Earlier this week CNN published a hit piece on Elon Musk and Twitter. Democrats are furious that conservatives may have a voice again on the platform now that Elon Musk is in charge. It is now common knowledge that Democrats can only win when they cheat.
On Tuesday Elon Musk tweeted on the left’s attempts to destroy advertising on the platform.
Elon Musk exposed the culprits behind the plot — Media Matters.
As reported in the Epoch Times, Elon Musk is calling for an investigation into, and exposure as to the funding for, far-left groups that pressure advertisers to drop certain media outlets.
Elon Musk called for an investigation into left-wing organizations that are pressuring companies to boycott Twitter if Musk changes the social media firm’s content moderation policies, coming about a week after it was announced he would purchase the platform.
As Musk has acquired Twitter with an intent to take it private and remove much of the ‘content moderation’ that unfairly targets and suppresses conservative speech, left-wing pressure groups are busy working to bankrupt Musk’s Twitter by pressuring businesses to pull their paid ads on the platform.
But since Musk is allegedly the richest men in the world, he’s not as easily pressured into silence by left-wing elites.
The stated mission for these left-wing groups pressuring advertisers is to enact strict ‘content moderation’ policies that stifle free speech and are usually disproportionately enforced on conservatives.
Less well known is how effectively the left has been engaged in this information war for the past decade, ensuring that successful alternative, dissident, and conservative media outlets have lower revenues.
These groups exist in a larger ecosystem that will fight Musk’s attempt to bring free speech to Twitter.
LEFT OPERATIVES USE CONTENT MODERATION RALLYING CRY TO BANKRUPT CONSERVATIVE SITES
One such group of several, NewsGuard, exists to facilitate bankrupting conservative media outlets by using ratings to generate a ‘score’ which they refer to as a media outlet’s ‘nutrition label’ – which they then hand off to groups that are the attack dogs going after advertisers using that score.
The process works like this: favored left-wing ‘fact-checking’ organizations obsessively rate ‘false’ even small issues on a conservative media site. There’s no real review or appeal process, and even on issues that are highly in dispute, the left-wing fact-check groups still rate something as ‘false’ that is in reasonable dispute. Those ratings, from multiple fact-check groups, are then collectively analyzed to create a ‘score’ for so-called ‘disinformation.’
Notably, mainstream outlets that push obvious frauds and falsehoods that fit the left-wing narrative machine, such as the Nick Sandmann incident or the Jussie Smollet hate hoax or the Bubba Wallace/NASCAR hate hoax or the Kamloops hoax among many others, are ever penalized for their left-wing disinformation.
So the left-wing generated score, compiled from collective ‘fact-checks’ from left-wing outlets like Lead Stories, pressure social media firms to ‘shadow ban’ shared links from the outlets they target. This significantly reduces the reach and advertising rates of conservative media. Then, in addition, a third tier of groups act like attack dogs pressuring companies that remain to drop conservative media altogether. Companies that fight back or refuse to drop disfavored outlets are viciously attacked until they comply.
“It’s a massive ecosystem that has been constructed, much deeper than people realize,” Gateway Pundit General Counsel Jon Burns explained. Burns has studied these organizations and has been in litigation with several of them for several years. “There are fact-check organizations, then there are ‘rating’ sites like NewsGuard, but there are also organizations that are attack dogs to pressure companies and advertisers to disavow certain platforms. For example, Sleeping Giants and Media Matters exist as the attack dogs to enforce these fake scores.”
LEFTIST ATTACK DOG GROUPS PRESSURE COMPANIES TO STOP ADVERTISING, OR ELSE
The Center for Countering Digital Hate is another attack dog going to advertisers to get them to drop the ad revenue. Burns adds, “This is basically a massive extortion racket. Don’t pay our political enemies or we’ll hurt you with defamation, saying that you fund racism, bigotry, etc. – it’s no surprise that most companies quickly fall into line to protect their bottom line.”
Groups that on the surface portray themselves as promoting standards in journalism, such as the Poynter Institute and their fact-check association the International Fact-Check Network, IFCN, are in fact enabling censorship of outlets that dissent from mainstream narratives. Their standards are used by social media platforms like Facebook to justify deplatforming conservative alternative media using left-wing pseudoscience.
