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How to report misinformation online (WHO tool)

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How to report misinformation online (WHO tool)

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As the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, we face the challenge of an overabundance of information related to the virus. Some of this information may be false and potentially harmful.

Inaccurate information spreads widely and at speed, making it more difficult for the public to identify verified facts and advice from trusted sources, such as their local health authority or WHO.

However, everyone can help to stop the spread. If you see content online that you believe to be false or misleading, you can report it to the hosting social media platform.

WHO works with the Government of the United Kingdom to tackle misinformation

In the context of the strategic partnership with the Government of the United Kingdom, WHO has joined forces with its communications teams to raise awareness of misinformation around COVID-19 and encourage individuals to report false or misleading content online.

This cooperation started with the joint Stop the Spread campaign in May-June 2020, which encouraged the use of trusted sources such as WHO and national health authorities for accurate COVID-19 information. The new phase of the joint campaign focuses on proactively identifying and reporting potentially wrong or misleading information, as part of WHO's efforts to address the spread of inaccurate and harmful information during the pandemic.

Learn more about inaccurate information on theWHO myth busters pages.

Visit our infodemiology pages to familiarize yourself with this emerging field of science.

Play Go Viral! to uncover the latest tactics used to spread false information, build your resistance to misinformation and help stop the spread of COVID-19. Go Viral! is brought to you by the Government of the United Kingdom and the University of Cambridge.

Learn more about cyber security.

Common COVID-19 vaccine misconceptions addressed

A year into the pandemic, vaccines are being rolled out, and information about them (some reliable and some not), is everywhere. In response, the Government of the United Kingdom and WHO have produced a digital series to address common misconceptions circulating online and explain the safety of approved COVID-19 vaccines.

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As the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, we face the challenge of an overabundance of information related to the virus. Some of this information may be false and potentially harmful. However, everyone can help to stop the spread.

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Edelman Trust Barometer
Big media companies worth more / wield more power than many nation states
FB very poor at removing hate speech outside US, see anti-Muslim examples
Emojis very good at promoting engagement ... and outrage
As with advertising, whether or not paid influencers are +ve or -ve depends on whether they can be clearly identified as paid influencers
We are all propagandists (but important to keep a perspective rather than constantly self-censor)
#PelosiMustGo example - "more engagement is more engagement"
Shifting the responsibility for stopping the spread of misinformation to individuals / end users - is this fair? Are there consequences?

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The News Literacy Project is a 501(c)(3) educational organization. We are independent and nonpartisan; the support we receive from donors and foundations does not determine or influence any content we develop and provide in our Checkology virtual classroom materials or other resources.

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Promotional Industries have their roots in Wartime propaganda.
Bernays: The Engineering of Consent
" ... pull[ing] the wires that control the unconscious mind."
cigarettes = torches of freedom
development of codes of ethics (is this even possible?)
Tim Wu - Big Think - people revolting against advertising every 30 years or so, contradiction of consumer's refusal to pay for web content fuelling the rise of more insidious techniques (paying with data, attention (casino effect), intermediated attention,
All entities (charities, public service etc) in a permanent state of self advocacy
What matters with advertising is transparency and credibility so  you KNOW when you're viewing advertising
Relationship between news organisation and advertiser is extremely important
"Native ads"

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Twitter attacks lead to appointment as co-director for terrorism research centre

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Twitter attacks lead to appointment as co-director for terrorism research centre

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The appointment of one of the directors of the Government’s research centre for counter-violent extremism has been described as “problematic” and “disturbing.”

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister Andrew Little made the announcement of the opening of the He Whenua Taurikura, Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, last week in response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch terror attacks.

Ardern said “I believe this centre will help us to be a more resilient, inclusive and safer Aotearoa New Zealand.”

Little, who is the Minister responsible for the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on the Christchurch Mosques, said he was looking forward to seeing the centre deepen understanding and enrich public discussion on preventing and countering violent extremism.”

Professor Dr Joanna Kidman and Professor Paul Spoonley were appointed as co-directors of the Centre. Spoonley was appointed as an interim Director for up to a year, while Dr Kidman’s term is three years.

Dr Kidman is a professor of Māori Education at Victoria University of Wellington and is a sociologist, researching indigenous sociology, Māori youth, higher education, decolonisation studies and comparative education.

Andrew Little noted the focus of the centre would be “understanding diversity and promoting social cohesion.” But is Kidman’s appointment at odds with the minister’s messaging?

Left-leaning political commentator Chris Trotter said it was a “very disturbing appointment.”

I consider Kidman to be an extremist” while Left-leaning political blogger Martyn Bradbury described the appointment as “insane.”

“Labour pushed back on their hate speech madness, but are still trying to find new ways to restrict free speech, meaning this new Extremist Research Academy will have vast influence over very large powers, which brings us to the problematic appointment of Professor Joanne Kidman” he wrote in his blog.

In 2020, Kidman accused fashion designer Trelise Cooper of perpetrating “colonial violence in floral polyester” after she named one of her dresses “Trail of Tiers.” Trail of Tears, was a series of forced death marches Native American tribes were sent on by the US Government between 1830-1850.

Kidman slammed Cooper on Twitter. "Accounts of Native women being raped by settlers and soldiers on the Trail of Tears and the Long Walk of the Navajo don't translate well into a fashion statement... but hey, Trelise Cooper, guess you're making a living, right?" Cooper swiftly apologised. Bradley said “Kidman wanted Cooper cancelled for a dress, that’s her threshold for hate and extremism, a dressmaker who had no idea of an indigenous atrocity.”

He believes Kidman is unsuitable for the Government-appointed position. “That’s the person in charge of an academy on extremism? Someone who is triggered by a dress and who used their platform to start a woke Lynch mob?”

“Now the good Professor Joanne Kidman may scream in rage that I’ve reminded everyone what her brittle thresholds for hate crimes are just as she gets her large dollop of creamy public money to investigate extremism, but I would calmly retort that Professor Joanne Kidman is getting the exact same zero benefit of the doubt that she as a woke crusader gave Trelise Cooper.”

Bradbury said “how could someone with such brittle thresholds for hate be put in such a critical position to directly advise the Government and the security apparatus on who should be targeted? - Anything coming out of this extremism research centre must be challenged.”

Kidman has, in the past, publicly criticised those whose views deviate from her own, including social media “pile-ons”, authoring petitions, and name-calling “offenders” as "settlers." Kidman didn't respond to written questions. The Māori Party didn’t respond, while the Green Party declined the invitation to comment.

Act Party Leader David Seymour said “the problem with Government appointing cultural enforcers is that the solution can be nastier than the problem. It’s even worse when the enforcers are chosen through the Government’s ideological lens, instead of character and competence.”

National Party Leader Christopher Luxon declined to comment, but the Prime Minister’s office was happy to and provided a statement.

“The Centre is an independent organisation focused on research on New Zealand-specific research on the causes of, and measures to prevent violent extremism and terrorism.”

“Professor Kidman has written many peer-reviewed papers around ethnicity, society and culture. Professor Paul Spoonley has researched and written on a wide range of topics such as social cohesion and diversity, racism, Pākehā identity, demographic change, the far-right, white supremacism and antisemitism.”

The spokesperson said both Directors Professor Joanna Kidman and Professor Paul Spoonley were appointed through a formal recruitment process led by Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC).

“The Directors are not public servants, and a Governance Board will oversee the work of the Centre and the Directors.

Ministers were not involved in recruitment decision-making.” In 2020, Kidman encouraged a petition ‘calling out’ Waikato Univesity as being racist.

However, an independent review into allegations of casual and structural racism at Waikato University concluded the claims were "incorrect, inaccurate", and reflective of differing perspectives.

It found that because New Zealand's public institutions, including universities, adhere to western traditions and cultures, there is a case for structural, systemic, and casual discrimination at the university.

On the Royal Society website, Kidman said a mature nation should be able to discuss history, even when doing so is uncomfortable or painful, referring to her $859,000 Marsden Funded research project on the New Zealand Wars.

As of 7th June, her latest video on YouTube about the statue of Sir George Grey in Albert Park, Auckland has been viewed 119 times.

On May 27th, she tweeted “nice example of historian-as-bigoted-dickhead to add to the pile of sixty-twelve million reasons why 99 percent of university historians should have a curfew and an ankle tracker.”

Kidman has attacked journalists whose articles she disagrees with, once describing a Wellington reporter as “still drunk.” Kidman often uses the derisive term “settler.”

On Jun 10, 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Movement in the United States, Kidman wrote “white academia: you’ve ‘discovered’ racism this past fortnight and taken to the streets in support of BLM. Now it’s time to turn your attention to the saturating whiteness of your own universities, disciplines and teaching & research practices, and recognise your own complicity.”

Leonie Pihama, a Senior Research Fellow at the Te Kōtahi Institute, University of Waikato, and Director of Māori And Indigenous Analysis Ltd, a Kaupapa Māori research company, provided some insight into the potential direction of the centre.

“The centre is an important development to investigate the origins of white supremacist colonial ideology, and its embedded violent practices in Aotearoa.”

A Victoria University high-ranking staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this type of discussion was troubling.

“I’m worried she’ll [Kidman] exploit the centre’s well-intended mission, reframing narratives in her ongoing pursuit of justice from colonisation. That’s not what it’s about. She’s a provocateur, and passionate, but those attributes don’t necessarily bring people together.”

Free Speech Union Chief Executive Jonathan Ayling said “this appointment is absurd and reveals the ideological capture that is pushing forward an anti-speech agenda.”

“Professor Kidman has claimed that words are equivalent to violence and has been at the forefront of numerous attempts to silence others.”

“The Free Speech Union would unreservedly stand by her right to speech, but this appointment is simply inappropriate for someone who has so overtly used her influence in the past to silence others and remove their right to speech.”

“This is a political appointment aimed at furthering anti-speech policies that will hurt the vulnerable and further erode social cohesion.”

“We call on the Government to reverse this appointment and fill the position with a less censorious candidate.”

Currently, countering terrorism and violent extremism is an important part of the security intelligence work of the NZSIS.

On its website it reads “there are individuals and groups in New Zealand that are committed to acts of terrorism, violence and intimidation. These are extremists who advocate using violence to impose their own political, ethnic or religious viewpoint on others.”

“It is important to note that terrorism can occur at the extremes of any ideology, cause or belief system. As such, NZSIS may investigate any individual, group or entity that advocates violence in support of an ideology.  The NZSIS collects intelligence related to possible terrorist activity and, through its links and cooperation with other security and intelligence organisations worldwide, monitors the movements and activities of known terrorists and terrorist groups around the world.”

Since her appointment, Kidman has hidden her Twitter account.

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Co-director appointment for terrorism research centre “disturbing” — CHRIS LYNCH NEWS

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Co-director appointment for terrorism research centre “disturbing”

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BREAKING: @CBSNews Broadcast Associate Reveals “Cheap” Way Network ‘Fact Checks’ Themselves Using Their Own Reporting; Admits to News Room Impartiality Issues by “Picking a Side or Leaning One Way.”

#ExposeCBS

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BREAKING: @CBSNews Broadcast Associate Reveals “Cheap” Way Network ‘Fact Checks’ Themselves Using Their Own Reporting; Admits to News Room Impartiality Issues by “Picking a Side or Leaning One Way.”

#ExposeCBS https://t.co/PjCPtXNVQ7

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BREAKING: @CBSNews Broadcast Associate Reveals “Cheap” Way Network ‘Fact Checks’ Themselves Using Their Own Reporting; Admits to News Room Impartiality Issues by “Picking a Side or Leaning One Way.”#ExposeCBS pic.twitter.com/PjCPtXNVQ7
— Lara Logan (@laralogan) June 7, 2022

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BREAKING: @CBSNews Broadcast Associate Reveals “Cheap” Way Network ‘Fact Checks’ Themselves Using Their Own Reporting; Admits to News Room Impartiality Issues by “Picking a Side or Leaning One Way.”

#ExposeCBS https://t.co/PjCPtXNVQ7

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BREAKING: @CBSNews Broadcast Associate Reveals “Cheap” Way Network ‘Fact Checks’ Themselves Using Their Own Reporting; Admits to News Room Impartiality Issues by “Picking a Side or Leaning One Way.”

#ExposeCBS https://t.co/PjCPtXNVQ7

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BREAKING: @CBSNews Broadcast Associate Reveals “Cheap” Way Network ‘Fact Checks’ Themselves Using Their Own Reporting; Admits to News Room Impartiality Issues by “Picking a Side or Leaning One Way.”

#ExposeCBS

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Twitter Killed the Peer Review Star https://t.co/mS6EeMZD9k How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory /1

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“A Toxic Milieu Dominated by Opportunists, Dilettantes, Racist/Misogynist Assholes, and Trolls”

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How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory

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Twitter Killed the Peer Review Star https://t.co/mS6EeMZD9k How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory /1 https://t.co/1GKCjWja8Y

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— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) June 7, 2022

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“A Toxic Milieu Dominated by Opportunists, Dilettantes, Racist/Misogynist Assholes, and Trolls”

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How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory

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Twitter Killed the Peer Review Star https://t.co/mS6EeMZD9k How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory /1 https://t.co/1GKCjWja8Y

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Twitter Killed the Peer Review Star https://t.co/mS6EeMZD9k How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory /1 https://t.co/1GKCjWja8Y

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Twitter Killed the Peer Review Star https://t.co/mS6EeMZD9k How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory /1

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“A Toxic Milieu Dominated by Opportunists, Dilettantes, Racist/Misogynist Assholes, and Trolls”

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How Media Darling Angela Rasmussen Tweeted Her Way Past Post-Doc Mediocrity to COVID-19 Fame and Glory

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A PolitiFact “fact checker” who has attempting to discredit National Pulse reporting on mask mandates and recent medical journal papers has almost zero experience in real news reporting, medical reporting, COVID-19 reporting, or even national news, The National Pulse can reveal.

The information is the latest in a slew of “fact checker” stories which reveal dubiously credentialed individuals working to remove anti-Big Pharma content from the internet at the behest of big tech companies and their sponsors in the pharmaceutical industry.

Floridian liberal Gabrielle Settles appears to have begun working for Politifact in March 2021, bylining at least 70 stories for the corporate-backed censor.

Settles, however, has no experience in dealing with any of this kind of information, having performed the majority of her “fact checks” simply by copying and pasting from the Centers for Disease Control website, and even veering off into “fact checking” pictures of Christmas cards and photos of singer Rihanna.

Prior to Politifact, Settles worked at a small, St. Petersburg outfit called “The Weekly Challenger”, and prior to that, as an “Office Administrator” at “Moody Radio” and a “contributing writer” at a blog called “The Power Broker Magazine.” The sites receive almost zero web traffic.

In fact, Settles’s journalistic contributions are extremely limited. But naturally, her contributions to partisan rhetoric are not.

The Politifact “reporter” – a job which includes no actual reporting – has a history of pro-Democrat and anti-Trump tweets. Naturally, she took umbrage with The National Pulse’s story on masks and deaths, derived from two separate stories of May 16th and May 26th.

In the first, Natalie Winters reveals how Beny Spira, Associate Professor at the University of São Paulo, published an April 19th 2022 study “analyz[ing] the correlation between mask usage against morbidity and mortality rates in the 2020-2021 winter in Europe.”

The data came from 35 European countries, and concluded:

“The findings presented in this short communication suggest that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage in the six-month period that encompassed the second European wave of COVID-19…”

The study also found:

“Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences…”

But Settles found this particular science to be “False” and as a result, the National Pulse story is now being censored on social media. Settles’s source appears to be a singular professor from the corporate-backed Milken Institute for Public Health at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her name is Emily Smith.

But Smith didn’t even tell Settles that Spira’s study was incorrect. She is quoted as saying:

“I think we can just use common sense to say that when cases are rising, people are more likely to do protective things… You’re more likely to wear a mask when you  go out and your city or your country might also have made recommendations or requirements to do those things.”

In other words, Smith is claiming that the mask usage and deaths is an inverse correlation, though she offers no evidence, nor science, nor refutation of the science offered. Instead, Smith suggests using “common sense” – a phrase oft-derided when used by anti-authoritarian activists at the beginning of the pandemic.

Smith, for what it is worth, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as revealed on her university biography.

A second study reviewed by The National Pulse, though thus far unmolested by Politifact, asserts:

“The most important finding from this study is that contrary to the accepted thought that fewer people are dying because infection rates are reduced by masks, this was not the case…Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or ∼50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates.”

The study also posited a potential reason for the disparity in risk ratio (RR) for dying from COVID-19:

“A rationale for the increased RR by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets, hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration.”

Dubbed the “Foegen effect,” the theory suggests that COVID-19 “virions spread (because of their smaller size) deeper into the respiratory tract.”

Settles has also claimed that airlines are not short staffed due to vaccine mandates (false) and that Virginia schools under Governor McAuliffe were not promoting critical race theory (also false).

The National Pulse reached out to Politifact at their truthometer@politifact.com address for a correction on June 2nd 2022. As yet, no one has responded, and Settles’s factually inaccurate “fact check” remains both online, and continues to censor The National Pulse stories on Facebook.

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Politif*cked: An Office Manager from Florida and a Gates-Funded Professor Are Censoring Studies Linking Mask Usage to Increased Deaths.

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A PolitiFact "fact checker" who has attempting to discredit National Pulse reporting on mask mandates and recent medical journal papers has almost zero experience in real news reporting, medical reporting, COVID-19 reporting, or even national news, The National Pulse can reveal.

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The election of Donald Trump in 2016 triggered an epistemological panic among the people in charge of our institutions. Truth had crumbled into post-truth. News had been perverted into fake news. Facts now spawned in disreputable corners to confuse rather than inform and guide the public.

A guilty party was immediately identified: the great digital platforms, Facebook above all, that conveyed astronomical volumes of information to the public beyond the reach of elite influence or control. Enormous pressure was applied by members of Congress, presidential candidates, media figures, academics, even Hollywood stars, to tame Facebook, Google and Twitter. With the advent of Covid-19 and the approaching 2020 presidential election, the parent companies of the digital platforms found it the better part of wisdom to capitulate. Last to surrender was Twitter, in August 2021.

And so the platforms became the guardians of truth-only they were unable to think at any level higher than "facts." Truth was hard but somehow facts were easy-all you had to do was verify them. In this manner the booming "fact-checking" industry began its peculiar career.

But how do facts relate to truth? That question can't be detached from the iron bonds of culture and history. So allow me, good reader, a brief detour through the genealogy of facts.

Science, Faith and Facts

In the Aristotelian universe that Christianity took over with a few minor edits, everything, including human beings, had an end purpose, a telos, and every statement of fact implied a judgment based on that purpose. By measuring proximity to the telos, facts were considered the building-blocks of the moral framework of the world.

By the time of the skeptical Enlightenment, however, philosophers were denying the idea of a telos and an objective moral framework and affirming the freedom of individuals to choose from a multitude of purposes. The facts had nothing to say in that quest-because, as David Hume famously declared, one cannot derive an ought from an is. Facts were neutral and inert. They lay embedded in reality, like an ore, until science extracted and smelted them into truth.

But how do brute facts become potent truths? In high school science, I was taught that reflection on the data would somehow engender a guess about the truth: a hypothesis. But if facts are neutral and inert, that's not a coherent explanation. And if we observe how scientists actually work, we soon learn to invert the equation: The hypothesis precedes the facts and is interested only in facts of a certain kind.

