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YouTube Just Banned QAnon. Will It Actually Work? – Rolling Stone

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On Thursday, YouTube became the latest platform to crack down on QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory promoting the idea of a deep state leftist cabal of pedophiles and child traffickers.

In a blog post, the company said that it would be taking another step in our efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence. It specifically cited QAnon as an example, noting that it had removed thousands of individual QAnon-themed videos and hundreds of QAnon-affiliated channels as a result of this policy update.

In announcing its policy update, YouTube has joined a slew of other platforms that have taken action against proponents of the conspiracy theory, including, most recently, Facebook, Pinterest, and the TikTok competitor Triller. Theres a greater focus in the lead-up to the presidential election on having clear, accurate communication to ensure that we are able to have a safe, fair democratic election, Kathleen Stansberry, associate professor of communications at Elon, tells Rolling Stone. Theres a lot of concern that widespread misinformation is an increasing problem and that needs to be addressed both by users and platform level.

QAnon has also been linked to episodes of real-world violence, such as the 2019 murder of a Staten Island mob boss, a 2018 incident with an armored vehicle at the Hoover Dam, and the kidnapping of multiple children across the country this year. Such incidents have likely played a role in putting pressure on platforms to update or clarify their content guidelines to scrub their QAnon presence, Stansberry says.

Following widespread de-platforming by social media websites, many QAnon believers have taken to alternative platforms like Parler and MeWe, which cater to conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists by offering much more lax content guidelines.

From the very start of the QAnon movement in 2017, YouTube has played an active part in the community, particularly for those new to the movement. YouTube has played a major role in radicalizing Q believers, with popular Q videos like Fall of the Cabal and Out of Shadows often serving as an introduction to the movement, author and QAnon researcher Mike Rothschild tells Rolling Stone.

Although platforms like Facebook have often served as entry points for newcomers to the community, YouTubes role as a storytelling platform has served a particularly powerful function for QAnon, Stansberry says. As with many conspiracy theories, theres rich lore attached to some of the structure of QAnon, she says. Its almost like the plot of a movie or an immersive video game. You become very sucked into the story. YouTube is a very effective platform for the dissemination of such narratives, she says.

Rothschild says that, like many other sites de-platforming efforts, YouTubes latest move likely wont scrub QAnon from the web entirely. YouTube banning Q content is a welcome and overdue step in de-platforming Q, but Id caution against looking at is as a death blow for the conspiracy, she says. Q promoters excel at ban evasion, and social media platforms are often slow to follow up on their promises of large scale bans.

Yet forcing believers off YouTube will likely reduce other peoples exposure to dangerous QAnon-related ideas, thus reducing the likelihood of them becoming radicalized, Stansberry says. We often think of conspiracy theories like this as hydras the more you cut off heads, the more heads grow, she says. But if you can cut off the source of attention and cut off access to eyeballs and people, then it becomes weaker.

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YouTube Just Banned QAnon. Will It Actually Work? - Rolling Stone

Opinion | The Facebook-Twitter-Trump Wars Are Actually About Something Else – The New York Times

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Much of the outrage around the Trump era and social media platforms like, most recently, the decision by Facebook and Twitter to reduce the reach of a highly questionable New York Post story about Hunter Biden is actually about government power and accountability. More specifically, people are angry about the absence of those things.

Going back to the 2016 Republican primaries, institutions that many people thought would act as a check on Donald Trumps rise to power have failed to stop him. Rules around emoluments and the Hatch Act have gone ignored. Even broader efforts to rein in Mr. Trump the Mueller investigation, his impeachment changed little about the presidents behavior.

But authority abhors a vacuum. As far as many people are concerned, if the government cant impose consequences for Mr. Trump, then the platforms ought to do so. The social media companies seem to relish the power that comes with that spotlight, but they do not want the responsibility.

Quinta Jurecic, the managing editor of the Lawfare blog, who closely covered Mr. Trumps impeachment trial, argued that the platforms are running up against some of the same problems government institutions dealt with during impeachment, when many of the guardrails of government broke loose. In a well-functioning political system, we would never get to the point where social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were having to decide how to handle a possible disinformation campaign two weeks before a presidential election, because all those other institutions would have quashed the problem to begin with, she told me.

Ms. Jurecic argues that the tech giants can feel like the only checks left standing because theyre among the few entities with any power at all. Its as if a train has skidded off the rails and jumped every barrier, and Facebook and Twitter are standing there waving their arms and yelling, Stop! But theyre not going to be able to make it stop all on their own.

