MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA – Google
has sent a warning shot across the world, ominously informing media
outlets, bloggers, and content creators that it will no longer tolerate
certain opinions when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Earlier this month, Google AdSense sent a message to a myriad of publishers, including MintPress News,
informing us that, “Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause
monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.”
This content, it went on to say, “includes, but is not limited to,
claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or
similar instances of victim-blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is
committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.”
This builds on a similar message Google’s subsidiary YouTube released
last month, stating, “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content
denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events. We
are now removing content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that
violates this policy.” YouTube went on to say that it had already
permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos on
these grounds.
Journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin was deeply troubled by the news. “It is really disturbing that this is the trend that we are on,” she told MintPress, adding:
It is a preposterous declaration considering that the
victim is whoever we are told by our foreign policy establishment. It
really is outrageous to be told by these tech giants that taking the
wrong side of a conflict that is quite complicated will now hurt your
views, derank you on social media or limit your ability to fund your
work. So you have to toe the line in order to survive as a journalist in
alternative media today.”
The most prominent victim of the recent banning spate has been Russian state media such as RT America, whose entire catalog has been blocked throughout most of the world. RT America was also blocked from broadcasting across the U.S., leading to the network’s sudden closure.
“Censorship is the last resort of desperate and unpopular regimes. It
magically appears to make a crisis go away. It comforts the powerful
with the narrative they want to hear, one fed back to them by courtiers
in the media, government agencies, think tanks, and academia,” wrote journalist Chris Hedges, adding:
YouTube disappeared six years of my RT show, “On
Contact,” although not one episode dealt with Russia. It is not a secret
as to why my show vanished. It gave a voice to writers and dissidents,
including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, as well as activists from
Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, third parties and the prison
abolitionist movement.”
Smaller, independent creators have also been purged. “My stream last night on RBN was censored on Youtube after debunking the Bucha Massacre narrative… Unreal censorship going on right now,” wrote
Nick from the Revolutionary Black Network. “My video ‘Bucha: More Lies’
has been deleted by YouTube’s censors. The Official Narrative is now:
‘Bucha was a Russian atrocity! No dissent allowed!’” Chilean-American
journalist Gonzalo Lira added.
Other social media platforms have pursued similar policies. Twitter
permanently suspended the account of former weapons inspector Scott
Ritter over his comments on Bucha and journalist Pepe Escobar for his support for Russia’s invasion.
A notice to MintPress from Google threatening demonetization
Those views are certainly currently in the minority, with testimonies
from locals pointing the finger at Russian forces, who have carried out similar acts during other conflicts. Yet even the Pentagon has refused to categorically conclude Russian culpability without a full investigation.
Beyond Bucha, where the line is in terms of accepted speech is being
kept vague, leading to confusion and consternation among independent
media outlets and content creators. “This is going to limit reporting on
the Ukraine crisis because people are going to be scared,” Martin said.
“People [in alternative media] are going to opt to not publish or not
report on something because of fear of retaliation. And once you start
to get demonetized, the next fear is that your videos are going to get
blanket banned,” she added.
While support for Russia has essentially been prohibited,
glorification of even the most unsavory elements of Ukrainian society on
social media is now all-but-promoted. In February, Facebook announced
that it would not only reverse its ban on discussing the Azov
Battalion, a Nazi paramilitary now formally incorporated into the
Ukrainian National Guard, but also allow content praising and promoting
the group – as long as it was in the context of killing Russians.
Facebook and Instagram also instituted a change in policy that allows users to call for harm or even the death of Russian and Belarussian soldiers and politicians. This rare allowance was also given
in 2021 to those calling for the death of Iranian leaders. Needless to
say, violent content directed at governments friendly to the U.S., such
as Ukraine, is still strictly forbidden.
The media demands more censorship
Leading the campaign for more intense censorship has been corporate media itself. The Financial Times successfully lobbied Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch to delete a number of pro-Russian streamers. The Daily Beast attacked
Gonzalo Lira, going so far as to contact the Ukrainian government to
make them aware of Lira’s work. Lira confirmed that, after The Daily Beast’s article, he was arrested by the Ukrainian secret police.
