Watch the full episode HERE
Note: This is a System Update Flashback revisiting some of the many instances of Western governments or political figures attempting to suppress speech and control the internet.
More Censorship Pressure
Click here to watch the clip. Originally broadcast on Oct.10, 2023
We have been reporting for almost two years now on the fact that the top priority of Western centers of power is to implement a rigorous fiscal and legally endorsed regime of censorship that primarily controls the principal means that we use to communicate with one another, to disseminate information and ideas and to receive our news, which is the Internet, and particularly the small handful of large platforms that have commandeered the power over the flow of information. And there have been all kinds of reporting, of course, on all the different ways that Western governments are attempting to influence and coerce censorship to demand that views that they regard as threatening to be banned. Every new crisis, including the election of Trump, Brexit, Russiagate, the 2020 election, January 6, COVID, the war in Ukraine and, now, the war in Israel, is seized upon – every single one of them seized upon – as justification for more and more censorship. That is how this censorship regime has been fortified.
One of the things that has happened without much media attention – we cover it every time it happens when we can – is that governments around the world, around the democratic world, are now adopting laws that empower them explicitly to wield the centers of power. It had been the case that they were doing it informally. The Twitter files, of course, were about how the CIA, the FBI and Homeland Security would pick up the phone and call Facebook and Google and Twitter and say, hey, what about this tweet? Why are you on this one? We want this one banned. There's a disinformation tweet about COVID, here's one about Ukraine: We want these gone. And a federal court recently ruled that the Biden administration's fixation on doing this violates the First Amendment. One of the gravest attacks on free speech, said the court ruling, in decades, if not in the history of the judiciary.
But governments are really not content any longer to use that kind of informal threat or that kind of shaming or the leverage they have over these companies because they regulate them, because they dole out benefits and said they're now adopting legal frameworks that lay out the powers that they have and provide for punishments, serious punishments if major social media platforms do not comply with their censorship demands, it is now a crime or illegal not to censor in the way that Western governments want. I can't overstate how repressive that is. We talk all the time about how China would impose all sorts of restrictions on the flow of political speech in China. That's exactly what Western governments are doing, and they're doing it by law. We covered the enactment and the approval of the Online Safety Act in the UK. Look at how Orwellian that is: The Online Safety Act, is trying to make the Internet safer for you by keeping away from you unsafe or dangerous ideas.
We have been reporting on the law that is pending in Brazil, which would be one of the most repressive of all but, at the last minute, its enactment was prevented because Google and Facebook went to the mat to argue against it. The point that the Brazilian Supreme Court banned them from doing that further, ordered the executive of those companies to appear at the Federal Police for interrogation over the activism in which they were engaged to stop the law.
One of the most repressive laws – and we've talked about the law in Canada as well recently – is the C-11 law which isn't quite as extreme as the UK law. And the most extreme of all is actually the one that has now been adopted by the EU, which is the Digital Services Act, an incredibly benign-sounding law that in fact is incredibly repressive. And they have been building up, they have been laying the foundation for months – we've been reporting on every step of the way – to essentially create a perception that the failure on the part of social media companies to censor in accordance with their demands is dangerous, it's causing the flow of disinformation and hate speech, it's fortifying Russian propaganda.
As I said, the war in Israel and Gaza is not even three days old and already the EU official who oversees this new censorship, who advocated for it, who's been a longtime censorship advocate, is a French official who works right under the German president of the EU. He has been working overtime to create the perception publicly that Twitter, Google and Facebook's value to censor is a serious public threat that the EU now has to do something about. And one of the tactics that censors always use when it comes time to censor is they always deliberately choose in the first instance someone who is so widely disliked that most of the public won't mind when those people are silenced. They think, Oh, well, I don't really care if this person with this extreme view has been silenced. That person is dangerous. The problem is that the reason they choose someone deeply unpopular is because they know the public will acquiesce and now the precedent has been set. And then once they start using it on less disliked people or people who have a greater proximity to, say, the mainstream, by then it's too late. You've given them that power. Remember the very first people who were depersonalized by big tactics got together and chose to eliminate them from Big Tech platforms all at once. It was in 2018, during the Trump years, of course, and it was Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones, two of the people most widely hated, certainly, by mainstream venues. And everybody said, “Well, I don't really care that Alex Jones can't be heard or Yiannopoulos can't be heard. They spread hatred, they spread lies.” Obviously, it was very predictable, and one of the very few people who stood up and objected at the time was Peter Thiel, who sat on the board of Facebook, and said this was an extremely dangerous precedent within a very short period. They were using it against more and more and more people including people who weren't as disliked as those two. But by the end, the power had been given to them because people didn't object. That's always what they do.
And so, one of the things the EU is doing, even though they're after Facebook and Google equally, they're focused primarily on Twitter, what is now X, because of how hated Elon Musk has become in neoliberal culture, given his commitment to free speech and his refusal to censor on command and they know that going after Facebook or Google this way will be more difficult, in part because they're just much bigger and more powerful companies. Twitter is a small fraction of the size of Facebook and Google, but also because Elon Musk has become such a hated figure. This is the person who did more than anybody to bring electric cars to the market at a time when liberals are saying that there's no greater priority than reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. You would think he would be a hero, and yet he's hated. Because he bought X by waving the free speech banner and promising to defy censorship orders. He's been far from perfect in that. We've covered and criticized him when he has violated his own principles, but he has allowed a lot of people who were previously censored to be heard and they're enraged by it. They are media elites and political elites and they know that if they focus on Elon Musk with the use of this new area, there will be enough people happy about it simply because they hate Musk and believe that he's allowing too much free speech, that very few people will object and they'll have this power to go and use it against Facebook and Google and everyone else that they want to use it for.
They know that emotions are extremely high about the war in Israel in the West; it is essentially a unified consensus in the mainstream that it is the duty of the West to support Israel. The monuments in Germany, France, the UK and the U.S. have all been lit in solidarity with Israel and support for Israel. The EU, the UK and the U.S. have all pledged across political parties to do everything possible to support Israel. They know that this is the issue that provokes the most emotions right now. And so, today they wrote a letter to Twitter, X, threatening Elon Musk that “you are going to pay a huge price if you don't censor more.” And they cited an allegation that he's allowing disinformation right now, specifically about Israel, knowing that that would be designed to get people on their post-censorship side.
