Social Media, Truthiness & Censorship
Google suppresses 'suspect' websites, Twitter deletes accounts, Shadow Bans others, as does Instagram, but for now, the following three in the main (and all three links seem to be Creative Commons). My thanks go out to all of the following authors and organizations, as this information needs to be known far and wide. It’s a bit of a tome, but I’ve edited out all I can and still keep the key elements alive and burning.
‘Gates Foundation funds Facebook fact-checkers that defend it from allegations; It also provides funding to dozens of media organizations that regularly give Gates and the foundation favorable coverage’, August 21, 2020, Tom Parker, reclaimtheinternet.org
“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides over $250 million dollars in funding to news organizations, charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, journalistic organizations, and fact-checking groups that regularly give investor and philanthropist Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation favorable coverage, according to an in-depth report from Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).”
Parker hadn’t provided a link to CJR, but here it is: ‘Journalism’s Gates keepers’, Tim Schwab, Aug. 21, 2020 (cleverly titled, eh?)
“The Gates Foundation provides this funding through charitable grants and has given over $2 million to groups such as fact-checker Africa Check ($1.48 million), media company Gannett ($499,651), and the journalism school the Poynter Institute ($382,997). These groups have defended or favorably covered Gates and the Gates Foundation in their fact-checks.
CJR notes that it found “sixteen examples of Africa Check examining media claims related to Gates” and that its “body of work overwhelmingly seems to support or defend Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation, which has spent billions of dollars on development efforts in Africa.” […]
“And the Poynter Institute-owned fact-checker Politifact also often defends Gates and the Gates Foundation from allegations such as claims that the Gates Foundation will profit from a vaccine and claims about Gates’ vaccine comments.
Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride told CJR that the money from the Gates Foundation was passed on to media fact-checking sites, including Africa Check, and noted that she is “absolutely confident” that no bias or blind spots emerged from the work. However, McBride acknowledged that she has not reviewed the work herself.” […]
In addition to giving funding to these organizations that have provided fact-checks, the Gates Foundation has also given charitable grants to the BBC, The Guardian, NBCUniversal Media, the Financial Times, ProPublica, The Atlantic, Medium, Al Jazeera, National Journal, Univision, the Texas Tribune, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, according to CJR’s report.
“When Gates gives money to newsrooms, it restricts how the money is used—often for topics, like global health and education, on which the foundation works—which can help elevate its agenda in the news media,” CJR added.” […]
CJR also notes that “during the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official” and describes this as the news media giving Gates “an outsize voice in the pandemic.”
Additionally, CJR suggests that when the Gates Foundation launched 20 years ago, journalists were much more critical of Gates’ philanthropy efforts and that “Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity.”
While much of the report focuses on the favorable coverage Gates receives on health and education topics, Gates has also used one of his recent appearances on NBCUniversal-owned CNBC to take aim at private messages and end-to-end encryption.
During this appearance, Gates lamented not being able to see the messages in end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp and claimed that the company has “made sure they can’t intervene” when users share content such as anti-vaccine content.
A spokesperson for the Gates Foundation told CJR that a “guiding principle” of its journalism funding is “ensuring creative and editorial independence” and noted that many of the issues the Gates Foundation works on “do not get the in-depth, consistent media coverage they once did” because of financial pressures in journalism.
The spokesperson added: “When well-respected media outlets have an opportunity to produce coverage of under-researched and under-reported issues, they have the power to educate the public and encourage the adoption and implementation of evidence-based policies in both the public and private sectors.”
In a follow-up statement, the Gates Foundation said: “Recipients of foundation journalism grants have been and continue to be some of the most respected journalism outlets in the world.… The line of questioning for this story implies that these organizations have compromised their integrity and independence by reporting on global health, development, and education with foundation funding. We strongly dispute this notion.” […]
“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that when a warning label gets applied to Facebook posts after they’re fact-checked, this drastically cuts their viewership and results in users not clicking through to the content 95% of the time.
With Facebook being the world’s largest social network and having over 2.7 billion users, the decisions of these Gates-funded fact-checkers can determine how well content about the coronavirus or vaccine heath concerns performs with a “false” rating cutting its click through rate by around 20x.”
At the bottom of the page, readers are invited to subscribe to the organization’s newsletter.
Now here is epic evidence of other dimensions of Truthiness entering the Gates Foundation’s philanthropic contributions and claims compared to actual results, including the fact that since Billy began giving away his money two decades ago, the B&M Gates Foundation’s wealth had doubled to $51 billion in assets at the end of 2019.
