Despite winning an Oscar, the Israeli-Palestinian-made film No Other Land cannot be found on any streaming platforms in the United States, making independent cinemas the only places to view it. However, in Miami Beach, even featuring the film will get you labeled an antisemite and kicked out of the city.
Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, who is Jewish and has deep personal and political ties to Israel, stirred controversy last week for seeking to shut down an independent art house cinema over its showing of the “No Other Land” documentary after attempting to pressure organizers to cancel a planned screening. Meiner claims that the film is antisemitic and a “propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents.”
A cinema house in Miami Beach, Florida, is urging city residents to oppose the city’s attempt to censor them and terminate their lease agreement after the theater showed an Oscar-winning documentary film that focuses on Israel’s apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. City leaders, including Mayor Steven Meiner, have accused the theater, O Cinema, of promulgating “pro-Hamas” and…
Washington, D.C., March 15, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges United States congressional leaders to protect the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) after President Trump signed an executive order on Friday aimed at dismantling the parent of Voice of America and six other federal agencies.
“It is outrageous that the White House is seeking to gut the Congress-funded agency supporting independent journalism that challenges narratives of authoritarian regimes around the world,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “We call on congressional leaders to protect this critical agency, which provides uncensored news in countries where the press is restricted.”
In addition to Voice of America (VOA), USAGM funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia. VOA recorded weekly global audiences of more than 350 million in 2023, and RFE/RL reaches more than 47 million people in 23 countries every week. The agency operated with a budget of more than $886 million in 2024 and employed more than 3,500 people. USAGM also subsidizes annual training for hundreds of media professionals around the world.
CPJ’s research shows that journalists for VOA and RFE/RL often put themselves at risk by reporting in highly censored or dangerous countries.
You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.
You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.
You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.
There’s always a boomerang effect.
Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.
The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.
This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.
Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.
If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?
We are all at risk.
History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. What starts as a crackdown on so-called “threats” quickly expands to include anyone who challenges those in power.
President Trump has made it clear that Mahmoud’s arrest is just “the first arrest of many to come.” He has openly stated his intent to target noncitizens who engage in activities he deems contrary to U.S. interests—an alarmingly vague standard that seems to change at his whim, the First Amendment be damned.
If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.
If you need further proof of Trump’s disregard for constitutional rights, look no further than his recent declaration that boycotting Tesla is illegal—a chilling statement that reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of both free speech and the rule of law.
What this means is that anyone who dares to disagree with the government and its foreign policy and express that disagreement could be considered a threat to the country’s “national security interests.”
Yet the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.
Indeed, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty. Certainly, if there is one freedom among the many spelled out in the Bill of Rights that is especially patriotic, it is the right to criticize the government.
Unfortunately, the Deep State doesn’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.
This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.
Regardless of party, those in power have repeatedly sought to limit free speech. What’s new is the growing willingness to criminalize political dissent under the guise of national security.
Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now, but Trump’s antagonism towards free speech is taking this hostility to new heights.
The government has a history of using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its power.
Once dissent is labeled a threat, it’s only a matter of time before laws meant for so-called extremists are used against ordinary citizens. Criticizing policy, protesting, or even refusing to conform could be enough to put someone on a watchlist.
We’ve seen this before.
The government has a long list of “suspicious” ideologies and behaviors it uses to justify surveillance and suppression. Today’s justification may be immigration; tomorrow, it could be any form of opposition.
This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.
It’s just a matter of time.
It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.
The groundwork has already been laid.
Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.
After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.
It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.
Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.
Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.
This is not just about one administration or one set of policies. This is a broader pattern of governmental overreach that has been allowed to unfold, unchecked and unchallenged. And at the heart of this loss of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding—or even a deliberate abandonment—of what sovereignty really means in America.
Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.
In other words, as the preamble to the Constitution states, in America, “we the people”—sovereign citizens—call the shots.
So, when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.
That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?
In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.
The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”
This is how far our republic has fallen and how desensitized “we the people” have become to this constant undermining of our freedoms.
If we are to put an end to this steady slide into totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none, we must begin by refusing to allow the politics of fear to shackle us to a dictatorship.
President Trump wants us to believe that the menace we face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.
Don’t believe it. That argument has been tried before.
The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have all been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.
We are walking a dangerous path right now.
Political arrests. Harassment. Suppression of dissident voices. Retaliation. Detention centers for political prisoners.
These are a harbinger of what’s to come if the Trump administration carries through on its threats to crack down on any and all who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and protest.
We are being acclimated to bolder power grabs, acts of lawlessness, and a pattern of intimidation, harassment, and human rights violations by government officials. And yet, in the midst of this relentless erosion of our freedoms, the very concept of sovereignty—the foundational idea that the people, not the government, hold ultimate power—has been all but forgotten.
“Sovereignty” used to mean something fundamental in America: the idea that the government serves at the will of the people, that “we the people” are the rightful rulers of this land, and that no one, not even the president, is above the law. But today, that notion is scarcely discussed, as the government continues its unchecked expansion.
We have lost sight of the fact that our power is meant to restrain the government, not the other way around.
Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, derailed or desensitized.
Columbia University administrators garnered widespread condemnation last year for overseeing a violent crackdown on students who protested against U.S. support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but those actions against pro-Palestinian students didn’t stop the Trump administration from cutting contracts and grants for the school on Friday. The White House announced it was canceling contracts…
As the Trump administration engages in a frontal assault on the teaching of race and ethnicity at the K-12 level, a quieter but no less important battle is shaping up in deep blue California. Communities of color are mobilizing statewide to defeat AB 1468, the latest bill to emerge from the CA Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) in its campaign to censor Palestinian voices in ethnic studies classes, and police all ethnic studies content along with it.
Although the words “Gaza,” “Palestine” and “Israel” are nowhere to be found in the proposed legislation, the language of AB 1468 restricts the discipline to the “domestic experience” of “marginalized people” to discourage teachers from developing lessons on the impact of Israeli settler colonialism on Palestinian American and Muslim communities.