Here is the news article from Reuters but what we really want to go through and show you is the letter sent by this leading EU official, which we will because I don't think you will believe just how heavy-handed, authoritarian and dictatorial it is and its tone and its sentiment.
You see the headline:
The EU's industry chief told Elon Musk that disinformation was spreading on his X messaging platform since the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas' surprise attack on Israel, urging him to take countermeasures in line with new EU online content rules.
Thierry Breton said on Tuesday he had indications that X, formerly known as Twitter, was being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the European Union. (Reuters. October 10, 2023)
Let me just stop here and say that obviously nobody likes disinformation in principle. The problem is who has the power to determine what's true and what's false. And I honestly can't fathom the level of drooling authoritarianism necessary to trust or want to empower government officials like Brenton, the French EU official, with the power to determine what is true and what is false to the point where they have the power to ban anything they decide is disinformation. But that is what this line is. It says it right there. It says urging him to take countermeasures. In line with new EU online content rules, which means that the people who decide what is disinformation and what can and can't be heard are people like Thierry Breton and EU officials. The article goes on.
Breton did not give details on the disinformation he cited. X did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The online content rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) require X and other large online platforms to remove illegal content and to take measures to tackle the risks to public security and civic discourse. (Reuters. October 10, 2023)
So, this is the key part. This law purports to require all social media platforms to remove what they regard as illegal content, which includes hate speech and disinformation, and to take measures to tackle the risk to public security and civic discourse, all as determined by the agenda of these EU officials. This is a pure censorship regime. There's no other way to describe it. No drama is needed, no hyperbole. This is a legally enacted EU-wide censorship regime that now entails massive punishments for any large social media platform that refuses to censor in accordance with the dictates, opinion, and agenda of EU officials.
If anyone thinks I'm overstating the case or being melodramatic about it, let us look at the letter sent today by this EU official to Elon Musk. Because, as I said, it's not just the content, the tone that makes it so manifest. What's really going on here?
It's on official EU European Commission stationery. It's from Thierry Breton, a member of the EU Commission. He, of course, is in Brussels. These are Eurocrats, the kind of Brussels-based bureaucrats that the people of the United Kingdom decided they did not want to be ruled by when they enacted Brexit because this is the sort of people they are.
Following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, […]
So, do you see already what they're doing? They're exploiting these emotions. They're saying, given the outrageous, dangerous terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, knowing that most people are horrified by what they saw – as we covered last night – “We have indications”…
[…] We have indications that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU.
Let me remind you that the Digital Services Act sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation. […]
And as we all know, content moderation is just a liberal euphemism for censorship. But he's saying that there are now very precise obligations regarding content moderation under this new law and now he is about to lay out what those requirements are.
First, you need to be very transparent and clear on what content is permitted under your terms and consistently and diligently enforce your own policies. […]
Why does the government have the power to require social media platforms to censor in a certain way? He goes on.
This is particularly relevant when it comes to violent and terrorist content that appears to circulate on your platform. Your latest changes in public interest policies that occurred overnight left many European users uncertain.
Second, when you receive notices of illegal content in the EU, you must be timely, diligent and objective in taking action and removing the relevant content when warranted. We have. from qualified sources, reports about potentially illegal content circulating on your service despite flags from relevant authorities.
Third, you need to have in place proportionate and effective mitigation measures to tackle the risks to public security and civic discourse stemming from disinformation. Public media and civil society organizations widely report instances of fake and manipulated images and facts circulating on your platform in the EU, such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games. This appears to be manifestly false or misleading information.
I therefore invite you to urgently ensure that your systems are effective, and report on the crisis measures taken to my team. […]
You see how dictatorial these people are, how despotic and authoritarian they are, you are to censor in accordance with our demand, and then you are to report to me on these censorship steps you have taken.
Given the urgency, I also expect you to be in contact with the relevant law enforcement authorities and Europol, and ensure that you respond promptly to their requests. […]
So, we have this whole controversy in the United States because the CIA, Homeland Security and the FBI were pressuring Twitter, Facebook and Google to remove information. A court found that it is unconstitutional, but they're in the EU. They're saying we have law enforcement authorities that are going to be contacting you, demanding that you take down certain content. When they do, you had better ensure that you are in contact with the relevant law enforcement authorities and Europol and ensure that you respond promptly to their requests. That is not just a suggestion. That is the requirement of the law now. Social media companies have to obey the censorship orders of European law enforcement agencies, EU agencies, Security State agencies, the DOJ, the FBI equivalent, and the CIA equivalent of Homeland Security.
In case you thought the orders were done:
Moreover, on a number of other issues of DSA compliance that deserve immediate attention, my team will follow up shortly with a specific request.
I urge you to ensure a prompt, accurate and complete response to this request within the next 24 hours. We will include your answer in our assessment file on your compliance with the DSA. I remind you that following the opening of a potential investigation and a finding of non-compliance, penalties can be imposed.
Yours sincerely, Terry Brighton.
(EU Letter to Elon Musk. October 10, 2023)
Are you comfortable with that? I cannot fathom how anyone could be. I genuinely can't. It’s one of those issues where somebody who tries very hard to see things from other people's perspectives – actually I work a lot on that with my kids and the importance of not only looking at the world through your own perspective but trying to understand other people's perspectives if they have a view or a conclusion different than your own, instead of just condemning it or denouncing it or rejecting it, you have to first try to understand where that's coming from, what the basis is. It's just empathy, the ability to understand the perspective of other people. This is an issue in which try though I might, I cannot understand how people would think it's a good idea, how they would want and trust government officials do have this power. Except, of course – and you have to be cynical, I guess, to assume this – it's because they believe that these government officials have a perfectly aligned ideology with their own and that therefore the censorship will only be aimed at their political enemies. I still wouldn't want that if I believed that to be the case. In part because I just think it's wrong, intrinsically, and dangerous, intrinsically, but also because I would never be secure. Then, at some point, those leaders will change and then the views about disinformation and hate speech will morph and start to be directed at my own cause or my own views.
