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Good evening. It's Wednesday, September 6. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight: The rapid and well-funded emergence of the fraudulent industry of self-anointed “disinformation experts” is one of the most consequential weapons developed after the 2016 election of Donald Trump and therefore is a significant focus of the show. As we have repeatedly documented, these groups that demand the right to decree what “disinformation” is are almost always funded by the same small set of neoliberal billionaires – led by George Soros and Pierre Omidyar – Western security agencies and the arms industry and have a goal that is as obvious as it is nefarious, not just to denounce disinformation, but to demand the silencing and censoring of those whom they accuse of producing it.
The way this typically works is that groups claim to employ “disinformation experts” – a brand new and fake expertise they created overnight – and then produce studies that purport to document who is either circulating harmful disinformation or who is permitting it to be heard. This latter accusation, permitting dangerous disinformation to be heard, always means that one social media company or another is failing to censor in accordance with the demands of the group and its funders. They then get corporate media outlets who crave censorship to melodramatically trumpet their accusatory studies using flamboyant headlines that claim a disobedient technology platform has the blood on their hands, knowing that it will spread virally, but very few people actually read the study to determine if the accusations have any validity.
This entire industry and this specific practice are a thinly disguised tactic to elevate brute political censorship into something more noble, something more objective and academic, not something despotically intended to silence political dissent. Perish the thought. No, this is something that uses the high and noble fields of science and data to justify the silencing of people who are spreading demonstrably and objectively false claims.
Last week, The Washington Post – one of the media leaders in agitating for online censorship by touting these fraudulent disinformation studies – published one of the worst attempts yet to disguise censorship demands as science and data from experts. In a predictable mega-viral tweet, retweeted by at least 10,000 people, liked by tens of thousands of others, the paper announced, “Twitter under Elon Musk's ownership has played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began, according to a year-long study released this week by the European Commission."
The article itself made its barely hidden pro-censorship agenda manifest with this subheading: “X’s failure to slow the spread of disinformation on the Internet would have violated E.U. social media law, had it been in effect." Its central claim was described this way by the Post: “Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe."
The questions that emerged from this accusation in this article are obvious: What constitutes Russian propaganda about Ukraine? Does Russian propaganda about Ukraine mean anything other than those who dissent from the U.S. and NATO's narrative about the war? How are these determinations made? Can we see any examples of this “Russian propaganda”? What is a Kremlin-aligned account or a pro-Kremlin account? And how is that determined? Does it mean anything other than opposing us and NATO financing of the war in Ukraine? And – other than forcing Elon Musk to censor more in accordance with the war agenda of the EU and the Washington Post – what is Musk supposed to do about this supposed spread of propaganda on his platform? Obviously, the answer is to censor.
Unsurprisingly, one can read the entire Post article or the accompanying EU study in vain for any answers to these questions – at least in the Post article. There are no examples of Russian propaganda provided in this article, nor any indications of how this accusatory category was determined. In the study itself, they purport to show examples, but none that actually illuminate what these terms mean.
The Post, knowing that most liberals despise Elon Musk for refusing to succumb to the censorship demands of the liberal establishment, and knowing that American liberals continue to drown in paranoia about Russian disinformation spreading everywhere, simply threw the vague and unproven accusation out there, knowing it would be mindlessly spread by millions. And that's exactly what happened.
This EU study and the Post’s promotion of it constitute one of the most vivid examples yet of how deceitful and fraudulent these “disinformation” studies are because it was conducted by a Pierre Omidyar-funded group commissioned by the EU – which from the start of the war has aggressively used censorship to shield this propaganda from dissent – we think it is really worth examining what they did here in this specific case. Doing so reveals the core tactics that now shape this joint state, media and corporate campaign, to seize the power to decree what is and is not “disinformation” as a means of controlling the spread of information on the Internet.
Then: Washington is filled with institutes and think tanks that have benign or even inspiring names yet, which will have great policy influence often in the shadows. Such is the case for the John McCain Institute, named after the former prisoner of war in Vietnam, the GOP presidential candidate and a long-time beloved by the media as senator from Arizona. The institute devotes itself to advocating the same neocon commitment to endless war that John McCain championed his whole life. It's run by a former senior Obama Pentagon official and is lavishly funded by exactly the funding sources you would expect. We'll examine this institution to show you the role these entities play in the DC ecosystem of war, bipartisan consensus and propaganda.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
