“The Architecture of Cancel Culture.”

“The Architecture of Cancel Culture.”     
(TJ Coles. Nexus Magazine April 2023.)

Ideas are dangerous to those with power. They can inspire revolution, non- compliance, and alternative ways of doing things. So-called liberal Western democracies feel like they have reached a crisis point.
The corporate globalisation that enriches the few has triggered nationalistic pushback from the general public. In its quest for what the Pentagon calls Full Spectrum Dominance, the US is confronting two nuclear powers: Russia and China. Censorship has become the knee jerk response to these cultural and political problems.
In 2018 Roya Ensafi (dates unknown), an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, developed Censored Planet, a program that tracks online suppression. Dr Ensafi found, that in recent years, even free countries like Norway have upped their online censorship. An article on the subject notes that governments impose legislation on their populations which appear to be socially beneficial, such as giving themselves and corporations the power to prohibit the publication of child abuse material. But the specialists quoted in the piece go on to note that once legislation is enacted, missions creep to enable big tech to digitally kill any content of which government and/or lobbies disapprove.
In addition to online content, growing numbers of books are banned. In the USA, nearly 1,500 titles were barred from schools. libraries and colleges in different districts and states between 2021 and 2022 alone.
Some, like the anti-racist book “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884) are banned by leftists who want to protect minorities from the racist language spoken by the characters. Others are purged by right-wingers who see tones on trans rights as plots to undermine the morality of America’s youth.
Giant retailers are also sanctioning literature. In 2019, bowing to pressure from state- corporate media, Amazon banned the books “Fight Autism and Win” ( 2012) and “Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism” (2013), whose detractors accused the books of potentially harming children with alternative therapies.
Academics are also finding themselves unpersoned by their institutions. The National Association of Scholars (US) counts 267 academics in America and Canada alone who have been sacked, denied tenure, an/ or forced into early retirement.
The sheer number of deplatformings led dozens of writers and academics, including Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) and Noam Chomsky (b.1928) to sign a 2020 open letter on debate, published in “Harper’s”, which read, in part: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more restricted.”  The letter concludes that reflexive cancellation will do more harm than good.
This article examines the architecture of censorship: who is behind it, who benefits, how it works and who it targets.

Derank and Deplatform.
One of the many benefits of living in a free society is that one is able to express opinions without fear of retaliation. Free societies afford others the opportunity to respond. Responses can include anger, ridicule, or rebuttal,  but parties are protected from the threat of violence, lawsuits or sabotage. The idea rarely works in practise.
Part of the problem has to do with the structure of the Western information system. In 1997 the US Space Command comitted the military to achieving “info dominance” by the year 2020. In 2001 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration hosted a presentation to military and intelligence representatives in which they explained that in the age “It/Bio/Nano” the aims are to prevent “societal disruption” and the new enemy is “everyone.”
After 911 which took place later that year, the Pentagon created an Information Awareness Office and associated program known as Total Information Awareness.
Google is a monopoly which enjoy over 80% of the global search engine market. 
But Google is a branch of US military-intelligence.
It began with seed funding from the National Science Foundation and the CIA’s venture capital arm,In-Q-Tel. It’s employees have numerous ways of controlling non-mainstream media information.
In 2017, the company imposed a new search engine optimisation program, called Fred, in a supposed effort to help counter “fake news”.
The algorithm went after anti-war sites. Alternet, Antiwar, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, DemocracyNow, Global Research, Truth-out, the World Socialist Web site (WSWS) and many others, noted a significant drop in their traffic.
In Congressional testimony in 2020 Google CEO, Sundar Pichai (b. 1972) acknowledged that his corporation had imposed “moderation policies” on the WSWS over undisclosed “compliance issues”.
Google also targets the right wing with a program called Twiddler, which blacklists the search terms “gun owners of America”, “abortion is wrong,” and “devin kelly antifa “, referring to the belief held by some that the killer Devin Patrick Kelly (1991-2017) who shot 26 people to death in 2017, was part of the Antifascist Action.
Google’s list of websites that were removed from Google News include Angry Patriot, Conservatism101, the Conservative Post, Hangthe Bankers.com, Ilovemyfreedom.org, Infowars, Patriot Journal, the website of the late Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021), Revel Media, and many others.
These sites were “flagged for peddling hoax stories “.
The Google team rates sites according to what they call a Fringe Ranking/Classifier, which seeks to “directly grade channel quality.”
M rate highly, of course, as alternative sites are ranked low.
Even pre- COVID, so called “fringe” terms flagged by Google include “who shot JFK,” “proof earth is flat”, “do vaccines cause autism,” and”is global warming real” (six)
Google treats users like children with a “Penalty Box” for so-called hateful content, while it’s so-called
“conspiracies & fake news” topics include “Vaccines: The truth behind vaccinations.”