Facts exist at the speculative frontier of the great frameworks of truth erected by science-what Thomas Kuhn, scholar of scientific revolutions, called "paradigms." They matter only if they support or falsify the framework.

How do scientists choose between competing frameworks of truth? Kuhn speaks of a "transfer of allegiance" based in part on "faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind," he concludes, "can only be made on faith."

It sounds subjective, almost political-which is to say that the search for truth is an all-too-human adventure. Ordinary persons, no less than scientists, are along for the ride. I have never seen an atom or visited China-but I have faith in the sources that tell me such things exist. In the end, the answer to, "What is truth?" mostly hinges on another question: "Who decides?" The line between knowledge and power is blurry at best.

Tech Lords, Media Zombies and Fact-checkers

We can see that the obsession of Facebook and Twitter with fact-checking was based on the usual misunderstanding of the scientific method. They considered facts to be neutral and inert, simple to prove or disprove without much ideological fuss. Unfortunately, that only works if all of us agree on the framework of truth that integrates the facts-and it is precisely the disintegration of these frameworks in the digital age that triggered the epistemic crisis. In every domain, the ruling paradigms have lost their hold-but there has been no paradigm shift, only noise and struggle.

Given the lack of a framework, the answer to, "Who decides?" could only be partial and arbitrary. The public could decide, either directly, by the facts it valued, or in some algorithmic form. That would spin democratic society into a massive transactional churn, in which the truth of any proposition would go up or down unpredictably like the stock market. Whether such an arrangement would end in anything other than anarchy is an interesting question.

And, of course, the elites who run our modern institutions could decide. They did so in the last century, when government, media and the scientific establishment were the unchallenged arbiters of truth. The elites have endured a collapse of status and authority, but they retain their hold on the levers of power. For good reasons and bad, they wish to impose truth from above on the masses. Democratic society in this scheme would resemble a zombie movie version of the 20th century: Camelot of the living dead.

There can be little doubt that the lords of Silicon Valley, proprietors of the digital platforms, felt the need to appease the politicians in Washington and accommodate their own young, progressive workforces. The move to fact-checking begged many awkward questions about our post-truth moment but was flattering to the elites, who expected, as pedigreed "experts," that the task of fact-checking would fall to them. In this they were correct.

Remarkably, Facebook, Twitter and Google have subcontracted fact-checking to the news media-more accurately, to a handful of traditional media players clustered around the Poynter Institute, including Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. There could be no pretense of impartiality in the choice: Since 2016, the media has served as the attack dogs of the elite class. It commoditized opposition to Trump into a business proposition, as old-fashioned journalism, with its veneer of objectivity, gave way to a post-journalism that preached polarization to anxious liberals.

The public has hardly applauded this transformation: According to a recent survey by public relations firm Edelman, roughly six-in-ten Americans believe they are being lied to by journalists. But fact-checking was never an attempt to regain the public's trust. It was an exchange of protection for status, with a lot of money thrown into the bargain. To the question, "Who decides?" the semi-dead news media, with the blessing of the tech lords, returned a zombie growl: "We do."

Politics, Truth and Consequences

Under such conditions, the facts will always favor the left side of the argument. Matt Taibbi tells a story about a peer-reviewed article that questioned the data integrity of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine trials. Because two notorious anti-vax figures shared the article, Facebook's fact-checkers condemned it as "missing context" and restricted access to it. When the author queried Facebook, the company responded with a number of false claims about the content of the article. When these claims were refuted, the fact-checkers charged the author with not being "unreservedly supportive" of the Pfizer vaccine. The "missing context" tag, Taibbi observes, "should be understood for what it is: an intellectual warning label for true but politically troublesome information."

Bjorn Lomborg, a perfectly orthodox believer in climate change but a dissenter on what to do about it, had his comment on Facebook fact-checked as "misinformation" because it cited a peer-reviewed study that concluded more people died from cold weather than hot. During the 2020 presidential election, Twitter blocked a New York Post article with embarrassing information about Hunter Biden's laptop-information Twitter founder Jack Dorsey later admitted was accurate. All the platforms blocked or flagged any claim that a leak from a lab in Wuhan might be the origin of Covid-19, because Trump favored that theory. The list of such incidents is long. In Aristotelian fashion, facts are once again oriented toward a telos: the end of Trumpism.

An article in Scientific American on the psychology of fact-checking concedes that the activity is subjective and "messy" and recommends "adversarial fact-checking." Maybe teams of conservatives should fact-check the liberal media checkers-and libertarians would then fact-check the conservatives-and Marxists would do the same to the libertarians-and so on in an infinite regress until everyone on earth is checking the truth of what everyone else has posted online. I know certain denizens of the web who have already ascended to this ideal existence.

Even in such a fact-checking utopia, nothing would change. The quarrel today is not over facts but over the process that produces facts. The failure to agree occurs, and will continue to occur, because there's no framework of agreement. Until one is found that can survive the rigors of the digital storm, the elite panic will only intensify.

In my last contribution to this space I wrote that news, fake or real, rarely changes the public's mind. That is not to say that the current use of "facts" as political weapons lacks consequences. When you drive your opponents out of the public square, they will gather somewhere. If you push Trumpists out of Facebook and Twitter, they could well show up in 4chan. If you silence Trump under the spotlight of social media, you reward QAnon in the shadows. The evident corruption of the elites with regard to the truth has given rise to a cognitive underclass that believes in nothing and thus might believe in anything.

The first step out of the labyrinth is for the public to insist that digital platforms live up to the open society in which they operate. However, we are unlikely to arrive at the endgame until the shock of a powerful paradigm shift-say, Web 3.0-does to Facebook and Google exactly what they did to the newsprint version of the media.

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The Fifth Wave: Who Fact-Checks the Fact-Checkers?

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In the panic that followed the 2016 election, Facebook and other tech platforms instituted "fact-checking" to appease political, media and other elites eager to reassert control of the national narrative. Not surprisingly, those same elites insisted that they be the ones to decide which facts were real and which were fake.

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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has delivered the highly prestigious Harvard Commencement address, calling out social media as a threat to modern day democracy.

Jacinda Ardern speaking at Harvard University in Boston. Photo:

She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the university.

The Commencement is steeped in history with Ardern's predecessors including Winston Churchill, JFK, Angela Merkel - and topically for today's speech - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Capping off her day, Ardern confirmed to media afterwards that she will meet US President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time).

Watch it here:

She invoked the memory of the late Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim country, and to give birth while in office with Ardern being the second.

Seven months after the two women met Bhutto was assassinated, Ardern said.

"The path she carved as a woman feels as relevant today as it was decades ago, and so too is the message she shared here.

"She said part way through her speech in 1989 the following: 'We must realise that democracy… can be fragile'.

"... while the reasons that gave rise for her words then were vastly different, they still ring true. Democracy can be fragile."

Ardern told her audience of thousands that because of the speed of social media, disinformation is creating an ever increasing risk.

"Social media platforms were born offering the promise of connection and reconnection. We logged on in our billions, forming tribes and sub tribes."

Outside Harvard University in Boston on the day that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern received an honorary doctorate. Photo: Harvard Gazette / Kris Snibbe

While it started as a place to experience "new ways of thinking and to celebrate our difference" it is now often used for neither of those things, she said.

However, just two days after the massacre in a school in Texas that saw 19 students and two teachers killed, the biggest response she got from the audience was when she referred to changes to firearms law.

She received a standing ovation when she said the government had succeeded in banning military style semi-automatics and assault rifles, in the wake of the attacks.

"On the 15th of March 2019, 51 people were killed in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The entire brutal act was live-streamed on social media. The royal commission that followed found that the terrorist responsible was radicalised online.

"In the aftermath of New Zealand's experience, we felt a sense of responsibility. We knew we needed significant gun reform, and so that is what we did."

She went on to say that if genuine solutions were to be found to the issue of violent extremism online, "it would take government, civil society and the tech companies themselves to change the landscape. The result was the Christchurch Call to Action.

"And while much has changed as a result, important things haven't."

Ardern called on social media companies to recognise their power and act on it and acknowledge the role they play in shaping online environments.

"That algorithmic processes make choices and decisions for us - what we see and where we are directed - and that at best this means the user experience is personalised and at worst it means it can be radicalised.

"It means, that there is a pressing and urgent need for responsible algorithm development and deployment."

She said the forums were available for the tech companies to work alongside society and governments to find solutions to the issues.

She encouraged her audience to realise that their individual actions were also important.

"In a disinformation age, we need to learn to analyse and critique information. That doesn't mean teaching 'mistrust', but rather as my old history teacher, Mr Fountain extolled: 'to understand the limitations of a single piece of information, and that there is always a range of perspectives on events and decisions'."

While the prime minister's US trip was planned around the Harvard Commencement, there's a trade and tourism focus, but also a chance to check in with some of the tech giants at whom she delivered her message, in particular around the Christchurch Call, during the next few days.

Jacinda Ardern has received an honorary law doctorate from Harvard University. Photo: Harvard Gazette / Kris Snibbe

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PM Jacinda Ardern calls out tech giants in prestigious Harvard University speech

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Jacinda Ardern has called social media a threat to modern day democracy, during her latest speech in Boston.

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The Edge of the Infodemic

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But the NZ government is also doing this!

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But the NZ government is also doing this!

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Is the independence of Stats NZ under threat?

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Without notice by all but a scarce few, the independence of the government statistician (that is, the head of Statistics NZ) and the transparency of government data sharing and use in New Zealand could change after this year.

Statistics minister David Clark has managed to avoid public scrutiny of the constitutional implications of his Data and Statistics Bill, despite transparency of this kind of change being a proper expectation of citizens in a democratic society.

The bill Clark presented to parliament waters down the role of the government statistician by the simple means of enabling the role to be delegated to unspecified persons or organisations without any further legislative oversight or qualification.

That there are serious risks from giving to others the special powers of this statutory role is obscured by weak and generally irrelevant arguments given for the bill by the minister.

In effect, the bill uses the role and authority of the government statistician to provide an umbrella for extended data sharing across the entire range of government agencies, and unspecified non-government entities.

Longstanding obligations to protect confidentiality appear to have been watered down.

The bill has been presented to parliament by the minister as a modernising, "future-proofing" change which will improve all aspects of trust.

There are improvements needed now in research access and responsiveness to Māori, but these do not need the authority and powers of the government statistician to be opened up in this way.

Nowhere else in the world have changes of this sort been made, or in this manner - and to do so without a specific consultative process with Māori is surprising, in 2022.
Lack of oversight
The arguments for the bill do not acknowledge that administrative records have limits in their use for informing those policy areas that have been found to be weak.

This is because the administrative records of government departments supply data about policies and practices, from the perspective of government administration.

Those countries that have the most reliance on administrative records for official statistics generally have wide-ranging administrative registers for addresses and personal details. These registers require citizens to comply with registration processes that are rarely seen or accepted in Westminster systems.

The data and statistics bill is to be put in place without the strong legislative oversight and regulation of data sharing and data linkage across government that's in place in other countries, such as the Australian Data Availability and Transparency Act 2022, or the United Kingdom Digital Economy Act 2017.
Frivolous arguments
The arguments presented by the minister in speeches are hardly compelling, and I regard their selection as insulting to the public by their frivolousness and general nature:

* "The 1975 Act makes no reference to data at all".

* "It lacks the flexibility to respond to the changes in data and digital that we are seeing."

* "... but this Act was written before personal computers were widespread, before social media, before the cultural changes that technology continues to drive."

* "It does not provide the kinds of tools we need to boost the supply and quality of administrative data - so, this is data that's collected for other purposes, often: for registrations, service delivery, transactions, record-keeping."

* "... it modernises the framework for accessing data and research."

* "... and supports Stats New Zealand to become a data-first agency, an administrative data-first agency."
Constitutional implications
It is the independence of the government statistician as a guardian of confidential information provided to the government only for statistical use that underpins our trust in official statistics.

Official statistics give us confidence in how we measure progress - or lack of it - on economic, environmental and social concerns, reporting regardless of the political predisposition of ministers of the day.

Citizens, businesses, international organisations and ratings agencies are all stakeholders who depend on this trust.

After it is enacted, the bill will bring the government statistician into the fold of the policy, enforcement and operational agencies of government by permitting data sharing on an unspecified scale.

This would make unavoidable a reversal in the long-standing constitutional checks on involvement by the government statistician in policy advocacy or justifying the operational delivery of policies. These are only briefly referred to in the report of the select committee.

In providing others with the powers of the government statistician, as statistical "clones", concerns about the public legitimacy of statistical functions critical to trust in government may lead to a loss of trust we need to have in the role.

The bill permits the delegation to other persons and agencies of the powers that have been unique to Statistics New Zealand and the government statistician for some 110 years.

No policy, service or compliance organisation that I am aware of has maintained without question a consistent reputation for being responsible, scientific and transparent, for as long as the government statistician has.

Bodies that could receive such a delegation exist because of purposes that must at some time conflict with the statistician's impartiality, protection of confidentiality and privacy whenever their role involves policy, service delivery, advocacy, enforcement or surveillance.

It is near impossible for any organisation with other functions to either meet or be perceived to meet obligations of impartiality.
Propagating clones
To apply properly the legislative authority for legitimising clones that could publish trustworthy statistics with the duty of care required of the government statistician would mean that having expertise is not an essential requirement or condition of appointment to other positions, and which would be rarely met.

The bill will also water down the obligations on the government statistician to guarantee to protect the confidentiality of statistical responses, a reduced duty of care - and the minister has not yet drawn attention to it.

The bill risks weakening public trust generally, by ignoring the separation of roles of agencies involved in service delivery, enforcement or statistics. This gives agencies an opportunity to get confidential personal information beyond that needed for the functioning of their statutory roles.

Only last week the prime minister wisely commented about trust in government being "something that can be built up over decades but torn down in mere years".

The minister of statistics might take heed of his own leader.

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Is the independence of Stats NZ under threat?

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Without notice by all but a scarce few, the independence of the government statistician (that is, the head of Statistics NZ) and the transparency of government data sharing and use in New Zealand could change after this year.

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Institutional Alarmism: The BBC's Disastrous Climate Complaints

(use lateral reading to answer): Who are NetZero Watch?

NB NetZero Watch supported by some high profile, high achieving figures

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12 types of media bias
images
How to spot a deepfake

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❖
Twitter has The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for "Violating our rules against abuse and harassment," presumably in reference to a rule the platform "This may include references to such an event as a 'hoax' or claims that victims or survivors are fake or 'actors,'" Twitter said Haiphong is This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria's As journalists like Lauria compiles a mountain of evidence in refutation of NewsGuard's claim that Consortium News published "false content" about the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine, copiously citing outlets which NewsGuard itself has labeled accurate sources of information with its "green check" designation system. It becomes clear as you Then you've got Wikipedia, which blacklists the same sites as NewsGuard and whose operatives run relentless My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley. smear campaigns on anti-imperialist voices, thereby guaranteeing a view of history that is wildly tilted in the favor of empire-authorized narratives. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, also happens to serve on NewsGuard's advisory board. read the article that NewsGuard's real function is, as John Kiriakou put it, "guarding the country from the news." Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a "news rating agency" designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what's happening in the world. The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal outlined the company's many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and "chief propagandist" Richard Stengel as well as "imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund" when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations. excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard. far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington's temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records. of the new rule. "It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters." put in place a year ago which prohibits "content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent." imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.
That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

This idea that anyone can ever be an impartial arbiter of objective reality is logically fallacious and is invalidated by facts in evidence. It is clear that imposing regulations on people's efforts to understand world events on the platforms where people have come to congregate to share ideas and information will necessarily lead to an information ecosystem that is skewed to the benefit of whatever power structure is imposing those regulations. When that power structure is an alliance of oligarchs and government proxies whose interests are served by the ongoing dominance of the US-centralized empire, the information ecosystem will be biased in favor of that empire.

The most impressive feat of engineering in the 21st century has been of the "social" variety. The social engineering necessary to continually keep people confused and blinkered about what's going on in the world despite a sudden influx of information availability is one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of civilization, despite its depraved and destructive nature.

The empire has had mixed feelings about the internet since its creation. On one hand it allows for unprecedented surveillance and information gathering and the rapid distribution of propaganda, which it likes, but on the other it allows for the unprecedented democratization of information, which it doesn't like.

Its answer to this quandary has been to come up with "fact checking" services and Silicon Valley censorship protocols for restricting "misinformation" (with "facts" and "information" defined as "whatever advances imperial interests"). That's all we're seeing with continually expanding online censorship policies, and with government-tied oligarchic narrative management operations like NewsGuard.

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Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

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Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

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The Pentagon and State Dept.-linked outfit, with an ex-N.S.A. and C.I.A. director on its board, is accusing Consortium News of publishing “false content” on Ukraine, reports Joe Lauria.

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

Consortium News is being “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a U.S. government-linked organization that is trying to enforce a narrative on Ukraine while seeking to discredit dissenting views.

The organization has accused Consortium News, begun in 1995 by former Associated Press investigative reporter Robert Parry, of publishing “false content” on Ukraine.

It calls “false” essential facts about Ukraine that have been suppressed in mainstream media: 1) that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and 2) that neo-Nazism is a significant force in Ukraine. Reporting crucial information left out of corporate media is Consortium News‘ essential mission.

But NewsGuard considers these facts to be “myths” and is demanding Consortium News “correct” these “errors.”

Who is NewsGuard?

Ex-N.S.A. and C.IA. director Michael Hayden in 2015. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

NewsGuard set itself up in 2018 as a judge of news organizations’ credibility. The front page of NewsGuard’s website shows that it is “partners” with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as with several major corporations, such as Microsoft. The nature of these “partnerships” is not entirely clear.

NewsGuard is a private corporation that can shield itself from First Amendment obligations. But it has connections to formerly high-ranking U.S. government officials in addition to its “partnerships” with the State Dept. and the Pentagon.

Among those sitting on NewsGuard’s advisory board are Gen. Michael Hayden, the former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director; Tom Ridge, the first U.S. Homeland Security director and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO. NewGuard says its “advisors provide advice and subject-matter expertise to NewsGuard. They play no role in the determinations of ratings or the Nutrition Label write ups of websites unless otherwise noted and have no role in the governance or management of the organization.”

The co-CEO, with former Wall Street Journal publisher Louis Gordon Crovitz, is Steven Brill, who in the 1990s published Brill’s Content, a magazine that was billed as a watchdog of the press, critiquing the role of the media to hold government to account.  NewsGuard is a government-affiliated organization judging media like Consortium News that is totally independent of government or corporations.

NewsGuard has a rating process that results in a news organization receiving either a green or red label. Fox News and other major media, for example, have received green labels.

Getting a red label means that potentially millions of people that have the NewsGuard extension installed and operating on their browsers will see the  green or red mark affixed to websites on social media and Google searches. (For individuals that do not already have it installed and operating on Microsoft’s browser, it costs $4.95 a month in the U.S., £4.95 in the U.K., or €4.95 in the EU to run the extension.)

According to NewsGuard, libraries in the U.S. and Britain have had it installed on their computers, and it is also being put on computers of U.S. active duty personnel.  Slate reported in January 2019 that NewsGuard:

“struck a deal with Microsoft to incorporate those ratings into the tech giant’s Edge browser as an optional setting. That’s when the Guardian noticed that the Mail Online had been tagged by NewsGuard with a ‘red’ label, a reliability score of 3 out of 9, and the following warning: ‘Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.’ For Microsoft Edge users with the ‘News Ratings’ feature turned on, that warning appeared alongside every link to the Mail Online—whether in Google search results, Facebook or Twitter feeds, or the Mail’s own homepage.”