Dems Want Amazon to Censor
Click here to watch the clip. Originally broadcast on Oct. 23, 2023
That's what's happening with these kinds of overt censorship efforts emanating from elected officials in Washington over the Internet – the thing that we most use and most depend on for the dissemination of information, they now control it. They are able to demand the removal of content. Even with this appellate court ruling that we extensively covered, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Biden administration committed, in the words of the court, one of the gravest frontal assaults on free speech in the history of the judiciary, even with that, Democrats continue to, out in the open, not only not hide it, but brag about it, boast of their efforts to demand, to force and pressure tech companies and social media platforms to censor political speech they dislike. This is one of the most extreme examples yet – and I heard today from a very reliable source, I don't know if it's been publicly reported or not, that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case on appeal from the Fifth Circuit.
This whole campaign, this recent effort was initiated, as it so often is, by corporate media. That is one of the most remarkable parts about this whole censorship regime, is that it is led by its primary advocates. Our most vocal advocates are people who are employees of media corporations who call themselves journalists. These are the primary censorship advocates in the United States: journalists are the enemy of free expression and of free speech in the United States, corporate journalists in particular. And what happens is they have this roster of “disinformation experts,” this whole industry of this fake expertise, funded by Pierre Omidyar, Bill Gate, and George Soros. It really is that small handful of billionaires. I'm sorry, that sounds like a conspiracy theory but under every disinformation rock, one finds that along with funding by the U.S. government and British intelligence agencies, are this tiny group that controls this industry and therefore defines what is and is not disinformation. The newspapers, like the Washington Post, justify these disinformation experts' claims as a basis for publishing articles claiming that some site ought to be censored because it produces so much disinformation. Even though the irony, of course, is nobody produces more disinformation than these media outlets themselves, and often the disinformation experts on whom they rely.
All of this started on October 7, when The Washington Post published an article with this headline: “Amazon's Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen.”
The popular voice assistant says the 2020 race was stolen, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source — foreshadowing a new information battleground (The Washington Post, October 7, 2023)
“Foreshadowing a new information battleground” meaning the Washington Post has opened up a new front in the information war because they are now finding new reasons why free speech platforms that refuse to censor like Substack and Rumble, a new reason why they now need to be controlled and banned because they're responsible for contaminating Alexa, the noble and sacred oracle of truth, with claims about the 2020 election. And so much of this is going to intensify more than you can anticipate, more than I can anticipate, as we head toward the 2024 election, especially if, as looks likely, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. There are no limits that they will recognize when it comes to doing everything possible to ensure Donald Trump cannot win. They'll censor, they’ll lie, they'll propagandize beyond what they did in the 2020 election when most media ratified the CIA lie that Hunter Biden's laptops and the documents that came from it were inauthentic frauds and “Russian disinformation.” And then Big Tech censored those stories. That was extreme. Wait until you see what they're going to do to the 2024 election. So, here's what The Washington Post – the seed they planted:
Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Asked about fraud in the race — in which Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives. (The Washington Post, October 7, 2023)
There's so much packed in there designed to manipulate people's brains, including the fact that Rumble is not a conservative site. It is a site on which a lot of conservatives appear because they have escaped and fled from Big Tech censorship. But there are a lot of liberals and leftists on Rumble. There are a lot of independents, people who can't be characterized one way or the other because they're sometimes endorsing views associated with the left and sometimes with the right. There are a lot of people who are just anti-establishment, and a lot of demographic data suggests that at least one-fifth, and even higher, viewers of Rumble identify as Democrats and another 20%, or 30%, as independents. But that's all, of course, a way of trying to suggest that Rumble is inherently untrustworthy because it's a right-wing say, even though it's not.
I don't know. Are there really any people who regard Alexa as the place they go to learn about the world? Wikipedia, as we documented in the show we did a couple of weeks ago by talking to the Wikipedia co-founder, is one of the worst sewers of disinformation I've ever seen. Everything is geared toward promoting neoliberal orthodoxy. Anyone who dissents from it is smeared with lies on that site. That site is a font of disinformation, but because it's intended to serve the agenda the Washington Post likes, you'll never see an article like this about Wikipedia.
The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa Answers contributor.”
Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users. (The Washington Post, October 7, 2023)
So, because there are a couple of Substack articles that claim the 2020 election was the by-product of fraud because Rumble doesn't censor that claim and there are a few videos on Rumble claiming that, somehow the sacred Alexa got defiled because it used Rumble and Substack and therefore The Washington Post is trying to create the foundation to say that these sites are dangerous; Amazon should ban them and should only allow The Washington Post and the New York Times to contribute to its services, but not sites that actually allow a multiplicity of views.
That was The Washington Post performing its function.
Here now is the news outlet Must Read Alaska, we fact-checked this article and, as we're going to show you, it's entirely true. It just does a very good job of explaining what happened there. We didn’t want to steal their narrative, I wanted to give them the credit they deserve.
Do you see how it migrates from The Washington Post to the Democratic Party, all working together to try and constantly silence and marginalize whatever sites allow dissent or criticism of their orthodoxies?
I obviously don't need to go through how many lies The Washington Post disseminated about the Iraq war, the 2016 election, and Russiagate. They got Pulitzers for endorsing the CIA's unhinged conspiracy theory about Trump and Russia. They constantly called into question the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop to prevent Joe Biden from being negatively perceived by the American voter, by maligning that evidence based on lies, they obviously spread countless lies about COVID and the war in Ukraine. And yet here's what happens now as a result of that Washington Post article:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Rep. Joe Morelle of New York are concerned that Alexa cites sources they don’t approve of — like the video site Rumble — and they worry about the spread of misinformation leading up to the 2024 election. (Must Read Alaska, October 21, 2023)
They definitely do worry about the spread of misinformation leading up to the 2024 election because they intend to disseminate a lot of it. And they don't want any sites that permit people who are there to document the propaganda and deceit that they're using in anticipation of the election.