In 2006, Google bought Youtube.
In 2008 the company started monetising content. 
Four years later YouTube started demonetising, supposedly to ensure quality for advertisers. 
Between 2016 and 2017 YouTube’s seemingly arbitrary, partly automated demonetisation led to massive falls in advertising revenue, described by content creators as the “Adpocalypse”.
In 2019 one of the most popular content creators, Alex Jones (b. 1974) was banned from the platform under the company’s “dangerous individuals” guidelines, despite having harmed or inciting harm to anyone.
During a livestream, analysing the Christchurch massacre of that year, New Zealand journalist Vinny Eastwood found his video being cancelled midstream in what appeared to be one of the first instances of real time censorship.
YouTube’s “hateful content” policy later led to the removal of 100,000 videos and 17,000 channels.

Facebook has captured more than 60% of global social media market share. The company is run by intelligence officials.
Today, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg [a clone] confirmed, Facebook takes its orders on [“] national security [“] issues from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies.
Facebook’s content policing staff include: CIA contractorHagen Barnett, YS army officer Joey Chan, CIA analyst Cameron Harris, DOD project manager Sherif Kamal, DOD intelligence officer Suzanna Morrow, FBI threat investigator Ellen Nixon, Marine Corps intelligence officer Neil Potts, CIA targeting officer Scott Stern, CIA senior analyst Mike Torrey,  fbi supervisory special agent Emily Vacher and CIA counter intelligence specialist Brian Weisbard.
Nathanael Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cyber security and an ex national security council and dept. of Justice staffer, explained that the company identifies foreign threats through its co ordinates inauthentic behaviour doctrine.
In 2018 Human Rights Watch criticized Facebook for cracking down under Zionist pressure to ban hundreds of posts exposing Israel’s demolition of houses in the occupied territories.

“Information Disorders”: Fact Checkers as Echo Chambers.

Referring to them as “infodemics”, Western regimes fear that citizens will form their own informational  ecosystems and break away from the propaganda prisons in which they are kept. As a result they are promoting “counter-disinformation” projects.
It is quite normal for institutions like the US Agency for International Development and the Westminister Foundation for Democracy to target foreign populations with propaganda. Yet over the last few years a cottage industry of domestic “fact checking” has sprung up.
Dozens of foundations, institutes, media companies, think tanks, and university departments act as informational prison guards.
They have made it their mission to search and destroy narratives that deviate from the increasingly narrow orthodoxy.

They include: Australia’s Fact Check (run by the Melbourne Institute of Technology-ABC) and it’s namesake FactCheck (AAP- Australian Associated Press), Britain’s Reality Check (BBC), Full Fact (funded by Facebook and Google)and Logically (funded by governments throughout the world), New Zealand’s Disinformation Project (undisclosed funding); the USA’s FactCheck.Org (Facebook and Google), Politifact (Poynter Institute), and Snopes (funded by ad revenue), and Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation (US government funded). 
Many of these organisations are signed up to the Poynter Institute:

During WWII the Office of War Information (OWI) spread US propaganda.
It was co-founded by Nelson Poynter. In 1953 US President Eisenhower authorised the establishment of the US Information Agency (USIA) which replaces the OWI.
USIA was a propaganda outlet aimed at foreign countries to promote elite US values.
The Smith-Mundt Act (1948) prevented the propaganda from being broadcast domestically. In 1975 Poynter created the Modern Media Institute to control the stock of his company called the St Perersburg Times (Florida, USA).
Today the paper is called the Tampa Bay Times and the Institute is called the Poynter Institute.
The Poynter Institute is now funded by foundations set up by major corporations, including the Charles Koch Institute (big oil), Gannett (the media giant which owns hundreds of local US media publications) and the Washington Post (bought by centibillionaire, Jeff Bezos.
Poynter’s counter-disinformation outreach, as they call it, stretches to Brazil, France, Spain and Turkey via its global program called MediaWise International.