NewsGuard has a partnership with the Pentagon. (Joe Lauria)

Approach to Consortium News

Consortium News was contacted by NewsGuard analyst Zachary Fishman. In his request to speak to someone at Consortium News he said categorically that CN had published “false content” and that the interview would be on the record. “I’m hoping to talk with someone who could answer a few questions about its structure and editorial processes — including its ownership, its handling of corrections, and its publication of false content,” he wrote in an email.

As editor-in-chief, I informed him that our founder, editors and writers came from high levels of establishment journalism. I told him that in thousands of press interviews I’ve conducted over nearly half a century in journalism I had never known anyone accusing a prospective interviewee of misconduct upfront and then determining that the interview would be on the record, when the ground rules are usually set by the person being interviewed.

Fishman apologized and tried to say his mind wasn’t made up about Consortium News, when he had clearly stated that it was. “I do apologize that the wording of my email insinuated that I had come to a predetermined conclusion on whether your website has published false content, when I have not — be sure that I am interested in your responses to my questions,” he wrote in an email.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Fishman had one previous job in science and financial journalism that lasted 15 months for a company called Fastinform that is now defunct. Last month, all the links of his published pieces on LinkedIn went to a site that no longer exists. The links have now been removed.

Fishman has degrees in health, environment and science journalism and engineering physics. He has no experience in political reporting and especially of the politics of Eastern Europe and U.S.-Russia relations.

NewsGuard’s determination on Consortium News will be made by the analyst and, “At least one senior editor and NewsGuard’s co-CEOs review every Nutrition Label prior to publication to ensure that the rating is as fair and accurate as possible.”

Charge: There Was ‘No US-Backed Coup’

Violence during the Maidan coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)

NewsGuard alleges that Consortium News has published “false content” by reporting that there was a U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and that ne0-Nazis have significant influence in the country.

Fishman took issue with a:

“February 2022 article ‘Ukraine: Guides to Reflection,’ [which] asserted, ‘Hence, the inflation of Russian behavior in Ukraine (where Washington organized a coup against a democratically elected government because we disliked its political complexion) … .’

Fishman then wrote:

“The U.S. supported the Maidan revolution that ousted then-Ukraine President Viktor Yanikovych (sic) in 2014 — including a December 2013 visit by John McCain to Kyiv in support of protesters — but there is no evidence that the U.S. ‘organized’ a ‘coup.’ Instead, it has the markings of a popular uprising, precipitated by widely covered protests against Yanukovych’s decision to suspend preparations for the signing of an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union.”

Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected as president of Ukraine in 2010 in an election certified by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a fact not mentioned in NewsGuard’s writings on the change of government in Ukraine.  Even though Yanukovych agreed to an EU political settlement and early elections, violence forced him to flee from the capital on Feb. 21, 2014. Reporting that the neo-Nazi Right Sector was at the forefront of the violent overthrow, The New York Times (green check) wrote earlier that day:

“Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, a coalition of hard-line nationalist groups, reacted defiantly to news of the settlement, drawing more cheers from the crowd.

‘The agreements that were reached do not correspond to our aspirations,’ he said. ‘Right Sector will not lay down arms. Right Sector will not lift the blockade of a single administrative building until our main demand is met — the resignation of Yanukovych.’ He added that he and his supporters were ‘ready to take responsibility for the further development of the revolution.’ The crowd shouted: ‘Good! Good!’

A study on the violence used to overthrow the government, by Prof. Serhiy Kudelia, a political scientist at Baylor University, says the overthrow succeeded because of  “the embeddedness of violent groups” in a non-violent protest. The violence began on Dec.  1, 2013 when these violent groups attacked police with “iron chains, flares, stones and petrol bombs” and tried to ram a bulldozer through police lines.  The police viciously fought back that day.

As the International Business Times (IBT) (green check) wrote about these groups at the time:

“According to a member of anti-fascist Union Ukraine, a group that monitors and fights fascism in Ukraine, ‘There are lots of nationalists here [EuroMaidan] including Nazis. They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters.

Different groups [of anarchists] came together for a meeting on the Maidan. While they were meeting, a group of Nazis came in a larger group, they had axes and baseball bats and sticks, helmets, they said it was their territory. They called the anarchists things like Jews, blacks, communists. There weren’t even any communists, that was just an insult. The anarchists weren’t expecting this and they left. People with other political views can’t stay in certain places, they aren’t tolerated,’ a member of the group continued.”

The violence by far-right groups was evidently condoned by Sen. John McCain who expressed his support for the uprising by addressing the Maidan crowd later that month. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and then U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt visited the square after the violence had broken out.

NewsGuard’s account of the events of Feb. 21, 2014 says that even though Yanukovych agreed to the early elections, “angry protestors demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation,” and he fled on that day after “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts.” NewsGuard then says “protestors took control of several government buildings the next day.”

Government Buildings Seized

Protestors occupied Kiev’s City Hall, replete with Confederate flag. (YouTube)

But protestors had already seized government buildings as early as December 2013. On Jan. 24 protestors broke into the Agriculture Ministry building in Kiev and occupied it. On the same day barricades were set up near the presidential headquarters.  Government buildings in the west of the country had also been occupied. The Guardian  (green check) reported on Jan. 24:

“There were dramatic developments in the west of the country on Thursday as hundreds of people forced their way into the office of the regional governor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a resignation letter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where support for the president is in the low single digits, later said he signed the letter under duress and was rescinding his resignation.

Thousands also stormed regional administration headquarters in Rivne on Thursday, breaking down doors and demanding the release of people detained in the unrest there, Unian news agency reported. In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000 protesters took over the first two floors of the main administration building and lit fires outside the building.

Similar action took place in Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytsky in western and central Ukraine, as well as parts of the north-east, the Party of the Regions said.”

Protestors had begun occupying Kiev City Hall in December, with a portrait of Ukraine’s World War II fascist leader Stepan Bandera hanging from the rafters. On the night of Feb. 21, the leader of the Neo-fascist Right Sector, Andriy Parubiy, announced that the Verkhovna Rada (parliament), the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had all come under control of the protestors.

Therefore NewsGuard has published “false content” by reporting that government buildings were occupied the day after Yanukovych fled the capital. It should print a correction.

On the day after Yanukovych fled, the Rada voted without the presence of Yanukovych’s party — the largest in the country — to impeach him after the fact of his violent overthrow. NewsGuard omitted the key fact that the impeachment vote was tainted by the absence of Yanukovych’s party and that the impeachment became largely irrelevant after violence forced him to flee the capital.

Democratically-elected leaders are removed by electoral defeat, impeachment or votes of no confidence, not by violence.  NewsGuard writes that “hundreds of police guarding government buildings abandoned their posts” on the day Yanukovych was forced out, but doesn’t say why.  As Jacobin (NewsGuard green check) magazine reports:

“Whatever one thinks of the Maidan protests, the increasing violence of those involved was key to their ultimate victory. In response to a brutal police crackdown, protesters began fighting with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, even a bulldozer — and, eventually, firearms, all culminating in what was effectively an armed battle in February, which left thirteen police officers and nearly fifty protesters dead. The police ‘could no longer defend themselves’ from protesters’ attacks,’ writes political scientist Sergiy Kudelia, causing them to retreat, and precipitating Yanukovych’s exit.”

NewsGuard calls the events a “revolution,” yet revolutions in history have typically been against monarchs or dictators, not against democratically-elected leaders. For instance, the 1776 American Revolution, the 1789 French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution, the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and countless others were against monarchs. Coups have been against both elected and non-elected leaders. Revolutions change political systems, usually from monarchies to republics. Ukraine’s political system was not changed, only its leader.

As a reader, Adrian E.. commented below on this article:

“When a movement that is supported by about half the population and opposed by about half the population violently overthrows a democratically elected government, this may be given different names (e.g. coup), but it is certainly not a “popular revolution”.

The Maydan movement was never supported by more than about half the Ukrainian population. It was supported by a vast majority in Western Ukraine, by very few people in the East and South of the country, with people more evenly split in the center/North. This clearly was not a case of a government that had lost public support to such a degree that there was a general consensus that it should resign. It was the case of one political camp representing about half the country that had lost the last elections imposing its will with brutal deadly violence.”

By any measure, Yanukovych’s ouster was an unconstitutional change in government. His “impeachment” without his party present for the vote came after government buildings had been seized and after violence drove him from the capital.

Circumstantial Evidence

McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)

In its version of these events, NewsGuard only refers to circumstantial evidence of the coup, interpreting it as U.S. “support” for a “revolution” against a democratically-elected president.

NewsGuard fails to point out that McCain, Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) as well as  Nuland appeared on stage in the Maidan with Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the Neo-fascist Svoboda Party, formerly known as the Social National Party.

NewsGuard does not consider how such events would be seen in the United States if a senior Russian foreign ministry official, two leading Russian lawmakers and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. appeared on stage with a far-right American leader to address a crowd on the Washington Mall seeking to oust an elected U.S. president. If that president were overthrown violently, would Americans think it a Russian-backed the coup?

NewsGuard discusses Nuland’s 2013 speech in which she revealed that since 1991 the U.S. had spent $5 billion to help bring about Ukraine’s “aspirations.” What it fails to point out is that U.S. aspirations were to turn Ukraine towards the West and away from Russia. And the U.S. had work to do.

In a 2008 poll, 17 years after this U.S. effort began, and the year in which the U.S. said Ukraine would one day join NATO, 50 percent of Ukrainians actually opposed NATO membership against just 24.3 percent who favored it. A 2010 Gallup poll showed that 40 percent of Ukrainians viewed NATO as more threat than protector.  Just 17 percent had the opposite view. So building up civil society through U.S.-funded NGOs to favor the West was the U.S. challenge.

NewsGuard does not mention that part of the $5 billion the U.S. spent was to help organize protests. There was genuine popular dissatisfaction with Yanukovych that the NED nurtured and trained. Jacobin reported of the 2014 events:

“US officials, unhappy with the scuttled EU deal, saw a similar chance in the Maidan protests. Just two months before they broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that “the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.”

In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported “played a big role in getting the protest up and running,” led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”

Writing in Consortium News six days after Yanukovych’s ouster, Parry reported that over the previous year, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which funds NGOs in countries the U.S. targets for regime change, had bankrolled 65 projects in Ukraine totaling more than $20 million. Parry called it “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

The NED, on Feb. 25, the day after the Russian invasion, deleted all projects in Ukraine it funded, which are archived here. The NED meddled in Ukrainian politics in 2004 in the so-called Orange Revolution.  The Washington Post (green check) wrote in 1991 that what the C.I.A. once did in secret — destabilizing and overthrowing regimes —  the NED was now doing openly.

C.I.A. or NED-led coups are never made up out of whole cloth. The U.S. works with genuine opposition movements within a country, sometimes popular uprisings, to finance, train and direct them. This U.S. has a long history of overthrowing foreign governments, the most infamous examples being Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954,  and Chile in 1973.

In September 2013, before the Maidan uprising began, long-time NED head Carl Gerhsman called Ukraine “the biggest prize” in a Washington Post op-ed piece, and warned that “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In 2016 he said the NED has been involved in Ukraine since the 1980s and he praised the “overthrow of Yanukovych.”

Nuland-Pyatt Tape Omitted

Most significantly, NewsGuard’s attempt to refute U.S. involvement in the coup omits the 2014 intercepted and leaked telephone call between Nuland and Pyatt, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in which the two discuss who will make up the new government weeks before Yanukovych was overthrown.

On the leaked tape, Nuland and Pyatt talk about “midwifing” a new government; Vice President Joe Biden’s role, and setting up meetings with Ukrainian politicians to make it happen. Nuland says the prime minister should be Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and indeed he became prime minister after the coup.

At the time, the BBC (green check) wrote of the leak: “The US says that it is working with all sides in the crisis to reach a peaceful solution, noting that ‘ultimately it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide their future’. However this transcript suggests that the US has very clear ideas about what the outcome should be and is striving to achieve these goals.”

The U.S. State Department never denied the authenticity of the video, and even issued an apology to the European Union after Nuland is heard on the tape saying, “Fuck the EU.” Mainstream media at the time focused almost exclusively on that off-color remark as a distraction from the greater significance of U.S. interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs.

Why did Nuland say, “Fuck the EU”? At the time she said it, France, Germany and Poland were working for the EU on a political settlement with Russia to the Maidan crisis that would leave Yanukovych in power.

Indeed the E.U. brokered a deal with Yanukovych, who agreed to early elections by December, a restoration of the 2004 Constitution and an amnesty for all protestors, clearing the way for no one to be held responsible for the violent ouster. Yanukovych  announced the agreement, with E.U. officials at his side in Kiev, on Feb. 21, 2014. Later that day he was violently driven from power.

Leaving the historic role of the NED and the essential Nuland-Pyatt conversation out of its reporting is an omission of evidence by NewsGuard, typical of corporate media. Omitting crucial elements of a story changes its meaning and in this case undermines NewsGuard’s account of the events of 2014.

This is an excellent example of why Parry started Consortium News: to report on crucial information that corporate media sometimes purposely and deceptively leave out to change the meaning of a story. NewsGuard should correct its story about the coup, not Consortium News. NewsGuard invites readers to request corrections by emailing them at corrections@newsguardtech.com.

Likely Reasons for the Coup

U.S. enabled Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection.

Wall Street and Washington swept in after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 under a pliable Boris Yeltsin (who received direct U.S. help to win re-election in 1996) to asset-strip the formerly state-owned industries, enrich themselves and a new class of oligarchs and impoverish the former Soviet people.

The ascension of Vladimir Putin to power on New Year’s Eve 1999 gradually began to curb U.S. influence in post-Soviet Russia, especially after Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, in which he blasted U.S. unilateral aggression, especially in Iraq.

Eventually Putin restored sovereignty over much of the Russian economy, turning Washington and Wall Street against him.  (As President Joe Biden has now made clear on more than one occasion, the U.S. aim is to overthrow him.)

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, former U.S. national security adviser ZbigniewBrzezinski wrote:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that’s not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out (U.S. takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup) and dominating Moscow as it did when this was written in the 1990s.

Deep Western involvement in Ukrainian politics and economy never ended from those early post-Soviet days. When Yanukovych acted legally (the Rada authorized it) to reject the European Union association agreement in favor of a Russian economic package on better terms, it threatened to curtail Western economic involvement. Yanukovych became a marked man.

Yanukovych had already made Russian an official language, he had  rejected NATO membership, and reversed his pro-Western predecessor’s move to glorify Nazi collaborators. Yanukovych’s predecessor, President Viktor Yuschenko, had made Ukraine’s World War II-era fascist leader Stepan Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine.”

There was genuine popular dissatisfaction among mostly Western Ukrainians with Yanukovych, which intensified and became violent after he rejected the EU deal.  Within months he was overthrown.

After the Coup

The U.S.-installed government in Kiev outlawed political parties, including the Communist Party, and stripped Russian as an official language. Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was banned in several oblasts and eventually collapsed. An American citizen became finance minister and Vice President Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s virtual viceroy in Ukraine.

Videos have emerged of Biden giving instructions to the nominal president at the time, Petro Poroshenko. By his own admission, Biden forced the resignation of Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

Shokin testified under oath that he was about to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on which the vice president’s son was given a lucrative board membership just months after the U.S.-backed coup.

Biden, other U.S. officials, and the media at the time lied that Shokin was removed because he was corrupt. State Dept. memos released this year and published by Just the News (green-check) actually praise Shokin for his anti-corruption work. The question of whether the leader of a foreign nation has the right to remove another country’s prosecutor was buried.

Eight days after nearly 50 anti-coup protestors in Odessa were burned to death on May 2, 2014 by far-right counter-protestors dominated by Right Sector, the coup-resisting provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass region declared independence from Ukraine. Russia began assisting them and, after a visit to Kiev by then C.I.A. Director John Brennan, Poroshenko launched a war against the separatists that lasted eight years, killing thousands of civilians, until Russia intervened in the civil conflict in February.

After the coup, NATO began arming, training and conducting exercises with the Ukrainian military, turning it into a de facto NATO member.  These were not just the interests of part of Ukraine that were being served, but those of powerful foreign actors. It was akin to a 19th century-style colonial takeover of a country.

Charge: Nazi Influence ‘Exaggerated’

Torchlight parade behind portrait of Bandera on his birthday, Jan. 1, 2015. (Wikimedia Commons)

The U.S. relationship with Ukrainian fascists began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles.  Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives.

The government study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a militant fascist organization.” Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, said: ““I…fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine….”

The study says: “At a July 6, 1941, meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined that Jews ‘have to be treated harshly…. We must finish them off…. Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.’”

Lebed himself proposed to “’cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918.” Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

The C.I.A. was not interested in working with Bandera, pages 81-82 of the report say, but the British MI6 was. “MI6 argued, Bandera’s group was ‘the strongest Ukrainian organization abroad, is deemed competent to train party cadres, [and] build a morally and politically healthy organization….’”  An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that, “the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations … “

C.I.A.’s Allen Dulles asks U.S. Immigration to allow Lebed re-entry to U.S. despite murder conviction. (From Hitler’s Shadow. Click to enlarge.)

Britain ended its collaboration with Bandera in 1954. West German intelligence, under former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, then worked with Bandera, who was eventually assassinated with cyanide dust by the KGB in Munich in 1959.

Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union.  The U.S. government study says:

“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. … Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe. Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ that the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. “Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.”

Bandera Revival

Bandera monument in Lvov. (wikimapia.org)

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved. “Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University,” the U.S. National Archives study says.

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however.  It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to IBT.

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported.  “Following the demise of Yanukovich’s regime, the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.

That is a direct link between Maidan and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.

Despite the U.S. favoring the less extreme Lebed over Bandera, the latter has remained the more inspiring figure in Ukraine.

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the Neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. (Svoboda won 10 percent of the Rada’s seats in 2012 before the coup and before McCain and Nuland appeared with its leader the following year.)

In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by Yanukovych, who was overthrown.

More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected. A Swiss academic study says:

“On January 13, 2011, the L’vivs’ka Oblast’ Council, meeting at an extraordinary session next to the Bandera monument in L’viv, reacted to the abrogation [skasuvannya] of Viktor Yushchenko’s order about naming Stepan Bandera a ‘Hero of Ukraine” by affirming that ‘for millions of Ukrainians Bandera was and remains a Ukrainian Hero notwithstanding pitiable and worthless decisions of the courts’ and declaring its intention to rename ‘Stepan Bandera Street’ as ‘Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera Street.’”

Torchlit parades behind Bandera’s portrait are common in Ukrainian cities, particularly on Jan. 1, his birthday, including this year.

Mainstream on Neo-Nazis

From the start of the 2013-2014 events in Ukraine, Consortium News founder Robert Parry and other writers began providing the evidence NewsGuard says doesn’t exist, reporting extensively on the coup and the influential role of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. At the time, corporate media also reported on the essential part neo-Nazis played in the coup.

As The New York Times reported, the neo-nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of Neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.

The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych. The BBC ran this report a week after his ouster:

And this one in July 2015:

After the coup a number of ministers in the new government came from Neo-fascist parties.  NBC News (green check) reported in March 2014: “Svoboda, which means ‘Freedom,’ was given almost a quarter of the Cabinet positions in the interim government formed after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February.”