‘Why the Bill Gates global health empire promises more empire and less public health, Behind a veil of corporate media PR, the Gates Foundation has served as a vehicle for Western capital while exploiting the Global South as a human laboratory. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to intensify this disturbing agenda’, by Jeremy Loffredo and Michele Greenstein, the grayzone, July 2, 2020, (Creative Commons)
“The US abandonment of the WHO means that the organization’s second-largest financial contributor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is soon to become its top donor, giving the non-governmental international empire unparalleled influence over one the world’s most important multilateral organizations.
Bill Gates has achieved a hero-like status during the pandemic. The Washington Post has called him a “champion of science-backed solutions,” while the New York Times recently hailed him as “the most interesting man in the world.” Gates is also the star of a hit Netflix docu-series, “Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak,” which was released just weeks before coronavirus hit the U.S., and was produced by a New York Times correspondent, Sheri Fink, who previously worked at three Gates-funded organizations (Pro Publica, the New America Foundation, and the International Medical Corps).” […]
“Saving the world?
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation on Earth, reporting over $51 billion in assets at the end of 2019. Bill Gates says his foundation spends a majority of its resources “reducing deaths from infectious diseases,” and through this philanthropy, he seems to have bought a name for himself as an infectious disease expert.
Corporate media networks rolled out the red carpet for Gates as he advised the world on how to handle the Covid-19 outbreak. In just the month of April, while the virus was severely impacting the U.S., he was hosted by CNN, CNBC, Fox, PBS, BBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Daily Show and The Ellen Show. On the BBC, Gates described himself as a “health expert,” despite his lack of a college degree in medicine or any other field.
The ultimate solution
According to Bill Gates, creating and distributing a Covid-19 vaccine to everyone on Earth is “the ultimate solution” to the outbreak. Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman echoed these sentiments, proclaiming that “a successful vaccine has to be made available for 7 billion people.” […]
Conflicts of interest
Since shortly after its founding, the foundation has owned stakes in several drug companies. A recent investigation by The Nation revealed that the Gates Foundation currently holds corporate stocks and bonds in drug companies like Merck, GSK, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, and Sanofi.
The foundation’s website even candidly declares a mission to pursue “mutually beneficial opportunities” with vaccine manufacturers.” [lengthy snip re: buying the WHO and creating GAVI, briefly]:
“The foundation also funds the WHO indirectly through Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI), a “public-private partnership” that facilitates bulk sales of vaccines to poor countries. GAVI is the second-largest non-state funder of the WHO (after the Gates Foundation), and gave $158.5 million to the WHO in 2018.”
“Today, Tedros, the first WHO director general who is not a medical doctor, can be found tweeting praise for Bill Gates’ op-eds.” […]
“The Guardian’s entire “Global Development” section was made possible through a partnership with the Gates Foundation.” […]
Deadly double standards
“The foundation appears to see the Global South as both a dumping ground for drugs deemed too unsafe for the developed world and a testing ground for drugs not yet determined to be safe enough for the developed world.” […]
“As far back as 1977, a study published by British medical professionals in The Lancet established that the risks of the whole-cell pertussis jab (used in the DTP vaccine) are greater than the risks associated with contracting wild pertussis. After mounting evidence linking the drug to brain damage, seizures, and even death, the U.S. and other Western countries phased it out in the 1990s and replaced it with a safer version (called DTaP) that did not contain the whole pertussis cell.
However, African nations are still being financially incentivized to continue using the out-of-date, deeply dangerous DTP vaccine, with GAVI making DTP a priority for African children.
“The foundation has spent more than $1 billion distributing an oral polio vaccine (OPV) that contains a live polio virus to African and Asian countries. This live virus can replicate inside a child’s intestine and spread in places with poor sanitation and plumbing. That means people can contract the virus from the vaccine.” […]
“In recent years, more children have been paralyzed by the vaccine strain of the virus in OPV than by wild polio. In an interview with NPR, professor of microbiology Raul Andino said, “It’s actually an interesting conundrum. The very tool you are using for polio eradication is causing the problem.”
Back in 2000, the U.S. halted its use of the OPV. But in the developing world, the Gates Foundation uses its instruments of influence to ensure governments continue administering it.” [lengthy snip w/ other Gates-driven OPV paralysis horrifying stats in various nations]
“Despite the scientific consensus against the OPV, and the opposition to such programs in the target countries, OPV remains administered in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia as part of “aid” programs, creating windfall profits for pharmaceutical giants who may not have been able to sell their products elsewhere.”
