Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media Just the Beginning, Warns Top
Neocon Insider
October 24, 2018
At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim
some credit for the recent coordinated purge of alternative media, report
Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague.
By Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague
Gray Zone Project
This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of
users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American
users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites
that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free
Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of
journalists like Rachel Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these pages had broken our rules against spam and
coordinated inauthentic behavior. However, sites like The Free Thought
Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate
sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who
contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of favoring mainstream
sources and silencing alternative voices.
In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington
insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge and
promised more takedowns in the near future.
Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open
political system, remarked Jamie Fly, a senior fellow and director of the
Asia program at the influential think tank the German Marshall Fund, which
is funded by the U.S. government and NATO. They can invent stories that get
repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push
back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So
this is just the beginning.
Fly went on to complain that all you need is an email to set up a Facebook
or Twitter account, lamenting the sites accessibility to members of the
general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the
situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance.
Fly made these stunning comments to Jeb Sprague, who is a visiting faculty
in sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and co-author of
this article. The two spoke during a lunch break at a conference on Asian
security organized by the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin,
Germany on Oct. 15 and 16.
The remarks by Fly we are just starting to push back seemed to confirm
the worst fears of the alternative online media community. If he was to be
believed, the latest purge was motivated by politics, not spam prevention,
and was driven by powerful interests hostile to dissident views,
particularly where American state violence is concerned.
Fly: A Rising Neocon
Fly: Neocon rising.
Fly is an influential foreign policy hardliner who has spent the last year
lobbying for the censorship of fringe views on social media. Over the
years, he has advocated for a military assault on Iran, a regime change war
on Syria, and hiking military spending to unprecedented levels. He is the
embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.
Like so many second-generation neocons, Fly entered government by burrowing
into mid-level positions in George W. Bushs National Security Council and
Department of Defense.
In 2009, he was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative(FPI), a
rebranded version of Bill Kristols Project for a New American Century, or
PNAC. The latter outfit was an umbrella group of neoconservative activists
that first made the case for an invasion of Iraq as part of a wider project
of regime change in countries that resisted Washingtons sphere of
influence.
By 2011, Fly was advancing the next phase in PNACs blueprint by clamoring
for military strikes on Iran. More diplomacy is not an adequate response,
he argued. A year later, Fly urged the US to expand its list of targets
beyond the [Iranian] nuclear program to key command and control elements of
the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities
associated with other key government officials.
Fly soon found his way into the senate office of Marco Rubio, a
neoconservative pet project, assuming a role as his top foreign policy
advisor. Amongst other interventionist initiatives, Rubio has taken the lead
in promoting harsh economic sanctions targeting Venezuela, even advocating
for a U.S. military assault on the country. When Rubios 2016 presidential
campaign floundered amid a mass revolt of the Republican Partys middle
American base against the party establishment, Fly was forced to cast about
for new opportunities.
He found them in the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate that formed soon
after Donald Trumps shock election victory.
PropOrNot Provides the Spark
A journalistic insiders account of the Hillary Clinton presidential
campaign, Shattered, revealed that in the days after the election, Hillary
declined to take responsibility for her own loss. Her top advisers were
summoned the following day, according to the book, to engineer the case
that the election wasnt entirely on the up-and-up
Already, Russian
hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.
Post: Ran with unverified story. (Photo credit: Daniel X. ONeil)
Less than three weeks after Clintons defeat, The Washington Posts Craig
Timberg published a dubiously sourced report headlined, Russian propaganda
effort helped spread fake news. The article hyped up a McCarthyite effort
by a shadowy, anonymously run organization called PropOrNot to blacklist
some 200 American media outlets as Russian online propaganda.
The alternative media outfits on the PropOrNot blacklist included some of
those recently purged by Facebook and Twitter, such as The Free Thought
Project and Anti-Media. Among the criteria PropOrNot identified as signs of
Russian propaganda were: Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup
of the EU and Eurozone and Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia
and Syrian resistance to Assad. PropOrNot called for formal investigations
by the U.S. government into the outlets it had blacklisted.
According to Timberg, who uncritically promoted the media suppression
initiative, Propornot was established by a nonpartisan collection of
researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.