For Kathy Zappitello, it was the Dobbs decision. For Mary Kunesh, it was the gutting of licensing requirements for school media specialists. For Ilana Stonebraker, an academic librarian who ran for — and won — a seat on the Tippecanoe County Council in 2018, it was the first election of Donald Trump. “I felt it viscerally,” she told Truthout. “I needed to do something tangible.
Over 500 film, TV, and media workers have condemned BBC executives for “racism” and “censorship” after the British broadcaster pulled a documentary highlighting the horrific impact the US–Israeli genocide in Gaza has had on Palestinian children.
“As industry professionals who craft stories for the British public, including for the BBC, we condemn the weaponization of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinized through a lens of suspicion,” the letter reads.
The letter also condemned a “racist” and “dehumanizing” campaign targeting the film ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone,’ which the BBC removed from its iPlayer streaming service after pressure from pro-Israel activists.
On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking out against Israeli violence.
Surrounded by supporters, Engler reaffirmed his commitment to freedom of expression and criticized the Montreal police’s collaboration with anti-Palestinian figures. He highlighted the absurdity of the new charges, which claim he harassed the police simply by writing about the accusations already brought against him.
This arrest follows a campaign led by anti-Palestinian media personality Dahlia Kurtz, who lobbied for Engler to be charged after he called out her pro-Israel rhetoric. Over 2,500 people have emailed the Montreal police, demanding they drop the charges.
Watch Engler’s final words before entering police custody.
An investigation has exposed the tech firm’s cooperation with autocratic regimes to remove unfavourable content
Google has cooperated with autocratic regimes around the world, including the Kremlin in Russia and the Chinese Communist party, to facilitate censorship requests, an Observer investigation can reveal.
The technology company has engaged with the administrations of about 150 countries since 2011 that want information scrubbed from their public domains.
In its eagerness to appease supporters of Israel, the media is happy to ride roughshod over due process and basic rights. It’s damaging Australia’s (and New Zealand’s?) democracy.
COMMENTARY:By Bernard Keane
Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.
The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.
Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.
To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.
Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.
That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.
The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.
Abandoned due process The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.
The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.
The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.
The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.
No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.
Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.
Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.
Opinion | Australian democracy and the rule of law is being damaged by the media’s willingness to abandon due process and attack those who criticise Israel, writes @bernardkeane.
Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.
Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.
No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.
The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.
Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.
Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.
Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was sacked from her job at ABC because she shared an Instagram post from @hrw in which the NGS accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. She is now taking the broadcaster to court. pic.twitter.com/jRmQW2AAl3
Damaging the fabric of democracy
This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.
The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.
Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.
The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.
Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.
The Swiss official who ordered the arrest of renowned Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah justified doing so on the false and defamatory basis that Abunimah is “an Islamist Jew-hater.” Mario Fehr, the head of Zurich’s Department of Security, made the bogus accusation in a recent comment to the Swiss publication NZZ, which also falsely characterized Abunimah as an “Islamist” and an “extremist.”
Swiss authorities detained Abunimah on Jan. 25, after they initially allowed him entry into Switzerland following an hour-long interrogation.
The Trump administration revoked Associated Press reporters’ access to a White House event this week after officials demanded that the publication change an editorial standard in compliance with a President Donald Trump order — a chilling instance of censorship that violates constitutional rights, the publication said. In a statement, AP Executive Editor Julie Pace said that the Trump…
I watched US President Donald Trump’s joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week in utter disbelief. Not that the idea, or indeed the practice, of ethnic cleansing of Palestine is new.
But at that press conference the mask has fallen. Recently, fascism has been on the march everywhere, but that press conference seemed to herald an age of naked fascism.
So the Palestinians have just been “unlucky” for decades.
“Their lives have been made hell.” Thank God for grammar’s indirect speech. Their lives have been made hell. We do not know who made their lives hell. Nothing to see here.
Trump says of Gaza: “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings — level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area . . . ”
I wonder who are those lucky “people of the area” he has in mind, once those “unlucky” Palestinians have been “transferred” out of their homeland.
Trump speaks of transforming Gaza into a magnificent “Riviera of the Middle East”. Obviously, the starved amputees of Gaza do not fit his image of the classy people he wants to see in the Riviera he wants to build, on stolen Palestinian land.
No ethnic cleansing questions
After the press conference, I did not hear a single question about ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation or international law.
Under the new fascist leaders, just like under the old ones, those words have become old-fashioned and are to be expunged from the lexicon.
The difference has never been more striking between the meek who officially hold the title “journalist” and the brave who actually work to hold the powerful to account.
Now, more than ever, independent journalists are a threatened species. We should treasure them, support them and protest every attempt to silence them.
Gaza is now the prototype. We can forget international laws and international organisations. We have the bombs. You do as we wish or you will be obliterated.
Who now dares say that the forced transfer of a population by an occupying power is a war crime under the Geneva Convention? But then again, Trump and Netanyahu are not really talking about “forced transfer”. They are talking about “voluntary transfer”.
Once the remaining Israeli hostages have been freed, and water and food have been cut off again, those unlucky Palestinians will climb voluntarily onto the buses waiting to transport them to happiness and prosperity in Egypt and Jordan.
Or to whatever other client state Trump manages to threaten or bribe.
Can the International Criminal Court (ICC) command a shred of respect when Netanyahu is sharing the podium with Trump? Or indeed when Trump is at the podium?
Dismantling the international order
Recently, fascist leaders have been dismantling the international order by accusing its organisations and officials of being “antisemitic” or “working with terrorists”. Tomorrow they will defund and delegitimise these organisations without the need for an excuse.
I listen to Trump speak of combatting antisemitism and deporting Hamas sympathisers and I hear, “We will combat anti-Israel views and we will deport those who protest Israel’s crimes.
“And we will continue to conflate antisemitism and anti-Israel’s views in order to silence pro-Palestinian voices.”
I watch Trump and Netanyahu, the former reading the thoughts of a real estate developer turned into a president’s speech and the latter grinning like a Cheshire cat — and I am gripped by fear. Not just for the Palestinians, but for all humanity.