Author Jacob Levitch called Gates sort of philanthropy: philanthro-capitalism in his thesis ‘The real Agenda of the Gates Foundation’, March 15,2018.
Their entire exposé must be 20,000 words, and the portions I’ve used are only half it. I’ll just provide the headings of the remaining horrors:
With drugs discarded by the West, an illusion of choice for African women (contraceptives & eugenics)
Guinea pigs in the Global South
Weakening the public health systems of states (including his Green Revolution, invesstments in Monsanto GMO seeds, and agribusiness pesticides)
Operation Warp Speed immunizes Big Pharma from lawsuits (Gates & Trump)
A centralized stockpile to “make WHO dependent on the goodwill of Big Pharma”
History repeats itself
The Grayzone contacted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), and the Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH) with requests for comment on this article, and has yet to receive a response.
You may remember that Gates was behind Narendra Modi’s converting to a ‘cashless (digital) economy’ in India. Microft’s cloud-computing has moved to New Zealand, and along the way I’d seen a version of these in the Twittersphere:
‘CASHLESS SOCIETY 2020: Bill Gates Goes Viral on Digital ID and Digital Currency’, by David Haggith, May 7, 2020, thedailycoin.org
“This may be my most important article to date. Bill Gates went viral in several controversial interviews last month, advocating mandatory digital ID as proof of coronavirus vaccination as soon as a vaccine is available. The proof will be required, if Gates has his way, before anyone is allowed in large public gatherings.”
And from amrstrongeconomics, July 23, 2020:
“Gates and his wife were behind India canceling their currency, and they are pushing that agenda at the United Nations and in Europe. Only Russia is standing up against Microsoft and Gates.
Gates and everyone he buys, like the Clintons, joined him to further his world domination goal. We will see an unending parade of companies joining Gates and his dream. Mastercard has just joined ID2020.”
(cross-posted from Café Babylon)
Comments
DKos Censorship
FWIW, I'd just add that based on my own experience and research, just about anyone (including myself) who posted a positive diary about Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard got kicked off the site.
Still not sure what set people off about Tulsi
Somehow the mavens of the democratic party establishment got it out that she should be attacked and smeared every time she appeared on some big media outlet. This ranged from Colbert (what a lackey) to websites like dailykos. One of the sites and some of the worst attacks were from The Young Turks. Ana Kasperian engaged in McCarthy like tactics trying to link her with white supremacists. I think the only outlet that gave her room for her views was Tucker Carlson on Fox.
you mean queen of the warmongers didnt resonate
lol i liked tulsi for calling her the queen of the warmongers and demanding a throwdown. that was good and funny. great bojo material for the orange state of confusion aka dailykos. vanity much. or what.
oakland doing so great since markos moved the hq out of sf. both places doing so great now. just great. vote d and get some great of your own. go on i dare ya. lol just kidding but not really. good luck.
a bit different than
social media censorship, but i don't doubt your anecdotal evidence. marcos seems like a real piece of work. seems he'd earned any number of creepy nicknames. a 'reformed republican' isn't he?
"Former" CIA, too
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
lol; not surprised.
last night i'd remembered 'Moose Tits'. ; )
Maybe Bill Gates created COVID-19
What's his Deep State connection?
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
i dunno about his deep state
connections, but he sure had some with lolita express and epstein, lol.
the big buzz that may have led to that theory (as far as it may have) was this, although i'd thought it was in 2018, not 2019, as if this isn't shiver-inducing food for thought enough:
Event 201
on the same page, this link, undated:
Statement about nCoV and our pandemic exercise
reclaimtheinternet.org
Sounded like a good name to know - after going there, however, I was upset to discover it's all about the fictitious "War On Women": https://www.thedailybeast.com/men-are-harassed-more-than-women-online
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
i scanned your daily beast
article, but hadn't noticed reclaim the net mentioned. you might want to peek into the place yourself, Moonbat.
Wait, what???
That's so weird - when I tried that, I got...well, first I got this:
https://get.privacykeeper.net/offer?cachecode=pc%2Ff%2F12rMxdiWxwLuaEANA...
Then this...
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.reclaimtheinternet.com/
Then, after jumping that fence, this:
https://www.reclaimtheinternet.com/
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
.com, .org
potato, potahto. i did err in writing 'reclaimtheinternet.org, when it's 'reclaimthenet.org', but both my links go to their site.
