Summary of

Facebook Censorship of Alternative Media “Just the Beginning,” Says Top Neocon Insider

By Max Blumenthal and Jeb Sprague

Oct. 23, 2018

At a Berlin security conference, hardline neocon Jamie Fly appeared to claim some credit for the recent coordinated purge of alternative media.

1. Jamie Fly

• German Marshall Fund fellow and director of its Asia program 
• 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. 

JF: “Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system. 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 ... 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.

He is the embodiment of a neoconservative cadre.

In 2009, JF was appointed director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a rebranded version of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century (PNAC). 

• PNAC 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 Washington’s sphere of influence. 

JF assumed a role as Marco Rubio's 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.

JF co-authored several op-eds emphasizing the need for a massive social media crackdown. ... 

“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.”

2. 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. government’s soft-power arm the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and 
• the German Foreign Office (known in German as the 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.

3. RussiaGate by Hillary Clinton

[from book "Shattered"] 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 wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up … Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." (1, 2, 3, 4)

4. Craig Timberg - Washington Post - PropOrNot

Less than three weeks after Clinton’s defeat, the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg published “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news.'” (Nov. 24, 2016)

PropOrNot listed some 200 American media outlets as Russian “online propaganda.” 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 listed.

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. 

5. Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD)

 ... 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.

ASD was sponsored by one of the most respected think tanks in Washington, the German Marshall Fund

bipartisan national-security hardliners on the ASD’s advisory council, 

• Bill Kristol, 
• former Clinton foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan, and 
• ex-CIA director Michael Morell.

6. Atlantic Council 

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.

6.a Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab)

This May (2018), Facebook announced a partnership with the DFRLab to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation during elections around the world.” 

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.” Nimmo’s victims included ... a British pensioner named Ian Shilling. 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.”

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Version: 29.10.2018

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