The demands for answers come after a Washington Post story worried that Alexa sometimes refers to Rumble and Substack as sources when answering questions. (Must Read Alaska, October 21, 2023)
Here is the letter that Amy Klobuchar and Joseph Morelle wrote to Jeff Bezos on October 19, citing The Washington Post story and nothing else. Needless to say, the Democratic Party, with Biden in the White House and their control of the Senate, has enormous power over Jeff Bezos and his various companies. They awarded contracts to him and Amazon worth billions and billions of dollars. They can punish Amazon and regulate Amazon. He also is the owner of the Washington Post, the outlet that published the story that they're now using,
Dear Mr. Bezos:
As we approach the 2024 elections, we write to express serious concern about recent reporting that Amazon Alexa – a virtual voice assistant tool relied upon by millions of Americans – is repeating false claims about the outcome of the 2020 elections and to request information about your efforts to combat this troubling content.
Again, what's crucial here is these are not just ordinary citizens writing to Amazon with their complaints. These are people writing in their official capacity as members of the U.S. Senate and Congress, knowing all the power and influence they have over Jeff Bezos. That reminds me a lot of when U.K. officials wrote to Rumble saying, “I demand to know what you're doing to de-monetize Russell Brand,” obviously trying to intimidate Rumble and other sites to cut off Russell Brand's livelihood, even though he's still, by the way, not been charged – let's remember that Russell Brand still to this date has never been charged, let alone convicted, of any crimes. They tried to coerce various sites, upon the pain of being banned in the UK, to punish Russell Brand. And that's what they're doing here.
According to public reports, when asked about the 2020 presidential election Amazon Alexa cited unvetted sources to make false claims about election fraud. While Alexa relies on a variety of sources to answer questions, when asked about the 2020 presidential election it appears that some answers were provided by contributors instead of verified news sources.
What is a verified news source? Who verifies these news sources? Who determines what are legitimate news sources and what aren't? We're going to do a segment at the end about a new report from Brazil that Brazil's domestic intelligence agency had CIA and FBI illegally spied on me as reprisals for my reporting, something that has happened many times in my career from other governments, including the Ukrainian government, putting me on a blacklist and the U.S. government and the UK government doing all kinds of reprisals. That to me is what a real reporter is. That's how you can identify them, not by people who are constantly patted on the head by Democratic Party officials, people who are never threatening in any way to anyone in power. According to verified news sources, Amy Klobuchar and this congressman mean people who don't ever defy their worldview, who never question it, but who serve it.
This spreading of election-related misinformation and disinformation is particularly troubling given the emerging use of artificial intelligence to mislead voters. With some ballots for the 2024 election being sent out as early as this December, it is important that proactive measures are promptly taken so that voters can trust the information that is provided to them. It is for this reason that we request responses to the following questions by November 3, 2023.
● What is Amazon’s existing policy to address the spread and amplification of election misinformation and disinformation by Alexa? What steps have been taken to improve the accuracy of information repeated by Alexa?
● How is Amazon vetting responses from contributors, particularly responses pertaining to our elections?
I mean, are you comfortable with Democratic Party officials being this fixated on what information is available to the public about our elections and which information ought to be banned? The scheme is very ripe for abuse to me. They go on:
● In advance of the 2024 elections, what additional protections does Amazon intend to implement to prevent the spread of election misinformation and disinformation?
● What procedures does Amazon make available for users or others to raise concerns or complaints of misinformation shared by Alexa?
Thank you for your attention to these important issues. We look forward to your response. (Amy Klobuchar, Joseph D. Morelle. Letter to Jeff Bezos, October 19, 2023)
I mean, this is as heavy-handed and despotic as it gets. This is just one example, but it's a particularly vivid one to me because it shows you how the environment functions. This all started with a Washington Post article claiming that precious Alexa has been defiled and vandalized by these ruffians on Substack and Rumble, who weren't even verified by news organizations and now it deserves a letter from the Senate and House to Jeff Bezos saying, “We expect you to fix this. We expect you to impose greater controls on the flow of information on all Amazon products, especially as it concerns our election.”
House Report Details FBI-Ukraine Partnership
Click here to watch the clip. Originally broadcast on July 11, 2023
The thing that has turned out to be so menacing is that it is not just these companies making these decisions on their own as oligarchical despots. It is they are taking orders from the U.S. government because the U.S. government exerts extreme amounts of power over them. The U.S. government can punish these Big Tech companies in all sorts of ways and has threatened to do so repeatedly in the event that they fail to comply. That's what the Twitter Files was. That's why corporate media instructed everyone to ignore the Twitter Files and called it a Nothing Burger. Because this is the dirty secret of establishment power the Internet is being increasingly controlled and censored. If you go back and read the literature in the mid-1990s about the reason people were excited about the Internet and its advent, they viewed it as a liberatory technology or something that would emancipate individuals from the need to rely on centralized corporate and state control to communicate, to organize. It would allow individuals the freedom to disseminate use without having to rely on corporations or state power to do so. It had the potential to be the most empowering technological innovation in history. That's what its proponents were heralding it as being. Instead, it has been degraded into its exact opposite by allowing the U.S. government to turn it into a tool of mass surveillance, it became the greatest tool of coercion and monitoring in human history. And now it is one of the most closed information systems and one of the most potent propaganda systems in the world – under the control of the U.S. security state, the U.S. government, exercising its power through Big Tech, with the ability to ban all dissent and all dissidents to make them disappear. And that's what happened. And the more that happens, the more the word prison gets created in the mind. That's how real despotism works.