Svoboda’s leader, Tyahnybok, whom McCain and Nuland stood on stage with, once called for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” The International Business Times (green check) reported:

“In 2005 Tyahnybok signed an open letter to then Ukrainain president Viktor Yushchenko urging him to ban all Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed carried out ‘criminal activities [of] organised Jewry’, ultimately aimed at the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”

Before McCain and Nuland embraced Tyahnybok and his social national party, it was condemned by the European Parliament, which said in 2012:

“[Parliament] recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada [Ukraine’s legislature] not to associate with, endorse, or form coalitions with this party.”

Such mainstream reports on Banderism have stopped as the Neo-fascist role in Ukraine was suppressed in Western media once Putin made “de-nazification” a goal of the invasion.

The Azov Battalion, which arose during the coup, became a significant force in the war against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass, who resisted the coup. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, infamously said Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

In 2014 the now Azov Regiment was officially incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It is further integrated into the state by working closely with the SBU intelligence service. Azov is the only known Neo-fascist component in a nation’s military anywhere in the world.

As part of the Ukraine military, Azov members have still sported yellow arm bands (until this week) with the Wolfsangel once worn by German SS troops in World War II. Including the atrocities it has continued to commit, Azov shows the world that integration into the state has not denazified them.  On the contrary, it may have increased its influence on the state.

The U.S. and NATO have also trained and armed Azov since Barack Obama had denied lethal aid to Ukraine. O ne reason Obama declined sending arms to Ukraine was because he was afraid they may fall into these right-wing extremists’ hands. According to the green-checked New York Times,

“Mr. Obama continues to pose questions indicating his doubts. ‘O.K., what happens if we send in equipment — do we have to send in trainers?’ said one person paraphrasing the discussion on the condition of anonymity. ‘What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin escalates?”

NewsGuard’s Objections

Collage of Neo-fascist leader Oleh Tyahnybok. meeting with McCain, Biden and Nuland. (Facebook image by Red, White and You of clip from film Ukraine on Fire)

NewsGuard’s argument against the major influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine rests on Neo-fascist  political parties faring poorly at the polls. This ignores the stark fact that these groups engage instead in extra-parliamentary extremism.

In its charge against Consortium News for publishing “false content” about Neo-fascism in Ukraine, NewsGuard’s Fishman wrote:

“There isn’t evidence that Nazism has a substantial influence in Ukraine. Radical far-right groups in Ukraine do represent a ‘threat to the democratic development of Ukraine,’ according to 2018 Freedom House report. But it also stated that far-right extremists have poor political representation in Ukraine and no plausible path to power — for example, in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the far-right nationalist party Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote, while the Svoboda candidate, Ruslan Koshulynskyy, won just 1.6 percent of the vote in the presidential election.”

But this argument of focusing on elections results has been dismissed by a number of mainstream sources, not least of which is the Atlantic Council, probably the most anti-Russian think tank in the world.  In a 2019 article, a writer for the Atlantic Council said:

“To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of ‘red herring.’ It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity. Whether this is due to a continuing sense of indebtedness to some of these groups for fighting the Russians or fear they might turn on the state itself, it’s a real problem and we do no service to Ukraine by sweeping it under the rug.” [Emphasis added.]

“Fear that they might turn on the state itself,” acknowledges the powerful leverage these groups have over the government. The Atlantic Council piece then underscores how influential these groups are:

“It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote ‘national patriotic education projects’ in the country. On June 8, the Ministry announced that it will award C14 a little less than $17,000 for a children’s camp. It also awarded funds to Holosiyiv Hideout and Educational Assembly, both of which have links to the far-right. The revelation represents a dangerous example of law enforcement tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups willing to use violence against those they don’t like.

Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.”

The Atlantic Council is not the only anti-Russian outfit that recognizes the dangerous power of the Neo-fascist groups in Ukraine.  Bellingcat published an alarming 2018 article headlined, “Ukrainian Far-Right Fighters, White Supremacists Trained by Major European Security Firm.”

NATO has also trained the Azov Regiment, directly linking the U.S. with far-right Ukrainian extremists.

The Hill reported in 2017 in an article headlined, “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda,” that:

“Some Western observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, chalking the assertion up to propaganda from Moscow. Unfortunately, they are sadly mistaken.

There are indeed neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing.

Azov’s logo is composed of two emblems — the wolfsangel and the Sonnenrad — identified as neo-Nazi symbols by the Anti-Defamation League. The wolfsangel is used by the U.S. hate group Aryan Nations, while the Sonnenrad was among the neo-Nazi symbols at this summer’s deadly march in Charlottesville.

Azov’s neo-Nazi character has been covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the Telegraph and Reuters, among others. On-the-ground journalists from established Western media outlets have written of witnessing SS runes, swastikas, torchlight marches, and Nazi salutes. They interviewed Azov soldiers who readily acknowledged being neo-Nazis. They filed these reports under unambiguous headlines such as “How many neo-Nazis is the U.S. backing in Ukraine?” and “Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis.”

How is this Russian propaganda?

The U.N. and Human Rights Watch have accused Azov, as well as other Kiev battalions, of a litany of human rights abuses.”

Neo-facism has infected Ukrainian popular culture as well. A half-dozen neo-Nazi music groups held a concert in 2019 commemorating  the day Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

Amnesty International in 2019 warned that “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”

Zelensky & Neo-Nazis

Zelensky with an Azov member (right) addressing the Greek Parliament in April. (Greek Parliament TV)

One of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs from the early 1990s, Ihor Kolomoisky, was an early financial backer of the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. According to a 2015 Reuters (green-checked) report:

“Many of these paramilitary groups are accused of abusing the citizens they are charged with protecting. Amnesty International has reported that the Aidar battalion — also partially funded by Kolomoisky — committed war crimes, including illegal abductions, unlawful detention, robbery, extortion and even possible executions.

Other pro-Kiev private battalions have starved civilians as a form of warfare, preventing aid convoys from reaching separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine, according to the Amnesty report.

Some of Ukraine’s private battalions have blackened the country’s international reputation with their extremist views. The Azov battalion, partially funded by Taruta and Kolomoisky, uses the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, and many of its members openly espouse neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic views. The battalion members have spoken about “bringing the war to Kiev,” and said that Ukraine needs “a strong dictator to come to power who could shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the process.”

In April 2019, the F.B.I. began investigating Kolomoisky for alleged financial crimes in connection with his steel holdings in West Virginia and northern Ohio. In August 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice filed civil forfeiture complaints against him and a partner:

“The complaints allege that Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Boholiubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars.  The two obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit from approximately 2008 through 2016, when the scheme was uncovered, and the bank was nationalized by the National Bank of Ukraine.  The complaints allege that they laundered a portion of the criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the United States.  As alleged in the complaint, the loans were rarely repaid except with more fraudulently obtained loan proceeds.”

Meanwhile, the Azov backer’s television channel had by this time aired the hit TV show Servant of the People (2015-2019), which catapulted Volodymyr Zelensky to fame and ultimately into the presidency under the new Servant of the People Party. The former actor and comedian’s presidential campaign was bankrolled by Kolomoisky, according to multiple reports, including this one by Radio Free Europe (not rated).

During the presidential campaign, Politico reported:

“Kolomoisky’s media outlet also provides security and logistical backup for the comedian’s campaign, and it has recently emerged that Zelenskiy’s legal counsel, Andrii Bohdan, was the oligarch’s personal lawyer. Investigative journalists have also reported that Zelenskiy traveled 14 times in the past two years to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoisky is based in exile.”

Before their run-off election, Petro Poroshenko called Zelensky “Kolomoisky’s puppet.” According to the Pandora Papers, Zelensky stashed funds he received from Kolomoisky off shore.

During the campaign Zelensky was asked about Bandera. He said it was “cool” that many Ukrainians consider Bandera a hero.

?? #Zelensky the actor who plays President:

"Stepan Bandera is a hero for some percentage of Ukrainians, and that's normal, that's cool"

?NOT COOL? pic.twitter.com/pD2HSiorSi

— 21st Century Wire ?? (@21stCenturyWire) April 21, 2022

Zelensky was elected president on the promise of ending the Donbass war. About seven months into his term he traveled to the front line in Donbass to tell Ukrainian troops, where Azov is well-represented, to lay down their arms. Instead he was sent packing. The Kyiv Post (green check) reported:

“When one veteran, Denys Yantar, said they had no arms and wanted instead to discuss protests against the planned disengagement that had taken place across Ukraine, Zelensky became furious.

‘Listen, Denys, I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests,’ Zelensky said, videos of the exchange show. As he said this, Zelensky aggressively approached Yantar, who heads the National Corps, a political offshoot of the far-right Azov volunteer battalion, in Mykolaiv city.

‘But we’ve discussed that,’ Yantar said.

‘I wanted to see understanding in your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser standing in front of him,’ Zelensky said.”

It was a demonstration of the power of the military, including the Azov Regiment, over the civilian president.

After the Russian invasion, Zelensky was asked in April by Fox News about Azov, which were later defeated in Mariupol. “They are what they are,” he responded. “They were defending our country.” He then tries to say because they are part of the military they are somehow no longer Neo-Nazis, though they still wear Nazi insignia (until Tuesday). (Fox’s YouTube post removed that question from the interview, but it is preserved here:)

Outrages Greek Officials

Also in April, Zelensky infuriated two former Greek prime ministers and other officials by inviting a member of the Azov Regiment to address the Greek Parliament. Alexis Tsipras, a former premier and leader of the main opposition party, SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance, blasted the appearance of the Azov fighters before parliament.

“Solidarity with the Ukrainian people is a given. But nazis cannot be allowed to speak in parliament,” Tsipras said on social media. “The speech was a provocation.” He said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “bears full responsibility. … He talked about a historic day but it is a historical shame.”

Former Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras called the Azov video being played in parliament a “big mistake.” Former Foreign Affairs Minister Nikos Kotzias said: “The Greek government irresponsibly undermined the struggle of the Ukrainian people, by giving the floor to a Nazi. The responsibilities are heavy. The government should publish a detailed report of preparation and contacts for the event.”

Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ MeRA25 party said  Zelenky’s appearance turned into a “Nazi fiesta.”

Zelensky has also not rebuked his ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, for visiting Bandera’s grave in Munich, which provoked this reaction from a German MP: “Anyone like Melnik who describes the Nazi collaborator Bandera as ‘our hero’ and makes a pilgrimage to his grave or defends the right-wing Azov Battalion as ‘brave’ is actually still benevolently described as a ‘Nazi sympathizer.’”

Zelensky has closed media outlets and outlawed 11 political parties, including the largest one, Eurosceptic Opposition Platform for Life (OPZZh) and arrested its leader. None of the 11 shut down  are far-right parties.

Donald Trump was rightly castigated for remarks he made about white supremecists in Charlottesville. But Zelensky, whose oligarch backer funded Azov, and who brought a Neo-Nazi to address a European Parliament, is given a pass by a Democratic administration and the U.S. media though he condones the far worse problem of Neo-fascism in Ukraine.

‘Infested’

NewsGuard’s Fishman took issue with similar phrases that appear in Consortium News articles by columnist Patrick Lawrence, and by legendary journalist John Pilger. Lawrence refers to the Ukrainian government as a “Nazi-infested regime” and Pilger to the “the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis.” NewsGuard objects to this characterization because the political wings of violent neo-Nazi groups fare poorly in Ukrainian elections.

Fishman wrote:

“The March 2022 article ‘PATRICK LAWRENCE: Imperial Infantilism’ stated: ‘Now the names we have for Putin roll around among like pinballs. ‘Hitler’ has fallen somewhat out of fashion, the hyperbole having proven too silly, or maybe because NATO is now arming a Nazi-infested regime,’ which was a reference to the Ukrainian government.

The February 2022 article “John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda” stated: “Vladimir Putin refers to the ‘genocide’ in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 – orchestrated by former U.S. President Barack Obama’s ‘point person’ in Kyiev, Victoria Nuland – the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis, launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbass, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.” This article makes the claims similar to the ones highlighted in the previous … articles, and are seemingly false for the same reasons.”

One can quibble over whether “infested” is the best choice of words, but it is clear that the Ukrainian state has long protected influential Neo-Nazism. Consortium News gives a wide latitude to columnists and commentators like Lawrence and Pilger, both vastly experienced journalists, to express themselves. There is no doubt about the outsized influence of Neo-fascism in Ukrainian society and government, especially since the events of 2014.

NewsGuard’s dismissal of the influence of Neo-fascism by looking only at election results completely misses the point. Fishman has demanded CN correct its reporting on neo-Nazism in Ukraine. But Fishman’s statement that “There isn’t evidence that Nazism has a substantial influence in Ukraine” should instead be corrected by NewsGuard.

The ‘G’ Word

Fishman also took exception to the use of the word “genocide” in two Consortium News articles published about Ukraine.

“I also found some instances where Consortium News appeared to publish false or misleading claims, and I’d like to get your comments on them. I’ve listed some examples and provided brief explanations on why they seem to be false:

The March 2022 article ‘A Proposed Solution to the Ukraine War’ stated: ‘The government of Ukraine has denied human rights and political self-determination to the peoples of the Donbass. Some 13,000 people have died during the eight years since the 2014 coup, according to the United Nations. The Ukrainian government has overtly genocidal policies toward Russian minorities.’

The February 2022 article “John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda” stated: ‘Vladimir Putin refers to the “genocide” in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 …  the coup regime … launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbass, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.”

Fishman went on:

“The International Criminal Court, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have all said they have found no evidence of a genocide in Donbas. For example, A 2016 report by the International Criminal Court found that the acts of violence allegedly committed by the Ukrainian authorities in 2013 and 2014 could constitute an ‘attack directed against a civilian population,’ but it also said that’“the information available did not provide a reasonable basis to believe that the attack was systematic or widespread.’

And the U.S. Mission to OSCE stated in a February 2022 Twitter post, ‘The SMM [Special Monitoring Mission] has complete access to the government controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims [of genocide in Ukraine].'”

Genocide is defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by 153 nations.  The convention says:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The Convention adds:

“The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.”

Based on the convention, an argument for and against genocide in Donbass could be made. The Ukraine military and extreme right militias have undoubtedly carried out attacks on civilians who, by reason of their language and religion, constitute a separate ethnic group.  Points (a) and (b) of the definition are certainly true, (c) and (d) are questionable.  The question of “intent” is crucial. Have the Ukrainian authorities had the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”?

The charge of “genocide” is thrown about by political opponents with less than due care to its actual definition. For instance, Biden and Zelensky have both accused Russia of “genocide” in its ongoing military operation. There is no defined number of civilian deaths that constitute an intent to destroy a people “in part.” Three months after the Russian invasion, the OSCE reports around 4,000 civilians killed. Both sides are shooting and killing civilians.

It is a judgement call whether genocide has taken place. The ICC report, referred to by Fishman, says Ukraine’s military action against Donbass could “constitute” an “attack directed against a civilian population,” but the ICC’s judgement about genocide was not definitive as it was based on “the information available.”

His second reference does not come from the OSCE itself, but from the U.S. mission to the OSCE, undercutting its objectivity since it is a narrow, national view from a country with a distinct political interest in events in Ukraine.

Consortium News has not taken a position that genocide was committed in Donbass. These are the only references made to genocide in Donbass and both CN articles are clearly labeled as commentaries with the disclaimer: “The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.“

Pilger only says that Putin “refers to genocide,” while Pilger himself calls it “a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbass.”

Consortium News did not endorse the judgment of these two commentators as it often publishes material with which it does not share editorial positions. Genocide in the context of Donbass is an arguable point, and therefore CN published these commentaries.

Financing and Other Questions

NewsGuard has also demanded detailed information about Consortium News‘ financing. Consortium News is funded almost entirely by small contributions from its readers raised during three public fund raisers per year.

IRS rules require donors who contribute more than $5,000 in a year be told to the tax agency. But their names do not have to be revealed to the public to protect the donors’ privacy. CN has made public its two major donors from its last tax returns. Roger Waters, the rock musician of Pink Floyd fame, donated $25,000 in both 2020 and 2021. The other major donor is the New York-based Cloud Mountain Foundation, which has donated $25,000 in each of the past three years.

Consortium News has never taken a penny from any government, corporation or advertiser. To prove this, CN is hiring an independent auditor to attest to this fact. It will publish on this website the independent audit statement as soon as it is prepared to once and for all end any smears or suspicions about the sources of CN‘s funding.

Fishman also mistakenly wants to know why authors’ bios don’t appear below CN articles, when they clearly do. NewsGuard wants to know what CN‘s corrections policy is. It is as follows: typos are corrected without a notice, factual errors are corrected with a CORRECTION notice at the bottom of the article.

A History of Dissent

Thomas Paine by Gutzon Borglum, parc Montsouris, Paris. (couscouschocolat from Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France/Wikimedia Commons)

The United States was founded by dissenters. The Declaration of Independence is one of history’s most significant dissenting documents, inspiring people seeking freedom around the world, from the French revolutionists to Ho Chi Minh, who based Vietnam’s declaration of independence from France on the American declaration.

But over the centuries a corrupt centralization of American power seeking to maintain and expand its authority has at times sought to crush the very principle of dissent which was written into the United States Constitution.

Freedom to dissent was first threatened by the second president. Just eight years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights, press freedom had become a threat to John Adams, whose Federalist Party pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Laws. They criminalized criticism of the federal government.

The Union then shut down newspapers during the U.S. Civil War.

Woodrow Wilson came within one vote in the Senate of creating official government censorship in the 1917 Espionage Act.  The 1918 Alien and Sedition Act that followed jailed hundreds of people for speech until it was repealed in 1921.

Since the 1950s, McCarthyism has become the byword for one of the worst periods of repression of dissent in U.S. history.

The closest we’ve come to Wilson’s troubling dream is the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security, now on hold.

The roots are in the earliest English settlers in North America, described in The Scarlet Letter and applied to McCarthyism in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Though its industrial and scientific achievements are most lauded, America’s tradition of dissent is probably the greatest thing in U.S. history and it is once again under threat.

The Current Climate

NewsGuard’s accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West’s war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have been kicked off  Twitter.

PayPal’s cancellation of Consortium News‘ account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company’s view that CN violated its restrictions on “providing false or misleading information.” It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else.

CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.

Those causes are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to; the coup and 8-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.

Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.

Consortium News can be wrong at times, but never as wrong as mainstream media was on WMD in Iraq or Russiagate. CN got both those consequential stories right while they were happening, and contends it is correct in its analysis of the Ukraine crisis.  In any case, it is entitled to its analysis. On Iraq, Russiagate and Ukraine, Consortium News has clashed with the conventional wisdom forged by powerful forces and its corporate media allies. In response CN has been repeatedly smeared as agents of Iraq and Russia.

An overly self-confident Western establishment cannot appear to understand how experienced Western journalists could exercise their own agency and editorial judgment to critique U.S. foreign policy in real time, without them being agents of a foreign power. Consortium News sued the Canadian television network Global News for publishing such a smear.

It is evidently not enough for powerful forces to simply disagree and respect CN‘s constitutional right to free speech.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Abrams v. United States wrote:  “[T]hat the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market…That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” Justice Louis Brandeis added in Whitney v. California that the remedy for ill-conceived speech is more speech, not enforced silence.

NewsGuard’s review of Consortium News and other independent media is a test case: Can the U.S. establishment tolerate dissent or is it joining the tradition of Adams and Wilson to crush it?

