Censorship
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Interest of | • 7th floor group • Anti-Defamation League • Josep Borrell • Center for Countering Digital Hate • European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation • Nick Fuentes • Paddy Hannam • Kim Iversen • Rania Khalek • Karen Kornbluh • Elon Musk • Brendan O'Neill • PewDiePie ADL controversy • Giovanni Pitruzzella • Project Censored • Nathalie Van Raemdonck • Michael Rectenwald • Social Observatory for Disinformation and Social Media Analysis • Lauren Southern • Spiked Online • Trusted News Initiative • Andrew Vallance • Brittany Venti • Henry Wales • Wikiscanner |
The organised suppression of information, increasingly being resorted to by large hierarchical organisations such as the nation states intent on preserving public credulity in their official narratives, many of which are at ever greater variance with reality. |
Contents
Official Narrative
US President John F. Kennedy elegantly articulated the official narrative of the time when he stated "The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings."
An official (albeit contentious, and still openly debated) addendum to this narrative suggests that nation states are justified in using increasing censorship to protect their citizens against terrorists. Since the launching of the "war on terror" the concept of "national security" is being ever more widely used to prevent both the publishing of information by individuals and the withholding of information gathered at public expense by government bodies.
Problems
In the time of the cold war, the censorship of information by the governments east of the iron curtain was widely understood. Censorship in Western nations was more subtle. Often, a public system of censorship existed, but was rarely used. Since 1912, for example, UK has operated a system of censorship called the D Notice system to muzzle the commercially-controlled media. While officially optional, this is nevertheless fairly effective in practice allows the government to censor material. Australia started a similar system in 1952. This has provided a first line of cover for more extensive, clandestine, systems of censorship - such as the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, active since the 1950's.
The internet in general has proved a problems for old censorship models. Its non hierarchical nature, together with the fact that information flows so freely, have presented an unsurmountable challenge to those seeking to censor information. Wikileaks, for example, has published material which governments have tried to censor with D Notices.
Internet Censorship
In spite of mass surveillance by intelligence agencies such as the NSA, many nation states have sought to explicitly curtail free self-expression on the internet.
Australia
"For some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift", stated Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, in September 2014, as laws were being introduced to outlaw speech that the authorities see as "advocating terrorism".
UK
In March 2014, Wired reported that James Brokenshire (UK minister for immigration and security) "has called for the government to do more to deal with 'unsavoury', rather than illegal, material online." Brokenshire is reported as stating that "Terrorist propaganda online has a direct impact on the radicalisation of individuals and we work closely with the internet industry to remove terrorist material hosted in the UK or overseas."[1]
Russia
In May 2014, Vladimir Putin passed a law which requires bans anonymous wifi connections and requires any site with more than 3,000 visitors/day to register, and meet certain requirements.[2][3]
US
The US government has long had a polict of seizing entire top level domains (particularly .com addresses) at will. This effectively censors websites not only for the US public, but worldwide. This policy has lead to increasing interest in a de facto adjustment to the system for managing domain names.
Wikipedia
- Full article: WikiSpooks:Problems with Wikipedia/Censorship
- Full article: WikiSpooks:Problems with Wikipedia/Censorship
Wikipedia tries hard to present itself as a democratic alternative medium "the encyclopedia that everyone can edit..." but its guidelines on notability and its definition of what constitutes a "reliable source" mean that it is firmly part of the corporate media establishment. Below are some pages which used to exist on Wikipedia but were removed:
Page | Description |
---|---|
2001 Anthrax attacks/Timeline | A detailed and revealing timeline about the Amerithrax attacks, deleted from Wikipedia in April 2014, recovered from an archive at Deletionpedia. |
2001 Israeli Nerve Gas Attacks | For 6 weeks in early 2001, Israel is reported to have carried out a series of nerve gas attacks on Palestinian civilian populations in both Gaza and the West Bank. |
9-11/Censorship | A range of tactics have been employed to try to stifle dissent about 9/11, from ad hominem attacks to assassination. As of 2016, censorship is ongoing. |
9-11/E-4B | An E-4B was spotted over the White house and the Pentagon on 9/11. The official narrative for more than a decade was not to talk about it, although it was reported on CNN and video, photos and eye witnesses do exist. Later declassification did prove the basic fact that the plane was present. |
9-11/Premature death | Many people have been killed in an effort to suppress the truth about 9/11. Where convenient, deaths have been made to look accidental or illness related. Sometimes people have been "suicided", making it hard to know exactly how many were murdered. |