There's a prelude, an introduction to “1984” that George Orwell wrote and that ended up being banned, I believe it was to 1984. It might have been to his essay about Catalonia. We'll check on that. But the essay didn't get published because the point that Orwell made was too threatening to the West right after World War II. What he was essentially saying was, we're taught that despotism means this blunt use of force, that if you criticize the government, death squads in black costume show up at your house, point guns at your head, haul you off to a gulag, put you in prison. That is a form of despotism. But the much more effective form of control is to so propagandize the public so that dissent disappears in people's minds. The prison exists in people's minds. So that you don't need to punish dissent because there is no dissent or there's so little dissent that it's easily marginalized. And you've just turned the population into such conformists that they believe everything the government says. That is a much more effective form of despotism. It doesn't create a backlash. It creates the illusion of freedom. And that's what the Internet is designed to do, to create the illusion that you have freedom and you have a choice when in reality everybody knows that there's a tiny little range of freedom in which they can function and everything that falls outside the line, no matter who you are – even if you're an heir to one of America's most storied and powerful and political families like RFK, Jr. – if you step outside that line set by the U.S. government in collaboration with Big Tech, you will be silenced, censored and disappeared.
Just to show you how nefarious this is, there's breaking news from today. It's a House Judiciary report. They are investigating the weaponization of the FBI, which is what that Congress is supposed to do. It's the first real investigation into the U.S. security state since the Church Committee in the mid-1970s that uncovered all kinds of abuses of the FBI, infiltrating political groups, monitoring political dissidents and the like on both the left and the right. And here's the new report: “The FBI’s Collaboration with a Compromised Ukrainian Intelligence Agency to Censor American Speech”
On February 15, 2023, as part of its investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the Committee on the Judiciary issued a subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube. Documents obtained in response to those subpoenas revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence entity, requested—and, in some cases, directed—the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online.
The Committee’s investigation has revealed that the FBI, the federal law enforcement agency responsible for disrupting foreign malign influence, facilitated censorship requests to American social media companies on behalf of a Ukrainian intelligence agency infiltrated by Russian-aligned actors. Regardless of its intended purpose in endorsing the SBU’s requests, the FBI had no legal justification for facilitating the censorship of Americans’ protected speech on social media.
The FBI and SBU sent Meta massive spreadsheets containing thousands of accounts to remove, including authentic American accounts. […]
On March 1, 2022, FBI Special Agent Kobzanets sent an e-mail to a Meta employee with the subject “additional disinformation accounts.” Copying Agents Kellett and Chan, Agent Kobzanets wrote, “I have a few more Instagram and [Facebook] accounts that according to the SBU, spread Russian disinformation. For your review and action as deemed appropriate.”
According to his e-mail signature, Agent Kobzanets was then serving as the “Assistant Legal Attaché” for Ukraine and Belarus. Agent Kobzanets attached two spreadsheets to his e-mail to Meta. One spreadsheet contained a catalog with the timestamp, text, and URL for 15,865 individual items of content on Instagram, including posts, stories, and reels. The other spreadsheet contained a detailed registry of 5,165 Facebook accounts, ostensibly suspected of “spread[ing] Russian disinformation.”
Meta suggested establishing a “24/7 channel” to respond to the SBU’s requests although the SBU’s lists contained American accounts, neither the FBI nor Meta appeared to raise concerns about the provenance of the SBU’s “disinformation” registries.
Instead, the FBI demonstrated a willingness to support and implement the SBU’s calls to take down certain accounts, even though the requests included U.S.-based accounts. For instance, on March 14, Agent Kobzanets sent an e-mail to a Meta employee, writing, “[p]lease see attached a request from the SBU containing Facebook and Instagram accounts believed to be spreading disinformation. The SBU requested your review and if appropriate deletion/suspension of these accounts.” (July 10, 2023, House Judiciary Report)
So, let's just look at this graphic here, just to get an idea of what has happened, according to this House Judiciary investigation. What they're essentially saying is that a lot of these Ukrainian agencies have been infiltrated by Russian agents, as a result, some of the requests sent by Ukrainian agencies to the FBI – remember, this is the Ukrainian government telling the FBI these are posts we want to be removed from the Internet. Tell Facebook and Google to take this off. And many of those posts were written and expressed by American citizens expressing their free speech. Right. And the Ukrainian government sitting in Kyiv is telling the FBI, to take that information down, offline. So here you see the SBU, which is Ukraine, sending a takedown request to the FBI, which in turn sends that takedown request to Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube. So just want you to think about this for a second. You as an American citizen are funding the war in Ukraine. You're sending hundreds of billions of dollars, more than $100 billion now to the government of Ukraine for all kinds of military aid and other types of assistance. The Ukrainian government is then turning around and telling the FBI to take down your post because your speech transgresses the limits that the Ukrainian government wants to exist on what you are and are not allowed to say about the war that you're funding through your government. And the FBI is dutifully complying with the Ukrainian agent's request by pressuring Facebook and Google to remove constitutionally protected speech, according to this committee. Sometimes these agencies are infiltrated by Russia, and so, some of their requests are actually pro-Ukrainian content. But who cares? Who cares if they're infiltrated by Russia or not? The Ukrainians have no business trying to get censored from the Internet the speech of American citizens about a war that the American citizens are funding. And the FBI, independent of everything, has no business pressuring these Big Tech platforms to take down constitutionally protected speech. This is what the federal court has enjoined, has prevented, and has banned after seeing the evidence of what is being done.
Just to give you a sense of how frequently this is happening here from March 2022, which is the month after the Russian invasion. These little corporate logos reflect how often the FBI sent takedown requests to Big Tech agencies. Here, on Tuesday, they sent them to Facebook, Google, and Instagram; on Wednesday to Instagram; on Saturday to Facebook, Instagram, and Google; on Sunday to Facebook, Instagram on Tuesday to Facebook, etc.
This is the censorship regime that the U.S. government has created. These are not autonomous decisions of Big Tech. These are pressure campaigns by the U.S. government, in this case working with the Ukrainian intelligence agencies, over what speech is allowed on the Internet. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment, and it's even more offensive here because it's coming not from the American government, which is bad enough and unconstitutional, but from some foreign government over which you have no access to exercise, no control, no democratic accountability but that you are funding. To a great extent. And while you're transferring your money to them, they're turning around and trying to censor your speech. If that is, you are a dissident to American establishment orthodoxy. If you're a follower of the Democratic Party, if you are a supporter of Bernie Sanders, AOC. If you like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, you don't have to worry. You're fine. These are censorship campaigns aimed at actual dissidents to institutions of American power. That's who gets censored.
