Reuters (9/19/18) described two branches of the National Endowment for Democracy, set up by the Reagan administration during the Cold War to promote US foreign policy objectives, as “two US nonprofits.”
Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18).
In a previous FAIR article (8/22/18), I noted that the “fake news” issue was being used as a pretext to attack the left and progressive news sites. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm have reduced traffic significantly for progressive outlets like Common Dreams (5/3/18), while the pages of Venezuelan government–backed TeleSur English and the independent Venezuelanalysis were shut down without warning, and only reinstated after a public outcry.
The Washington, DC–based NDI and IRI are staffed with senior Democratic and Republican politicians; the NDI is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while the late Sen. John McCain was the longtime IRI chair. Both groups were created in 1983 as arms of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Cold War enterprise backed by then–CIA director William Casey (Jacobin, 3/7/18). That these two US government creations, along with a NATO offshoot like the Atlantic Council, are used by Facebook to distinguish real from fake news is effectively state censorship.
Facebook’s collaboration with the NED organizations is particularly troubling, as both have aggressively pursued regime change against leftist governments overseas. The NDI undermined the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, and continues to do so to this day, while the IRI claimed a key role in the 2002 coup against leftist President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, announcing that it had
served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…. We stand ready to continue our partnership with the courageous Venezuelan people.
The Reuters report (9/19/18) mentioned that Facebook was anxious to better curate what Brazilians saw on their feeds in the run-up to their presidential elections, which pits far-right Jair Bolsonaro against leftist Fernando Haddad. The US government has a long history of undermining democracy in Brazil, from supporting a coup in 1964 against the progressive Goulart administration to continually spying on leftist President Dilma Rousseff (BBC, 7/4/15) in the run-up to the parliamentary coup against her in 2016 (CounterSpin, 6/2/17).
Glenn Greenwald (Intercept, 12/30/17) reported that “Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials.”
Soon after it partnered with the Atlantic Council, Facebook moved to delete accounts and pages connected with Iranian broadcasting channels (CNBC, 8/23/18), while The Intercept (12/30/17) reported that in 2017 the social media platform met with Israeli government officials to discuss which Palestinian voices it should censor. Ninety-five percent of Israeli government requests for deletion were granted. Thus the US government and its allies are effectively using the platform to silence dissenting opinion, both at home and on the world stage, controlling what Facebook‘s 2 billion users see and do not see.
Progressives should be deeply skeptical that these moves have anything to do with their stated objective of promoting democracy. Bloomberg Businessweek (9/29/17) reported that the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party went to Facebook headquarters for discussions with US companies about how it could use the platform for recruitment and micro-targeting in the 2017 elections. AfD tripled its previous vote share, becoming the third-largest party in Germany, the far right’s best showing since World War II.
Public trust in government is at 18 percent—an all-time low (Pew, 12/14/17). There is similar mistrust of Facebook, with only 20 percent of Americans agreeing social media sites do a good job separating fact from fiction. And yet, worldwide, Facebook is a crucial news source. Fifty-two percent of Brazilians, 61 percent of Mexicans, and 51 percent of Italians and Turks use the platform for news; 39 percent of the US gets their news from the site.
This means that, despite the fact that even its own public mistrusts it, the US government has effectively become the arbiter of what the world sees and hears, with the ability to marginalize or simply delete news from organizations or countries that do not share its opinions. This power could be used at sensitive times, like elections. This is not an idle threat. The US created an entire fake social network for Cubans that aimed to stir unrest and overthrow the Cuban government, according to the Guardian (4/3/14).
That a single corporation has such a monopoly over the flow of worldwide news is already problematic, but the increasing meshing of corporate and US government control over the means of communication is particularly worrying. All those who believe in free and open exchange of information should oppose Facebook becoming a tool of US foreign policy.
“How many foxes does it take to guard a hen house?” is no joke
Face Book or The NYT…just keep checking validity from non corporate sources if you can..
I don’t have any other comments at the moment.
Shame on anyone that sees Facebook as a credible source of news. They deserve to be misinformed. Let’s just hope they don’t vote.
Facebook is a place to connect with all those long-lost acquaintances that you never really cared about in the first place. Yet, now you can see voyeuristically if they are fat or their kids are ugly. Facebook’s job is to garner impressions to sell to advertisers. People go to Facebook to escape reality — not to be educated about different worldviews or philosophies. That’s Fair’s job. If anything, Facebook succeeds if it is able to affirm the users mainstream opinions and target ads in that direction. Their job is to create nice corrals for the sheep to wander through while staring captively at advertisements on the wall.
If someone is getting “news” from the site, it’s likely what they or their like-minded friends “liked” previously. If that disturbs you, there is one simple trick to fix everything. Facebook “hates” when you do it. “Like” alternative news sources to infect your friends’ feeds (and maybe their heads). It’ll pop their bubble until they ignore or block you. Otherwise, go check out the photo of Bob and his children or Betty showing off her latest plastic surgery.
You can’t ask Facebook to filter things you don’t like (conservative views) and then not expect the same to happen to your own. Enjoy the suck. You helped create it.
Now, Facebook is another community wherein participating in commercial society becomes increasingly more important relative to “civil society”. Cognitive dissonance threatens consumer confidence.
All of the organizations mentioned, including Facebook, Reuters, Atlantic Council, NED, NDI and IRI are closely connected with the Rockefeller CFR, flagship of the globalist establishment. Madeleine Albright and John McCain are/were CFR members, along with Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg, Reuters president Stephen Adler, NED president Carl Gershman, Atlantic Council president Frederick Kempe and most of the Council directors. See lists in the CFR annual report.
I have never joined facebook. The whole idea of it is horrifying. Why do I say this? I had thought about joining–BUT when a friend decided o check on an ex relationship–I was astounded with what she— an unknown person to my ex could find out. WHY would people knowingly do this to themselves? This lack of privacy is horrifying—-but then too, as being connected has come to mean ——-no privacy from facebook to Equifax and apparently all 17 spy agencies too–Is there any relevance to the 4th Amendment anymore?
Common Dreams has themselves done their fair share of censoring. It’s been a long time since they have been progressive.
In March of last year, at the behest of several international Jewish organizations, Amazon.com expunged over 100 listings of books on Holocaust history of which said organizations disapproved. Look up the granddaddy (1976) of them all, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Arthur Butz, which was listed for decades. You’ll get a doggie.
Conragalation in worlda :))))
I think it’s time for you to update this news coverage based on my journalistic investigation as to why TeleSUR and their partners were actually unpublished:
https://medium.com/@arielvoyager/censorship-or-community-standards-b8c9f6b840c8