Some organisations are quite open about their status as gatekeepers for the ruling class.
bewsGuard is an app for smartphones which directs consumers away from sources it’s editors regard as untrustworthy.
NewsGuard’s Board of Directors and Advisors include Don Baer,  a former White House
Communications Director under Bill Clinton and Elsie Jordan, a former speech writer for George Bush’s  Secretary of State, Condolesa Rice.
The NewsGuard team contacts website owners and editors to ask about their sources of funding.
Max Blumenthal, founder and editor of the Gray Zone responded that he would not “grovel for approval” because NewsGuards partners are “some of the most notorious purveyors of state violence and imperialist propaganda on the planet.

The effect that “fact-checkers” and “disinformation specialists” have on society usually consists of state-corporate media amplifying their messages against targets.
In recent years the remit of self-appointed fact-checkers has crossed the boundaries, mixing race hate with public health responses. 
For instance, state corporate media often focus on the alleged nexus between far-right politics and “vaccine” scepticism. The vaccinologist and science communicator, Dr Peter Hotez says that scepticism of injections equals “anti-science aggression”, which he says has killed 10 times more Americans than terrorism. 
One year into the COVID-19 pandemic the UK based Center for Countering Digital Hate published a report on what it called the “disinformation dozen” which suggests that the fact- checkers cannot count, as there were 13 people named in the document. 
The researchers claim that 65% of social media shares-engagements of so-called vaccine disinformation could be traced to the statements and posts of the individuals named in the report.
So how does this constitute censorship?
Echoed by National Public Radio, the accounts of some of the offenders were removed or suspended:
“After NPR’s reporting Facebook said it had taken additional action against some of the figures identified.”

Just as people have mental disorders, Dr Jate Hannah of New Zealand Disinformation Project reckons that societies must be cured of what she and colleagues call “information disorders”.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate utilised MSM to name and shame Facebook into banning the “disinformation [bakers] dozen.”
Likewise, The Disinformation Project worked with the New Zealand media giant, “Stuff”, to name and shame the retailer Whitcoulls into banning the Australian magazine “New Dawn” from its shelves.
The publication is one of the few remaining print magazines that questions prevailing narratives.

The counter-disinformation experts spread disinformation and invented fake news.
They falsely claim that the offending “New Dawn” article (authored by me) contains instructions on how to find the video of the Christchurch 2019 massacre which is banned under New Zealand law.
Other outlets, including NewstalkZB, cited “Stuff’s” bogus statements.
The self-appointed  disinfo experts used a combination of shaming and “lawfare” (weaponising legislation) to intimidate readers away from the magazine.
On the other side of the political spectrum,US President Donald Trump’s former campaign advisor, Roger Stone spread fake news about the situation, claiming that New Zealand’s then Prime Minister, Jacinta Arden had personally banned the magazine.

“Information Terrorists” Threaten and Demonetise.

Lawfare is another method of censorship.
Examples include the anti-Trump FBI making a series of raids and arrests, including of Roger Stone (broadcast live by CNN) and the right wing Project Veritas founder, James O’keefe.
Sometimes direct threats are issued.
Back in 2008, the wife of Tom Feeley, the founder of the anti-war site, Information Clearing House found 3 men in their house, warning Feeley to stop his online activities.
He ignored the threat and carried on editing ICH until suffering a stroke in 2016.

Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange has been jailed indefinitely without charge in an apparent attempt to warn whistleblowers not to go to journalists and journalists/editors not to publish leaks.
In other cases, like those of Gary Webb (1955-2004) who supposedly comitted suicide by shooting himself twice in the head, the intelligence agencies physically eliminate their enemies.

Lawfare is also being deployed against alleged foreign adversaries.
“American Herald Tribune” was a news and analysis website established by the Canadian academic, Professor Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge.
(Hall was forced into retirement by the Zionist lobby).
It’s Facebook posts were purged as part of Facebook’s above-mentioned CIB doctrine, during which time Facebook worked with a private US ”cyber security” firm called FireEye, (now Trellix).
Recall that the messages of so-called ”fact-checkers” are amplified by state-corporate media, leading to the deplatforming of targets.
In 2020 CNN cited FireEye’s allegations that AHT was a front for the Iranian regime. Claiming that AHT was also part of a bigger foreign -run network, called the Liberty Front Press, the FBI cited this so -called evidence in order to obtain a seizure warrant. Later that year the AHT web domain was seized by the Bureau and the Department of Justice.