Meanwhile, The New York Times published
a hit piece on anti-war journalist Ben Norton, accusing him of
spreading a “conspiracy theory” that the U.S. was involved in a coup in
Ukraine in 2014, while claiming that he was helping promulgate Russian
disinformation. This, despite the fact that the Times itself reported
on the 2014 coup at the time in a not-too-dissimilar fashion, thereby
incriminating its own previous reporting as Russian propaganda. If
referencing The New York Times’s own previous reporting becomes
grounds for suppression, then meaningful online discourse is under
threat. As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote
last week, the West is in danger of establishing an “intellectual
no-fly zone,” where deviating from orthodoxy will no longer be
tolerated.
An image shared in the NYT hit against Norton. Credit | Multipolarista
The invasion of Ukraine has also raised a number of troubling
questions for Western anti-war figures: How to oppose Russian aggression
without providing more political ammunition to NATO governments to
further escalate the conflict? And how to critique and highlight our own
governments’ roles in creating the crisis without appearing to justify
the Kremlin’s actions? Yet this new perilous media environment raises a
further quandary: How to express views online without being censored?
Google’s new updated rules are vaguely worded and open to
interpretation. What constitutes “exploiting” or “condoning” the war?
Does discussing NATO’s eastward expansion or Ukraine’s aggressive
campaign against Russian-speaking minorities constitute victim blaming?
And is referencing the seven-year-long civil war in the Donbas region,
where the UN estimates
that over 14,000 people have been killed, now illegal under Google’s
policy of not allowing content about Ukraine attacking its own citizens?
For some, the answer to at least some of these questions should be an emphatic “yes.” On Thursday, journalist Hubert Smeets attacked
longtime anti-war activist Noam Chomsky, explicitly accusing him of
blaming President Zelensky and Ukraine for its fate. Chomsky has
previously described
Russian actions as incontestably “a major war crime, ranking alongside
the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland in
September 1939.” Yet he has also for years warned that NATO actions in
the region were likely to provoke a Russian response. If Google and
other big-tech monopolies decide an intellectual giant like Chomsky’s
voice must be suppressed, it will mark a new era of official censorship
not seen since the decline of McCarthyism.
Old propaganda, new Cold War
The United States was allied with the Soviet Union during World War
II. However, as the Cold War began to set in, so did attacks on
dissenting voices. The postwar anti-communist push began in earnest in
1947, after President Harry S. Truman mandated a loyalty oath for all
federal employees. As a result, the political beliefs of two million
people were investigated, with authorities attempting to ascertain
whether they belonged to any “subversive” political organizations.
Those in positions of influence were most aggressively vetted,
leading to purges of academics, educators, and journalists. Many of the
most celebrated individuals from the world of entertainment – including
actor Charlie Chaplain, singer Paul Robeson, and writer Orson Welles –
had their careers destroyed because of their political beliefs.
“Socialism was canceled, dissent was canceled after World War Two,” Breakthrough News host Brian Becker recently said, warning that this new Cold War with Russia and China could usher in a new McCarthyist era.
The old Cold War against Russia ended in 1991. However, the new Cold
War arguably started 25 years later with the electoral victory of Donald
Trump. On November 8, 2016, the Clinton campaign alleged that the
Kremlin had used social media to spread fake news and misleading
information, leading to Trump’s victory. Despite the lack of hard
evidence, corporate media immediately took up Clinton’s message. Only
two weeks after the election, The Washington Post published a report
claiming that hundreds of fake news websites had pushed Trump over the
line and that a credible group of nonpartisan expert researchers had
created an organization called “PropOrNot” to track this effort.