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

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US State-Affiliated NewsGuard Targets Consortium News

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The Pentagon and State Dept.-linked outfit, with an ex-N.S.A. and C.I.A. director on its board, is accusing Consortium News of publishing “false content” on Ukraine, reports Joe Lauria. By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News Consortium News is being “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a U.S. governm

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Accurate information inappropriately spread by bad-faith actors with the intent to cause harm, particularly to the operation of democratic processes.

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New term from WHO: Overabundance of information, including disinformation, that undermines the global health response.

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The New Zealand legacy media have spent the past month emphasising the need for 'face coverings' or masks in community settings, particularly in schools. They're carrying this activity out via narrowly framed articles, which don't accurately reflect public health norms, and certainly don't reflect conceptions of risk outlined in the scientific and scholarly literature.

What we observe here is New Zealand's legacy media effectively manufacturing ignorance in service of mask mandate crackdowns that serve the purposes of already-published secondary legislation. This is occurring through a small coterie of message makers and Ministerial power-brokers, rather than through broader, democratic processes.

With regards to mask crackdowns, the message makers appear consistently unable or reluctant to make a critical public health distinction- most mask data demonstrates that prevention of disease is based on vulnerable and unwell populations wearing masks to protect themselves. If there is no meaningful difference on rates of hospitalisation and death, imposing mask mandates on not-at-risk populations is arbitrary and cruel.

That our media would simply repeat the 'infection' narrative, at this stage, when data has long demonstrated that the majority of the population are not at harm from infection, is a public health debacle.

Evidence that community-level mandated masking meaningfully prevents hospitalisation and disease is weak. Healthy populations should not be coerced, through social, political, and regulatory pressure, to comply with a medical intervention that makes no meaningful difference, while ignoring interventions that may make greater difference for those most at risk of harm.

We can see that the #NZPOL and our 'accredited' media are pimping community masking at the same time as the Minister for COVID-19 Response, Chris Hipkins has released secondary legislation that implies ongoing mask mandates. The May 30th COVID-19 Public Health Response (Protection Framework) Amendment Order (No 9) 2022 has formalised the exemption pass for masking rules with ' personalised ' exemption passes.

Onerous masking rules have been required by the Ardern Government for months, yet COVID-19 ripped through our secondary and tertiary institutes in February 2022, as the school year commenced. All children and young people were obliged to be fully masked up. Mask mandates in educational institutions were dropped on April 13, 2022. This unequivocal failure alone rendered the evidence for masking in a New Zealand educational context non-existent.

This graph tells a story that if anything, mandatory masking coincided with increased levels of infection in the New Zealand population.

RINSE AND REPEAT

Recent media articles promote a form of ignorance, or a culture of journalism that involves keeping nuances around real risk from COVID-19 and the role masks play (or do not play) outside the discussion.

Last week Radio New Zealand released an opinion piece stating that teachers are ' feeling angry and unsafe because of the risk of catching Covid-19 in their classrooms. ' The pressure on students, from this article, to comply or risk being tagged as reckless, malevolent disease carriers, is alarming. It is an opinion piece because the author of the article has not discussed the evidence on the efficacy of community masking.

During April and May the media were busy with articles such as this one by microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles which promote global community masking. However, when only one study is cited as the example, which relied on modelling rather than real world data, it can be seen as 'cherry picking.'

Wiles gets media visibility again and again. Another piece co-authored by Wiles is unable to discuss the fact that COVID-19 is not a primary risk for children and young people. It repeats the case mantra, as dogma, citing, for legitimacy, studies that only focus on transmission rates, such as this US study and this Australian study. The authors state 'in line with other published studies' - citing a 2020 review, long before Omicron appeared on the horizon.

While Wiles has considerable experience on bioluminescence and bacterial infections in mouse models, she is neither an expert in respiratory viruses nor an epidemiologist. There are plenty of experts in immunology and infectious diseases that remain silent.

And no, mysterious data analyst at the Ministry of Education, neither your Ministry, nor the New Zealand Government have " a responsibility to prevent as many children as possible from being infected and reinfected " with Covid-19.'

HOSPITALISATION AND DEATH

The New Zealand Government has a responsibility to keep people safe from hospitalisation and death. The Government has a duty to protect children, and consideration of well-being includes balancing the nuances. If the majority of children are not at risk from a respiratory virus, they should not have to be socially and politically coerced into wearing a (newspeak) 'face covering' all day, every day. And no, COVID-19 is not a far greater threat to children than the seasonal flu.

This brings the issue back to choice, and the role of masks in protecting the wearer.

Two tragedies arise from this form of cultivated, mainstream media ignorance. Firstly, such coverage, unquestioningly accepted by the general population, service workers, children and young people to daily mask wearing. These groups, who are often younger and healthier, pay the price of this cultivated ignorance in their daily 'enmuzzlement'.

Mandates and lockdown tactics have stymied education and development. They've led to an increase in non-attendance. The worst taxed with remote learning have been low-income communities. Hard of hearing children have suffered immensely.

There is evidence that masks may contribute to the case fatality rate. The author theorised droplets concentrating inside masks increased exposure to the virus to the wearer, driving risk of infection.

We have never seen a bioethics panel convene to discuss such nuances - and instead, media and talking heads conflate risk with infection, over and over again.

FEAR IS NOT A PROXY FOR HEALTH

Relying on modelling can be misleading. Recently, a paper was published that claimed that mask wearing in community settings reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The models remain uncertain and there is no effort to discuss the elephant, whether in Omicron the 19% reduction makes a meaningful difference.

As I have discussed, Te Pūnaha Matatini modelling for vaccine uptake excluded persistent questions of waning and breakthrough of the vaccines that might lead us to question vaccine efficacy. Our Ministries and agencies have failed to finance (at arm's length from the institutions invested in high vaccine and mask compliance) both epidemiological studies and the literature reviews of the scientific literature on the safety and efficacy of mRNA genetic vaccines.

Modelling all too often gets put in place to legitimize predetermined policy aims. This is an utter science and governance 'fail.'

NOPE, MASKING IN HEALTHY POPULATIONS IS NOT SETTLED

Recently when an earlier well-publicised observational CDC study was replicated, using a larger dataset and a longer time interval, the authors ' failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval.'

A recent study reviewing morbidity, mortality and mask usage rates across 35 countries in Europe over a 6-month period found that 'countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.' Even in surgical settings, the effectiveness of masks remains unresolved. In the UK, in March 2022, ' adults aged over 16 years who reported that they did not need to wear a face covering at school or work were less likely to test positive than those who reported that they always wore a face covering. '

The second tragedy that can be inferred is the fear that, despite mandated vaccinations, and boosting, teachers are at risk of COVID-19. Those with multimorbidity, immunosuppressive conditions, with poorly controlled diabetes, remain at risk from SARS-CoV-2. Teachers appear to believe that masking children is the intervention that is most likely to keep them safe. And, dismayingly, it's evident that boosted populations are now at increased risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 in New Zealand.

Source: Ministry of Health. COVID-19: Case demographics

Alarmingly, the New Zealand government has never made a space for early treatment, for nutraceutical and medical treatments that are designed to prop up the immune system; and dually reduce viral replication and risk for thrombotic events that are associated with both the SARS-CoV-2 infection, and vaccination by the mRNA genetic vaccines.

QUESTIONS MEDIA COULD ASK

If the media were acting impartially, they would ask whether there was suitable evidence that the evidence for mandates concerning the community wearing, including in educational institutions of face coverings was soundly evidence-based. Even with secondary legislation, the actual policy of mask mandates must not be arbitrary nor tyrannical.

Media would confirm that there was no way that mask wearing across the New Zealand community would be enforced in legislation, simply because there might be some indication that mask wearing prevents 'cases.' For it is clear from the scientific literature that most of the population is not at risk from infection, and that this has been evident from March 2020.

Such evidence would also consider the prior infection in the population, the degree to which the population has already been exposed. It would also consider the potential for harm to arise at pre-school, primary, secondary and tertiary level, from mask wearing.

Just in case the journalists of New Zealand's government-funded media, who lack appropriate protections such as journalistic freedom of speech, are curious about these issues, I have asked the Minister in charge of this secondary legislation, the Minister for COVID-19 Response, Chris Hipkins, these very same questions.

COVID-19 EMBEDDED CONFLICTS OF INTERESTS IN GOVERNANCE

The concentration of power in relatively few hands throughout COVID-19 has placed any chance of appropriate checks and balances on the backburner.

Hipkins is also the Minister for Education. In addition to the May mask exemption legislation, Amendment Order (No 9), Hipkins has not made an effort to take meaningful measures to explain the fact why he, as the relevant Minister, would now arbitrarily pop into secondary legislation on May 15, 2022, COVID-19 Public Health Response (Vaccinations) Amendment Order (No 4) 2022. This contains a brand new schedule of outdated vaccines, that remain predominantly based on a spike protein from 2019, that now has 32 mutations. There has been no reviews of the published literature to establish, over a year after most were released, whether they are safe and effective, and work lockstep like the schedule promises, for 183 days (6 months).

The new schedule is in the form of secondary legislation. Secondary legislation does not have the checks and balances of primary legislation which include public and Parliamentary consultation.

It is evident that truckloads of secondary legislation have been churned out of the Parliamentary Counsel Office over the last few years, with no consultation with the public.

Ironically, the Member of Parliament in charge of the Secondary Legislation Bill (now Act) is the same person who sponsored the overnight legislation, the COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill that continues to be the authorising Act that gives the Labour Regime power to keep churning out the COVID-19 secondary legislation. That person is also the Attorney General, who has stated that a later amendment to that Act was perfectly fine and did not compromise the New Zealand Bill of Rights.

It is evident that the current myopic-mask media campaign aligns with recent legislation which requires mask exemptions to be digitally logged. This appears to triangulate ID systems with vaccination and contact tracing. Is this for the benefit of society, or for the benefit of digital identity schemes?

Not being able to observe the Fourth Estate acting with impartiality, in order to parse the difference between infection from a respiratory virus, and hospitalisation and death - has been one of the many tragedies of the last two years. There is no safe space for meaningful dissent and challenging conversations in New Zealand's legacy media.

This media are not the arbiters of truth. They are tamed and compliant, and overly-dependent on opinion-based Op-eds while lacking resources, media freedom guidelines, and a public interest culture to ensure that they sniff out hypocrisy, contradiction and the missives of power.

J.R. Bruning is a consultant sociologist (B.Bus.Agribusiness; MA Sociology) based in New Zealand. Her work explores governance cultures, policy and the production of scientific and technical knowledge. Her Master's thesis explored the ways science policy creates barriers to funding, stymying scientists' efforts to explore upstream drivers of harm. Bruning is a trustee of Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR.org.nz). Papers and writing can be found at TalkingRisk.NZ and at JRBruning.Substack.com and at Talking Risk on Rumble.

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Legacy Media Pushes the Mask Mandate: The New Zealand Case ⋆ Brownstone Institute

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The New Zealand legacy media have spent the past month emphasising the need for 'face coverings' or masks in community settings, particularly in schools. They're carrying this activity out via narrowly framed articles, which don't accurately reflect public health norms, and certainly don't reflect conceptions of risk outlined in the scientific and scholarly literature.

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Truth, Objectivity, Independence and Autonomy

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Robert Epstein warns against Big Tech manipulation

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Robert Epstein warns against Big Tech manipulation

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"They hold in their hands the power to change thinking and behavior on a massive scale, the power-in close elections anyway-to pick the winner, in country after country after country."

I sit down with Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT). He studied at Harvard University under B. F. Skinner, previously was editor-in-chief of "Psychology Today," and founded the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. Today, he is perhaps best known for leading studies looking at how tech giants influence human behavior, and conducting extensive monitoring projects of bias in Google products and beyond. According to his team's research, Google shifted at least 6 million votes in the 2020 elections.

"All these so-called free services, these services are not free. You pay for them with your freedom," he says.

In this episode, he breaks down his team's latest findings, detailed in his report " Google's Triple Threat," and major ways in which Big Tech companies secretly manipulate their users without leaving any paper trail. With Congress unable to come to any consensus on how to deal with Big Tech, he says he's found another way to force Big Tech to stop.

Below are some links Epstein mentions in the interview:
Dr. Robert Epstein's Privacy Tips
Report on Google's Triple Threat
Taming Big Tech: The Case for Monitoring
More information on Dr. Epstein's Google research
The American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology

Jan Jekielek: Dr. Robert Epstein, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Dr. Epstein: Well, thanks. Nice to be back.

Mr. Jekielek: You've been studying for almost a decade now, how Big Tech is able to effectively manipulate people and in ways that people aren't really aware of. And the last time you were on the show, I think it was in November of 2020, you had told me, "We have all this data and I can't talk about it just yet, because we haven't analyzed it," because you're so rigorous in the work that you do. So, where are things at right now?

Dr. Epstein: Well, we've made more progress in the last, I'd say year and a half, than we have in the previous eight years combined. So when we last met, we were talking about the 2020 presidential election. We recruited field agents mainly in swing counties, in four swing states. And we had, with their permission, installed special software in their computers, which allowed us to look over their shoulders as they were doing anything that was election-related on their computers. And we had 1,735 of them all registered voters, they were balanced between conservatives, liberals and moderates. We preserved more than 1.5 million ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Google Homepage and more.

So what started as a very tiny project about six years ago in the 2016 presidential election, where we had 95 field agents in 24 states, has grown into something much, much more sophisticated. We've made a lot more discoveries, we've got lots more numbers and they're all terrible. In the sense that, they're telling us over and over and over again that we are pawns. We are being manipulated in ways that we cannot see, and in ways we cannot counteract and using methods that don't leave a paper trail for authorities to trace. So yes, I've been saying that for years, but now, we have so much more data, so much more information, so much more knowledge about how that works.

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned ephemeral experiences, so briefly if you can, explain what it actually means. And that's actually, as I understand it, the language that Google itself uses.

Dr. Epstein: They're brief experiences that we have online. In fact, most of the experiences we have online are ephemeral that affect us, like a newsfeed is flashed before our eyes, or some search results or some search suggestions, or all kinds of things. A sequence of YouTube videos, a suggestion for which video to watch next, they affect us, they disappear, they're stored nowhere and they're gone.

It's the ideal form of manipulation. People have no idea they're being manipulated, number one, and number two, authorities can't go back in time to see what people were being shown. In other words, how they were being manipulated, so as it happens, the experiments I've been doing for a very long time, now almost a decade, that's what they're all about.

They're all about ephemeral experiences and trying to understand them, trying to name them and trying to quantify them to figure out the power that each kind of ephemeral experience has to change thinking and behavior and votes.

Mr. Jekielek: So you've been working in the field of psychology for many decades actually, and I just love to learn the trajectory of your career, and also how you came to end up focusing on this exactly.

Dr. Epstein: Well, I got my doctorate under B. F. Skinner at Harvard. I was actually his last doctoral student. And Skinner was kind of obsessed, I was going to say interested in, but that's too weak. He was kind of obsessed with issues of control. Are we controlled? Is there such a thing as free will? Could control be benign? And that was, he felt, in fact, that control could be benign. And therefore, that behavioral scientists had a responsibility to help engineer humanity. Somehow, whether we're going to engineer society, so that people are as happy as they can be, as productive as they can be and as creative as they can be. And people generally didn't like his concept, because we all feel that we're really not being controlled. Skinner's reply to that was, "Well yes, you are, you just don't know it."

So it's interesting that, that's in my background, but I didn't study control per se for a very, very long time. It wasn't until 2012, so that's decades after I got my doctorate, that I suddenly got interested in control again. That's because my website got hacked, I ended up getting a bunch of email alerts from Google, I think eight or nine or 10 of them saying, "Your website's been hacked and we're going to prevent people from going there and you better fix it."

I was baffled, but why was I getting these alerts from Google? Who made Google the sheriff of the internet? I've been a coder, a programmer since I was a teenager, so I also was about some of the tech involved in their ban. Somehow [they] were blocking me also through Apple Safari, that made no sense-different company. They're also blocking me somehow through Firefox, which was a browser that was created by a nonprofit organization called Mozilla. That made no sense.

There were all kinds of aspects of this that really got me looking at Google with a critical eye, which I had never done before, so that's early 2012. By the end of 2012, I was noticing a growing literature on search results, this was quite interesting. This was coming out of the field of marketing. Marketers, of course, want to help companies sell things.

And marketers were finding out that if you can just get up one more notch in Google Search results, that could make the difference between the success and failure of your company. It could increase sales by 30 percent or more. I mean, just literally going up one notch. That if you're on the second page of search results, you're done, that's it. You've got to be on that first page.

So there was a lot of new information and it caught my eye, because I was wondering, "Well, if people are so trusting of high ranking search results, could search results be used to change people's opinions?" "Could they even be used maybe to change their votes, their voting preferences?" And so early 2013, I began a series of experiments that just hasn't stopped till this day. And these are randomized, controlled, counterbalanced, double blind experiments, so they adhere to the very highest standards of scientific research.

And I thought, "Let's see if I can change people's opinions." I'll randomly assign people to two groups. In one group, the search results are going to favor one candidate and in the other, the search results are going to favor the opponent, the opposing candidate. What does that mean? That means that if someone clicks on a high ranking search result, they're going to get to a webpage that makes that candidate look really good and might make the other candidate look really bad. And in these experiments, I used real search results, real webpages, webpages we got from online, the search results we got from Google. And people were randomly assigned to these different groups and I thought, "I could shift people's voting preferences in this way by two percent or three percent." Very first experiment we ever ran on this, we shifted voting preferences by more than 40 percent. So I thought, "That's impossible, that can't be." We repeated the experiment with another group, got a shift of more than 60 percent. So I realized, "Wait a minute, maybe I've stumbled on something here."

Mr. Jekielek: You're just talking about this so casually, but so, okay. But because we're going to be talking about this a lot, what does it actually mean to shift people's opinion by, let's say the median or the middle of that, 50 percent? What does that mean exactly?

Dr. Epstein: It means that if I'm starting out with a 100 people and we're always using people who are undecided, because those are the people who can be influenced. So if I have a hundred undecided people and I say, "Okay, who are you going to vote for right now?" It's almost like they're doing mental coin tosses, so I end up with 50 people voting for one candidate and 50 voting for the other, so that's how I'm always starting.

And now, in fact, I will ask people some questions before the manipulation part of the experiment, I'll ask them questions. "How much do you like each candidate?" "How much do you trust each candidate?" And then ask them, "Okay, who would you vote for if you had to vote today?" How do we find people who are undecided? Very simple. We use participants from the United States and the elections we use are always somewhere else. They're usually from Australia.

And we ask specifically, before the manipulation, we ask, "How familiar are you with the politician named..." And whoever it may be, Tony Abbott and we get those numbers. If people are very familiar with one candidate or the other, we throw them out. We want undecided participants, so we start that way. And when I say there's a 40 percent shift in the direction of either candidate, okay, so that's important because remember, this is a random assignment. We could be putting them in the pro candidate A group or the pro candidate B group. So 40 percent shift means that I take 40 percent of the 50, in that case, it would be 20 and I move them over to the other group. So now, I've only got 30 leftover here and over here, I've got 70. I've taken a 50/50 split and turned it into a 30/70 split. I now have a win margin of 40 percent. So a 40 percent shift means I mix things up in such a way that I get a win margin that corresponds to that percentage.