Mystery Plague and Dr. Evil
I have been a pandemic skeptic from the very start of this bizarre episode in human history. The worst case of the "threat" of the virus has been hyped shamelessly right up to this minute. The covid odometer recently turned over to 170,000 deaths officially attributed to the pandemic. I don't bother with quibbling over that count because it is still a tiny portion of the population -- just a bit over five one hundredths of one percent. If the current count of dead bodies triples, up to half a million, the total would still remain significantly lower than the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-20. When you factor in population growth over the past century, the official death toll is still one tenth of what happened then.
Even as I watched the Unwarranted Fear Porn play out month after month, I still could not figure out how the ruling class could profit from creating the worst depression of all time. The conspiracy theories keep circulating any way, of course. Most of them involve the idea of the rich buying bankrupt businesses and buildings for cheap. Uh, there is a reason why this depression will make businesses and buildings cheap -- because lots of people will not have any money to buy shit with!
Bankrupt "assets" are not really assets.
.
From the start, I would say on the internet -- half in jest -- that the only conspiracy theories that make any sense involve Doctor Evil. Some demented got-rocks who suffers from Alexander The Great Syndrome is in a funk because he already conquered the business world. Now he wants to do something nobody ever did, not even The Brain of Pinky and The Brain -- to take over the world!
Gates fits that fanciful definition perfectly. It must suck to be on track to become a trillionaire. So boring.
Nothing like a campaign to Take Over to spice things up.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
i'm too tired to
even think straight, but answering your comment coherently is impossible tonight. (cooking for Terror Tuesday food tithing took longer than i'd thought, then other RL obligations).
Dr. Evil, yes, King of the World: yes, he's got everything in hand. even how to solve climate chaos in the blink of an eye!
again:
what's the difference between god and bill gates?
god doesn't think she's bill gates.
if he's rebuilding the World in his own image, i shudder to imagine what his inner life is like. at least as far back as 2012 i've been blogging about his [on edit: disastrous and unhealthy] Green Revolution, likely far earlier. Bono, Obama and the G-8 Ally with Monsanto to Bio-Wreck African Agriculture, june 5, 2012
but dig what he's tweeting here among many reach-for-a-barf-bag tweeties:
ah, yes: malaria and mosquitoes, females that is. remember when he'd given some outfit like Orinek (?) a bunch of his filthy lucre to gene-edit mosquitoes to cause the males to self-sterilize and 'reduce the population'? florida and texas said: let them loose here!' i wonder how that project worked out. or his GM salmon spliced with eel dna.
good night, all.
The people who die are the lucky ones.
It's the ones who recover or survive Covid-19 who are facing a lifetime of physical and mental suffering. Even for those who never show symptoms, Covid-19 will slice decades off of their lifespans.
Yeah. No one is talking about this. But it is very real. Doctors are very aware of this, but they are not discussing it openly. And serious scientists don't expect a vaccine to come along and solve the problem. Certainly not one that provides protection for more than a year, if that.
Go ahead and be skeptical. But make sure you don't catch the virus.
Would You Believe It?
I already want to avoid getting the disease. But thanks for the advice.
Somehow I do not think you were giving friendly advice. I think you are making a very curious argument. You are also skeptical of what "no one is talking about" -- the story being told in the media.
For all I know, these lingering ailments will torment every "case" for the rest of time. That has nothing whatsoever to do with either my post or my skepticism -- which is that the only way to make sense of the pandemic response is to consider the oracular power of Mike Myers.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
The 170,000 lucky ones?
This is quite an assertion. I know exactly three human beings in real life who have been tested positive for Covid 19. One guy in his 60s had a very rough time in the hospital before recovering as of July. A co-worker tested positive in May and she had a light bout with flu-like symptoms. A third guy is finishing his quarantine period after testing positive a week and a half ago. He has no symptoms at all.
These unlucky persons should commit suicide according to your expert assessment about how unlucky they all were to survive.
.
And another thing.
I have no proof that you are wrong about the long term effects and it strikes me as a plausible reality. Although your post gives me no reason on earth to believe you, it might well be true that the living survivors of Covid 19 will all envy the dead. If that is the "reality," the first order of business should be to STOP paying any attention to fatalities -- according to you, they are just the lucky ones.
Instead, our civilization should immediately stop trying to "flatten the curve" -- a strategy that embraces a "controlled" spread of the virus, and to throw every asset we have into preventing any infections at all.