The USA is basically at war with Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy. Big tech is essentially behaving under wartime conditions, having zero-tolerance for dissent.
We have seen how the Google-owned YouTube has arbitrarily demonetised content creators and how Google was seed funded by the CIA. PayPal was co-founded by Peter Third in 1998. In 2003 Third co-founded the data mining and analysis firm, Palantir, which has since been granted over $1 billion in military contracts.
In 2022 two anti-war publications, Mint Press and Consortium News has their assets frozen by PayPal and were banned from using the platform.

US allies are threatening American and non-American journalists and academics in an effort to set an example and scare others into silence.
The US funds the Ukrainian military’s Centre for Countering Disinformation (CCD).
In 2022, the CCD published an entirely arbitrary list of 94 Western politicians, former intelligence and military personnel, celebrities, journalists and academics whom they accuse of being “Information terrorists” in their war on Russia; a charge which could lead to the listed individuals facing trial for war crimes in Ukraine.
Big names include ex-CIA Ray McGovern, firmer US Marine Scott Ritter, rock star Roger Waters m, actor Steven Seagal, academic John Mearsheimer and err….. me. (I have no profile and gave hardly written about Ukraine, minus a chapter in my book, “Britain’s Secret Wars” and a few articles for the GrayZone, which makes the CCD look rather desperate to sniff out the minuscule number of Western anti-war activists and analysts.)

Western elites are preventing their public’s from receiving Russia’s propaganda.
Britain and the European Union banned RT (formerly Russia Tiday) from broadcasting.
However the public could watch live-streams on Rumble.com, except in France: the French government leaned on Rumble to cease streamingRT.
Rumble responded by pulling its entire content from France.
Free speech and freedom of the press are protected in the US, to a degree, by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
It is therefore, harder to ban foreign media in the US than in other countries.
However the US is an unusually business-oriented society, so the looohole is that government can lean on corporations to ban and limit media content.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, major US television distributors, including Apple TV, DirecTV, the Dish Network, and Roku announced that they would no longer carry RT America.
This led to the financial collapse of the company and significantly reduced output and quality. (Having ignored me for years, with some exceptions, RT then reached out to me via email to ask me to appear on their diminished program, as more highly regarded individuals had fallen away.
I declined, thinking of Mr Burns to Homer in the Simpsons: “So come crawling back, eh?”

Conclusion: Shame and Shun “Conspiract Theorists.”

Liberals correctly denounce the practice of “othering”; ie., discriminating against lgbtq+, disabled, non-white and other minirities on the basis of perceived differences. However liberals are quite happy to “other” so-called conspiracy theorists.
They have invented a meaningless slur with which to attack people who think differently.
“Conspiracy Theorist”has long been a term of abuse, but it is now morphing into a new category of political enemy.
So called “Conspiracy Theorists” are names and shamed in the public square.

Independent red and documentary film maker, Richard D Hall was recently the subject of a 30 minute BBC Panorama episode which attempted to smear Hall as a man whose enquires into the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 were psychologically traumatising the purported survivors.
Likewise two British academics- Dr Piers Robinson and Tim Haywood- were smeared on the front page of The Times in 2018, as being “apologists” for the Syrian regime of Bashar al- Assad because their publications had questioned the official pro-Western narrative of the proxy war against Syria.
The aim is to shame Hall et al, into shutting up and to pressure universities to fire or retire academics refusing to toe the official line.

There is some pushback against cancel culture. In academia, the National Association of Scholars (US) and the Free Speech Union (UK) are coming to the aid of cancelled academics.
New social media platforms and video hosts like Gab and BitChute are popping up but the problem is that they become right-wing echo chambers because the right wing now loses as the saviour of free speech.
In addition, these and other platforms are carried by the tech giants who can shut them down and de-rank search results.
The solution requires a coordinated effort by those who have been cancelled.

TJ Coles. Nexus Magazine April 2023.)

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