The best example of this is the four-year debate over whether Twitter should ban Mr. Trump for his conspiratorial, untrue and geopolitically dangerous tweets. The argument in favor of deplatforming the president is a strong one, given that he frequently flouts and violates the companys rules. But the calls to ban Mr. Trump dont stem from a deep respect of Twitters rules but instead from concerns about national security. His winking calls to LIBERATE are potentially destabilizing. His constant tweets pushing mail-in ballot misinformation threaten to undermine the integrity of the election. In 2017, Mr. Trumps tweets about North Korea were interpreted by North Korean officials as an act of war.

These tweets are destabilizing and threatening. Still, deplatforming the president even a profoundly unfit one appears out of the question for these companies. And, of course, the problem with Mr. Trump is much bigger than his tweets. As Casey Newton, a tech writer who writes the Platformer newsletter, noted recently, Trump is a problem platforms cant solve.

Mr. Newton came to that conclusion citing recent research from Harvards Berkman Klein Center that suggested social media played only a secondary and supportive role in the recent high-profile voting disinformation campaign. Mr. Trumps position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media, the Harvard researchers argued.

Its a decent argument that Donald Trump is, himself, a platform. (After all, he elevates and amplifies people and ideas, is a natural radicalization engine and feeds off our attention.) Still, none of this absolves the social media companies. They are responsible for the loopholes theyve created to allow the president and other elected officials to lie. Not only that, they help to amplify those lies and blur the lines of reality. And their speech moderation policies work only when theyre enforced consistently and transparently something few, if any, social media platforms have managed to do (on Friday Twitter reversed its policy on the Hunter Biden story).

The amplification cycle that Mr. Trump enjoys is part of a bigger information ecosystem that involves participation from the president, the platforms and the news media. The platforms and the media can (sometimes) exist in this equation without each other you can take one of them out, or you can introduce meaningful friction into the way they amplify information, and the system will still operate. But the president is essential.

Where does this leave us? Nowhere good. It makes sense that Mr. Trump and Republicans who effectively have no party platform and who seem wholly uninterested in governing beyond confirming judges and posting memes to own the libs would deem any authority forcing them to play by any set of rules as a near-existential threat. Just as it makes sense that, for Mr. Trumps opponents, the platforms occupy an uncomfortable role as one of the last lines of defense for democracy.

The entire debacle is what happens when two broken systems information distribution and American politics collide. It will most likely be very hard to fix one without the other, and there are no easy solutions. The reality of what it will take to fix it all will probably bore and frustrate everyone. In both cases, solutions will be achieved only with clear and transparent systems of rules and precedents, backed up by real accountability for offenders over a long enough period of time to build up real trust.

But the biggest hurdle is our stakeholders lack of a collective desire to fix this situation instead of exploiting the byproducts of our broken systems to score cheap political points. Both the platforms and lawmakers need to want to do the hard work of actual governance. Which is why we have a long way to go.

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Opinion | The Facebook-Twitter-Trump Wars Are Actually About Something Else - The New York Times

Why ACT are so dangerous & why they will cost National the 2023 election – thedailyblog.co.nz

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The ACT Party have gone from a 1% Party to an 8% Party.

Their sudden rise because of Nationals implosion means much of their crazy far undergrad right wing policy is not being examined at all

no one is voting ACT because of these crazy policies, I doubt most of the new ACT converts have any idea of these polices, ACT is now a Right Wing Values Party and right wingers who have been let down by National are flocking to Seymour.

It started LIKE I FUCKING WARNED IT WOULD when the bloody woke identity politics activists went on their deplatforming rampage and tried to strangle free speech off.

In the end, David invited a feminist conference onto Parliament grounds because Masey Uni in Wellington deplatformed it!

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

The woke ended up making David a free speech hero FFS!

I warned the woke at the time that all they were doing was giving ACT the ammunition ACT would would use against us, and that picking a free speech fight with Seymour could awaken a dormant electoral fault line that will bite us in the arse.

Once ACT started registering 2MPs, it became a viable political vehicle for the Gun festishists and Davids ongoing performance has made him the defacto Leader of the Opposition.

As National have floundered, ACT have looked stronger and peoples gut political values have done the rest.

The problem is ACT are so fucking right wing that the idea of them + National being the answer to 2023s issues could only be true if we have been invaded by UFOs and they are demanding all members of the Government must be immediately handed over as human sacrifices to our new Alien overlords. In that scenario, voting ACT + National in makes sense.

Outside that scenario, no.

Once left wing and centrist voters realise just how far right ACT really are, the fear of keeping them from Government will outweigh whatever sin Jacinda has committed.

ACTs sudden and uncritical rise will hurt National and win Labour the 2023 election.

Its easy to cry wolf when the wolf is a brain hungry zombie dog hunting for human flesh in a premature infants ward.

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, soif you value having an independent voice going into this pandemic and 2020 election please donate here.

