"In the event that access to Facebook is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors are able to successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our user base and user engagement may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected."
Avoiding Reality
In other words, another way to have framed this story is that powerful politicians who could severely harm Facebook's business model were getting in the face of Facebook executives and essentially demanding that they come up with something to support the Democratic Party's theory of "Russian meddling."
The Democratic leaders wanted this finding as an explanation for Hillary Clinton's stunning defeat, rather than going through the painful process of examining why the party has steadily lost ground in white working-class areas across the country.
What is missed in these Russia-bashing articles is that the Democratic brand has been sinking for years, including massive losses in statehouses across the country as well as in Congress. The party's decline was not a one-off event with Donald Trump suddenly snaking away with significant parts of the white working class because the Russians bought some Facebook ads.
However, instead of looking in the mirror, national Democrats demanded that Facebook executives ferret out whatever tiny or imaginary information there might be about some Russians buying Facebook ads -- and then allow those coerced findings to be fed into the excuse industry for why Hillary Clinton lost.
And, what about the Post's repeated accusations about Russia engaging in "disinformation" and "fake news" without offering a single example? Apparently, these assertions have become such articles of faith in the U.S. mainstream media that they don't require any proof.
However, honest journalism demands examples and evidence, not just vague accusations. The reality is that the U.S. government has stumbled again and again when seeking to paint RT as a disinformation outlet or a vehicle for undermining American democracy.
For instance, the Jan. 6 report on alleged Russian "cyber operations," released by Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, included a lengthy appendix, dated from 2012, which decried RT for such offenses as allowing a debate among third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates; covering the Occupy Wall Street protests; and citing the environmental dangers from "fracking."
The idea that American democracy is threatened by allowing third-party candidates or other American dissidents to have a voice is at best an upside-down understanding of democracy and, more likely, an exercise in hypocritical propaganda.
False Accusations
Another misfired attempt to discredit RT came from Obama's Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard Stengel, who issued a "Dipnote" in April 2014, which helped establish the narrative of RT as a source of Russian disinformation.
For instance, Stengel claimed that RT reported a "ludicrous assertion" that the United States had spent $5 billion to produce Ukraine's "regime change" in February 2014.
But what Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine, apparently failed to understand was that RT was referring to a public speech by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, in which she told them that "we have invested more than $5 billion" in what was needed for Ukraine to achieve its "European aspirations." In other words, the RT report wasn't "ludicrous" at all.
Nuland also was a leading proponent of "regime change" in Ukraine who personally cheered on the Maidan demonstrators, even passing out cookies. In an intercepted pre-coup phone call with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland discussed who should run the new government and pondered with Pyatt how to "glue" or "midwife this thing."
So, Stengel was the one disseminating false information, not RT.
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