On August 27th, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming what the Twitter Files, Murthy vs Missouri, and many others had long claimed – that the Biden administration aggressively pushed to censor First Amendment-protected speech on social media, in particular relating to COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop.
In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg writes that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including “humour and satire”.
Zuckerberg also notes that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma”, a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of. The laptop was not “disinformation”, it was real and Twitter and Facebook wrongly suppressed the New York Post story that exposed it.
But Zuckerberg’s statement missed a key detail – at least three Facebook staff members participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden table-top exercise that game-planned how to suppress the story two months in advance of the New York Post story.
The Aspen Institute “table-top” brought together a host of media and Big Tech including Facebook, the New York Times, Twitter, the Washington Post and “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft, to create their very own disinformation operation, literally planning day-by-day how they would respond to the leak.
Zuckerberg, however, writes, “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
You can almost see the fall maple leaves feathering their way innocently to the forest floor.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.”
But there was no surprise, as Facebook had participated in the Aspen exercise two months before the story broke.
Even for Aspen’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the exercise, things went even better than planned:
Regarding COVID-19, Zuckerberg says the Government “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor”. Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, he only mentions they were “warned” “about a potential Russian disinformation operation”. There is no mention of pressure to censor. Did the Federal Government push Facebook to attend the Aspen Institute exercise? It seems they attended of their own volition.
Attending the Aspen suppression planning for Facebook was Nathaniel Gleicher, “Head of Security Policy at Meta”, who continues in his position to this day. The Twitter Files show Gleicher also met regularly with the Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI, and participated in a Harvard-led pre-election tabletop with the DoD whilst the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed on Facebook.
Surely someone as senior as Gleicher, tasked as he was with such sensitive and high-level contacts, would have told his boss about his attendance? After all, the laptop story could have a real impact on the outcome of a Presidential election.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth also attended the Aspen exercise and played a critical role in suppressing the Hunter Biden story on that platform. Did Gleicher play the same role at Facebook? Gleicher’s participation has been known publicly since Michael Shellenberger first broke that story, 18 months and more than 100 million impressions ago.
If Zuckerberg believes suppressing the story was wrong, why has he kept Gleicher in such a senior role? If he knew of Gleicher’s participation in the Aspen exercise, why didn’t he blow the whistle at the time? Instead, he places all the blame at the foot of the Federal Government. No doubt they exerted pressure, but that does not appear to be the whole story.
Is Zuckerberg attempting to absolve himself of responsibility?
Andrew Lowenthal is a Brownstone Institute fellow, journalist and the founder and CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties initiative. He was co-founder and Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific digital rights non-profit EngageMedia for almost eighteen years, and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. This article first appeared in the Brownstone Institute.
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still can’t see europe’s third wave
https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
It’s the wave saying goodbye to freedom
Yes – and it has to be borne in mind that the Euromomo graphing dies tend to exaggerate in certain cases.
It would help if all the graphs used the same vertical scaling
it would also be better if the countries used total deaths rather than their ludicrous Z-score
As an ungrateful child in late 60’s refusing to eat all of my dinner mum would say
‘There are plenty of starving children in Pakistan who would be thankful to have that to eat’*
“So fine put it in a bag and send it to them !”
‘You wait till your father gets home’.
(* Film of famine and starvation from the Sub Continent was a staple of TV news in the 60’s.)
If the Dutch authorities are so certain that the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe they could, with a clear concience, donate those 11 million doses to India in her hour of need.
If it was the late 60s wouldn’t the rhetorical starving children more likely have been Biafran?
‘There are plenty of starving children in Pakistan who would be thankful to have that to eat’*
Same for me and my brother, though Biafran He used to say, “name one”. ;-))
Puts all the fuss the EU made about getting supplies of AZ instead of UK rather into perspective.
The EU is STILL making a fuss, and has today formally taken legal steps to sue AZ.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/european-commission-sues-astrazeneca-over-vaccine-supplies-shortfall-973007?ITO=newsnow
The author: …. incidents of clotting “believed to have stunted the confidence” in vaccines. Stunt… as if confidence growing after such incidents would be a natural and good thing.
“incidence of clotting believed to have stunted the confidence . . .”
Trans =
“ramped up the hostility toward vaccines”.
‘
Interesting reports of tinnitus in a minority after jabs. Not clear if it goes away yet. Tinnitus is also reported in a minority with Covid, It seems as though those spike proteins are capable of creating damage all on their own – those with mild or intermittent tinnitus should probably add this to the list of risk as they weigh up the pros and cons.
The big question is, are the new experimental vaccine treatments causing life-altering effects in the young that Covid does not in that age group?
The only country I trust to look dispassionately and carefully at this is Norway.
Clownworld:
The Dutch would be doing the world a favour if they dumped the poison in a hazardous waste pit.
If the AstraZeneca vaccines are not going to be used, shouldn’t they be donated to the Covax programme?
How utterly fraudulent and deceptive this official Dutch explanation. The reality is that the over-sixties declined the vaccine at an unimaginable rate (the Dutch press actually reported this lamely and the percentage of rejections is claimed to be 40% which means it probably was near 60-70%) and hence there is this surplus. It has nothing to do with other vaccines becoming available….these will be declined too. The over-sixties were the last generation in this country who were actually taught how to think for themselves and are hence highly skeptical about attempts at enforced mass inoculation with an experimental gene-therapy the long term effects of which are unknown. This skepticism is not confined to particular brands.