Fw: Government Intel And Security Agencies Behind NGO Demands For More Censorship By X/Twitter
Jim Delton
Government Intel And Security Agencies Behind NGO Demands For More Censorship By X/TwitterGroups leading the advertiser boycott of X/Twitter receive money from and have a history of spying for governments
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) are nongovernmental organizations, their leaders say. When they demand more censorship of online hate speech, as they are currently doing of X, formerly Twitter, those NGOs are doing it as free citizens and not, say, as government agents. But the fact of the matter is that the US and other Western governments fund ISD, the UK government indirectly funds CCDH, and, for at least 40 years, ADL spied on its enemies and shared intelligence with the US, Israel and other governments. The reason all of this matters is that ADL’s advertiser boycott against X may be an effort by governments to regain the ability to censor users on X that they had under Twitter before Musk’s takeover last November. Internal Twitter and Facebook messages show that representatives of the US government, including the White House, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as the UK government, successfully demanded Facebook and Twitter censorship of their users over the last several years. ADL is waging a very similar campaign against X/Twitter that it successfully waged against Facebook in 2020. In just three days, 800 companies, including $129 billion consumer products giant Unilever, withdrew tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue from Facebook until it agreed to ADL’s censorship demands. “The Facebook caved to far-left pressure groups and now allows them to silently dictate policy in exchange for ad money,” said Musk yesterday. “That is the relationship they’ve had with X/Twitter for many years. Presumably, they have that with all Western search or social media orgs.” It’s possible that there has been an increase in hate on X since Elon Musk bought the company. With greater free speech policies comes the possibility of more offensive speech, including racist or antisemitic speech. Bigotry does exist, and it should be challenged. But there is no good evidence of that. Public has debunked claims by ISD and CCDH of an increase. And researchers have repeatedly debunked ADL’s claims of rising antisemitism for years. In 2009, an Israeli filmmaker found that ADL could not support its claims of an antisemitism crisis. Wrote NPR in a review of the film, “When he presses ADL staffers for evidence to back up their claims of a sharp spike in North American anti-Semitism in 2007, they can offer only wan transgressions…” Eleven years later, Liel Leibovitz noted in Tablet that ADL had, for a report, “counted hundreds of threatening calls to Jewish community centers made by a mentally troubled Israeli teenager. You had to read the report’s fine print to learn that the number of violent attacks against Jews that year had actually decreased by 47%.” ADL, ISD, and CCDH have not presented any good evidence that offensive speech online directly causes “hate-motivated violence,” nor that censorship prevents it. Moreover, last week Public reviewed evidence suggesting that the best way to combat hate speech is through open and public debate, which allows people to change their minds, not censorship. ADL’s main goal is supposed to be stopping “the defamation of the Jewish people,” but the organization is using the legacy of antisemitism and the Holocaust to justify unrelated censorial advocacy work. This is exploitative, and it is defamatory to say that Jews, in general, need and favor censorship. Many Jews on both the left and the right have argued that ADL does not represent their interests. By claiming to speak for all Jewish people while demanding highly unpopular policies, the ADL may be inadvertently driving antisemitism. As troubling as these highly partisan ideological biases are, what’s most dangerous are the past and present ties between ADL, ISD, CCDH, and governments, particularly security and intelligence organizations, which we detail below. Neither ADL, ISD, nor CCDH have responded to multiple requests for more information or an interview. While we have yet to uncover documented proof of a conspiracy by the intelligence and security agencies of the US and British governments to censor citizens, there is sufficient evidence to merit an investigation by members of Congress and the British Parliament. ADL’s Spying For Governments