Timberg quoted a figure associated with the George Washington University
Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, Andrew Weisburd, and cited a report
he wrote with his colleague, Clint Watts, on Russian meddling.
Timbergs piece on PropOrNot was promoted widely by former top Clinton
staffers and celebrated by ex-Obama White House aide Dan Pfeiffer as the
biggest story in the world. But after a wave of stinging criticism,
including in the pages of The New Yorker, the article was amended with an
editors note stating, The [Washington] Post
does not itself vouch for the
validity of PropOrNots findings regarding any individual media outlet.
PropOrNot had been seemingly exposed as a McCarthyite sham, but the concept
behind it exposing online American media outlets as vehicles for Kremlin
active measures continued to flourish.
Taxpayers Pay for Russian Bot Tracker
By August, a new, and seemingly related initiative appeared out of the blue,
this time with backing from a bipartisan coalition of Democratic foreign
policy hands and neocon Never Trumpers in Washington. Called the Alliance
for Securing Democracy (ASD), the outfit aimed to expose how supposed
Russian Twitter bots were infecting American political discourse with
divisive narratives.
It featured a daily Hamilton 68 online dashboard that highlighted the
supposed bot activity with easily digestible charts. Conveniently, the site
avoided naming any of the digital Kremlin influence accounts it claimed to
be tracking. The initiative was immediately endorsed by John Podesta, the
founder of the Democratic Party think tank the Center for American Progress,
and former chief of staff of Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign.
Julia Ioffe, the Atlantics chief Russia-gate correspondent, promoted the
bot tracker as a very cool tool.Unlike PropOrNot, the ASD was sponsored by
one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall
Fund, which had been founded in 1972 to nurture the special relationship
between the U.S. and what was then West Germany.
Weisburd: Brains behind Dashboard.
The German Marshall Fund is substantially funded by Western governments, and
largely reflects their foreign-policy interests. Its top two financial
sponsors, at more than $1 million per year each, are the U.S. governments
soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the
German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). The U.S. State Department also
provides more than half a million dollars per year, as do the German
Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and the foreign affairs
ministries of Sweden and Norway. It likewise receives at least a quarter of
a million dollars per year from NATO.
Though the German Marshall Fund did not name the donors that specifically
sponsored its Alliance for Securing Democracy initiative, it hosts a whos
who of bipartisan national-security hardliners on the ASDs advisory
council, providing the endeavor with the patina of credibility. They range
from neocon movement icon Bill Kristol to former Clinton foreign policy
advisor Jake Sullivan and ex-CIA director Michael Morell.
Jamie Fly, a German Marshall Fund fellow and Asia specialist, emerged as one
of the most prolific promoters of the new Russian bot tracker in the media.
Together with Laura Rosenberger, a former foreign policy aide to Hillary
Clintons 2016 campaign, Fly appeared in a series of interviews and
co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media
crackdown.
During a March 2018 interview on C-Span, Fly complained that Russian
accounts were trying to promote certain messages, amplify certain content,
raise fringe views, pit Americans against each other, and we need to deal
with this ongoing problem and find ways through the government, through tech
companies, through broader society to tackle this issue.
Yet few of the sites on PropOrNots blacklist, and none of the alternative
sites that were erased in the recent Facebook purge that Fly and his
colleagues take apparent credit for, were Russian accounts. Perhaps the only
infraction they could have been accused of was publishing views that Fly and
his cohorts saw as fringe.
Whats more, the ASD has been forced to admit that the mass of Twitter
accounts it initially identified as Russian bots were not necessarily bots
and may not have been Russian either.
Not Convinced on This Bot thing
A November 2017 investigation by Max Blumenthal found that the ASDs
Hamilton 68 dashboard was the creation of a collection of cranks,
counter-terror retreads, online harassers and paranoiacs operating with
support from some of the most prominent figures operating within the
American national security apparatus.
These figures included the same George Washington University Center for
Cyber and Homeland Security fellows Andrew Weisburd and Clint Watts that
were cited as experts in the Washington Posts article promoting PropOrNot.