CENSORSHIP CABAL TIED TO GOVERNMENT, MILITARY, INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES
What is also slowly emerging, however, is that these censorship groups are tied to the government and military.
“In many federal agencies now have a ‘social media working group’ with a wide mandate. They develop department policies, but they also exert pressure on social media companies to do what they want. This was true for the COVID scamdemic but also for the Hunter Biden laptop story. There was a highly-coordinated effort to influence public perception and it was pressure across all of the mainstream media.”
Robert Kennedy Jr. has also noted that this has been planned for nearly 20 years. Kennedy has publicly said that public officials conduct wargame planning sessions in order to combat ‘disinformation’ so that they can be trained in how to control the public narrative on a particular topic.
ACADEMIA ENLISTED INTO CENSORSHIP CABAL TO BANKRUPT DISSENT
Academic departments are also studying so-called disinformation/misinformation across social media networks. They use highly sophisticated statistical modeling and tracking to figure out how things spread, and which sites amplify news and have the greatest reach. This allows the censorship cabal to know where to focus their attention. The Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard is one example of academia spending considerable resources on perfecting their censorship models.
Yochai Benkler is one such supposed expert involved in this effort. Benkler and academic Robert Faris wrote papers on this topic, and eventually published a book “Network Propaganda” expounding on the topic. Instead of combating propaganda, however, most of the book is focused on fighting and de-platforming right-wing alternative media. Benkler and Faris are studying how to silence their political opponents, of whom the Gateway Pundit and the Daily Caller are two of their primary targets.
CENSORSHIP CABAL HAS KILLED MANY POPULAR CONSERVATIVE MEDIA OUTLETS
Facebook changed their algorithm in response to both the 2016 election and using this research, to effectively bankrupt what they labeled as ‘controversial’ sites in early 2017. Dozens of major conservative sites died after this demonetization change, ultimately claiming Allen West’s online publication, as well as the Conservative Tribune, Liberty Alliance, among others. The Gateway Pundit lost a third of its traffic overnight.
Gateway Pundit Publisher Jim Hoft gave testimony to Congress in April 2018 about this topic. Then-Rep. Steve King relayed the significance when he said:
I have some documents I would like to ask consent to enter into the record. The first one is from Mr. Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, St. Louis. And he is the one who initiated the beginnings of this hearing today. He has taken a pretty hard hit himself in multiple different ways, and I have watched as his views have gone from, been dropped down from 33 percent–Facebook page was 33 percent of the overall views–down to 3 percent.
One-eleventh of what it was. That would be evidence of censorship, in my opinion. A number of other comments in there that I would like to introduce that into the record along with a Christian publisher says Google banned it over faith we express, which illustrates that quoting the Bible can get you censored in this country.
And there are multiple charts here delivered by Gateway Pundit of other–here is Gateway Pundit’s traffic. Here is the President’s traffic, which the gentleladies expressed in their testimony. The Young Conservatives’ traffic, which went from around five and three-quarter million down to essentially nothing.
In a similar period of time, multiple other sites, Conservative sites all of them, the graphics in the charts–it is the best material out here that quantifies this impact, I think, produced by Mr. Jim Hoft.
What wasn’t known at that time, is that the censorship campaign was not just a collection of left-wing activists at key spots in social media companies, but instead had its connections to the military and intelligence worlds.
POLITICAL CENSORSHIP CONNECTIONS TO MILITARY BECOMING MORE OVERT
Nina Jankowicz was recently appointed by Biden to head a “Disinformation Governance Board” at the Department of Homeland Security.
The social media censorship regime is connected to the government through the military and intelligence community as Glenn Greenwald recently wrote:
…when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral. They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech monopolies such as Google and Facebook.
Greenwald also noted in another recent column, “Big Tech and the U.S. security state are in a virtually complete union, with all sorts of overlapping, mutual financial interests.”
“It’s all about control. It all comes back to the government and the deep state within it, that are actively trying to silence their political opponents,” Gateway Pundit Counsel Burns said.
“The first amendment isn’t just under attack, we are watching the construction of massive institutions and an entire ecosystem backed by the government to silence all dissent,” Burns continued. “Musk fired a shot against these people, but the SEC is already investigating him likely in retaliation, and the system is going to fight back hard. I don’t think he fully appreciates the magnitude of the deep state he’s up against.“
