"RT's reports often characterize the United States as a 'surveillance state' and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use.
"RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial collapse."
Is the corporate state so obtuse it thinks the American public has not, on its own, reached these conclusions about the condition of the nation? Is this what it defines as "fake news"? But most important, isn't this the truth that the courtiers in the mainstream press and public broadcasting, dependent on their funding from sources such as the Koch brothers, refuse to present? And isn't it, in the end, the truth that frightens them the most? Abby Martin and Ben Norton ripped apart the mendacity of the report and the complicity of the corporate media in my "On Contact" show titled "Real purpose of intel report on Russian hacking with Abby Martin & Ben Norton."
The blacklist published by the shadowy and anonymous site PropOrNot in November 2016 soon followed. The blacklist was composed of 199 sites PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, "reliably echo Russian propaganda." More than half of those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were major left-wing outlets including AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. The blacklist and the spurious accusations that these sites disseminated "fake news" on behalf of Russia were given prominent play in The Washington Post in a story headlined "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during the election, experts say." The reporter, Craig Timberg, wrote that the goal of the Russian propaganda effort, according to "independent researchers who have tracked the operation," was "punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy." Last December, Truthdig columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote a good piece about PropOrNot, which to this day remains essentially a secret organization.
The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, also the founder and CEO of Amazon, has a $600 million contract with the CIA. Google, likewise, is deeply embedded within the security and surveillance state and aligned with the ruling elites. Amazon recently purged over 1,000 negative reviews of Hillary Clinton's new book, "What Happened." The effect was that the book's Amazon rating jumped from two and a half stars to five stars. Do corporations such as Google and Amazon carry out such censorship on behalf of the U.S. government? Or is this censorship their independent contribution to protect the corporate state?
In the name of combating Russia-inspired "fake news," Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN in April imposed algorithms or filters, overseen by "evaluators," that hunt for key words such as "U.S. military," "inequality" and "socialism," along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker. Ben Gomes, Google's vice president for search engineering, says Google has amassed some 10,000 "evaluators" to determine the "quality" and veracity of websites. Internet users doing searches on Google, since the algorithms were put in place, are diverted from sites such as Truthdig and directed to mainstream publications such as The New York Times. The news organizations and corporations that are imposing this censorship have strong links to the Democratic Party. They are cheerleaders for American imperial projects and global capitalism. Because they are struggling in the new media environment for profitability, they have an economic incentive to be part of the witch hunt.
The World Socialist Web Site reported in July that its aggregate volume, or "impressions" -- links displayed by Google in response to a search request -- fell dramatically over a short period after the new algorithms were imposed. It also wrote: "... [O]ut of the 17 sites declared to be 'fake news' by the Washington Post's discredited blacklist, 14 had their global ranking fall. The average decline of the global reach of all of these sites is 25 percent. ..."
Another article, "Google rigs searches to block access to World Socialist Web Site," by the same website that month said:
"During the month of May, Google searches including the word 'war' produced 61,795 WSWS impressions. In July, WSWS impressions fell by approximately 90 percent, to 6,613.
"Searches for the term 'Korean war' produced 20,392 impressions in May. In July, searches using the same words produced zero WSWS impressions. Searches for 'North Korea war' produced 4,626 impressions in May. In July, the result of the same search produced zero WSWS impressions. 'India Pakistan war' produced 4,394 impressions in May. In July, the result, again, was zero. And 'Nuclear war 2017' produced 2,319 impressions in May, and zero in July.
"To cite some other searches: 'WikiLeaks,' fell from 6,576 impressions to zero, 'Julian Assange' fell from 3,701 impressions to zero, and 'Laura Poitras' fell from 4,499 impressions to zero. A search for 'Michael Hastings' -- the reporter who died in 2013 under suspicious circumstances -- produced 33,464 impressions in May, but only 5,227 impressions in July.
"In addition to geopolitics, the WSWS regularly covers a broad range of social issues, many of which have seen precipitous drops in search results. Searches for 'food stamps,' 'Ford layoffs,' 'Amazon warehouse,' and 'secretary of education' all went down from more than 5,000 impressions in May to zero impressions in July."
The accusation that left-wing sites collude with Russia has made them theoretically subject, along with those who write for them, to the Espionage Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which requires Americans who work on behalf of a foreign party to register as foreign agents.
The latest salvo came last week. It is the most ominous. The Department of Justice called on RT America and its "associates" -- which may mean people like me -- to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No doubt, the corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents, meaning we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the intent. The government will not stop with RT. The FBI has been handed the authority to determine who is a "legitimate" journalist and who is not. It will use this authority to decimate the left.
This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot honestly compete in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do -- govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence.
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