9-11/WTC7/Destruction/Censorship | A very telling omission by the corporate media, lasting for several years, that totally suppressed mention of the complete (forewarned) collapse of WTC7. Note that the 911 originally neglected to give an account of this unprecedented event. |
9-11/Whistleblowers | Many people have sought to share important evidence about 9/11, using inside knowledge from a professional capacity. |
Ziad Abdelnour | A neoconservative financier who was disciplined by the SEC. |
Arms Dealer | A "third rail" topic for commercially-controlled media. Wikipedia has nothing to say on the topic. |
Scott Bennett | Spent 2 years in jail as a result of speaking his mind and attempting to blow the whistle on fraud and corruption inside the US war machine. |
CIA/Drug trafficking/Exposure | Drug trafficking by intelligence agencies — especially the CIA — is, as of 2019, pretty widely understood to be a part of their modus operandi. This follows decades of research into and publicity about this topic, most notably by Gary Webb who broke the story of CIA Drug trafficking over the early WWW. |
James Corbett | James Corbett is a popular critic of the US establishment who has been active on the internet since 2007. |
David Kelly/Assassination | On 17 July 2003, David Kelly allegedly committed suicide by swallowing 29 co-proxamol tablets and cutting to his ulnar artery (wrist) with a blunt pruning knife. He was writing a book exposing high level corruption at the time and had given no indication of depression. An official inquest was commenced but never completed. |
Jack Davis | CIA, censored from Wikipedia |
Deep event | An event which has major influence on the politics of a country or group of countries by virtue of its psychological impact on populations, principally through corporate media construction and reporting of what becomes its "official narrative". Such events predominantly involve controversial domestic politics, especially in the field of so-called "national security", foreign affairs and geo-politics. |
Bill Fairclough | Bill Fairclough's biography |
Mohammed Ferrat | Mohammed Samir Ferrat was reportedly killed aboard Flight TWA 800. He was a colleague of Ron Brown who had died 3 months earlier in another suspicious plane crash. Prior to the flight his business was in financial difficulties and he had taken more that one multiple life insurance policies and borrowed heavily from would be investors in Ivory Coast and Switzerland. |
Anthony Hall | Academic targeted by B'nai B'rith in 2016 for "using his academic credentials to deny the Holocaust and promote 9/11 conspiracy theories." |
Emad Abdalla Hassan | A person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, sold to US for $5000 and has been subject to illegal imprisonment and torture in Guantanamo Bay for years. Cleared for release in 2010, he was transferred to Oman on June 13, 2015. |
Israel/Defense Forces/T-shirt affair | Unremarked for at least 3 years before becoming common knowledge and condemned world-wide in 2009, IDF soldiers were wearing bad taste T-shirts about murder. |
JFK/Assassination/Perpetrators | Mark Gorton terms this group "the cabal" and suggests that they are responsible for a large number of treasonous crimes up to the present day. The group includes two subsequent US presidents, Lyndon Johnson and George H. W. Bush. |
JFK/Assassination/Premature death | Dozens of people were killed in a vain effort to suppress the truth about the JFK Assassination. Where convenient, deaths have been made to look accidental or illness related. Sometimes people were "suicided", making it hard to know exactly how many were murdered. |
Pierre Jovanovic | A critic of the system of fiat currency and central banks. His page was removed from French Wikipedia. |
Isaac Kappy | An actor who died aged 42 after accusing former Hollywood friends of paedophilia. |
Lawrence E. King | Prosecuted for fraud but not for the Franklin child prostitution ring. Wikipedia removed his page. |
Nuclear demolition | Use of nuclear explosions to demolish buildings was first mooted in the late 1960s. This article on the topic is based on a page which appeared and was soon removed from Wikipedia in March 2010. It is based on the work of Dimitri Khalezov. |
Official narrative | The "Official Narrative" is the cover story of "the powers that be". On Wikispooks this generally means the story intended for citizens of the so-called 'Western Democracies'. This could be the truth, but the term is usually reserved for use in cases in which it departs significantly from the truth (which may be be unclear or completely unknown, cover by a veil of official lies). |
Official opposition narrative | The Official Opposition Narrative is the alternative cover story of "the powers that be". Debate is generally encouraged between the two. |
The Corbett Report | Named as an outlet of "Fake News" by PropOrNot. Censored and deranked by Youtube and Twitter. |
UK Column | An independent media source based in UK. |
Douglas Valentine |
Examples
Page name | Description |
---|---|
9-11/Censorship | A range of tactics have been employed to try to stifle dissent about 9/11, from ad hominem attacks to assassination. As of 2016, censorship is ongoing. |
Imran Ahmed | Spooky activist "Buffalo might never have happened if online hate had been tackled after Christchurch" |
COVID-19/Censorship | Dissident thought about COVID-19 is being heavily censored, particularly online, as as discussed at Event 201 |
Cancel culture | A part of Censorship |
Climate Action Against Disinformation | A coalition of "climate and anti-disinformation organisations" intending to "eliminate the spread of climate disinformation" by creating "strong policies from both governments and tech platforms" |