Weisburd, who has been described as one of the brains behind the Hamilton 68
dashboard, once maintained a one-man, anti-Palestinian web monitoring
initiative that specialized in doxxing left-wing activists, Muslims and
anyone he considered anti-American. More recently, he has taken to Twitter
to spout off murderous and homophobic fantasies about Glenn Greenwald, the
editor of The Intercept a publication the ASD flagged without explanation
as a vehicle for Russian influence operations.
Watts, for his part, has testified before Congress on several occasions to
call on the government to quell information rebellions with censorious
measures including nutritional labels for online media. He has received
fawning publicity from corporate media and been rewarded with a contributor
role for NBC on the basis of his supposed expertise in ferreting out Russian
disinformation.
However, under questioning during a public event by Grayzone contributor
Ilias Stathatos, Watts admitted that substantial parts of his testimony were
false, and refused to provide evidence to support some of his most colorful
claims about malicious Russian bot activity.
In a separate interview with Buzzfeed, Watts appeared to completely disown
the Hamilton 68 bot tracker as a legitimate tool. Im not convinced on this
bot thing, Watts confessed. He even called the narrative that he helped
manufacture overdone, and admitted that the accounts Hamilton 68 tracked
were not necessarily directed by Russian intelligence actors.
We dont even think theyre all commanded in Russia at all. We think some
of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into
promoting Russia, Watts conceded.
But these stunning admissions did little to slow the momentum of the coming
purge.
Enter the Atlantic Council
In his conversation with Sprague, the German Marshall Funds Fly stated that
he was working with the Atlantic Council in the campaign to purge
alternative media from social media platforms like Facebook.
The Atlantic Council is another Washington-based think tank that serves as a
gathering point for neoconservatives and liberal interventionists pushing
military aggression around the globe. It is funded by NATO and repressive,
US-allied governments including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Turkey, as well as
by Ukrainian oligarchs like Victor Pynchuk.
This May, Facebook announced a partnership with the Atlantic Councils
Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to identify, expose, and explain
disinformation during elections around the world.
The Atlantic Councils DFRLab is notorious for its zealous conflation of
legitimate online dissent with illicit Russian activity, embracing the same
tactics as PropOrNot and the ASD.
Ben Nimmo, a DFRLab fellow who has built his reputation on flushing out
online Kremlin influence networks, embarked on an embarrassing witch hunt
this year that saw him misidentify several living, breathing individuals as
Russian bots or Kremlin influence accounts. Nimmos victims included
Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the
famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner
named Ian Shilling.
Shilling: I am not a bot.
In an interview with Sky News, Shilling delivered a memorable tirade against
his accusers. I have no Kremlin contacts whatsoever; I do not know any
Russians, I have no contact with the Russian government or anything to do
with them, he exclaimed. I am an ordinary British citizen who happens to
do research on the current neocon wars which are going on in Syria at this
very moment.
With the latest Facebook and Twitter purges, ordinary citizens like Shilling
are being targeted in the open, and without apology. The mass deletions of
alternative media accounts illustrate how national security hardliners from
the German Marshall Fund and Atlantic Council (and whoever was behind
PropOrNot) have instrumentalized the manufactured panic around Russian
interference to generate public support for a wider campaign of media
censorship.
In his conversation in Berlin with Sprague, Fly noted with apparent approval
that, Trump is now pointing to Chinese interference in the 2018 election.
As the mantra of foreign interference expands to a new adversarial power,
the clampdown on voices of dissent in online media is almost certain to
intensify.
As Fly promised, This is just the beginning.
This article originally appeared on the Grayzoneproject.com
Jeb Sprague is a visiting faculty at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. He is the author of Globalizing the Caribbean: Political economy,
social change, and the transnational capitalist class (Temple University
Press, 2019), Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in Haiti
(Monthly Review Press, 2012), and is the editor of Globalization and
transnational capitalism in Asia and Oceania (Routledge, 2016). He is a
co-founder of the Network for the Critical Studies of Global Capitalism.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books
including best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That
Shattered the Party, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty
One Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, and The Management of Savagery,
which will be published later this year by Verso. He has also produced
numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and
several documentaries including Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the forthcoming
Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a
journalistic light on Americas state of perpetual war and its dangerous
domestic repercussions.