Using what it called sophisticated “internet analytics tools,” PropOrNot published a list of over 200 websites that they claimed were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” Included on the list were publisher WikiLeaks, Trump-supporting websites like The Drudge Report, libertarian ventures such as The Ron Paul Institute and Antiwar.com, as well as a host of left-wing websites like Truthout, Truthdig, and The Black Agenda Report. MintPress News
was also featured on the list. While there were some obviously
fake-news websites included, the political orientation of the list was
obvious for all to see: this was a catalog of outlets – right- and
left-wing – that was consistently critical of the centrist Washington
establishment.
A sure sign that you are reading Russian propaganda, PropOrNot
claimed, was if the source criticizes Obama, Clinton, NATO, the
“mainstream media,” or expresses worry about a nuclear war with Russia.
As PropOrNot explained,
“Russian propaganda never suggests [conflict with Russia] would just
result in a Cold War 2 and Russia’s eventual peaceful defeat, like the
last time.”
Despite the blatantly shoddy list, one that even included the websites of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, The Washington Post’s
article went viral, being shared millions of times. PropOrNot’s list
was subsequently signal-boosted by hundreds of other outlets. And
despite calling for McCarthyist investigation into and suppression of
hundreds of outlets, PropOrNot categorically refused to reveal who they
were, how they were funded, or any methodology whatsoever.
It is now almost certain that it was not a neutral, well-meaning
independent organization but the creation of Michael Weiss, a
non-resident senior fellow of NATO think tank The Atlantic Council. A
scan of PropOrNot’s website showed that it was controlled by The Interpreter, a magazine of which Weiss is editor-in-chief. Furthermore, one investigator
found dozens of examples of the Twitter accounts of PropOrNot and Weiss
using the identical and very unusual turn of phrase, strongly
suggesting they were one and the same. Thus, claims of a huge [foreign]
state propaganda campaign were themselves state propaganda.
The reaction to this crude “propaganda about propaganda” campaign was
both swift and wide-ranging. In early 2017, Google launched Project
Owl, a massive overhaul of its algorithm. It claimed that it was purely a
measure to stop foreign fake news from taking over the internet. The
main outcome, however, was a catastrophic, overnight collapse in search
traffic to high-quality alternative media outlets – drops from which
they have never recovered. MintPress News lost nearly 90% of its organic Google search traffic and Truthout lost 25%. Websites that were not on PropOrNot’s list also suffered devastating losses. AlterNet experienced a 63% reduction, Common Dreams 37% and Democracy Now! 36%. Even liberal sources only moderately critical of the status quo, such as The Nation and Mother Jones,
were penalized by the algorithm. Google search traffic to alternative
media has never recovered and has, in many cases, gotten worse.
This, for Martin, is a sign of the increasingly close relationship
between Silicon Valley and the national security state. “Google
willingly changed their algorithm to backpage all alternative media
without even a law in place to mandate them to do so,” she said. Other
social media juggernauts, such as Facebook and YouTube rolled out
similar changes. All penalized alternative media and drove people back
towards establishment sources like The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News.
The consequence of all this was to retighten the elite’s grip over
the means of communication, a grip that had slipped owing to the rise of
the internet as an alternative model.
The “nationalization” of social media
Since 2016, a number of other measures have been taken to bring
social media under the wing of the national security state. This was
foreseen by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who wrote
in 2013, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology
and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Since then,
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have become integral parts of the
state apparatus, signing
multibillion-dollar contracts with the CIA and other organizations to
provide them with intelligence, logistics and computing services.
Schmidt himself was chairman of both the National Security Commission on
Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board,
bodies created to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with
cyberweapons, further blurring the lines between big tech and big
government.
Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda,
has an even closer relationship with the national security state. From
being a strategic planner and information management officer for NATO,
he then moved to Google in 2008. In 2013, he began working for U.S.
Cybercommand and in 2015 for the Defense Innovation Unit (both divisions
of the Department of Defense). At the same time, he became a YouTube
executive, rising to the rank of Director of Operations.
