“Facebook is a private company and can delete any pages they want,” has been repeated ad nauseam since Alex Jones was wiped from its platform. While it is certainly true that a private company can and should be able to choose who they associate with, the idea that Facebook is private is not accurate.
For this reason, the recent purge of hundreds of alternative media sites, including the Free Thought Project, was not only questionable, but unconstitutional. In May, after Americans were successfully whipped into a tizzy of Russian hacking and meddling, along with the fake news hysteria, the Americans begging for censorship craze came to a head when Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council.
Facebook announced that it partnered with the arm of the council, known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab that was brought on to help the social media behemoth with “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”
Apparently, Free Thought Project was one of those threats. Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council, so what, right? They can do whatever they want and hire outside third parties to help them police the platform they own, right?
Yes, this is correct. However, the Atlantic Council is funded by government. The Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri.
The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists — is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Google, the United States, the US Army, and the Airforce. The “think tank” Facebook partnered with to make decisions on who they censor is directly funded by multiple state actors — including the United States — which voids any and all claims that Facebook is a wholly “private actor.” It gets worse.
The Atlantic Council wields massive influence over mainstream media too, which is why when this partnership was announced, no one in the mainstream press pointed it out as the Orwellian idea that it is. Instead, headlines such as “US think tank’s tiny lab helps Facebook battle fake social media(Reuters)” and “Facebook partners with Atlantic Council to improve election security (The Hill)” were put out to spin the fact that a NATO propaganda arm is now censoring the information Americans see on Facebook.
They have even been caught engaging in the creation of actual fake news and no one in the mainstream has called them out on it. As Bryan MacDonald so aptly noted, some of the stuff the Atlantic Council itself gets away with serves to show its power over the mainstream media.
For instance, when Ben Nimmo, a one-time NATO press officer, and Atlantic Council board member, himself ludicrously insisted grammar mistakes were “proof” that social media users critical of NATO were paid Kremlin trolls, and later when he smeared a British man by labeling him a Russian bot, the popular press didn’t bother to question whether he was a fit and proper person for Facebook to engage as a censor.
Even after the victim appeared on Sky News to prove he was a real person. Thus, what should have been a warning of the dangers of DFR Lab was essentially ignored.
At the time, after Nimmo, instead of apologizing, wrote “interesting to see the real face of Ian56789, rather than the David Gandy one, at last (referring to his Twitter avatar). Not a troll factory account. Rather, a pro-Kremlin troll(definition based on [sic] use of someone else’s picture, systematic use of Kremlin narratives, and repetitive abusive behaviour),” WikiLeaks was the sole voice of reason, and challenged the lobbyist.
“You literally produced, with money from weapons companies and dictatorships, a fake news story that spread all over the world, defaming a very British retiree, who wants to reduce arms company profits, as a Kremlin bot,” they wrote. “So who’s the paid troll?”
This is the group Facebook is now taking direction from in regard to who is allowed to post information on their platform. The Atlantic Council has been proven to create fake news to slander people who have an antiwar stance in an effort to keep their pro-war weapons companies in the black. It is utter insanity.
However, in today’s information war, it is to be expected. Caitlan Johnstone, who has been a champion of calling out this censorship since the start, also pointed out several other reasons why Facebook is anything but “private.”
Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How “private” is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.
Indeed, unless we fight back in the form of sharing information deemed “wrong think” by the censors, this problem will only continue to get worse. We must continue to alert our fellow humans to this censorship before it becomes the norm. We must use this recent purge as our Streisand moment and turn this massive and blatant act of censorship around as a tool to expose the tyrants behind it. Make no mistake, October 11, 2018 marked the day the battle over information became a war. If you are not on our email list, please sign up here. If you’d like to subscribe to our site to aid in the battle against the censors and receive special perks along the way, you can do so at this link. We are also working with the folks from minds.com and have created a platform on their uncensored network as well. You can follow us at this link. We have been on Steemit as well. And Instagram too. We are also in meetings with software developers who are building a platform that government will never be able to touch. Stay tuned for more information on this move.