Climate Disinformation Coalition | Coalition of NGOs lobbying to introduce more censorship of social media. Partners with the spooky Institute for Strategic Dialogue. |
Corporate media/Censorship | On important topics, corporate media is subject to de facto censorship. |
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency | The agency that cares so much about security, it's in the name twice. |
DSMA-Notice | An official request to news editors not to publish or broadcast items on specified subjects for reasons of national security, a system of censorship in use in the UK. |
Deplatforming | Anti-free speech concept. A part of censorship, particularly on social media. |
Renee DiResta | "Former" CIA operative who is "leader of the global censorship industry" as research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. |
Document:WikiLeaks D Notice | |
Facebook/Oversight board | The group charged with deciding what could be said on Facebook, and what should be removed |
Faktisk | Norwegian "fact-checking" website with close personnel ties to the intelligence services and the military. |
File:WikiLeaks-Australian-suppression-order.pdf | Australian Supreme Court secret super-injunction preventing the publication of information about a corruption case involving 17 named individuals including senior Malaysian, Indonesian, Vietnamese politicians and Reserve Bank of Australia directors |
Forum on Information & Democracy | The Forum on Information & Democracy is an Orwellian named group to where the intention is exactly the opposite, massive censorship. Secret funders. |
Global Disinformation Index | |
Julie Inman Grant | According to herself "turned down" CIA employment, before working 17 years for Microsoft. Then she became Australia's online censorship commissioner who wants to "recalibrate" freedom of speech. |
Information hygiene | A scientific-sounding buzzword being promoted as part of the SDS internet censorship project. Information hygiene is a mix of censorship through "fact checkers" and "technological solutions", and attempting to get the population to self censor and instead "trust the experts". |
Internet/Censorship | Removing things from the internet has become a high priority for those who seek to contain knowledge and shape ideas. This is done under a range of covers, notably the "war on terror". |
Nina Jankowicz | An Integrity Initiative's Inner Core member who styled herself "The Mary Poppins of disinformation", nominal head of a US DoDS internet censorship project in 2022 which was disbanded amid condemnation and ridicule. In 2024 she resurfaced as head of the "American Sunlight Project". |
Lèse-majesté | The "crime" of dishonouring the ruler. The term is historically applied to crowned heads of state like kings, queens and emperors. While the original meaning is regarded as quaint, insulting rulers is still disliked, and several republics still classify offences against the dignity of the president or the state itself as a crime. Noticeably, several countries also criminalize insults to foreign heads of state. |
Missing documents | Files do go missing, both accidentally and on purpose. This article reviews some of the common patterns. |
Holger Münch | "The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action." |
New Zealand Broadcasting Standards Authority | New Zealand government supervision body for corporate media. |
PewDiePie ADL controversy | The ADL's attempt to destroy the world's most recognised YouTuber. There are still a number of theories to what really happened behind the scenes. |
Political correctness | a term. |
Rappler | Filipino online news website and "fact checker" largely funded by CIA or other deep-state run foundations. |
Section 86a | German law which criminalised holocaust denial, and other organisations and symbols. |
Shadow banning | |
Stanford/Internet Observatory | Cut-out for the Department of Homeland Security to censor online speech. Wound down (or activities shifted to other places) in 2024 after increasing exposure. |
Surveillance and censorship program | The UK government's 'Surveillance and censorship' (SAC) program is alleged by Kevin Galalae to be a part of the their CONTEST 'war on terror' strategy. He describes it as a project to 'brainwash the young and the impressionable to hold skewed and hypocritical views in line with the British Government’s foreign and domestic policy objectives'. |
Third rail topic | A topic that is not to be touched. |
Wikipedia/Protection | Wikipedia protects sensitive pages, to prevent anonymous edits which are deemed unwanted. Such protection is an indication that a page may be of deep political relevance. |
Woke | a part of Censorship |
Censorship victims on Wikispooks
Title | Description |
---|---|
Brian Berletic | Researcher, Writer, Commentator, banned from Twitter in 2022. |
Vernon Coleman | Medical doctor with decades of experience. His Wikipedia article received a complete re-write when he started to criticize the official narrative on Covid-19. |
T. J. Coles | |
Sue Grey | "Anti vax" lawyer from New Zealand |
Attila Hildmann | German-Turkish TV chef, turned "anti-vaxxer" and "far-right conspiracy theorist" |
Karoline Leavitt | Republican political aide |
Whitney Webb | Investigative journalist who has published many aspects of The Deep State |
Related Quotations
Page | Quote | Author | Date |
---|---|---|---|
"Disinformation" | “The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself with the censorship of "disinformation" on social media is that the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and facilitated by disinformation.” | Caitlin Johnstone | July 2021 |