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Why ACT are so dangerous & why they will cost National the 2023 election - thedailyblog.co.nz

Report Says Shadowbanning Is RealAnd It’s Suppressing Sex Workers – The Daily Dot

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Opinion

Im shadowbanned from Twitter. According to shadowban.eu, my Twitter account @acvalens is banned from search and search suggestions. My sex work account is similarly impacted. Whenever I share content related to my sex work on either username, my tweets advertising my content are far less likely to be seen by my followers. This harms my ability to pay the bills, which is a minor nuisance at best and a financial crisis at worst, depending on the month. This is something called shadowbanning, a form of content moderation where users visibility is strictly limited without warning nor explanation.

Ive dealt with shadowbanning for a few years now, but my sex work content has been significantly suppressed since June. My engagement has decreased because, I suspect, Twitter is less likely to show my sex work content on my followers feeds. My story mirrors other sex workers experiences. Its also the subject behind Posting Into the Void, a new peer-led research report by sex worker-centered tech collective Hacking//Hustling. The report, penned by researchers Danielle Blunt, Emily Coombes, Shanelle Mullin, and Ariel Wolf, compares and contrasts the ways social media platforms target sex workers and activists, organizers, and protesters (AOPs) on services like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The reports information comes from a survey Hacking//Hustling sent out in June, and the fast turnaround is not a coincidence. In an email interview with the Daily Dot, Blunt warned the U.S. government is still on the offensive against Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which SESTA-FOSTA infamously watered down in 2018.

It was important for us to get this information out as quickly as possible, before future amendments to CDA 230 were signed into law and content moderation becomes more extreme, Blunt said. I hope that civilians [non-sex workers] and AOPs understand how the repression and deplatforming of sex workers impacts them too and that this research reaches outside of the sex working community.

Shadowbans are complicated, in part because they dont just impact marginalized users. Conservatives commonly claim theyre the biggest targets of the practice; the term itself gained mainstream prominence after President Donald Trump tweeted about it. Nor are social media platforms transparent about their shadowbanning process, making it difficult to verify when a user is shadowbanned and when they arent. So what are sex workers up against, and how are shadowbans impacting the American public at large? The answer is as urgent as it is complex.

According to Posting Into the Void, shadowbanning is a tool used by online platforms to reduce the prevalence of content that the platform deems high-risk and that should not be easily discoverable. Shadowbanning is an umbrella term and describes many different practices, from hiding users accounts on sitewide searches to preventing users posts from being seen by others.

Because of these types of reduced visibility and discoverability, an account might show up less in other users feeds, unable to connect with new followers, the report notes. At times, shadowbanning can make social media platforms unusable, for example, when you are unable to connect with or find community and clients.

Shadowbanning has roots in corporate advertising on mainstream social media platforms. Before shadowbans, alerts informed banned users that they were removed from a site, which lowers banned users exposure to paid ads. Shadowbans allow platforms to simultaneously control impacted users speech while continuing to monetize their time on the platform. Hacking//Hustling describes this as a core component of surveillance capitalism, a market structure in which private human data is computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets for knowing what we will do now, soon, and later, as the terms inventor Shoshanna Zuboff said in 2019.

Deplatforming an individual means that the platform is no longer able to generate ad revenue, sell data to data brokerage firms, or provide data to Social Media Intelligence companies, Hacking//Hustlings report notes. Shadowbanning becomes a very powerful tool for platforms to silence dissent while still turning a profit and collaborating with the state to surveil and police communities.

Shadowbanning is manipulative and opaque. Its impossible to know if youve been shadowbanned unless you use a shadowban test, such as shadowban.eu for Twitter or Triberr for Instagram. These tests use Twitter and Instagrams content visibility features, such as searching a users account, in order to declare whether a user is or isnt shadowbanned, and theyre partially based on guesswork. As Triberr puts it, its test is largely based on several assumptions related to Instagram and its algorithms, as well as insights from the Instagram user community. Without confirmation from social media platforms, its hard to know exactly how shadowbans work. This sows doubt in shadowbanned users and may make them feel confused, self-conscious, or even ashamed. These responses are symptoms of gaslighting, which social media platforms engage in by design, Hacking//Hustling argues.

The term structural gaslighting was coined by the 12 doctors behind Scientific Americans George Floyds Autopsy and the Structural Gaslighting of America and describes when the state, structures, or institutions deny a set of practices which certain users or communities know to be true, Hacking//Hustling notes. While structural gaslighting originated as a way to describe Black Americans experiences with state and institutional structures that gaslight them into thinking their experiences with oppression are not real, its use across state and corporate institutions is not coincidental. Posting Into the Void used this definition as the foundation for a new term, platform gaslighting, which is structural gaslighting that occurs when platforms deny a set of practices which certain users know to be true. Twitter, for example, has regularly engaged in platform gaslighting regarding its moderation features, up to and including gaslighting me as a reporter and shadowbanning victim.