If we think fascism is only coming for people on a distant shore, we ought to think again.
I watch Netanyahu repeating lies that investigative journalists have spent months debunking. Why would he care? The truth about his lies will not make it to mainstream media and the consciousness of the majority of people.
Hamas suspends the release of Gaza captives, accusing Israel of violating the ceasefire by continuing to kill Palestinians and blocking humanitarian aid.
Lies taking hold, enduring
And the more he repeats those lies, the more they take hold and endure.
I wonder how our political leaders will spin our allies’ new, illegal and immoral plans. For years, they have clung to the mantra of the two-state solution while Israel continued to make every effort to render this solution unfeasible.
What will they say now? With what weasel words will they stay on the same page as our friends in the US and Israel?
Netanyhu praises Trump for thinking outside the box. Here is an idea that Israel has spent billions on arms and propaganda to persuade people that it is dangerously outside the box.
Instead of asking Egypt and Jordan to take the Palestinians, why not make Israel end the occupation and give Palestinians equal rights in their own homeland?
Sawsan Madina is former head of Australia’s SBS Television. This article was first published by John Menadue’s public policy journal Pearls and Irritations and is republished with permission.
When physician and human rights activist Suzanne Barakat was invited to give a keynote address at the People of Color Conference (PoCC) in December 2024, she was excited and did not anticipate that her remarks would elicit a barrage of hate. After all, friends had previously told her that the conference was one of the few places where educators of color and their anti-racist allies felt at ease.
The Electronic Intifada’s executive director Ali Abunimah was deported by Switzerland on Monday after spending two nights in jail.
Abunimah described his experience in a statement he made upon arrival to Istanbul airport late Monday. He said that he was “cut off from communication with the outside world” and “not even permitted to contact my family.”
He said that police accused him of “offending against Swiss law” but was not presented with any charges. Abunimah added that he was questioned “by Swiss defense ministry intelligence agents without the presence of my lawyer, and they again refused to allow me to contact her or my family.”
They’ve arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland.
The Electronic Intifada’s executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country.
Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years.
In October of last year, Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Asa Winstanley saw his home raided by British “counterterrorism” police in response to his social media posts about Israel’s western-backed abuses in the middle east.
“Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival,” Donald Trump railed at a rally in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. “We have no choice, the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down — and they must do this — lay down their very lives to defend their country.”
This is more than political theater — it’s a clarion call to enforce, by any means necessary, what can only be called “post-truth schooling,” a system where ideological conformity replace inquiry and objective truth as the foundation of education.
President Donald Trump in his inaugural speech on Monday vowed to end online censorship by government using social media companies as proxies.
He said:
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents, something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again.
Later on Monday Trump signed the executive order, “Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship
With the Tiktok ban just days away, American youth have started flooding the Chinese social media app RedNote, pushing it into #1 position on the app store. Labeled “Tiktok refugees” by Chinese netizens, the newcomers have been welcomed by app users with open arms, curiosity, and a fair bit of humor.
Though initially confused at the sudden influx of English speakers, long-dwelling app users quickly connected the dots and were quick to poke fun at the US government’s accusations of China spying on your typical American citizen.
The app “Xiaohongshu” directly translates to ‘Little Red Book,” but it has been dubbed RedNote in the United States. Many are quick to think of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong’s famous Little Red Book, though app officials say it isn’t a direct reference. Still, the comedic composition is something to celebrate.
The Tiktok ban is quite evidently backfiring on the US government. As users snub the ban and move to a real Chinese social media app, spontaneous interactions between US and Chinese citizens are naturally sorting through years and years of anti-China propaganda.
WAIT! The social credit thing isn’t real??? One user commented, after locals revealed that there is no such thing as a social credit score in China — just one of the many stories the media has falsely fed us.
The app has ushered in a new wave of cross-cultural learning. Americans have been posting questions like, “How does China feel about Palestine?” and “What does the US government tell us about China that isn’t true?” There’s been comparisons between the US and China health systems (of which China’s is undoubtedly superior) and tours of China’s incredible EVs. The vast number of Americans agree: the US has fallen way behind.
Not only that, but American citizens cite a new appreciation for China, and the number of people learning Mandarin has grown. Duolingo has already seen a 216% spike. While Chinese citizens have taken it upon themselves to start teaching newcomers common Chinese phrases, Americans simultaneously help local users with their English homework.
It is more than just cultural exchange, however. This is an unprecedented people-to-people moment, allowing two communities to come together and realize they are more alike than not. Such a realization is desperately needed, and undercuts a rapidly escalating war climate between the US and China.
Recently, the US approved a $2 billion arms sale to Taiwan, citing potential war with China. In response, China sanctioned numerous US weapons companies for violating the one-China principle and destabilizing the region. War talk isn’t new — the US government has been pushing and planning for it ever since China rose to power in the early 2000s. A natural threat to US global hegemony, our politicians have been plotting the fall of China for decades, spending billions and billions of dollars to militarize the region around China and pushing a narrative of hatred and fear in the media.
Just this week, China hawk Marco Rubio underwent his Secretary of State confirmation hearing. Due to his push for war against China, he has been travel-sanctioned by the Chinese government for years. Our nation’s top “diplomat” is going to have some trouble conducting diplomacy when he’s unable to even travel to the nation where we need it most. Not that anything Rubio does could ever be considered diplomacy.
But despite the constant anti-China rhetoric plaguing our politicians and media, new RedNote users appear to be taking a different path:
The internet is a modern tool not previously available to the people during the great power wars of previous decades. It provides a fresh avenue that can circumvent the weaponization of the media and allow people to easily connect from different sides of the globe.
Perhaps an app like RedNote is exactly what we need to continue diffusing all the anti-China propaganda attempting to manufacture consent for the next great war. It’s about time the people decide for themselves who they should and shouldn’t be calling “enemy” rather than adhering to the whims of a war-obsessed government.