Although ADL is currently focused on demonizing Trump supporters as “domestic terrorists,” it has a history of partnering with the state and law enforcement to target the Left. In the 1950s, ADL cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and shared its internal files with the committee. ADL purged suspected Jewish communists from its organization, created anti-communist committees, and aided the FBI. In 1993, ADL California police discovered that ADL was operating what the Los Angeles Times called a “nationwide intelligence network” and kept files “on more than 950 political groups, newspapers and labor unions and as many as 12,000 people.” In addition to a few white nationalist organizations, the ADL was also surveilling groups like Greenpeace, the United Farm Workers, the Institute for Palestine Studies, ACT UP, the Association of Vietnam Veterans, and the Japanese-Americans Citizens League. ADL’s files on these groups were confidential and had been “obtained illegally from law enforcement agencies.” Following the revelation of these illegal surveillance tactics, ADL avoided prosecution by agreeing to pay $75,000 to anti-hate programs in San Francisco. The organization later settled a class-action lawsuit in federal court for spying on Arab-Americans, African Americans, and left-wing groups. Plaintiffs alleged that the ADL had hired intelligence agents to gather information about them and had sold information about anti-apartheid groups to the South African government. Investigative journalists say ADL is deeply connected to Western intelligence agencies. “There are some intelligence fronts that are not CIA fronts but fronts for foreign intelligence agencies,” wrote Wayne Madsen in his 2016 book The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries & Contractors. “Although the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is richly deserving of being included in any list of front organizations, it belongs in Israel’s Mossad, not the CIA.” Former Los Angeles law enforcement investigator and journalist, Michael C. Ruppert, wrote in Crossing the Rubicon, in response to the ADL spying scandal, “To think of the ADL affair as something that originated solely with Israeli impetus is to overlook some key historical data.” Ruppert argued that US intelligence agencies used ADL to spy on Americans after the Congressional investigations of the mid-1970s. “As the LAPD scandal was unfolding I served as one of the unnamed sources for the Los Angeles Times’ reporting,” wrote Ruppert. “Although the Times stopped short of stating that US intelligence agencies had supported this intelligence gathering, two decades later the pattern is very clear. The ADL was there when it was needed. Yet, in using the ADL as a plausibly deniable cutout, American intelligence agencies at the state and federal levels paid a price. They gave ADL a license to use the data for its own purposes and created a monster.” Today, ISD, CCDH, and ADL manipulate their research methodology to claim rising hate and antisemitism. ADL, for decades, has claimed that hate is increasing by expanding the definition of “hate” and “hate speech.” ADL’s Hate Symbols Database, for example, asserts that anti-antifa flags, the “okay” hand sign, and “100%” are all examples of white supremacist hate. ADL classifies the numbers 12, 13, 14, 18, 23, 28, 38, 43, 83, 88, 109, 110, 211, 311, 318, and many more as hate speech. ADL also alleges that terms like “deep state” and phrases like “do your own research” are rallying cries for QAnon followers. These classifications can easily lend themselves to the over-reporting of hate and extremism. ADL’s 2023 report about antisemitic attitudes in America states that 85% of Americans believe in at least one anti-Jewish trope, but the most common trope Americans agreed with was the statement, “Jews stick together more than other Americans.” The idea that Jewish people preserve community ties is not necessarily a negative trope, and many people surveyed may have interpreted it as something positive. ADL’s most recent audit of antisemitic incidents was almost entirely based on emails, online form entries, and phone calls to ADL. Hyping antisemitism as a crisis, which ADL explicitly does, can easily lead to an increase in reports regardless of whether incidents are actually on the rise or not. The organization’s sloppy statistics and continual conflation of real antisemitism with criticism of divisive figures like George Soros suggest that it is deliberately using accusations of antisemitism as a partisan tool to silence its political opponents. Today, ADL is demanding ever more power to censor. “What they are demanding is what ADL has long called for in our COMBAT Plan: A unified national strategy to combat antisemitism,” the ADL’s top lobbyist, ex-AIPAC executive Dan Granot, told Jewish Insider. “Now is the time for a concerted, coordinated, whole-of-government strategy to address the hatred that is becoming dangerously mainstream.” Government ties abound. Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is on the ADL board, serving as its Special Advisor for Global Affairs. During the Covid pandemic, Blair’s Institute for Global Change lobbied parliament to enact harsher flagging and fact-checking measures online. Anyone who looks at the ADL Board of Directors and has some awareness of the key players in the Censorship Industrial Complex will be struck by one member, in particular, Yasmin Green. Green is the CEO of Google Jigsaw, an internal group at the Big Tech company founded by Jared Cohen, who worked at the State Department under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Jigsaw developed the “Redirect Method” and has worked with ADL to steer Google users toward videos that would “undermine extremist narratives” as a late-stage “War on Terror” program. Green is also a senior advisor on innovation to the private intelligence firm Oxford Analytica and a member of the Aspen Institute’s Cybersecurity Group, two key Censorship Industrial Complex leaders. Today, ADL’s ties to intelligence and security organizations are closer than ever. It works with the FBI by holding a training session with agents and hosting FBI Director Christopher Wray as a featured speaker. According to Greenblatt, the FBI works directly with ADL “every day.” The Case For An Investigation
We do not have firm proof that there is a conspiracy by the intelligence and security agencies of the United States and Britain to control the content on social media platforms like X and Facebook through their control over CCDH, ISD, and ADL. Perhaps ideological, cultural, and political alignment alone explain the remarkable coordination we have documented. Perhaps the US and UK government funding for CCDH and ISD is insignificant compared to their nongovernmental funders. But there is enough evidence of conspiracy for members of Congress and Parliament to investigate CCDH, ADL, ISD, and other so-called “nongovernmental” organizations for the advocacy of censorship. Who is funding them? What are their relationships with government officials? What is their role in intelligence and security organizations? Evidence abounds of tight connections between the intelligence community and Consider that all of the above has been taking place in the background of investigations by UK NGO Big Brother Watch, which has discovered and publicized over the last several months a secretive UK censorship organization, the “Counter-Disinformation Unit” (CDU), which collaborated with British intelligence and security organizations, as well as the BBC. It worked to censor users in the UK just as the Virality Project, run by Stanford Internet Observatory, worked to censor users in the US, on identical issues relating to Covid vaccines. “The intelligence community,” reported the Telegraph of London last week, “which includes MI6, MI5 and GCHQ – continued ‘working closely’ with the CDU ‘where appropriate’ during this time [2019 to 2020], documents show.” There is reason to believe that the US State Department, which has funded ISD, and the UK government, which has funded CCDH, are using those organizations as “cut-outs” or “fronts” for demanding censorship. A former member of the UK parliament, Imran Ahmed, started CCDH. And before running for parliament, Ahmed studied Russian at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow and earned a bachelor's degree in war studies at King's College London, which is famous as a place from where spy agencies recruit. Ahmed then went to work for the United Nations as a special assistant for political affairs in Mogadishu. After that, he developed his information operation skills at advertising giant M&C Saatchi. His appears to be an intelligence career tailor-made for spreading disinformation and demanding censorship on behalf of the UK government and its allies. Just this summer, the Member of Parliament who has most championed a crackdown on free speech in the UK, Damien Collins, joined CCDH’s advisory board. The arrival of Collins comes shortly after the UK government gave a 5 million pound grant to a foundation that funds CCDH. ISD accepts funding from many governments, including Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Canada, the UK, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States. It also receives funding from the European Commission and the United Nations. The US State Department gave the ISD a grant in September 2021 to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda.” The Institute for Strategic Dialogue won the grant after participating in an event sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the U.S. Embassy in Paris, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). What’s clear is that we also need to change our view of ADL, CCDH, and ISD. They cannot be considered “nongovernmental organizations.” Their ties to the government, particularly the national security state, are too strong. It’s high time we got to the bottom of who, exactly, is behind them. After we do, we need to clean house. That will start with replacing the heads of the FBI, CIA, and MI6 and rooting out the unelected, authoritarian, and paramilitary elements within them in the same way our governments did after the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.
© 2023 Michael Shellenberger
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