These are obviously huge, huge numbers. Can this really be done? Oh yeah, because I've now done scores, and scores and scores of experiments. Yes, this is real.

Mr. Jekielek: Because typically, you think it's the statistical significance. There's all sorts of tests assigned to figure out if a very small shift is actually... These things are off the charts significant, basically. Yeah.

Dr. Epstein: They're so off the charts that really, you don't even need to do statistics. We do them anyway, but you don't need to. But you're quite right, usually in the behavioral and social sciences, we're looking at small effects. The effects that we have found in identifying these new sources of influence that the internet has made possible. These are among the largest effects ever discovered in the behavioral and social sciences in more than a hundred years that, in fact, people in my field have been looking for new kinds of influence. These are crazy big effects. So that's one thing that makes them scary, but that's not all, they're scary because people are generally unaware that they're being influenced.

They're crazy because all these experiences that people have in these experiments, they're all ephemeral, so there's no paper trail. And most of all, they're scary because they're controlled almost exclusively by four American tech companies. Now put that all together, now you've got something that's frightening, because you have sources of influence controlled by really a handful of executives who are not accountable to any public, not the American public, not any public anywhere, they're only accountable to their shareholders.

And yet, they hold in their hands, the power to change thinking and behavior on a massive scale. The power in closed elections anyway, to pick the winner in country after country, after country. We calculated it at one point, that as of 2015, which was quite a while ago, as of 2015, upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world were being controlled, being determined by Google's Search algorithm. This is because no one uses any other search algorithms-everyone uses Google's Search engine.

Mr. Jekielek: We don't know if someone is actually putting their fingers on the scale or not. But I remember you telling me, you actually are more concerned if they're not in a way and I thought that was always a very fascinating answer. I want to get you to reprise that because it's counterintuitive in a way.

Dr. Epstein: Sure.

Mr. Jekielek: Yes.

Dr. Epstein: There are various ways in which content could be constructed, so that it shifts opinions, shifts beliefs, shifts purchases, shifts votes, various ways in which that could happen. It could be that an executive of the company says to his or her minions, "Do this, make this happen." The second way is that, it's what I call the Marius Milner effect, is that one single software engineer at a company can simply tinker with some parameters.

And, is there precedent for that? Oh yeah. In fact, a software engineer named Marius Milner at Google, apparently according to Google, created this massive program in which Google Street View vehicles were driving around 30 different countries for more than three years, not only photographing our homes and our businesses, but also vacuuming up WiFi data. And according to Google, that whole project was just the invention, never authorized, the invention of one software engineer named Marius Milner

Did they then fire him? Oh, no. Marius Milner is still at Google and he's a hero at Google. So the point is, there could be rogue employees, rogue programmers that can do it, or it could be maybe they're just not paying attention. In fact, let's call this as I do in a new article I have coming out, Algorithmic Neglect. Okay, say they're just neglecting it, let's say there's an election coming up in Fiji, I used to live in the Fiji Islands with my wife, and more than 90 percent of searches in Fiji are done on Google. So let's say they don't care about Fiji at Google, so they're not paying any attention to the election. Guess what? Their algorithm is still going to favor one candidate over another. Why? Well, that's how it's built, that's what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to put one kind of webpage ahead of another, it's judging webpages and it's judging which ones are better.

And when it does that, it not only puts one dog food ahead of another, or one guitar brand ahead of another, it puts one candidate ahead of another. If you're not paying attention to it, it still does this, that's what it... Put it another way, there's no equal time rule built into Google's Search algorithm. We wouldn't want it to have an equal time rule, we want it to tell us what's best and we want it to put that near the top of the search results.

The reason why, to me, that's the scariest possibility is because that means that a computer program is picking the winners of elections, or is picking what dog food we buy or is picking what we should think. That's very scary, because computer programs are really, really, really stupid. So if computer programs are determining who runs the world, who runs many countries around the world, that can't be good for humanity. They're just not smart enough to make good decisions for us.

Mr. Jekielek: Just to beliguer this a little bit longer, people just say, "Well, that's just the natural consequence of the algorithm. That's fine." I think that would probably be a common way to think about it.

Dr. Epstein: Well, people don't know how algorithms work. They don't even know what algorithms are. So it could be people are just going to be indifferent about them. But there's another piece in this puzzle that I think would disturb a lot of people and that is the human element. We know from a variety of research that algorithms are built in a way that incorporates the biases of the programmers.

Now 96 percent of donations from Google and other tech companies in Silicon Valley go to one political party. It happens to be the party I like, which is the Democratic Party. But the point is, there's a lot of political bias in these companies. And we know from very good research that when people have bias, when programmers have bias, that gets programmed into the algorithms, so the algorithms end up having bias. Google admits to adjusting its search algorithm more than 3000 times a year, roughly 10 times a day, human beings are adjusting and making adjustments, changing it.

Now again, presumably they're changing it in ways that reflect either their personal bias, or the bias of their supervisor or the bias of the CEO of the company. So again, the human element. The algorithms at Google and other companies, also really to make them run smoothly, they check lists-blacklists and whitelists. Our main concern here is the blacklists.

In 2016, I published an investigative piece, quite lengthy, in "U.S. News & World Report" that was called The New Censorship. And, it was about nine of Google's blacklists. Now, I had never seen any of Google's blacklists, Google never admitted to having blacklists, but I knew they existed because I'm a programmer. And one of the simplest ways to make an adjustment in what an algorithm is doing is have your algorithm check a blacklist before it displays any results to anyone.

Mr. Jekielek: You kind of predicted these things existed, because you saw that certain things just wouldn't appear in search for example, right?

Dr. Epstein: Oh, exactly.

Mr. Jekielek: Yes.

Dr. Epstein: Or things that were appearing, suddenly no longer appear. Or a company like Google, or Twitter or Facebook announces that certain kinds of points of view are really not acceptable, so suddenly, they're banned. Well, what do you do then? All you do is add some phrases and some words to your blacklist, that's how you do it. You don't have to reprogram anything, it's so simple.

But yes, I was writing about these things pretty early on. In 2019, I testified before the Senate Committee in Washington. And just before I testified, a representative of Google, a vice president from Google testified, he was under oath and a United States Senator asked him, "Does Google have blacklists?" And this man replied, "No Senator, we do not."

Speaker 1: Has Google ever blacklisted or attempted to blacklist a company, group, individual or outlet from its advertising partners, or its search results for political reasons?

Speaker 2: No, ma'am. We don't use blacklists, whitelists to influence our search results or...

Speaker 1: For what reason does Google blacklist a company?

Speaker 2: As I said, per your previous question, we do not utilize blacklists or whitelists in our search results to favor political outcomes, that's not...

Dr. Epstein: A few weeks later...

Mr. Jekielek: ... political outcomes, it's not.

Dr. Epstein: A few weeks later, a fellow named Zach Vorhies, who had been a senior software engineer at Google for eight-and-a-half years, walked out of Google and took property with him. This was the first time that a whistleblower had actually walked out with property. He walked out with more than 950 pages of documents and a two-minute video. Among those documents were three documents labeled blacklists. This was just a few weeks after that hearing. This man was lying under oath to Congress, which is a felony.

Mr. Jekielek: What is the strongest effect that you've been able to observe in your own manipulations and what method was used to create that effect and how did it really work, so people can get a picture?

Dr. Epstein: The strongest effect that we've discovered so far is abbreviated OME which stands for opinion matching effect. A paper on this was accepted for presentation at a scientific conference. So, end of April in the year 2022, we'll be presenting this at a conference. It's so simple. You are, let's say, "The Washington Post" or you might even be Tinder and you tell people, "Hey, election is coming up and we're going to help you make a decision about who to vote for," because a lot of people have trouble. Some people have very strong political views. They know who they're voting for.

But close to an election, in fact, news organizations and sometimes some strange companies like Tinder say, "We'll help you make up your mind. So come to our website, go to this website, click here, and we'll give you a quiz. And based on how you answer the questions about your opinions on immigration, your opinions on nuclear weapons, your opinions on Russia, whatever it may be, we'll tell you which candidate is the best match for you." That's why this is called opinion matching.

We have found that when we, in experiments, give people a quiz and then we tell them how good a match they are for one candidate or another, so you match Candidate A by 85 percent. The other one, you only match by 23 percent, and then we say, "Okay, now who are you going to vote for, or how much do you like this candidate or trust this candidate," all the numbers shift in the direction of whichever candidate we said you match. They all shift. And the shifts we get are between 70 and 90 percent. Now, there's something else... Which are the biggest numbers we've ever gotten consistently in any kind of experiments we've run in, now, almost a decade. But there's something else about opinion matching, about OME that is crazy.

Normally, when we run experiments like this, some people, at least a few people, are suspicious and they think that maybe there's some bias in the content they're being shown. Sometimes it's four percent or five percent, sometimes it's 25 percent, it depends. But in OME, nobody suspects that there's any kind of bias involved in the content that we're showing them. How could they see bias? They don't have an opportunity to see bias, even though we're not paying any attention whatsoever to their answers. We don't even look at their answers. But not a single person that has ever run in our OME experiments has said anything about bias. Now, are there really opinion matching websites out there that ignore your answers? Oh, yeah. So that's the other part of that research project.

We have been looking at dozens and dozens of opinion matching websites. We've actually created algorithms that do this, so we can actually take a quiz many, many, many times, just typing in random numbers and then checking to see what results we're getting. So we found websites that help you decide which political party you should join.

On one website, you almost always will be told, "You're a perfect match for Republicans. Join the Republican Party," and then on another website, you're told almost always, "You're a perfect match for Democrats, for the Democratic Party. Sign up here." We're typing in random answers. So opinion matching is a fantastic way to manipulate people because you can shift people very, very, very dramatically and they have no clue. They do not suspect any kind of bias or manipulation.

Mr. Jekielek: Let's jump to the monitoring now. Broadly speaking, from that data set from 2020, what is it that you found?

Dr. Epstein: In 2020, at first we had about 700 field agents who were monitoring the presidential election and they were located in swing counties in three swing states. We found, as we have found in the past, a very strong, liberal bias, but not on Bing or Yahoo. Bing and Yahoo had a little bit of a conservative slant, but they don't affect very many votes because hardly anyone uses them. On YouTube, 93 percent of the videos being recommended to people by Google's Up Next algorithm, 93 percent came from strongly liberal news sources. Now, that's going to all of our field agents. And in fact, there was more of a liberal bias in those recommendations on YouTube going to conservatives than going to liberals.

Think of it as a kind of arrogance. Now, you could say, "Well, maybe there's just a lot more liberal content out there. Maybe that's why we're seeing what appears to be biased. Maybe it's not really biased, maybe it's just telling you about the content that's available." I don't think so. We've looked into that. There's no way you could get to 93 percent on YouTube just according to the availability of content. That's impossible. So a lot of stuff [is] happening on Google. There was so much happening and we were getting so much data.

At that point, I think we had about a half a million ephemeral experiences preserved that we did something we've never done in the past because this is a larger scale project and done more rigorously than our previous projects. We decided we're going to go public. So among other things, we contacted various papers, "The Washington Post" and other places. We weren't seeing much interest. So we contacted the "New York Post." A woman there took a very strong interest, a journalist there, and she took all our content. She started writing a fabulous piece, which is about how the tech companies are rigging our elections. And she read me some of the piece and I thought it was great, frankly.

Next step, this was Friday, October 30th, next step was that her editor had to get comment from Google on some of the factual content. This is normal. This is perfectly normal. And the next thing that happened was, this was supposed to come out the next morning, but later that night, really two things happened, number one is "The New York Post" killed the piece. Wow, I couldn't believe it.

But then, I looked up their traffic sources, and about 40 some odd percent of their traffic was coming from Google. So okay, I get it. You can't really attack Google at least on this kind of a scale without risking your business. So okay, they killed the piece. That's number one. And number two, Google turned off its manipulations in the presidential election. Some of the bias we had been seeing disappeared the next day. So those last couple of days before the election, which was on November 3rd, Google appeared to turn off their manipulations, and we thought, "That's interesting."

So along the way here, I contacted someone I knew in Senator Cruz' office. On November 5th, two days after the election, three U.S. senators sent a very, very strong threatening letter to the CEO of Google summarizing Epstein's preliminary findings in the presidential election. And then, a miracle occurred, because at this point we had more than 1,000 field agents located throughout Georgia and we were very, very carefully monitoring the content coming from the tech companies prior to the Senate runoff elections in Georgia which was in January of 2021.

And lo and behold, there was the usual bias on Bing and Yahoo and Facebook. Wherever we looked, the usual bias was there, except all the bias was gone from Google. I mean, gone. I mean, literally zeros every single day when we're looking at bias in their search results, zeros, and no Go Vote reminders. And that's true for our liberal field agents, our conservative ones and our moderate ones. Not a single Go Vote reminder.

To put this another way, we, with the help of some senators, got the biggest vote manipulator in history to back down and stay away. The lesson there being, this is the solution to the way in which at the moment these companies, some more than others, interfere in our democracy and interfere in our lives and interfere with our children. This is the solution, which is permanent, large-scale monitoring, 24 hours a day in all 50 states, doing to them what they do to us and our kids. If we do it to them, if we monitor, we capture, we archive, and we expose, then they will stay out of our lives. They'll still make a fortune, they'll still make a lot of money, but they will give us back our free and fair election.

Mr. Jekielek: So you just said the biggest vote manipulator in history. That's a very strong statement. So explain to me the evidence and which papers can people look up to see the data that qualifies that.

Dr. Epstein: It is a strong statement. And so, I don't make strong statements like that unless I can back them up, unless I think there's evidence. And in this case, when it comes to Google and votes, the evidence is overwhelming. First of all, we have our monitoring data, and in these last couple elections alone, we preserved 1.5 million ephemeral experiences. We have a lot of data that we've analyzed now in great detail. We spent more than a year on the analysis, but there's more.

We have, for example, a video that leaked from Google called The Selfish Ledger in which Google employees are talking about the power the company has to impose company values, that phrase is in this film, company values on all of humankind to literally re-sequence behavior, that's also a phrase right from the video, to re-sequence behavior affecting all of humankind and spreading company values.

Speaker 3: As gene sequencing yields a comprehensive map of human biology, researchers are increasingly able to target parts of the sequence and modify them in order to achieve a desired result. As patents begin to emerge in the behavioral sequences, they too may be targeted. The ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior, but offers direction towards a desired result.

Dr. Epstein: We've got a leak of a PowerPoint presentation from Google called The Good Censor in which they're talking about the fact that they have to suppress some content and boost other content that, in effect, they have no choice. They have to censor content, but that they're good censors. What content are they censoring? Well, as it happens, because of the people who work there, they tend to be censoring content that has a certain political leaning namely conservative content. Now, I'm not a conservative so I say, "Keep going. Yeah, absolutely. I love it," but I don't love it because I don't want a private company that's not accountable to the public deciding what billions of people can see and cannot see. The problem there is you don't know what they don't show.

And then, we've got the whistleblowers. So we've had about a dozen in the past two years and they're coming out of Google, they're walking out of Google sometimes with documents saying over and over and over again, "There's crazy political bias at this company and they are imposing it on people around the country and around the world." The whistleblowers are telling this to us. They're saying it. A couple of them have testified before various congressional committees. So we've got documents now too. We've got leaked emails. The evidence is overwhelming that Silicon Valley companies and Google, above all, are messing with our lives and messing with our elections.

Interesting footnote. Country by country, they don't necessarily lean left. They do whatever suits their needs as a company. So in Cuba, for example, where the government is obviously left, it's a leftist government, but it's very opposed to companies like Google. Google supports the right. Google has worked with the government of Mainland China off and on for a number of years, helping Mainland China control its population. Now, that's, I wouldn't say is in the spirit of democracy. Google does what it needs to do country by country by country. But in the United States of America, they definitely have impacted elections on a very large scale and they definitely lean in one direction politically.

Mr. Jekielek: And just in terms of the impact on the elections, I just want to see if I understand this correctly. You're seeing certain types of what you believe to be manipulations based on this over-the-shoulder recording of ephemeral experiences. At the same time, you're comparing that to the experiments that you've run on the impact of those same types of manipulations can have on people's actual voting behavior. And then, that is how you determine that they're actually having this massive impact. Do I understand that right?

Dr. Epstein: That's exactly right. In fact, we can estimate a range of votes that can be shifted with each technique. So for example, we didn't have much data in 2016, but based on the data that we did collect and based on the level of bias that we observed on Google which was absent on Bing and Yahoo, we calculated that Google's search engine shifted to Hillary Clinton, whom I supported, somewhere between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes over a period of months before the actual election.

In the 2018 elections, the midterm elections, we were able to calculate how many votes were being shifted. It was in the millions spread across hundreds of elections. In 2020, again, we were able to do calculations showing that at least 6 million votes were shifted by Google to Joe Biden and other Democrats. These are estimates, but they're estimates based on almost a decade of very rigorous controlled experiments. Add to that the leaks, add to that the whistleblowers, and we get a pretty solid picture, I think, of what's occurring.

I've been working also with attorneys general from various states with members of Congress. We are getting more aggressive in going after Google and other companies, but the EU is way ahead of us and they've been collecting their own sorts of evidence now for a long time. They have fined Google since, I believe 2017, they have fined them over €10 billion. And by the way, euros are worth a lot more than dollars. So that's a lot of fines.

I was invited just a few weeks ago to talk to members of the European parliament. I've spoken to them before. They're moving on these issues and they could make a big difference. In our country, it's not clear that our Congress is going to do very much to protect us from manipulation by these companies. The EU, I think, could make a huge difference. They can take very dramatic actions to protect Europeans at first, but that would have a ripple effect around the world.

Mr. Jekielek: This particular work obviously is incredibly politically charged. I noticed that you keep mentioning your own political persuasion. Well, actually, quickly, why do you keep mentioning it?

Dr. Epstein: I keep mentioning my own political persuasion because I'm cursed. I have a curse. I'm cursed by the fact that my findings tend to help conservatives, which is not what I'm trying to do. And as a result though, because that is the case, a lot of my own peers, even members of my family, are mad. They think I'm a Trump supporter which I'm positively not, and it is a kind of curse. It's awful. I keep trying to cast off the curse. So over and over again, far too many times, I keep saying I'm not a conservative. Does it take care of the curse? No.

Mr. Jekielek: So when you, for example, with some of this politically charged work, for example, that shows that your estimate is 6 million votes were shifted in 2020 across all these different candidates in the presidential election, have you subjected that to peer review, those types of findings? And if so, what do those peers say when they see it?

Dr. Epstein: Well, some of the findings from our 2020 and 2021 monitoring projects, those have gone through a level of peer review for a scientific presentation, and that is a level of peer review. So we have presented that work to colleagues, again, in a context of scientific meetings. And that will soon be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. That's a process that takes time, and that will most certainly be published either toward the end of 2022 or perhaps early 2023. And it'll be there. It'll be on the record and it will have gone through peer review. I hope it helps when people are skeptical about what I'm doing. I hope it will help, but it may not. People are not thinking very clearly these days.

Partisan thinking dominates everything. It dominates media far more than it should. It dominates our Congress which, for the most part, can't get anything done. It even dominates how people view science. All I can do is what I know how to do, which is I know how to do very, very good science, and that's what I'm doing. Without the work that my team and I are doing, people are just, they're blind. They're oblivious. They have no idea how new technologies are impacting their lives. They can see it at the superficial level.