This is the censorship campaign laid out perfectly. It was already menacing enough that Big Tech was doing it. It was more menacing still that the U.S. government is controlling those decisions. And to learn now that the Ukrainian government, which in the past already issued blacklists of American journalists and American activists they accused of being Kremlin propagandists – I've been on those lists before of the Ukrainian government while my tax dollars are being used to fund them in their war. To watch them now, you can see the emails in this report – we hope to have someone from the Judiciary Committee this week to talk about this investigation – but part of this report contains the emails sent by the FBI to Big Tech companies that specifically cite the reports and the demands of the Ukrainian intelligence agencies to watch those emails and that flow of censorship demands and how it functions is really remarkable. And I think, again, what we have to understand is that this is a war on dissent. This is a war to cleanse the Internet of anyone who questions U.S. orthodoxy and to ensure that the Internet is banned from being what it was supposed to be – a source of free information and free expression – into what really is the most potent and most inescapable propaganda weapon ever to be developed. It's aimed right at people's brains and the idea is to cleanse it of the sense that the only information to which people are exposed is information that American power centers want them to think and want them to have.
That is why I really do regard as the overarching cause the preservation of the few remaining places on the Internet devoted to free speech. Remember, Elon Musk turned into public enemy number one. He was beloved by the global public. He was the person who was going to give us electric cars, save the planet from climate catastrophe, and get us to Mars. Someone who has been a success story in everything he touched. Overnight, he turned into public enemy number one because he bought Twitter based on the promise to just allow a little bit more free speech. Take away that weapon from them. That's how valuable the censorship regime is to them. And now you have the entire U.S. security state creating vast tentacles to ensure that this happens.
Few remaining places on the Internet genuinely allow free speech. Rumble is one of them. RFK, Jr. has put his channel on Rumble because that's one of the few places where he can go where he knows he won't be censored. These are like outposts of dissent. And obviously, power centers are waging war on them. Rumble already is not available in France because France demanded that Rumble remove R.T. from its platform. The French government switched over to this American corporation and said, we demand you obey our censorship order and take off this news agency that we dislike and want to be silenced and Rumble said no and they were forced to remove themselves from France pending a lawsuit.
Those attacks are going to come more and more and more and of any platform that is devoted to free speech and that's the reason these platforms are so worth fighting for because that is for now – until we get this kind of decentralized protocol that Jack Dorsey believes is the ultimate solution to decentralize the Internet, to put protocols in the hands of every person and not have it be centralized – until that happens, the only outpost for free speech will be sites like Rumble, or any place devoted to protecting free speech. And if those are lost, we will live in a world dominated by the censorship industry.
You don't have to worry if you are a good liberal – which is why good liberals aren't worried. In fact, they're happy about this because those are never the people targeted with censorship. It's only real dissidents, people who dislike establishment orthodoxy and who are opposed to establishment power, who are threatened by those and who are the targets of it. And that's how you can identify who they are.
Interview with Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski
Click here to watch the clip. Originally broadcast on August 22, 2023.
Glenn Greenwald: As you can see, we are not in our normal studio. We are instead in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, live, where we are outside of the arena where tomorrow night, the Republican presidential debate, the Trump free Republican presidential debate will take place. But I expect there to be a lot of interesting clashes and a lot of interesting things to cover as well. And we hope to have for you a great lineup of interviews with some of the candidates, some of the other people here who are worth talking to you before night. For tonight, I have with me a very special guest. He is the founder and CEO of Rumble, Chris Pavlovski, who arranged for Rumble to have the exclusive online broadcasting rights for the Republican debate, something that wasn't at all obvious to happen. And yet he managed to make it happen. And we are here to talk to him about that and many other things relating to online censorship and the fight for online freedom. Chris, it is great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Chris Pavlovski: Glenn Thanks for having me on. Glad to be here with you in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. First time.
Glenn Greenwald: First time for you in Milwaukee. I guess you said first time as well for you to be on our show if my memory serves. That's right. So we're excited about many of those things. So let's start off with the fact that obviously, Fox is hosting the debate. It has exclusive rights for TV. More and more people these days, though, don't consume TV who are who are under the age of 83. They instead are consuming political content online. And if you want to watch the debate online, there's only one place you can do that with just rumble. How is it that Rumble secured the exclusive right instead of Facebook, Google or any of the other more recognizable platforms from the perspective of, say, the corporate world and big tech?
Chris Pavlovski: Yes. So Fox obviously has the broadcast rights. They have the rights to do it on their their website as well. But when it comes to social media platforms and platforms, we were the exclusive provider for that. And we're doing it through the RNC channel on Rumble. And it came about, I would say it's been like earlier this year, it was something that we wanted to bid on doing the whole thing and taking over that one entire debate, maybe getting you there to question the candidates. And then we kind of got to a point where it made more sense to just go after the streaming rights and not have it on any of the other platforms. And that's where we ended up and that's where we are today. And now we have the first and the second debate, which is like I think it's a historic moment for new tech, like any new technology platform, to be able to have something that is this important in the United States. So it's a huge win for Rumble. I think it's a huge win for new tech in general.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, I see it is definitely a watershed moment for the independent media for the ability to kind of liberate ourselves from the tyranny of big tech. But from the perspective of the Republican Party, which is dominated by a lot of big corporate donors, it's not really that obvious of a choice. This is an incredibly important showcase for the Republican Party to get as many people as possible to watch their candidates headed into the general election, especially the first debate. Why is it that you think they were willing to kind of roll the dice? It's such an obviously safer choice to say we're going to have an exclusive deal with YouTube or with some massive show on YouTube or Facebook. Why do you think they were willing to take this gamble and put their exclusive rights on the Rumble?
Chris Pavlovski: Yes. So it's I think like when you take a look at all the candidates, like whether it's President Trump, Governor DeSantis, or even Vivek, like they all have profiles and they're all on Rumble and they're they're not very big advocates of big tech. So like, if you just look at the candidates' perspective that you don't have, they're not advocating big tech at all when it comes to the constituents. They're definitely not advocating big tech. So you have this massive constituency that is on Rumble and is promoting and wants to see it on new tech. They don't want to see it on big tech. So I think it was a moment. The RNC thought about it and they made a really good decision in doing that. They also had the same kind of feelings that the constituents and the candidates had when it comes to big tech.