With a potential TikTok ban on January 19 looming over the United States, American TikTok users are moving en masse to RedNote, a Chinese social media app. Known in China as Xianhongshu, which literally translates to “little red book” (yes, the allegory isn’t lost here), the app is currently sitting at the top of the social media charts in the App store, gaining over half a million new users over the last few days.
In a display of camaraderie, users — monikered “TikTok refugees” on the platform — flocked to RedNote, and Chinese and American users have taken to using the shared platform as an opportunity of a rare and (as of yet) fraternal cultural exchange.
forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and deploying this multilayered PSYOPS of direct and covert operations have been brought to us, partially, by the Edward Bernays of the World … now we are here: Fear and Loathing in Our Delusional and Self-Incriminating Selves! (Haeder, May 28, 2023)
Trillions for Ukraine. Christ, this is 2019, from The Nation, not exactly a radical rag : Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine/ Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant. By Lev Golinkin
Before the Russian invasion, CIA reports linked him to an oligarch so dirty and so mired in “significant corruption” that the State Department banned him from entering the U.S.
But now CIA propaganda portrays Zelensky as nobler than Winston Churchill and saintlier than Mother Theresa.
Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up (source)
Now now, I know we can’t in PC/PAEC (Politically Approved by Elites Correct) society point out a spade from a diamond. Ahh, even after Nakba 75? Who stopped it, a celebration-remembrance-sadness of that genocide?
Sorry, but it does matter who controls the levers of power, the narrative, the engines of Press-Propaganda-Entertainment. As well as, politics, marketing, education? Nakba is a lie. You don’t see a pattern here?
In a statement Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said, “We will fight the ‘Nakba’ lie with full strength and we won’t allow the Palestinians to continue to spread lies and distort history.”
Ahh, this commemoration, by the UN, of all organizations, is despicable, according to another Jew, and that is a-okay language, no?
In a recorded statement, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, said that the organization’s decision was “shameful” and would harm any efforts to find a peaceful solution to the generations-old conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people.
Asking other U.N. representatives to boycott the commemoration, he said, “[A]ttending this despicable event means destroying any chance of peace by adopting the Palestinian narrative calling the establishment of the state of Israel a disaster while ignoring Palestinian hate, incitement, terror and refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.”
“UN Recognition of Palestinian Displacement Angers Israel” — One headline, and just replace, “…angers Israel” with, “…. angers Christians, Zionists, Israel-Firsters, Members of Congress, Members of the MSM, politicians, AIPAC, etc., et. …”
Shit, recognition of that Liberty, that United States SHIP, and more poison arrows launched by the Isra-Hellions:
Shit, that crime memorial is coming up, June 8 = The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War.
Ahh, can we protest that other anniversary? By virtue of General Assembly Resolution 273, Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949. In the three years following the 1948 Palestine war , about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands.
Can we remember June 8 without being smeared?
For more information on Israel’s crimes, and the USS Liberty, go here: IAK.
Now transitioning to more racism and bigotry and Big Brother-ism by Jewish leaders, ZioCryptos, and the like, let’s scour the WWW for those attacks on Pink Floyd’s front man: Jews will attack Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, and they will get countless thousands of lies published in countless broken media outfits immediately. Just Google-Gulag search: “Roger Waters and Berlin Fascism.” Hate, pure lies, and the hasbara and powerful Jewish hatred of thinking Rogers is an antisemite!
Again, a concert, and Israel speaks up.
Israel’s foreign ministry later criticized Waters on social media, tweeting on May 24: “Good morning to everyone but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”
I am sorry to say that the Jewish folk I have been reading about, listening to, and researching throughout my decades, even from day one of college onward, many (not all) are indeed a clear and present danger to straight-up research and critical thinking. Then, just move over to the fact in my humble opinion, many powerful Jews hate Russia, Russians, and anyone who might dare question the UkroNazi Proxy War with Russia, started, oh, hell, way before 2014.
Self-proclaimed Jewish criminal, Kolomoyskyi is the dirty banker and the dirty funder of Zelensky:
[Photo: On the left, Zelensky in circle behind Kholomoisky. On the right, Zelensky on the campaign trail is followed by one of Kholomoisky’s bodyguards.]
But, read this Jewish rag in Isra-Hell, Haaretz | World News/
Ukraine recently requested air defense systems and training from Israel, saying that Iran would use the deployment of its weapons systems in Europe to refine their capabilities. Still, Israel maintains that it would not send military assistance to Ukraine
A senior Ukrainian official close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on world Jewry to push Jerusalem to arm his country with defensive weapons on Wednesday, only two days after Moscow warned Israel that supplying military equipment to Ukraine would “destroy the political relations between the two countries.”
Of course, I am disgusted by any racist group calling on “all Jews worldwide to continue the murder of Russians and Ukrainians in Donbass, and now, throughout Ukraine and into Russia.
This is merchant of death war mongering, and it has to stop, stop first by beginning to call a Jewish Fascist a Jewish Fascist when you come in contact with him or her or them: Here, more lies, blatant valorizing of a corrupt and criminal man, Zelensky!
1. The most important Jewish leader in the world (source)
The past week has turned us all into experts on Ukraine, now at the center of every conversation. Did you know how big it is? (When you lay it over the U.S. map, it stretches from New York to Chicago.) Who knew that we were actually using the Russian city names and not the Ukrainian ones (it’s Kyiv, not Kiev; Lviv, not Lvov; and Kharkiv, not Kharkov). And their president—did you know that he is Jewish?
Volodymyr Zelensky is probably the most admired Jewish leader the world has to offer right now. Before entering politics in 2018, Zelensky was a popular comedian (and you can’t get any more Jewish than that); he does not often speak about his Jewish identity, but he has never tried to hide it. In a country like Ukraine, which is still struggling with a painful legacy of antisemitism, Zelensky’s Jewishness has always been present.
For Jews across the world, Zelensky is now a source of pride: a young, inexperienced leader who is putting his life at risk for his people by leading a nation of 40 million people in opposing a ruthless Russian aggressor.