Like, my teenage daughter seems to spend 200 hours a week on her devices, and there aren't even 200 hours in a week. So I may have had a lot of people say things like that to me. They can see what's happening superficially, but they don't understand the impact that these companies are having on people's minds and nobody really understands how these companies are impacting our children, especially young children. So that's become my latest obsession is trying to figure that out.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, it almost seems, you know, to go back to the beginning of the interview a little bit, it's almost like they've kind of taken a page at a B. F. Skinner's playbook, so to speak, right? And perhaps imagine themselves sort of trying to positively engineer human thinking towards the right way that it should be.

There is this famous quote from Mark Twain, I never remember it exactly, but basically, "It's a lot easier to dupe people than to show them or convince them that they have been duped." I just think there's kind of an intrinsic opposition in a lot of people's minds to even accepting that everything we've just talked about could be true because as you said before, I'm the master of my own fate, how dare you suggest that? Somehow I've been manipulated to make my decision, right?

Dr. Epstein: Well, the problem is actually darker than what you're suggesting, because there's very good research showing that when you use a method of manipulation to manipulate people, that they cannot see. People end up believing wholeheartedly that they have made up their own minds. So it's very hard to change people's minds when in fact people believe that they've made up their own minds. You can even go back and show them what you did. You could show them that they were randomly assigned to one group and they made up their mind according to how they were supposed to make up their mind, according to the bias that we had control over. You can show them all that, and it doesn't help very much. People are not clear thinkers as a rule.

Fortunately, I don't need people to understand all these intricacies. I don't need everyone getting scared. In fact, that would be scary. I don't want everyone being scared. What we have to do is take concrete measures to get these companies off our back. Now, we can do that without convincing everyone that these companies are doing some bad things or they have the power to do bad things. We don't have to convince everyone of that.

So now and then, the government sets up programs to protect people, even though people don't necessarily understand the issues. It was our government. It was particularly, one particular surgeon general who stepped up and said, cigarettes are dangerous. They're bad for our health. I don't think the American public believed that, but the government started a program. It was a long term program of education, of changing various kinds of laws regarding smoking in confined areas and so on and so forth. They stepped up because there were sound medical reasons for doing so.

Well, the same is true here. There are sound reasons for wanting to get these companies out of our elections, because if we don't, it makes democracy into a kind of a joke or at least an illusion because it means in close elections, election after election after election, it means these companies are choosing the winner. But the public doesn't necessarily have to understand this or understand the details, just our leaders or some subset of our leaders has to understand, or some very wealthy philanthropists have to understand what's going on and say, "You know what? Epstein, set up that monitoring system. Let's get these companies out of our elections." The cool thing about monitoring is that if you can get these companies to back down, the monitoring system detects it. And if these kind companies come back in and start fiddling around again, the monitoring system detects it. I'll give you one quick example.

If on election day in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg had decided to send out go vote reminders just to Democrats-Zuckerberg is a Democrat and supports Democrats. The vast majority of donations from Facebook or Facebook Meta in fact go to Democrats. So Mark Zuckerberg on election day decides to set out go vote reminders just to Democrats. First of all, could he have done that? Of course. What impact would it have had on votes? Well, we know from Facebook's own published data in a study that was done with former colleagues of mine at the University of California, San Diego, which is right near where we're sitting, we know from Facebook's own published data that, that would've given to Hillary Clinton, that day, approximately 450,000 additional votes. Now, did Zuckerberg do that? I don't believe he did, but we weren't monitoring that.

Now, fast forward to let's say the upcoming midterm elections in 2022 or how about the presidential election 2024, we are going to be monitoring. Okay, if Zuckerberg sends out go vote reminders and he does it in a targeted way, he's sending it only to one particular group, we would detect that within minutes, and we would report that to the media, to the Federal Election Commission, to members of Congress, all hell would break loose. And I guarantee you that within an hour or two, he would take down those vote reminders. Now, meanwhile, he would've definitely shifted a lot of votes. That's the problem.

But then he would've been charged probably with a crime. What's the crime? Well, he's actually breaking the laws that have to do with campaign donations. He's breaking the laws. Because even though it didn't cost him one dime to send out those targeted vote reminders, it doesn't matter. What he's just done has made a huge in kind donation to a political campaign without declaring it, and that's against the law.

If you have very large scale, extremely well-designed monitoring systems running, and you're capturing a massive amount of data showing, look at this, we have 10,000 field agents and 3,000 are our Democrats, 3,000 are Republicans, 3,000 are moderates or independents. And look at this, it's only the Democrats, only liberals are getting his reminders. Okay, that could be presented to a court of law. In which case, he could be in serious trouble. Not just him, but his colleagues at the company. Not just them, but the company itself could be in deep trouble. If we're documenting more and more precisely what it is they're doing, and how they're affecting people, and how they're affecting elections, and how they're affecting children, it's very possible, I would say likely, that our leaders will pass laws.

Now, is this necessarily going to happen in the federal government? No, not necessarily. I mean, they're dysfunctional. But could it happen in states? Positively. California has a data protection law. It's the only state so far that has a strong data protection law, but it's a law just like the data protection law in Europe. So states could go after these companies, again, based on a massive amount of data being collected.

Think of the alternative. The alternative is if there is no monitoring, then these billions upon billions of ephemeral experiences that are affecting us are gone. They disappear forever. Every single decade, thousands of elections occurring and millions of children being impacted. And if you don't monitor, you'll never understand what happened.

I've had parents telling me that they're very concerned about what's happening with their kids, how their kids are behaving. They don't get it, and they think maybe it's because of social media, but they don't really understand what's happening on social media. You know, so I took away my daughter's cell phone, I took away her iPad, and all that did was create chaos in the house. That didn't solve any problem. And I don't think she was really off social media anyway. I think she was getting on ... In other words, people are going nuts because they don't really understand, they don't know what's happening. Monitoring systems will tell us- they'll show us.

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned this opinion matching effect earlier, which you said was the strongest effect. Briefly, could you kind of summarize some of the strong effects that you've found across these different platforms as well so people can get a picture of what is happening?

Dr. Epstein: Well over the years, we've been very successful in building simulations of different online platforms. First one we built was the Google search engine. Our platform was called Kadoodle. We have a superb YouTube simulator, we have a Twitter simulator, we have a simulator of Amazon's personal assistant. So we have a bunch of these and we're building more. These allow us to do various kinds of experiments and to see whether activities on these platforms could indeed shift thinking and behavior. We're trying to figure out how the manipulation works, but most importantly, we're trying to quantify it. So we're trying to figure out how many votes could we shift? How far could we shift opinions? How many more people could we convince to get off their sofas and vote who otherwise would stay home?

With kids, since we haven't really started that work yet, but with kids, we're not even sure what the questions are at this point. But when we begin that work, we're going to be generating, I'm sure over time, hundreds of different questions, and we're going to find ways to understand the potential for manipulation and then to quantify it.

So we found all kinds of manipulations and we have been able, over time, to quantify them and understand them. The first one was SEME, the search engine manipulation effect. So that was 2013, but we're still working on that. We're still learning about that almost a decade later. The SEME-

Mr. Jekielek: And that one is rank changing the ranking positions, right? If I understand it correctly.

Dr. Epstein: Well, it involves filtering and ordering. So filtering means you're picking certain webpages and certain search results and not others. And then there's the ordering and you're putting them in a certain order. So SEME, we found, can easily shift 20 percent or more of undecided voters. In some demographic groups, the number can be much higher. The highest number we've ever found was 80 percent, and that was moderate Republicans, and that was in a nationwide study that we did in the United States. We did that in India. Again, we found some groups that we could influence by over 60 percent.

Search suggestions, that's another source of influence, a new kind of influence. And so we named the search suggestion effect or SSE. We found that search suggestions are very powerful. This is because mainly of the ability that a search engine has to suppress certain kinds of suggestions and allow those suggestions to appear when it suits their needs.

For example, let's say it's Clinton versus Trump, and let's say I support Clinton. So the first thing I would do with my search suggestions is make sure when someone is typing a search term, that they never get a negative search suggestion for Clinton. So you're screening out, very, very rapidly, you're screening out negative terms and all you're left with are some neutral or some positive terms, but you don't do that for her opponent.

So for Trump, you just let everything fly up no matter how negative the terminology is. As it happens, in June of 2016, a news organization called SourceFed released a video that was quite well produced. And basically, it said, "Look, we've been looking at search suggestions on Google, Bing and Yahoo. And on Google, it's just about impossible to get any negative search suggestions for Hilary Clinton, but you can get them for Trump." You can get Trump as an idiot popping up as you start to type a search term. Trump is a horse in a hospital, that one pops up. Okay, but for Hillary, no.

On Bing in Yahoo, if you start to type in, Hillary is ... you'll get, Hillary is the devil, Hillary is ill, Hillary is sick, Hillary ... You'll get eight or 10, highly, highly negative suggestions. Now, if you go over to one of Google's tools that tells you what people are actually searching for, and you look up Hillary Clinton, you're going to find that they're searching for negative things. But Google's search engine, so it appeared, at least in the summer of 2016, was suppressing negatives.

So we've done controlled experiments on SSE, search suggestion and effect, and we have found that just by either suppressing or not suppressing negative search suggestions, we could turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split with no one having the slightest idea that they're being manipulated.

More recently, we've been looking at these so-called answer bot effects. This applies both to the answer boxes that Google now shows pretty frequently above search results. And you know, if you show people an answer box, number one, they don't spend as much time looking at search results and they don't click on very many search results. Very often, they just accept what's in the answer box as being true.

But we've shown that when you put an answer box above search results, it increases the shift that you get from biased search results. And if you show people perfectly unbiased results, but you give them an answer box that favors one candidate, we've produced shifts of about 38 percent just from the answer box where all the search results themselves are unbiased. And then we realized, wait, there's something else out there in the world now that's just like that, where just someone asks a question and they get one answer and that's the personal assistant.

So we call these IPAs, intelligent personal assistants, and that's assistants like Apple Siri, which just so happens, gets all of its answers from Google. Like Amazon's Alexa. It's another one of these devices like, well, the Google Assistant, which comes on Android phones, and answers your questions. And with personal assistants, you ask a question and you don't get a list of 10,000 search results, you just get an answer. It might be wrong, it might be right.

We have been conducting experiments now with personal assistants and they talk. In fact, they sound just like Amazon Alexa does. And we have been able to produce shifts of 40 percent or more just based on what one question and answer interaction. If we let people ask multiple questions, six questions or more, we're getting shifts of 65 percent or higher.

The downside of that, by the way, is that if you let people ask multiple questions and you're showing them biased answers over and over and over again, they start to detect the bias, but it doesn't have much impact on the shift that you're getting in their opinions. And that we've found pretty consistently now for again, almost 10 years. Merely being able to see the bias, doesn't necessarily protect you from the bias.

Mr. Jekielek: Now, I have to ask this, have you done any work to assess whether the effect of this is cumulative? Because of course, people are being affected by multiple of these types of interactions with their devices.

Dr. Epstein: So far, we've only done one kind of experiment in which we repeat a manipulation. And sure enough, if you repeat a manipulation, the numbers go up. Now, they go up kind of more and more slowly as one would expect, because you're reaching some sort of asymptote, some sort of maximum, but we are planning actually a few months from now, that's on our schedule, to approach that issue very aggressively. Because as it happens, almost all, if not all of the tech companies in Silicon Valley have the same political bias. So it has crossed our mind. I mean, it's a natural thing. What if people were seeing the same kind of bias, not just over and over again on one platform, but across platforms?

And in a way I regret having focused so much on Google, although I think it is the biggest player here, because I think that what's really happening is that there is a cumulative effect of not just political bias, but of values; literally a cumulative effect of being exposed to certain kinds of values over and over and over again on one tech platform after another. And I think that the people who are most vulnerable to being impacted by that kind of process are children.

And so that's why it's so important to me ... As a dad, it's so important to me to finally begin to explore that. I thought about this years ago, but I just couldn't figure out how we would do that. How are we going to look at kids? How are we going to look over their shoulders as they're on their little mobile devices or their little iPads? How are we going to do that? We finally figured it out and we finally got funding for it too. So that's going to happen this year. That line of research is going to happen. We're going to be looking at multiple sources of influence and we're going to be looking at kids

Mr. Jekielek: Well, so this is exactly what I wanted to touch on here. And when it comes to being undecided on things, I think a lot of kids are actually quite undecided. Probably a much larger portion of younger people, they're just trying to figure out their identities, who they are, what they like, they're testing different things. These giant systems are there ready to provide answers in a particular direction based on their values as you suggest. Wow! That is really unprecedented in history. And so first of all, like how long has this been going on? I mean, that's something else that you've been ... Have you been able to assess these types of manipulations, when they would've started?

Dr. Epstein: I have a rough idea and it's only rough, but the fact is if you look at Google's history. So Google was really the first company that turned into one of these mega giants that we have now. In 2004, I believe, they introduced search suggestions or what they called auto complete. The programmer who invented it named Kevin Gibbs, I believe, he thought it was a cool thing and he said, "Wow! Look at this cool thing, it's going to give you an idea of what other people are searching for. It'll speed up your searches, et cetera, et cetera." But in 2008, they changed it. Originally, this was an opt-in feature. In 2008, it became standard and you couldn't even opt out of it. Okay, so I think something's starting to shift there. And then in 2010, they shifted from always having had 10 search suggestions on the list now to having just four.

Now, as it happens, we discovered in 2016 with our SSE research, that if you want to maximize your control over people's searches, using search suggestions, the optimal number of suggestions to show them is four. You guessed it. That's right. It's four. So ...

You guessed it, that's right. It's four. So what that's telling me is somewhere during that last decade, that last decade of the current century, 2008, 2010, somewhere in there, they were shifting. I recently heard from a man named James Whittaker, he was the first high level Google executive to leave the company. And when he left, he was being badgered, how could you leave? You're making a fortune and it's so cool. It's such a cool place. And so he issued a little public statement and the public statement said, "Well, yeah, I was there at Google almost from the very beginning and it was like the coolest place on the planet to be working. There was so much creativity and everything was fun. And we were just... It was wild," he said. He said, "And then one day it turned into a ruthless advertising company. It turned into something else-something very different."

He said, "And that's not what I signed up for. So I left." So there was a shift, there was a shift because what people were realizing was that they had all these cool tools, which initially they were just using to help people find information, but they realized they could make a lot of money. And then they realized that they could actually exert influence over people. In other words, they started discovering how they could, I guess the right term is repurpose, what they already had. And it's that repurposing that's led to this scary world that we live in now. Only a decade or so later, this is a scary world in large part because of the tech companies and these crazy powers that they have. And they know it, they know they have these powers. How do I know that?

Well, one of the whistle blowers is a fellow named Tristan Harris. He was featured, I think just last year in a very popular Netflix film called The Social Dilemma. Tristan, who I know just actually came out into the real world and said, "Guess what I was doing the last few years, I was working at Google on a team of hundreds of people. And we were just trying to figure out every single day how to manipulate a billion people around the world."

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned Zach Vorhies earlier. I believe that one of the documents that he took out at the time that he left Google was the thing about machine learning fairness, if I recall, right? So that's a kind of manipulation that is very, very transparent, actually. Unlike the things that we were just talking about, but it can give us insight into how Google perceived its, I guess ideological mission, if you will.

Dr. Epstein: It will sure. I don't know how carefully people have ever looked at those documents that Zach brought with him out of the facility, but there's some amazing stuff in there. There are multiple documents on machine learning fairness or algorithmic fairness, they call it, where basically they're saying, look, most firefighters are male. When people type into Google firefighter and then they click on images, look at this, they're getting all these men who are firefighters. And that may be true. It may be factually true. That proportion might be accurate, but it's not fair. So we're going to take care of that. We are going to make our algorithms fair. So that means now, even though it's not technically true, now people are going to see half male and half female.

In fact, now they throw in some transgender firefighters and now they're going to balance them for race and ethnicity. And they're creating a fake world because of the values that they hold. Now, not everyone holds those values. There was also a manual in there called the Twiddler manual or it's the manual for their Twiddler system. I never heard of it before. And right on the front cover, it says something like, Twiddler, a system for re-ranking search results. What? Now over and over and over again, when some Google representative would criticize my work publicly, they would always say, "We never re-rank our results for political purposes." And I, in my head would go, re-rank, what's that? I never accused them of re-ranking anything.

And here's a manual that's all about re-ranking. What's going on here? What's going on here is something amazing, which is that they actually have software that would allow them, as Zach told me, this is an exact quote, that would allow them to turn bias on or off, like flipping a light switch, like flipping a light switch. And that's what I'm pretty sure they did in Georgia in those Senate runoff elections in late 2020, early 2021. I think that's what they did. So they have the ability not just to shift people's thinking and behavior by showing bias content, they have the ability to turn the bias off. That's astonishing to me because search engines are pretty complicated algorithms. But they figured out how to do it. I mean, there's some brilliant people there and they figured out how to do it. You know what? Let's take advantage of that. Let's monitor them. Let's do to them what they do to us, let's monitor them, let's expose what they do and let's force them to flick that switch to the off position.

Mr. Jekielek: So how do you, and or what would you suggest to people watching the show right now, how to avoid being influenced this way? Because clearly in all these myriad ways, or at least most people aren't ready to turn it all off. I probably, like you, spend the vast majority of my day online doing things.

Dr. Epstein: It's hard to answer that question. You're asking a very, very good question, and I can tell you what you can do fairly easily, but it's not going to ease all your concerns. What you can do fairly easily is just go to my website, which is at myprivacytips.com. So that's really easy to remember, myprivacytips.com and you'll get to an article of mine. And it begins, I have not received a targeted ad on my phone or my computers since 2014. And that's true. I have learned, I started learning back in 2014, 2013, when I started doing this kind of research, I have learned how to use tech and keep my personal life to myself. I've learned how to protect my privacy pretty, pretty well. And that's why I don't get targeted ads. So everyone can learn that. There's some pretty easy steps there. It's not that complicated. Do you have to spend some money instead of just using all these so-called free services? These services are not free.

You pay for them with your freedom. So do you have to pay a fortune if you're giving up these so-called free services? No, you're paying maybe 10, $15 a month maximum and yes, you're signing up for some alternative services that give you fantastic kinds of results that work beautifully. But you're pulling back from Google, you're pulling back from the companies that depend on surveillance for their income, instead give someone five bucks a month, okay. So they don't have to turn you into a product that they're going to sell. Okay, so yeah, you spend a little money, you sharpen up some skills, you can definitely use tech and protect your privacy pretty well. So that part, I know how to help people with. And the research institute where I do my work has now set up a new organization, which I hope people will keep an eye out for, which is called Internet Watchdogs.

Internet Watchdogs is going to be a place where there's a big forum and there's lots of videos and lots of services. It's going to help people break free of Google. It's going to help people protect their privacy, help people protect the privacy of their children and their family. People will be able to sign up. People can become members. And in fact, if you get involved early on, you can take on a position of real responsibility. I think the world needs this.

We're going to help, I hope over time, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people break free of this surveillance business model. I think it's very creepy. Now, there are larger questions here though. I mean, how do you protect democracy? What do I do about my kids who don't care? A lot of young people now just don't even care about privacy. They've never had it. So they just don't care about it. They don't understand that it used to exist, that you used to be able to finish a letter to someone and seal it and put it into a mailbox.