Glenn Greenwald: What are those feelings? What do you perceive as the kind of animosity that Republican constituents have toward big tech?
Chris Pavlovski: Well, a perfect example is Congressman Devin Nunes, right. He was one of the first people to join Rumble back in 2020. This is prior to the 2020 elections. And he comes on the platform in the late summer of 2020 and he calls me up. You know, I'm a Canadian guy and I'm thinking, why is a ranking member of the House Intel Committee calling me? I thought I was going under some kind of investigation.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, that’s never the kind of call you want, ordinarily.
Chris Pavlovski: Yeah. So I get this call from him and he's like, “Hey, if I bring my podcast to Rumble and I search for my name, am I going to be able to find it?” I'm like, Yeah, of course. How could you not? And he's like, “Well, that's not happening on YouTube.” He joined and within like 2 to 3 months, he has like 2 to 300,000 subscribers on Rumble, whereas on YouTube, in four years he only had like 10,000 subscribers. So that was the first watershed moment. That was like the first major moment for Rumble that kind of opened the eyes to everybody else. And then obviously Dan Bongino came and really set it to a whole new level. So there's that. That's a perfect example. Imagine, you're a Republican that has probably nearly a million constituents in your district and you can't reach your audience, but you can reach a better on Rumble than you could on YouTube. That's a problem. And I think everyone sees that as a problem. And these are how they come to these decisions.
Glenn Greenwald: So we're both talking about this as an important moment, a watershed moment in independent media, the ability to liberate ourselves in the oppression of big tech. Ultimately, though, as the person who founded Rumble and now runs it, and it's had a meteoric rise, it's now a publicly traded company on the public markets, what do you see as the kind of 1 or 2 defining differences between, say, Rumble on the one hand and Google's YouTube on the other?
Chris Pavlovski: We are fair. We don't discriminate content. You can search and you'll have the same ability to find content that any other creator has. The deck isn't being stacked against you. You're getting access to tools, you're getting access to monetization tools, and distribution tools that you normally wouldn't get on these incumbent platforms. If you're a small creator, just generally speaking, we're just fair. And these other platforms are not fair and how they treat their creators and how they treat the audience, they're stacking the deck, they're picking and choosing. You could call it censorship, you could call it preferencing and call it whatever you want. The bottom line is they're just not being fair with their audiences and their creators. And I think, like ultimately, you know, we're going to prevail because we're just going to be fair.
Glenn Greenwald: So I've been around the Internet for a long time in the sense that my journalistic career was founded on the Internet. My audience was cultivated on the Internet. I never went and worked for a large media corporation in order to build my journalism career. I only did that much later on once my career was established. And even then I always had kind of one foot in and one foot out in terms of independent media. So it never surprises me to see lies being deliberately disseminated, especially about new entities that are kind of threats to establishment power. And obviously there's no shortage of kind of lies and deceit, mythologies about Rumble. And I know that firsthand because before I decided to bring my nightly show to Rumble, but even these periodic videos that I was doing for a year or so before. I spent a lot of time looking into Rumble’s history to understand what it was I was about to join. And the history of Rumble, the actual history of Rumble, could not be any more different than the perception that people have of it. So as the person who actually founded Rumble and not in 2020 and 2021, when large amounts of people became aware of it. But back in 2013, when you were kind of in obscurity, building it slowly. Talk a little bit about what it was that impelled you to do that. What the idea behind Rumble was and essentially what was the idea that gave birth to this company that has now become so big?
Chris Pavlovski: Yeah. Looking in hindsight, it's it kind of all makes sense a lot more. What we started to do and what we were actually looking at back in 2013 when we started. But the whole premise of Rumble was that, Google purchased YouTube in 2006 and post-2006, YouTube became like the de facto platform for video and sucked up basically all the oxygen in the room and everyone went there. By 2009 and 2010 they started introducing programs with multi-channel networks. There were companies called Fullscreen and Maker that basically aggregated content and managed content on the platform. And by 2013 I really started to sense that an opportunity was emerging and that opportunity was that these incumbent platforms, particularly in particular YouTube, were starting to prioritize corporations, big brands, and multichannel networks, and they were prioritizing our friends and family. So Rumble emerged on the premise of simply helping, our aunts, uncles, and friends monetize and distribute their video. Post-2013, YouTube started putting in restrictions from watch hours in order to monetize, minimum amount of subscribers, all these different barriers in order to monetize your video, which then would probably affect your distribution. And basically they they left the small creator. They built their platform on them and they decided to leave them for whatever reason they chose...
Glenn Greenwald: What do you mean by small creator?
Chris Pavlovski: Like your friends and family. You'd upload a family video like Charlie bit my finger back in like 2007, 2008 like that was got a billion views. The platform was built in a large degree off user generated content. And then obviously they had this huge copyright issues that they also were building their platform on. But that's a whole different story. But the small creator was just totally left behind. They were they were forgotten about. And we saw that as an opportunity to go help the small creator, give them exactly what the big creators are going to get on the monetization and distribution side. And we felt out that was the opportunity. We didn't think that it would go so broad that they would start censoring political candidates and taking it to like, you know, very large influencers.
Glenn Greenwald: Because back then in 2013, maybe there was a case here and there you can point to. But in general, there was no widespread perception, no widespread grievance that YouTube was engaged in political censorship. That wasn't part of anything you thought you were addressing, was it?
Chris Pavlovski: Yeah, They were engaged in small creator censorship.
Glenn Greenwald: Exactly. Like it was more commercial than ideological.
Chris Pavlovski: Yes. It was very commercials for the purpose of monetizing. And I believe it was probably for the purpose of generating more revenue. And they felt like because we don't know what every single indicators uploading, we've got to be careful what brands and advertisers go with the videos. So we'll let the corporations do that, let them create networks to do that, and then we'll monetize with them better and surface their content more rather than the small guy. And that was essentially the opportunity that we saw. And then it emerged to become something that's so much larger than just the small creator.