In his inauguration speech, Zelensky famously told lawmakers not to hang his portrait on their walls. “I do not want my picture in your offices: The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
True to form, Zelensky maintained his unassuming, direct style when crisis hit. His video messages, posted several times a day, have been helping reassure the Ukrainian people. He spoke from his office and from the streets of Kyiv, even as Russian troops closed in on the capital, and when the fighting intensified, Zelensky candidly shared with all Ukrainians the fact that he has been marked by the Russians as “target number one” and that his family is “target number two.” But when the U.S. offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to somewhere safer, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
I’m writing this column on Sunday, as Russian forces, bogged down and weakened by courageous Ukrainians armed with AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, or sometimes just a large pole they picked up on the side of the street, still threaten the capital. Zelensky is leading the effort to save his nation, though most foreign intelligence services still think he’s fighting a losing battle.
So, this POS war crimes leader, Zelensky, *elensky because the letter “Z” has been outlawed, and Ukraine and Zelensky with the one-two-three punch of US and UK, with their Kill List, you have to imagine that in the USA and Canada and UK and EU and Europe, all brains have been thrown out the window, or the voice of reason has gone where?
Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.
The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.
[…]
One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.
It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.
Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful.
Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes.
Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.
Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so.
But then, this is another form — of propaganda . . . denial, and denigration and plain ignoring alternative views, even those that are consistent and repeated:
But it’s the 74th Anniversary of an illegitimate state, apartheid and ethnic cleansing one albet> This is how ZioAzovLensky rolls, and even the corrupt CIA-controlled Wikipedia has some facts here on the murderous Jews, Zelenksy’s mother ship, historical grounding, who called themselves Zionists, but I know very few Jews who are not ZIONISTS, overtly or covertly:
A successful paramilitary campaign was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.
The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, which was under the control of the officially recognised Jewish leadership of Palestine, remained cooperative with the British. But in 1944 the Irgun, an offshoot of the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule, thus joining Lehi, which had been active against the authorities throughout the war. Both were small, dissident militias of the right-wingRevisionist movement. They attacked police and government targets in response to British immigration restrictions. They intentionally avoided military targets, to ensure that they would not hamper the British war effort against their common enemy, Nazi Germany.
The armed conflict escalated during the final phase of World War II, when the Irgun declared a revolt in February 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. Starting from the assassination of Baron Moyne by Lehi in 1944, the Haganah actively opposed the Irgun and Lehi, in a period of inter-Jewish fighting known as the Hunting Season, effectively halting the insurrection. However, in autumn 1945, following the end of World War II in both Europe (April–May 1945) and Asia (September, 1945), when it became clear that the British would not permit significant Jewish immigration and had no intention of immediately establishing a Jewish state, the Haganah began a period of co-operation with the other two underground organisations. They jointly formed the Jewish Resistance Movement.
The Haganah refrained from direct confrontation with British forces, and concentrated its efforts on attacking British immigration control, while Irgun and Lehi attacked military and police targets.[6] The Resistance Movement dissolved amidst recriminations in July 1946, following the King David Hotel bombing. The Irgun and Lehi started acting independently, while the main underground militia, Haganah, continued acting mainly in supporting Jewish immigration. The Haganah again briefly worked to suppress Irgun and Lehi operations, due to the presence of a United Nations investigative committee in Palestine. After the UN Partition Plan resolution was passed on 29 November 1947, the civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs eclipsed the previous tensions of both with the British. However, British and Zionist forces continued to clash throughout the period of the civil war up to the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948.
Within the United Kingdom there were deep divisions over Palestine policy. Dozens of British soldiers, Jewish militants, and civilians died during the campaigns of insurgency. The conflict led to heightened antisemitism in the United Kingdom. In August 1947, after the hanging of two abducted British sergeants, there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting across the United Kingdom. The conflict caused tensions in the United Kingdom–United States relations.
Putin and Russians and those of us who actually want Russia to have a safe border, peace, and zero NATO interference, see Zelensky and his Jewish Lords — Kagan Familias, Nuland, Blinken, Yellen, Sherman, Garland, and hundreds of others in the Biden White House and thousands of others in the Military Industrial Expanded (finance, computing, surveillence) Complex and millions more in the world of turning a dollar on death — as the ENEMY. Murderous, conniving, hateful, slick enemies numero uno, those espousing war with China and war with Russia.
I know Dissident Voice is reluctant to publish voices that might lean toward a Pepe Escobar critique of the Israel Hell unleashed on the world. I get it. But, the fact is violence and terror, those are right up Zelensky’s alley, and this war that UK and USA and Five Eyes and EU have unleashed will not end soon, because Ukraine in the minds of many is Israel 2.0. An added “benefit” for these monsters: Expect those weapons that USA taxpayer footed the bill for to bring down some commercial airlines in a neighborhood near-by soon.
We are a soiled Western Culture, and we have seeded the rest of the world with our feces — high tech, low tech, money, land theft, pollution, exploitation, consumerism, throw-away mentality, sanctions, blood lust, coups, supporting despots, money laundering and gold theft and assets removal. Loans from Hell, and alas, here we are, in a putrid world, a day before the big Monday Holiday, Memorial Day, and we are straddled by syphilitic monsters running the world and our own populous generally marked for death, marked as marks, these, the billionaires, the fleecers and many left and right, Jewish or not, they are Zionists and Israel-Firsters who have sold us down the Ukrainian toilet.
Israeli newspapers point out the victories?
These are THEIR graphics, and by me point these out, I am deplatformed, stopped from teaching, pushed to the excrement posts of publishing my books anywhere
But leave it to the Paranoid Former Nazis and the disgusting ADL and AIPAC and Mossad loving Israelis to attack us all attacking them:
“The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in 1980,” Roger Waters said.
“I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression where I set it… My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price,” he said.
“Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.”
Waters is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of holding anti-Jewish views. He has floated an inflatable pig emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts. The singer denies the anti-Semitism accusations, saying he was protesting against Israeli policies, not Jewish people.
Ah, those old days, which now would be both considered hate speech and also ground down by the ugly media and the uglier mainstream fools in college, in towns, every where.
