more fully in our democracy. On a small scale, journalism is now a weapon to take 1A rights away from those deemed politically unsuitable. Here’s one case study to spoil breakfast.

I don’t know Shawn McCaffrey or Christopher Mathias. I do know both of them believe in ideological purity. But one’s a threat to the 1A and one just likes to hear himself talk.

Shawn belonged to Identity Evropa, which among other things played a role in the 2017 “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville. Chris meanwhile identifies as a journalist for Huffington Post and covers “far right, disinformation, and hate.” He believes Identity Evropa Shawn is dangerous because he is “racist, homophobic and hosts an anti-Semitic podcast.”

Chris believes Shawn is so dangerous he devoted his own First Amendment rights as a journalist to stomp the wind out of Shawn’s First Amendment right to say hateful things, to the point where Chris and HuffPo stalked Shawn to discover he had enlisted in the Air Force. They turned over their 1A-protected “journalism” to a progressive-aggressive Congresswoman for weaponization, not unlike the two-step practiced by place like NYT and Twitter. The Congresswoman made the Air Force throw Shawn out.

Why did Chris, HuffPo, and the Congresswoman go so far out of their way to get Shawn out of the Air Force? Because they believe people like Shawn join the military not to serve their country, but “to receive combat training they can use to inflict violence on civilian targets and can recruit other servicemen and servicewomen to their cause.” Journo Chris adds this is “a problem brought into focus by the prevalence of current and former military personnel taking part in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6.” At worst only 15 percent of those arrested had some vague “tie” to military service.

This game is not new for Chris and HuffPo. They got an elementary school teacher fired for writing things on “extremist” sites they did not agree with. The teacher also wrote for The Atlantic, Vice, The Daily Caller, and The Weekly Standard, the latter two Chris tells us “let him make his racist sympathies clear in print.” In 2019 Chris and HuffPo “exposed” 11 racist servicemen. Evidence HuffPo amassed included a Facebook posting by one who wrote he likes “Tennessee because it is conservative and Christian, implicitly white.” That’s not even true; the state is almost 17 percent black but whatever.

Chris the journalist also believes without evidence “many nameless fascists today lead double lives, hiding behind avatars to promote their noxious beliefs online while holding down respectable day jobs in education, military, law enforcement, medicine or government.” He works with whatever the hell the Anonymous Comrades Collective is “to expose Nazis, racists and fascists.”

By the way, in case you haven’t guessed, paranoid Journo Chris is the threat and Racist Shawn is the one who just likes to hear himself talk.

When so-called journalists judge ideological purism, we see in practice the same hatred and bigotry, backed up by self-granted righteousness, they claim to oppose. Shawn blathering out of his basement about how gays aren’t suitable for the military is no different than Chris standing atop HuffPo’s platform and saying people like Shawn aren’t suitable for the military.

Like any good National Socialist of old, Chris is certain what he is doing protects the country in what he wrote is a moment of moral emergency. He and HuffPo are nasty ideologues who believe their ends – ideologically cleansing America – justify the means. Right now that cleansing is a version of cancellation but really, why stop there? Go full Inglorious Basterds and really take out some Nazis as a final solution to free speech, the threat to democracy that keeps electing Republicans.

Things have moved beyond journalists sniping at each other in print, or even partisan reporting. The case with Chris and Shawn is repugnant because it involves a journalist who finds someone else’s exercise of a Constitutional right so distasteful that he used the full power of an international media organization protected by that same First Amendment to destroy the speaker. That’s far more distasteful than anything out of Shawn’s potty mouth. And, biggest picture of all, that’s what is left of journalism at this point.

wemeantwell.com