Glenn Greenwald: And so you pretty much can't read an article now in the corporate media about Rumble that, A, isn't derogatory, that makes sense as you become a competitor of corporate media establishment platforms. One that they perceive they can't control, and whoever they can't control, they will villainize and demonize in some way. But B, you can't read an article that doesn't describe Rumble as some sort of right-wing side as a MAGA side. And I think you can trace it to a couple of events. One is the fact that people like Devin Nunes were the first to really start migrating as a response or a reaction to YouTube's political censorship, that here you have a sitting Congressman routinely being suppressed in all sorts of ways. He wanted to have a place where he could speak freely. But also, I remember when you started recruiting people like myself to do deals where there'd be periodic videos contributed. I went along with people like Tulsi Gabbard and a couple of others. There was a Washington Post article deliberately designed to create the perception that Rumble was a right-wing site, even though the people leaving were myself, who was someone associated with left-wing causes. Tulsi Gabbard, who was a Democratic congresswoman who resigned from the DNC to endorse Bernie Sanders, that doesn't matter. So when you began Rumble, was there some ideological component to its mission? And is there an ideological component to its mission now in the sense of left versus right or Democrat versus Republican?
Chris Pavlovski: Our politics, when we started were cats and dogs, you can go look back way back, that's all there was on Rumble. That's as far as our politics went in terms of like, you know, really what we believed in was just treating everybody fairly. Then that permeated into 2020 and 2021. And we just never moved the goalposts. Like, yeah, you're very right. Like we're constantly under attack by the media. We're constantly under attack by, you know, everyone that's, that doesn't like to hear independent voices, wants to silence voices. We're essentially like the only platform that is really kind of fight back in the Covid era really allowed people to speak out against what they believe happened in the election, that you can't find places like that. Rumble was the place where people could voice their concerns and voice anything that they they felt that they could voice at their dinner table. You know, we got to a point where like the conversation me and you can have at a dinner table is not even allowed to happen online anymore. And that's completely wrong. So like your ideology was just treating people fairly and allowing people to have discussions and not moving those goalposts. And that definitely permeated in the later years to being like really sticking strong on the idea of allowing of following through on expression as much as possible. It definitely changed a little bit as I saw what was happening. I can't even imagine a congressman like a Congressman couldn't reach his constituents in an election year prior to the months before an election. That's more concerning to me as an individual than anything else. And like I feel I feel like one of the greatest achievements was that we were allow people to to have voices when other places weren't allowing them to have it.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah. For me, one of the red lines that was crossed where the concern reached a whole new level was the decision first by Twitter to completely prohibit any discussion of the reporting from the Hunter Biden laptop, from The New York Post, the nation's old newspaper, in the lead up to the 2020 election. It doesn't get enough attention, I think. But Facebook's suppression in that story was more insidious and more subtle, but actually more effective where they decided they were going to algorithmically suppress the story. That was an example where obviously conservatives felt like they were being targeted. Another example that for me was kind of a Rubicon crossing moment was when Rand Paul held a Senate hearing in the United States Senate, where he invited leading epidemiologists to talk about the potential benefits of ivermectin, some of the clinical studies being conducted into it. He, as has happened so many times before, broadcast the committee hearing where those witnesses were brought before the Senate to speak to the American people and YouTube, namely Google, just pulled it off the air.
Chris Pavlovski: Yeah, that's how he ended up on Rumble.
Glenn Greenwald: Yeah. So those are examples where conservatives are being censored. So my question is, the perception arose as a result of these people migrating to Rumble? Well, this is a refuge for conservatives, for conservative dissidents who are being censored. Do you see it that way or have there been examples of left-wing voices, nonconservative voices, or independent voices also being restricted, even if they're not even, political, cultural voices restricted in arbitrary ways or unfair ways who are also migrating to Rumble to escape that? And are they as welcome from your perspective, as conservative voices?
Chris Pavlovski: At first I don't really see it as like a left and right, just a personal perception and a personal opinion on that. I see it as like people who are talking truth to power and are being censored all the time. And there are people that affiliate with the very with the left and people who affiliate with the right. Anybody that goes against certain narratives that they don't like, regardless of what, you know, political affiliation they may have, has a high probability of being censored on the other platforms like we have like, perceived leftists on Rumble. We have perceived people on the right and.
Glenn Greenwald: The actual leftist, not just perceived [...]
Chris Pavlovski: Sure. We have actual communists on Rumble, there are some channels there that I've seen. When it comes to how I look at Rumble, we try to be as neutral as possible and not try to lean in any particular direction. At least that's my philosophy as running the company. We don't want to put the finger on the scale in any way. That's exactly why we've succeeded, is because we haven't. And it's very important that we don't. But yeah, we're open to everyone. I welcome everybody on the platform: left, right, up, down, forward, and back. Everyone's welcome on Rumble.
Glenn Greenwald: One of the dynamics I've noticed for a long time being a free speech advocate and I am happy to be called an activist for that cause as well, not just as a journalist, but a lawyer. A lot of people love to wade the banner of free speech. Who wants to be called the censor? Who wants to admit it? People love to claim that they're fighting the battle for free speech. And yet, the test really comes when the rubber meets the road, when there actually starts to become a price to be paid for whether or not you're actually willing to offer free speech. And there was a recent controversy where a lot of people were critical of Twitter right before the Turkish election for having complied with court orders to remove specific candidates, specific descendants of the Erdogan government. And the justification of Twitter was if we didn't obey the censorship commands if we didn't take down the people we were told to take down, there was a chance we would be unavailable in Turkey. You had a similar case prior to that where the government of France, not a small country – to put it mildly – ordered you to remove RT, which is the Russian state-owned media outlet, and a couple of other Russian state-owned media outlets as well because the EU had passed a law, shocking law, I think at the beginning of the war in Ukraine that made it illegal for platforms to provide a way for Russian safety to be heard, even if their adult citizens wanted to seek out those platforms.