Yep, it is a piece of shit piece of cloth for many, representing so so much death, murder, hate, and racism. Cloth, man, and alas, a symbol, for those who cry crocodile tears when they hear the National Anthem, and then for others, it is the greed and murder and Empire of Chaos-Lies-Terror in every red and white strip, every star and bar:
This stuff is not allowed on campuses, and not just Guantanamo Desantis’s Florida.
This is not anti-DIsney, but it is the Dsneyification of the world, and this is the outcome: bones, immolation, worldwide.
Old school, but you can’t get college students to analyze this without being charged with a Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT.
I doubt you can loosely call for the execution of Corporations, CEOs, what have you. Again, Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT on Haeder.
Ahh, if we are the biggest war profiteers, then we’ll be letting China take first place. Yep, that’s the modern college student’s response.
Ahh, I have been warned that telling my students that I was rapped on the head by cops, in Portland, El Paso, Seattle, and elsewhere, and that protest is dangerous but necessary, and that I would dare use the ACAB as an opening to discuss that Defund the Police Movement — who, what, where, when and WHY — as well as my own work as a police reporter and what I think of cops/pigs, all verbotten! Call SWAT on Haeder.
Hell, you can look this one up in Wikipedia. And babies?
Read the transcript: with the reason the poster was made, the soldier who was in the massacre!
Oh, no, trigger warnings, vicarious PTSD, verboten.
Partial transcriptof the Mike Wallace interview with Paul Meadlo in which Meadlo describes his participation in the My Lai massacre:
Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
A. Right.
Q. And you killed how many? At that time?
A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t – You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.
It is a well-oiled, well-placed, complex, 3-D kind of chess machine, and it is pure killer, pure killer, and most campuses utilized Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, DoD, BOrder Patrol, CIA, FBI, ATF, MONEY. Some of the nation’s most elite universities are deep into defense lobbying, often hiring Washington-based firms to press Congress and the Pentagon to fund their science projects.
Asked whether students or professors ever have ethical objections to working on projects funded by the Defense Department, Zuber said that “no professor has to take money from DoD.”
“We’re a bottom-up organization,” she said. “Professors make those choices.”
She also said that “if there are students who have a feeling that they don’t want to work on defense-related issues, they certainly don’t have to.” But, she added, “a whole lot seem to want to.”
Like MIT, the Association of American Universities, an alliance of 62 of the leading research institutions in the United States and Canada, advocates defense research funding.
The end result is that BABIES, kids, NEWBORNES, women, SENIOR citizens, disabled, PATIENTS in hospitals, youth on PLAYGROUNDS, are mudered, and killed, and imploded, so, then, BABY Killers is just a limited sigh — wedding parties, goat herders, and entire families at gravesites, murdered by universities, colleges, think tanks, corporations, marketing firms, law firms, retail services in the EMPLOY of the USA.
This sign? These youth? Their message? Their no war and stop the escalation and disarmament now, ahh, then, of couse, it’s triple bad, since they are free thinkers and align with New York Young Communist League.
So many more organizations working on it, working on it — no more NATO, no more Arms.
Back to the Jewish thing in Ukraine: And, well, and, who writes the narrative of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of the Jewish Apartheid State supporting the Nazis under Zelensky?
There is no way in hell you will read this story, objectively, anywhere:
The Jews are the ones behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and their goal is to create a new Jewish state to replace the failing Zionist project of Israel, Palestinian Islamic scholar Mraweh Nassar has claimed, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
Nassar, whom MEMRI identified as the secretary-general of the Jerusalem Committee of the International Union of Muslims Scholars, made his claims on March 22 while speaking with Channel 9, an Arabic-language TV station in Turkey that the media watchdog says is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now now, Dan Shapiro (New Atlanticist, err, Atlantic Council) wrote this one, and again, it’s the NARRATIVE and the MEDIUM is the MESSAGE driver, and then who gets to tell the stories and how the algorithms benefit the propagandists, shit dog, need we look further?.
Speaking to reporters this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the future he sees for his country in unusual terms: as “a big Israel.”
Gone, he said, are hopes for “an absolutely liberal” state—replaced by the likely reality of armed defense forces patrolling movie theaters and supermarkets. “I’m confident that our security will be the number-one issue over the next ten years,” Zelenskyy added.
With Russian forces having withdrawn from around Kyiv, suggesting that Ukraine successfully repulsed the first phase of the Kremlin’s invasion, the time is right for Zelenskyy to contemplate how to prepare for the next—and potentially much longer—phase of this conflict.
But what does he mean by “a big Israel”? With a population more than four times smaller, and vastly less territory, the Jewish state might not seem like the most fitting comparison. Yet consider the regional security threats it faces, as well as its highly mobilized population: The two embattled countries share more than you might think.
So if Zelenskyy really does have Israel in mind as a model for Ukraine, here are some of the key features he might consider for adoption (some of which are already applicable today):
Security first: Every Israeli government promises, first and foremost, that it will deliver security—and knows it will be judged on this pledge. Ordinary citizens, not just politicians, pay close attention to security threats—both from across borders and from internal sources— and much of the public chooses who to elect by that metric alone.
The whole population plays a role: The Israeli model goes further than Zelenskyy’s vision of security services deployed to civilian spaces: Most young Israeli adults serve in the military, and many are employed in security-related professions following their service. A common purpose unites the citizenry, making them ready to endure shared sacrific
I ask, “Will one vapid bought-and-brainwashed media person get on with some rejiggering their knowledge:
Contentious liability clause that could have exposed institutions to being sued by Holocaust deniers is scrapped
The government is to overhaul legislation imposing free speech duties on higher education in England, scrapping a controversial civil liability that potentially exposed universities to being sued by Holocaust deniers.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, told parliament that while the government intended to retain key parts of the law passed by the previous Conservative administration, she planned to revoke the “statutory tort” that allowed legal action by anyone claiming their freedom of speech had been restricted, and to largely exempt student unions from the legislation.