How do we do that? A real lock down that denies the virus ANY vector to spread, putting 100% of the population under total isolation? Of course, that solution poses some other problems -- like how are we going to eat?
Either we are serious about "protecting" the population from the horrors you describe in your short post or we are not. As of now, to be sure, the authorities are NOT EVEN TRYING to prevent infections altogether.
Other than going the whole hog and shutting down all social interaction altogether, how can we possibly prevent all infections?
.
Final note -- as of today, the number of "confirmed cases" in the USA in closing in on 6 million. Sounds like a big number -- well below 2% of the population. What a miserable life worse that death awaits all these folks, according to your assertion.
Maybe we should legalize suicide.
At any rate, even if those six million confirmed cases are living in abject misery, it is still less than 2% of the country. Just as I only know three RL confirmed cases but I can see the empty storefronts and 14 of my 38 co-workers have been "furloughed," the number of people whose lives are permanently fucked up by the Depression is already in the tens of millions.
Whether assessing the harm in terms of dead bodies or infections, the ineffective effort so far has done far more harm than the virus. And, if your theory is correct and survival is worse than croaking from it, the bottom line is that everybody will eventually catch the disease and thereupon hope to die.
You could be right. I hope you are wrong.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
i also get perplexed
by the issues of false negatives, false positives, in both covid and antibodies tests, including the 5 minute home tests, as well as 'new studies' showing that chirren can be asymptomtic, but spread the disease 10 x as widely, or something like that.
i do my best to stay away from the headlines, but as schools in many states have opened (including our local schools here), the headlines will likely increase.
but my purpose in creating this tome was to show exactly how The Most Famous Doctor on the planet paid to have fewer detractors, as well as the Truthiness of Bill's fauxlanthropic claims v. the actual damages he's done to planetary health by was of his Free vaccines, eugenics birth controls (to reduce the african population), as amply demonstrated by the grayzone's Jeremy Loffredo and Michele Greenstein.
Gates' AGRA pushing GMO crops like bT corn, which sets up little pesticide factories in human guts, killing the mainly beneficial strains of gut bacteria, or RoundUp ready crops requiring stronger herbicides have been killing soil microbes as well.
and healthy gut bacteria has to be one of the main immune boosters i can think of, although there are many. but a couple re-tweets from bill and sure bill:
on edit & FWIW; loffredo and greenstein did a remarkable job showing the utter incestuousness of the profiteering with examples, but among them this:
healthy gut bacteria has to be one of the main immune boosters
agreement there
antibiotics and vaccines made in a lab
destroy natural defenses
this is not the road to recovery
natural, individually grown internal probiotics
gives us a better chance
dunno what you mean by
'individually grown', but i used to culture our multi-strain probiotic yogurt, but stopped once the capsules quit culturing. mr. wd buys Greek Gods, and it's all live.
guts are key in other ways: as in keeping them clean. we use psyllium husks for that. (i like the ones that taste like Tang. ; )
thanks, amigo.
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind." Jim Morrison n/t
yes, he said it right;
thank you. in a more nuanced way, Marshal McLuhan's 'the media IS the message'.
stir in the Swiss Policy Research's ‘The American Empire and its Media’, July 2017; Updated: May 2020
image #1 (click for larger):
mr. wd just got home and i need to take care of a raft of chores and dinner prep. be back soon to try to answer you, fire with fire. ; )
Thanks for this graphic
Bookmarked to study. Boy howdy. Things are finally settling down a little so I will have time to peruse this. And for Dr Gates.
Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation
Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook
loffredo and greenstein wrote
a hella lotta words, and used a hella lotta inks, but i think it may surpass jacob levitch's exposé. this man is literally getting away with murder in some cases. paralysis and disease in other cases. but wow, does he have good PR: the best his filthy money can buy!
thanks, magi; nice to see you.
Out in the open censorship
Bill Binney was giving a talk on Reddit today about the fallacy of Russia Gate , but Reddit cut him off just after it started. Tweet in the EBs.
There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?
Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.
i don't know what
reddit is, so i'd bingled a bit, struck out, but what i did find were these two things:
bill binney's Twit account was 'suspended', and this lengthy open letter to jack dorsey:
‘Binney & Sullivan: An Open Letter Challenge To Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey On Censorship’, July 12, 2020, realconservativeunite.com (just 3 graphs):
it appears that my mission has failed
beyond comprehension. as kurt vonnegut would say: 'and so it goes'.
given that, let's hear from john trudell, may he be kickin' as on the other side.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku8ga-krBe4]