Josep Borrell | “Disinformation in times of the coronavirus can kill. We have a duty to protect our citizens by making them aware of false information, and expose the actors responsible for engaging in such practices. In today's technology-driven world, where warriors wield keyboards rather than swords and targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns are a recognised weapon of state and non-state actors, the European Union is increasing its activities and capacities in this fight.” | Josep Borrell | 10 June 2020 |
Daily Mail | “The headline should read "Sussex University examines claims made by professor etc", not just "investigate professor" without certifying if the claim he made is valid or not. Another case of guilty before case proven!” | 'Fizzelle' | 7 November 2018 |
EU/Censorship | “Facts are one thing and opinions are another. Opinions are free; facts are facts.” | Joseph Borrell | 10 June 2020 |
Freedom of speech | “Being right doesn’t entitle you to censor everyone who is wrong. That’s the central safeguard against tyranny, because even truth would be a tyranny if it didn’t allow opposition. Free speech – real free speech – has to include the right to be wrong, rude, stupid, offensive and a lying jerk. Because once you outlaw any of that – you’ve effectively ended free speech for all of us forever.” | 'Catte' | 26 February 2017 |
Ulrike Guérot | “[Interior Minister] Nancy Faeser when she is interviewed then of course says that the Democracy Promotion Law is there to weaken the anti-democrats and to strengthen the friends of democracy, although exactly the opposite is done. It is called the extremist centre, so the centre itself is becoming extremist, ideologizes itself and does not realize that it will thereby marginalize itself and damage democracy. The extremist center does not realize that has made itself extremist.” | Ulrike Guérot | June 2024 |
Věra Jourová | “Disinformation waves have hit Europe during the Coronavirus pandemic. They originated from within as well as outside the EU. To fight disinformation, we need to mobilise all relevant players from online platforms to public authorities, and support independent fact checkers and media. While online platforms have taken positive steps during the pandemic, they need to step up their efforts. Our actions are strongly embedded in fundamental rights, in particular freedom of expression and information.” | Věra Jourová | 10 June 2020 |
Rosa Koire | “Ministry of truth: If you are like me you use Wikipedia along with lots of other sources and find it helpful with many fact-based questions. It's the 'peoples encyclopedia'. That is, until you decide to update the Agenda 21, Communitarianism, Sustainable Development, or Asset Based Community Development listings. Then you'll find yourself censored and pounding at the gates. I was successful with a few of these, for a while, but then the gatekeepers found my additions and censored them. They said I was a conspiracy theorist and if I persisted in posting I'd be barred from making any changes or posts to Wikipedia in the future.” | Rosa Koire | |
PewDiePie ADL controversy | “Reinstalled Twitter to talk about PewDiePie's betrayal by donating 50k to the ADL. The company working with places like Twitter to get rid of anything "Offensive" @pewdiepie
You just supported a group that even ruined even YOUR deal to Disney. Wtf? PewDiePie literally paid $50,000 to not be called racist anymore. And in turn- he just got so many people in the future censored off of places like Twitter and YouTube. Anytime someone gets banned for now on, I'll be sure to say "Thanks Pewdiepie"” | Brittany Venti | 11 September 2019 |
SDS/Exposure | “Whatever is unnamed, whatever is misnamed, is something else, whatever is buried under an inadequate or lying language, this will become not merely unspoken but unspeakable.” | Adrienne Rich | |
Henry Wales | “In today’s world, we are so connected like a vast nervous system, whether we are online or not. And much like the virus, there are no borders online. So when vaccine misinformation and disinformation spreads, magnified on social media and in parts of traditional media, it exposes a collective threat to humanity. I believe that misinformation is a global humanitarian crisis, and the crisis is getting worse.” | Henry Wales | |
Henry Wales | “in a way, taking a predominately hands-off approach to problems for so long is itself an exercise in power, [...] I think it’s a false choice to say you have to pick between free speech or a more compassionate and trustworthy digital world. They are not mutually exclusive.” | Henry Wales |
Related Documents
Non-internet censorship
In 2013, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester chose the iconic 2005 anti-war collage Photo-Op (right) for a poster campaign to promote a new exhibition about modern art and war. However, two of the UK's biggest advertising companies (who together controlled about 60% of the UK outdoor advertising market in 2011) refused to carry the image. CBS Outdoor, one of companies, told the BBC that the poster was refused after consultation with the Committee of Advertising Practice, which advises firms on whether ads may breach its code of conduct, which forbids adverts likely to cause "serious or widespread offence", while it told the authors that they could not use images involving explosions on public transport. [4]
Photography restrictions
Several government facilities are subject to permanent photography bans (such as, for example, passport control). In US, a temporary "order of protection" was used to jail a peaceful protester, Mary Anne Grady Flores, for a year after she photographed an anti-drone protest outside a military base near her home.