An open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in response to the social media giant’s decision to abandon its fact-checking regime protection in the US against hoaxes and conspiracy theories. No New Zealand fact-checkers are on the list of signatories.
Nine years ago, we wrote to you about the real-world harms caused by false information on Facebook. In response, Meta created a fact-checking programme that helped protect millions of users from hoaxes and conspiracy theories. This week, you announced you’re ending that programme in the United States because of concerns about “too much censorship” — a decision that threatens to undo nearly a decade of progress in promoting accurate information online.
The programme that launched in 2016 was a strong step forward in encouraging factual accuracy online. It helped people have a positive experience on Facebook, Instagram and Threads by reducing the spread of false and misleading information in their feeds.
We believe — and data shows — most people on social media are looking for reliable information to make decisions about their lives and to have good interactions with friends and family. Informing users about false information in order to slow its spread, without censoring, was the goal.
Fact-checkers strongly support freedom of expression, and we’ve said that repeatedly and formally in last year’s Sarajevo statement. The freedom to say why something is not true is also free speech.
But you say the programme has become “a tool to censor,” and that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.” This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record.
Meta required all fact-checking partners to meet strict nonpartisanship standards through verification by the International Fact-Checking Network. This meant no affiliations with political parties or candidates, no policy advocacy, and an unwavering commitment to objectivity and transparency.
Each news organisation undergoes rigorous annual verification, including independent assessment and peer review. Far from questioning these standards, Meta has consistently praised their rigour and effectiveness. Just a year ago, Meta extended the programme to Threads.
Fact-checkers blamed and harassed Your comments suggest fact-checkers were responsible for censorship, even though Meta never gave fact-checkers the ability or the authority to remove content or accounts. People online have often blamed and harassed fact-checkers for Meta’s actions. Your recent comments will no doubt fuel those perceptions.
But the reality is that Meta staff decided on how content found to be false by fact-checkers should be downranked or labeled. Several fact-checkers over the years have suggested to Meta how it could improve this labeling to be less intrusive and avoid even the appearance of censorship, but Meta never acted on those suggestions.
Additionally, Meta exempted politicians and political candidates from fact-checking as a precautionary measure, even when they spread known falsehoods. Fact-checkers, meanwhile, said that politicians should be fact-checked like anyone else.
Over the years, Meta provided only limited information on the programme’s results, even though fact-checkers and independent researchers asked again and again for more data. But from what we could tell, the programme was effective. Research indicated fact-check labels reduced belief in and sharing of false information. And in your own testimony to Congress, you boasted about Meta’s “industry-leading fact-checking programme.”
You said that you plan to start a Community Notes programme similar to that of X. We do not believe that this type of programme will result in a positive user experience, as X has demonstrated.
Researchshows that many Community Notes never get displayed, because they depend on widespread political consensus rather than on standards and evidence for accuracy. Even so, there is no reason Community Notes couldn’t co-exist with the third-party fact-checking programme; they are not mutually exclusive.
A Community Notes model that works in collaboration with professional fact-checking would have strong potential as a new model for promoting accurate information. The need for this is great: If people believe social media platforms are full of scams and hoaxes, they won’t want to spend time there or do business on them.
Political context in US
That brings us to the political context in the United States. Your announcement’s timing came after President-elect Donald Trump’s election certification and as part of a broader response from the tech industry to the incoming administration. Mr Trump himself said your announcement was “probably” in response to threats he’s made against you.
Some of the journalists that are part of our fact-checking community have experienced similar threats from governments in the countries where they work, so we understand how hard it is to resist this pressure.
The plan to end the fact-checking programme in 2025 applies only to the United States, for now. But Meta has similar programmes in more than 100 countries that are all highly diverse, at different stages of democracy and development. Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the programme worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places.
This moment underlines the need for more funding for public service journalism. Fact-checking is essential to maintaining shared realities and evidence-based discussion, both in the United States and globally. The philanthropic sector has an opportunity to increase its investment in journalism at a critical time.
Most importantly, we believe the decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme is a step backward for those who want to see an internet that prioritises accurate and trustworthy information. We hope that somehow we can make up this ground in the years to come.
We remain ready to work again with Meta, or any other technology platform that is interested in engaging fact-checking as a tool to give people the information they need to make informed decisions about their daily lives.
Access to truth fuels freedom of speech, empowering communities to align their choices with their values. As journalists, we remain steadfast in our commitment to the freedom of the press, ensuring that the pursuit of truth endures as a cornerstone of democracy.
Editor: Fact-checking organisations continue to sign this letter, and the list is being updated as they do. No New Zealand fact-checking service has been added to the list so far. Republished from the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr accused private company NewsGuard, which uses journalistic methods to generate reliability ratings of media outlets, of participating in a “censorship cartel” in a Nov. 13, 2024, letter to four tech companies.
Carr accused NewsGuard of targeting and censoring certain outlets by giving them low credibility ratings and allowing bias to shape its ratings.
In the letter to the heads of Microsoft, Apple, Meta — which owns Facebook and Instagram — and Alphabet — which owns Google — Carr demanded lists of every product or service that relies on NewsGuard, information he said would “inform the FCC’s work to promote free speech and a diversity of viewpoints.”
Carr posted the letter on X, writing, “The Orwellian named NewsGuard along with ‘fact checking’ groups & ad agencies helped enforce one-sided narratives.”
Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel.
The Orwellian named NewsGuard along with “fact checking” groups & ad agencies helped enforce one-sided narratives.
According to NewsGuard’s website, it employs “a team of journalists and experienced editors” to produce reliability ratings for online publishers using “journalistic criteria.” In a statement responding to Carr’s letter, the company argued that the commissioner’s accusations were based on “false reports,” including from conservative outlet Newsmax, which NewsGuard has given a low credibility rating.
“Our journalism is itself speech protected by the First Amendment,” NewsGuard stated. “We’re concerned to see a government official using the powers of his office, however unwittingly after having been misled by Newsmax, to attempt to prevent a private company (NewsGuard) from producing journalistic content.”