Jeff
Bezo meets with Trump Defense Secretary James Mattis during a visit to
west coast tech and defense companies. Jeff Bezos | Twitter
Other platforms have similar relationships with Washington. In 2018,
Facebook announced that it had entered a partnership with The Atlantic
Council whereby the latter would help curate the news feeds of billions
of users worldwide, deciding what was credible, trustworthy information,
and what was fake news. As noted previously, The Atlantic Council is
NATO’s brain-trust and is directly funded by the military alliance. Last
year, Facebook also hired
Atlantic Council senior fellow and former NATO spokesperson Ben Nimmo
as its head of intelligence, thereby giving an enormous amount of
control over its empire to current and former national security state
officials.
The Atlantic Council has also worked its way into Reddit’s management. Jessica Ashooh went
straight from being Deputy Director of Middle East Strategy at The
Atlantic Council to Director of Policy at the popular news aggregation
service – a surprising career move that drew few remarks at the time.
Also eliciting little comment was the unmasking
of a senior Twitter executive as an active-duty officer in the British
Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and
psychological operations. Twitter has since partnered
with the U.S. government and weapons manufacturer-sponsored think tank
ASPI to help police its platform. On ASPI’s orders, the social media
platform has purged hundreds of thousands of accounts based out of China, Russia, and other countries that draw Washington’s ire.
Last year, Twitter also announced
that it had deleted hundreds of user accounts for “undermining faith in
the NATO alliance and its stability” – a statement that drew widespread
incredulity from those not closely following the company’s progression
from one that championed open discussion to one closely controlled by
the government.
The first casualty
Those in the halls of power well understand how important a weapon
big-tech is in a global information war. This can be seen in a letter
published last Monday written by a host of national security state
officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper, former CIA directors Michael Morell and Leon Panetta, and
former director of the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers.
Together, they warn that regulating or breaking up the big-tech
monopolies would “inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology
platforms to … push back on the Kremlin.” “The United States will need
to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure” that “the
narrative of events” globally is shaped by the U.S. and “not by foreign
adversaries,” they explain, concluding that Google, Facebook, Twitter
are “increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security
efforts.”
Commenting on the letter, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:
[B]y maintaining all power in the hands of the small
coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have
long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the
U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system
around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.”
The U.S. has frequently leaned on social media in order to control
the message and promote regime change in target countries. Just days
before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook deleted
the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists
and activists, all of whom supported the left-wing Sandinista
government.
When those figures poured onto Twitter to protest the ban, recording
videos of themselves and proving that they were not bots or
“inauthentic” accounts, as Facebook Intelligence Chief Nimmo had
claimed, their Twitter accounts were systematically banned as well, in
what observers coined as a “double-tap strike.”
Meanwhile, in 2009, Twitter acquiesced
to a U.S. request to delay scheduled maintenance of its app (which
would have required taking it offline) because pro-U.S. activists in
Iran were using the platform to foment anti-government demonstrations.
More than 10 years later, Facebook announced that it would be
deleting all praise of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from its many
platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Soleimani – the most popular
political figure in Iran – had recently been assassinated in a U.S.
drone strike. The event sparked uproar and massive protests across the
region. Yet because the Trump administration had declared Soleimani and
his military group to be terrorists, Facebook explained,
“We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the
U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
and its leadership.” This meant that Iranians could not share a majority
viewpoint inside their own country – even in their own language –
because of a decision made in Washington by a hostile government.
In this light, then, Google’s message to creators about
victim-blaming Ukraine or trivializing and condoning violence is a
threat: toe the line or face the consequences. While we continue to
consider tech monopolies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook to be
private companies, their overwhelming size and their increasing
proximity to the national security state means that their actions are
tantamount to state censorship.
While fake news – including that emanating from Russia – continues to
be a genuine problem, these new actions have far less to do with
combatting disinformation or denial of war crimes and far more to do
with reestablishing elite control over the field of communication. These
new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or
justifying U.S. aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or
blaming oppressed peoples – such as Palestinians or Yemenis – for their
own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote,
delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism. In war,
they say, truth is always the first casualty.
Feature photo | Image by MintPresss News
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.