And unless you're a criminal and there's a court order against you, no one will see what's in that letter until it reaches the recipient; no more. If you use Gmail, all of your emails, the incoming emails, all the outgoing emails that you write, all the emails that you kind of write, and then you say, "No, I'm not going to send that, that's crazy. I'll get fired." Even those emails are preserved permanently by Google. They're analyzed by Google's algorithms. They're used to create digital models of you to predict your behavior. They're used to control you.

So young people don't even understand that. They've grown up in a world where there is no privacy. So that's a tough problem. I don't have any easy answer for that problem. That's a generational phenomenon that we have to live up to, we have to face. No one intended that to happen, but yeah, we're raising kids now who don't know what privacy is, and I don't have a simple solution to that problem.

Mr. Jekielek: What about just the basic question, what search engine do you use? Obviously it's not Google, or maybe once in a while you flip on VPN, an incognito mode or something like that, and you check Google, but what do you use mostly?

Dr. Epstein: Well, if you go to myprivacytips.com, you'll find out that I use a fairly new browser, which is called Brave. And within Brave, I use a search engine, that's also called Brave. And it's pretty darn good. I'm very impressed with it. I don't use Gmail. I use an email system that's based in Switzerland called ProtonMail. So they're all very, very private, they're encrypted end to end. They're just like the old letters, because when I send out an email, it gets encrypted. No one can read it, not even the ProtonMail company can read it. The only person who can read it is the recipient, you at the other end, just like...

Mr. Jekielek: Well, as long as I have a ProtonMail, though, it gets a little less secure if...

Dr. Epstein: As long as you have a ProtonMail, that's correct.

Mr. Jekielek: Incredibly valuable information. And count me in on being an early one to sign up for Internet Watchdogs and any final thoughts before we finish.

Dr. Epstein: I'm hoping that people, who don't just dismiss this, I'm hoping people will take a little time, learn a little bit more, and I've been trying to make that easier and easier for people. So I testified before Congress in 2019. Very recently, just a few weeks ago, I took the congressional testimony and I updated it. And it's now in a pretty cool looking booklet, that's called "Google's Triple Threat To Democracy, Our Children And Our Minds."

That is free for people to download it's at Googlestriplethreat.com. So if you want to learn more, go there, if you want to learn even more and branch out to all the different kinds of studies that we're doing, go to my mygoogleresearch.com. That is also a place where you can support our research if you have the ability to do that. But I actually do want to make a particular kind of plea, a plea, we'll call it.

We are ready now to take the work that we have done to take it to the next level. And by that, I mean, we know how to do the research. We know how to do the monitoring. We know how to do the monitoring on a large scale. We know how to do the analysis. We even have now an algorithm that will calculate the political bias in a webpage in a split second.

That's going to allow us in the elections that are coming up to look at content that's being generated by the tech companies and analyze it in real time, analyze it lightning fast and find bias as it is occurring. So we've made a lot of progress. We need to go to the next level. The next level means setting up a permanent large scale self sustaining monitoring system in all 50 U.S. states. This is something which I think is required. It's not optional.

This is required for us. We must do this to protect our country, our democracy [and] our children. This must be done. It'll protect us from the Googles of today and the Googles of tomorrow because monitoring is tech, and it can keep up with tech, with emerging technologies, even decades from now, monitoring will protect us.

So here's my plea, my plea is that if you're in a position to help us go to the next level, please contact us. If you know someone who's in a position to help us build this big system in all 50 states, please contact us. You can reach me through our website, which is aibrt.org. You can reach our associate director, Michelle Volo, who is a fantastic human being, and you can reach her and she can get you involved with Internet Watchdogs. There's all kinds of ways to join us. And I hope very much that you will join us.

Mr. Jekielek: So I have to ask this and this certainly many of our viewers have kind of been watching how, let's call it the administrative state, for example, in the government has become a lot less accountable to the American people. There's a lot of this kind of perception. How is it that your system here, Internet Watchdogs and these other ones, the monitoring systems, how are they going to stay, I guess pure to their mission?

Dr. Epstein: That's a great question. I actually have an answer for it because we are like Google was at the beginning and Google got twisted into a ugly, kind of greedy version of itself because of money, because it's a for profit, because they found ways to get obscenely rich. Now, Internet Watchdogs, AIBRT, any project I've ever touched really is in the nonprofit world, is in a different world. There's no ownership. I don't own anything in these projects. No one does, you can't by definition because they're nonprofits. So we are the original Google. We are doing creative, crazy wild stuff. We're protecting humanity, protecting the kids, protecting democracy, having a ball, having fun while we're doing it. I mean, my team loves coming in. They love working long hours. Some of them don't get paid at all and they still do it. And so that's where we are. And I think that's going to remain the case.

The reason why good Google turned into something else, something twisted and demonic and distorted is because of money, because it's a for-profit and people realized after a while that they could become millionaires and then billionaires and that's what's happened, and money makes people nuts. All the projects that I've set up my whole life have been nonprofits. So people do what we're doing because of passion, because of love, because of good intentions. And I think that will still be true of the research Institute that I helped to found also of Internet Watchdogs. I think if we're lucky enough to be chatting again, a decade from now or even 20 years from now, and we're both going to look fabulous by the way, just as we do now, we're still going to look great.

I think in the future, we're still going to be excited about what we're doing, because we're in this kind of contest, a kind of cat and mouse game in which we are using good tech to fight bad tech, to protect kids, to protect humanity, to protect democracy without the money factor to drive people crazy. So I think we're on a good track. We're making fabulous progress and I think the future is going to be even better than what we're seeing now.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, Dr. Epstein, I wish you Godspeed and such a pleasure to have you on the show again.

Dr. Epstein: Thank you.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Subscribe to the American Thought Leaders newsletter so you never miss an episode.
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Robert Epstein: Inside Big Tech's Manipulation Machine and How to Stop It

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"They hold in their hands the power to change thinking and behavior on a massive scale, the power-in close elections anyway-to pick the winner, in country after country after country." I sit down with Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT).

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New + info about the world around us, is always a selection, [should?] primarily be about facts but also contains analysis and opinions.
Increasingly participatory.
Major recent changes driven by fall in advertising revenue (targeting, automation, shirt of value creation to multi-national tech companies)
Blurring of boundaries -- on many levels, aspects, eg, publisher or tech company?
Convergence (enabled by repurposing of content across different platforms)
Audience predicition is hard, explains unusual structure of media / media production.
Access dictated by # of available screens
Traditional news media still main originators of content cf tech platforms that curate content already produced
Newspapers the main victim of the shift to online, general public most not aware, or sympathetic when they do know. Australians less interested in news generally (in traditional sense).
Self-selected vx pre-selected personalisation (latter = filter bubbles)

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https://mediamanipulation.org/

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The Technology and Social Change Project was active from 2019-2023. The Media Manipulation Casebook was a major publication of the TaSC project, and will remain fully accessible at this URL going forward, but will no longer be actively updated.

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A digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation cam

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https://toolbox.google.com/factcheck/explorer

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https://beconnected.esafety.gov.au/topic-library/essentials/safety-first

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Discover some of the essentials of cyber safety like how your browser can help keep you safer online, how to create and remember strong passwords, spot common scams like phishing scams, safely download documents including PDF files, learn about the different payment options, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, for shopping in-store and online, as well as run antivirus software.

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safety first | online courses | be connected

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Safety first | Online Courses | Be Connected

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Build your digital skills with Be Connected, an Australian Government initiative. Access hundreds of free short courses today.

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Creating a good password

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0:00 / 19:59•Watch full video

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Facebook and Instagram Security Settings

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https://www.govt.nz/browse/law-crime-and-justice/scams/

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Taking care can help you avoid scams. If you think you've been scammed, report it straight away.

Common scams

There are lots of ways people try to scam you out of your money. The scams might be online - through email, the internet and social media - or the scammers might come to your door or contact you by mail, phone or text.

Common scams include:

phishing - an email or text that tries to trick you into providing your personal details

computer virus scams - where you get a phone call saying your computer has been infected with a virus, which the caller can fix, as long as you give them your credit card details and remote access to your computer

investment scams - you're offered the chance of high returns for very little risk

inheritance or lottery and competition scams - where you're told you've inherited or won money, but you need to pay a fee or taxes before you can get your winnings

online dating scams - where a person you've only met online and have become romantically attached to starts asking for money or wants your personal details

door-to-door scams - where someone knocks on your door and offers to do a job for you for an upfront fee, and then does it badly or not at all

phone scams - someone calls pretending to be from a government department or a well-known company, and asks for your personal information

identity theft - people try to find out your personal details and passwords so they can use your details to steal money or set up fake identities.

Is this a scam? - Consumer Protection
What to do if you've been scammed

If you think or know that you've been scammed, report it to your bank and to NetSafe's website.
Report a scam
Freephone: 0508 638 723 (NZ only)

NetSafe will get back to you with advice and may also pass your report to another agency, such as the police or Consumer Protection.

You can report a cyber security issue through CERT NZ.
Report a cyber security issue
Protect yourself from scams

Putting a few security measures in place can help to protect you from scammers.

On your phone and computer:

use different, hard to guess passwords, such as a mix of numbers, letters, upper and lower case

put a PIN on your phone

do not reply to unsolicited emails or texts, or click on links in them

use security software on your computer and keep it up to date

do not open spam emails - report them to complaint@spam.govt.nz and then delete them

hang up on cold callers offering investment opportunities.

How to avoid scams
You can check that people and businesses offering financial services are registered and have the correct licences.
Financial Service Providers Register
Find out about current scams

You can help protect yourself by finding out about current scams.
Follow scam alerts on Facebook Consumer Protection scam alerts
Utility links and page information

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Taking care can help you avoid scams. If you think you've been scammed, report it straight away. There are lots of ways people try to scam you out of your money. The scams might be online - through email, the internet and social media - or the scammers might come to your door or contact you by mail, phone or text.

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“What is truth?” mostly hinges on another question: “Who decides?”  (Question: What biases does Discourse magazine have since the Koch family largely funds its publisher, the Mercatus Center?)

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The election of Donald Trump in 2016 triggered an epistemological panic among the people in charge of our institutions. Truth had crumbled into post-truth. News had been perverted into fake news. Facts now spawned in disreputable corners to confuse rather than inform and guide the public.

A guilty party was immediately identified: the great digital platforms, Facebook above all, that conveyed astronomical volumes of information to the public beyond the reach of elite influence or control. Enormous pressure was applied by members of Congress, presidential candidates, media figures, academics, even Hollywood stars, to tame Facebook, Google and Twitter. With the advent of Covid-19 and the approaching 2020 presidential election, the parent companies of the digital platforms found it the better part of wisdom to capitulate. Last to surrender was Twitter, in August 2021.

And so the platforms became the guardians of truth-only they were unable to think at any level higher than "facts." Truth was hard but somehow facts were easy-all you had to do was verify them. In this manner the booming "fact-checking" industry began its peculiar career.

But how do facts relate to truth? That question can't be detached from the iron bonds of culture and history. So allow me, good reader, a brief detour through the genealogy of facts.

Science, Faith and Facts

In the Aristotelian universe that Christianity took over with a few minor edits, everything, including human beings, had an end purpose, a telos, and every statement of fact implied a judgment based on that purpose. By measuring proximity to the telos, facts were considered the building-blocks of the moral framework of the world.

By the time of the skeptical Enlightenment, however, philosophers were denying the idea of a telos and an objective moral framework and affirming the freedom of individuals to choose from a multitude of purposes. The facts had nothing to say in that quest-because, as David Hume famously declared, one cannot derive an ought from an is. Facts were neutral and inert. They lay embedded in reality, like an ore, until science extracted and smelted them into truth.

But how do brute facts become potent truths? In high school science, I was taught that reflection on the data would somehow engender a guess about the truth: a hypothesis. But if facts are neutral and inert, that's not a coherent explanation. And if we observe how scientists actually work, we soon learn to invert the equation: The hypothesis precedes the facts and is interested only in facts of a certain kind.

Facts exist at the speculative frontier of the great frameworks of truth erected by science-what Thomas Kuhn, scholar of scientific revolutions, called "paradigms." They matter only if they support or falsify the framework.

How do scientists choose between competing frameworks of truth? Kuhn speaks of a "transfer of allegiance" based in part on "faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind," he concludes, "can only be made on faith."

It sounds subjective, almost political-which is to say that the search for truth is an all-too-human adventure. Ordinary persons, no less than scientists, are along for the ride. I have never seen an atom or visited China-but I have faith in the sources that tell me such things exist. In the end, the answer to, "What is truth?" mostly hinges on another question: "Who decides?" The line between knowledge and power is blurry at best.

Tech Lords, Media Zombies and Fact-checkers

We can see that the obsession of Facebook and Twitter with fact-checking was based on the usual misunderstanding of the scientific method. They considered facts to be neutral and inert, simple to prove or disprove without much ideological fuss. Unfortunately, that only works if all of us agree on the framework of truth that integrates the facts-and it is precisely the disintegration of these frameworks in the digital age that triggered the epistemic crisis. In every domain, the ruling paradigms have lost their hold-but there has been no paradigm shift, only noise and struggle.

Given the lack of a framework, the answer to, "Who decides?" could only be partial and arbitrary. The public could decide, either directly, by the facts it valued, or in some algorithmic form. That would spin democratic society into a massive transactional churn, in which the truth of any proposition would go up or down unpredictably like the stock market. Whether such an arrangement would end in anything other than anarchy is an interesting question.

And, of course, the elites who run our modern institutions could decide. They did so in the last century, when government, media and the scientific establishment were the unchallenged arbiters of truth. The elites have endured a collapse of status and authority, but they retain their hold on the levers of power. For good reasons and bad, they wish to impose truth from above on the masses. Democratic society in this scheme would resemble a zombie movie version of the 20th century: Camelot of the living dead.

There can be little doubt that the lords of Silicon Valley, proprietors of the digital platforms, felt the need to appease the politicians in Washington and accommodate their own young, progressive workforces. The move to fact-checking begged many awkward questions about our post-truth moment but was flattering to the elites, who expected, as pedigreed "experts," that the task of fact-checking would fall to them. In this they were correct.

Remarkably, Facebook, Twitter and Google have subcontracted fact-checking to the news media-more accurately, to a handful of traditional media players clustered around the Poynter Institute, including Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. There could be no pretense of impartiality in the choice: Since 2016, the media has served as the attack dogs of the elite class. It commoditized opposition to Trump into a business proposition, as old-fashioned journalism, with its veneer of objectivity, gave way to a post-journalism that preached polarization to anxious liberals.

The public has hardly applauded this transformation: According to a recent survey by public relations firm Edelman, roughly six-in-ten Americans believe they are being lied to by journalists. But fact-checking was never an attempt to regain the public's trust. It was an exchange of protection for status, with a lot of money thrown into the bargain. To the question, "Who decides?" the semi-dead news media, with the blessing of the tech lords, returned a zombie growl: "We do."

Politics, Truth and Consequences

Under such conditions, the facts will always favor the left side of the argument. Matt Taibbi tells a story about a peer-reviewed article that questioned the data integrity of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine trials. Because two notorious anti-vax figures shared the article, Facebook's fact-checkers condemned it as "missing context" and restricted access to it. When the author queried Facebook, the company responded with a number of false claims about the content of the article. When these claims were refuted, the fact-checkers charged the author with not being "unreservedly supportive" of the Pfizer vaccine. The "missing context" tag, Taibbi observes, "should be understood for what it is: an intellectual warning label for true but politically troublesome information."

Bjorn Lomborg, a perfectly orthodox believer in climate change but a dissenter on what to do about it, had his comment on Facebook fact-checked as "misinformation" because it cited a peer-reviewed study that concluded more people died from cold weather than hot. During the 2020 presidential election, Twitter blocked a New York Post article with embarrassing information about Hunter Biden's laptop-information Twitter founder Jack Dorsey later admitted was accurate. All the platforms blocked or flagged any claim that a leak from a lab in Wuhan might be the origin of Covid-19, because Trump favored that theory. The list of such incidents is long. In Aristotelian fashion, facts are once again oriented toward a telos: the end of Trumpism.

An article in Scientific American on the psychology of fact-checking concedes that the activity is subjective and "messy" and recommends "adversarial fact-checking." Maybe teams of conservatives should fact-check the liberal media checkers-and libertarians would then fact-check the conservatives-and Marxists would do the same to the libertarians-and so on in an infinite regress until everyone on earth is checking the truth of what everyone else has posted online. I know certain denizens of the web who have already ascended to this ideal existence.

Even in such a fact-checking utopia, nothing would change. The quarrel today is not over facts but over the process that produces facts. The failure to agree occurs, and will continue to occur, because there's no framework of agreement. Until one is found that can survive the rigors of the digital storm, the elite panic will only intensify.

In my last contribution to this space I wrote that news, fake or real, rarely changes the public's mind. That is not to say that the current use of "facts" as political weapons lacks consequences. When you drive your opponents out of the public square, they will gather somewhere. If you push Trumpists out of Facebook and Twitter, they could well show up in 4chan. If you silence Trump under the spotlight of social media, you reward QAnon in the shadows. The evident corruption of the elites with regard to the truth has given rise to a cognitive underclass that believes in nothing and thus might believe in anything.

The first step out of the labyrinth is for the public to insist that digital platforms live up to the open society in which they operate. However, we are unlikely to arrive at the endgame until the shock of a powerful paradigm shift-say, Web 3.0-does to Facebook and Google exactly what they did to the newsprint version of the media.

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The Fifth Wave: Who Fact-Checks the Fact-Checkers?

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In the panic that followed the 2016 election, Facebook and other tech platforms instituted "fact-checking" to appease political, media and other elites eager to reassert control of the national narrative. Not surprisingly, those same elites insisted that they be the ones to decide which facts were real and which were fake.

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Expert answer:

Keep personal information to a minimum – use privacy functions and control who sees the content

Be mindful of strangers who befriends you

Create complex passwords that include symbols, use password managers, use multi-factor authentication

Minimise the use of unsecure networks

Do not click on any links in an email or SMS if you are not sure of the source

Look for the ‘padlock’ and https in the URL field and use established, well known sites

Do not respond to threats or harassments but keep a record (screen shot, download etc) and tell someone

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Various forms but all take place online. Harm generally mental / emotional rather than physical, but arguably worse than physical due to potential audience of billions (increasing shame factor), its 24/7 unrelenting nature (no escape even when at home), difficulty in getting redress (even when / if perpetrator takes down offensive material or apologises it's too late, multiple copies already made etc). Long tail impacts.
Is it cyberbullying?
Important to take screenshots, keep records, report to police but not respond to bully.

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Types: identity theft / unauthorised access to personal info / image-based abuse / cyber- bullying or stalking / exposure to illicit materials.
Hard to stop & surprisingly frequent, ie, Australians report unsolicited calls on a weekly basis scam, and being unable to get them to stop.
Most scams come by phone.

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Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

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Scamwatch is a website run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and provides information to consumers and small businesses about how to recognise, avoid and report scams.

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EU protections under GDPR legislation

Recent article from an expert

I tried to read all my app privacy policies. It was 1 million words

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what online safety legislation does NZ have?

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what online safety legislation does NZ have?

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Or an e-safety commissioner?

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NZ Herald 23 May 2022 Can we innoculate our kids against disinformation?

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Quick reflections: 12 different types, including video games, that either entertain, inform or persuade. Inherent in all will be a purpose, values and viewpoints, -- and some sort of wish to influence the reader / viewer? (NB Marshall McLuhan, The medium is the message.)

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UC Media Literacy short course - Topic 1 - What is media and why does  media literacy matter