When reached for comment about NewsGuard’s statement, Carr told The Washington Post, “NewsGuard’s response is a jumble of disinformation, deception and sleight of hand. In other words, it mirrors NewsGuard’s business model, in my opinion.”
Carr seems to be attempting to punish the company “for doing journalism,” NewsGuard Co-Editor-in-Chief Steven Brill told Deadline. “It’s like saying I am going to penalize Consumer Reports because it’s giving people information when they are looking to buy a toaster.”
Carr was appointed to the FCC in 2017 by President Donald Trump. On Nov. 17, 2024, after winning reelection, Trump announced that he had selected Carr as FCC chair, calling him “a warrior for Free Speech.”
Carr has supported Trump’s calls for NBC, CBS and ABC to lose their broadcast licenses over their alleged mistreatment of him, NPR reported.
The cartoon that was rejected by the Washington Post, definitely not because it portrayed Post owner Jeff Bezos in an unflattering light.
When Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post cartoonist, submitted a draft sketch shortly before Christmas, she must have known she was stirring the pot.
But after watching a parade of Big Tech CEOs jet down to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage—and millions of dollars—to Trump, a cartoon depicting these groveling billionaires must have seemed natural, even if it included her own boss, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Post since 2013.
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote in a Substack post (1/3/25) announcing her resignation from the Post, where she’s worked since 2008. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”
Telnaes’ post went further, criticizing media owners like Bezos for abandoning their responsibility to safeguard the free press “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”
In addition to Bezos, the other billionaires Telnaes depicted bowing before Trump were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.
And lying prostrate beneath these men was Mickey Mouse, Telnaes’ apparent nod to the cowardly $16 million settlement Disney-owned ABC recently offered Trump (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).
‘Bias against repetition’
Somehow the Washington Post running a column by Adam Lashinsky (12/30/24) about MAGA’s internecine battles over H-1B visas didn’t prevent it from publishing a cartoon on the same theme the next day (12/31/24)—or another one the next week (1/4/25).
The unenviable job of ensuring a thin-skinned Bezos wasn’t embarrassed by a cartoon in his own newspaper fell to Post opinions editor David Shipley. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in a statement justifying his killing of Telnaes’ cartoon:
My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.
It’s bizarre to argue that a regular cartoonist’s work should be killed because the paper published a column—or even two!—with similar content. Even so, we can only find one recent Post opinion column addressing Bezos’ efforts to curry favor with the president-elect (12/18/24).
What’s more, a search of the Post’s “latest cartoons” shows the paper has no problem publishing cartoons on the same topic as opinion pieces. Recent examples include Republicans’ difficulties finding a speaker (1/2/25, 1/4/25), Republican infighting over H-1B visas (12/30/24, 12/31/24, 1/4/25) and controversy over Biden’s death penalty commutations (12/23/24, 12/26/24).
Outside of opinions, the Post has run a few recent stories on the efforts of Big Tech executives, including Bezos, to mollify Trump (12/13/24, 12/19/24, 12/31/24).
Aside from repetitiveness, deputy opinions editor David Von Drehle offered another reason for spiking Telnaes’ cartoon. “I didn’t think it was a very good cartoon. It seemed pretty ham-handed to me,” Von Drehle told Post media critic Erik Wemple (1/6/25).
Wemple’s blog post also disclosed that Post executive editor Matt Murray wants the paper to stop covering its own problems. “I did set a policy that broadly we should not cover ourselves,” said Murray, who claimed his change was made weeks ago and wasn’t “specifically tied to the cartoon.”
Von Drehle’s denigrating comment about Telnaes’ cartoon only appeared in Wemple’s blog, not in a Post news story. In fact, amid the swirling controversy, the Post hasn’t written a single original news story on the spiked cartoon, only running an AP story (1/4/25) on the topic.
Exodus of talent
“It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility,” wrote Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (10/28/24) in a column that did just that.
Following the rejection of her cartoon, Telnaes resigned, marking just the latest departure from the storied paper.
“The Post is shedding talent at an unprecedented rate,” observed media journalist Oliver Darcy (Status, 1/6/25), who earlier noted (1/2/25): “Eventually treating employees with little respect has consequences.”
The growing exodus comes in the wake of Bezos spiking the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in late October—a move he took to curry favor with Trump (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).
Amid the ensuing backlash—in which 300,000 Post readers reportedly canceled their subscriptions—Bezos scapegoated Post reporters for his craven action, claiming their untrustworthiness had forced him to abandon the paper’s longstanding practice of issuing presidential endorsements. “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” was the headline accompanying Bezos’ self-serving op-ed (Washington Post, 10/28/24).
Ingratiation ratcheted up
Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 12/4/24) said he hopes to persuade Donald Trump that the press is “not the enemy”—in part by giving him a $1 million donation.
After Trump’s win, Bezos ratcheted up his ingratiation, saying Trump has “grown in the past eight years” and is now “calmer.” Bezos also told the New York Times’ Dealbook conference he’s “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term, and hopes to work with him (Washington Post, 12/4/24).
“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”
Bezos also trekked down to Mar-a-Lago, gifts in hand—just as Telnaes depicted. In addition to ponying up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration fund, Amazon is also broadcasting the inauguration live on Amazon Prime, an in-kind donation worth another $1 million (BBC, 1/4/25). Meanwhile, Amazon will release a new documentary on Melania Trump, who’s an executive producer of the film; Bezos’ company reportedly paid $40 million for the rights (Puck, 1/7/25).
Bezos didn’t become the second-richest person alive by prioritizing civic responsibility. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”
Meanwhile at the Post, the paper today “started laying off roughly 4% of its work force” (New York Times, 1/7/25).
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
A flood of devastating new testimonies documenting the systemic sexual abuse of Palestinian men and women by Israeli soldiers has surfaced in recent weeks. Yet, as these harrowing accounts gain traction amongst human rights groups and international organizations, Western media has conspicuously turned its focus elsewhere—amplifying Israel’s poorly corroborated claims against Hamas.
Following a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on December 28, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published a report documenting harrowing testimonies of sexual assault by Israeli soldiers.
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