Our position on shadowbanning hasnt changed, a Twitter spokesperson told me in December 2019, we dont do it.

I contributed to Hacking//Hustlings report by providing my previous correspondence with Facebook and Twitter. I also reached out to Twitter for comment, which was later quoted in the full report. Twitter says its policy has not changed.

Everyone can express themselves on Twitter as long as they dont break the Twitter Rules, a spokesperson said. We dont block, limit, or remove content based on an individuals views or opinions. In some situations, a Tweet may not be seen by everyone, as outlined here. According to the linked guide, tweets may be limited if they are considered abusive or spammy. Twitter also engages in content curation on users timelines by deciding what users are most interested in or contributes to the conversation in safe and healthy ways. Additionally, Twitter says it uses behavior-based signals that rank content appearance based on user interactions, blocks, and mutes.

Shadowbanning is a fundamentally political concept, and Posting Into the Void reveals shadowbanning tends to primarily target sex workers, not civilians. This implies social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google dont just rely on shadowbanning; they need bans to remain undetectable in order to deceitfully curate their platforms public image. Its digital gentrification, or the process by which platforms remove marginalized users to replace them with a more market-friendly consumerbase. Like police officers admitting that the American justice system doesnt actually bring about justice, acknowledging shadowbannings existence essentially damns its creators.

The fact that users dont know much about the process of shadowbanning, the report warns, is by design.

Thanks to Blunt, Coombes, Mullin, and Wolfs peer-led research, theres now a comprehensive dataset on how shadowbanning takes place and what it entails. Hacking//Hustlings findings come from 262 participants split between sex workers, AOPs, sex workers who are AOPs, and any miscellaneous respondents (approximately 7%). While Hacking//Hustling warns the sample cannot be generalized to AOPs or sex workers as a whole, the report offers a data-backed glimpse into shadowbannings long-term effects on marginalized users.

Hacking//Hustling also found that shadowbanning is innately discriminatory: Among sex workers, 69.57% experienced shadowbanning compared to just 34.88% of civilians. Over half of sex workers reported their usernames were filtered out of platform searches compared to just 22% of non-sex workers, and 41.01% of sex workers reported deplatforming compared to just 21.57% of civilians.

45.45% of those who have not done sex work were able to get their accounts back after being deplatformed from social media while only 7.27% of those who have done sex work said the same, the report found. Of those who identify as both a sex worker and an AOP, an incredible 51.28% report they have been shadowbanned.

Most of these revelations arent news to sex workers. But the data itself shows just how invasive shadowbanning is across the sex-working community. Sex working AOPs in particular experienced nearly double the amount of shadowbanning, deplatforming, and online suppression across survey questions, Blunt told the Daily Dot. Because civilians were far less likely to report similar experiences, sex workers struggles with social media are both discriminatory and rendered invisible. Only those connected to sex workers know what is going on.

Again, this is all compared to respondents who identified exclusively as activists, organizers, and protestors, Mullin told the Daily Dot. Its very likely that this gap would be even wider if compared to the general population.

Sex workers who engaged in more online work during the coronavirus pandemic were more likely to face censorship from social media platforms, too, Hacking//Hustling found. Over half of sex workers refused to use certain words to avoid platform censorship, and sex workers were nearly three times more likely to receive an official message stating their account could face deletion than non-sex workers.

It seems that the more active you are as a sex worker on social media, the more likely you are to have your content repressed, Blunt said. When people are relying on online work more due to COVID-19, the violent impact of the repression of sex workers content is highlightedit reduces their ability to earn an income and pushes them into increased financial insecurity.

By nature, silently curtails free speech by valuing certain voices over others. A civilian political analyst with a Substack newsletter, for example, is far less likely to be shadowbanned by Twitter than a sex worker. This implies that a civilian bloggers voice is more important to a free and open democracy than a sex workers. It doesnt matter whether the latter is far more politically versed in issues like fascism, sexual politics, or online censorshipor is just a better citizen overall: In Twitters eyes, the sex worker must be suppressed because they engage in sexual labor.

Shadowbanning is a political act. Shadowbanning does not happen in a vacuum but in a country fraught with government surveillance, police violence, AOP suppression, open-source technology defunding, and the treacherous circumstances of the U.S. presidential election, Blunt told the Daily Dot. The effects of shadowbanning arent just undemocratic; they run in conjunction with offline forms of oppression. Together, these acts run the risk of untangling democracy and creating authoritarian infrastructure that suppresses and erases marginalized voices.

We were seeing a lot of posts about platform repression of protest content, stories of financial payments being blocked that said #BLM, and financial technologies disrupting mutual aid efforts and wanted to document sex worker and activists experiences online during the protests and COVID-19 pandemic, Blunt told the Daily Dot. With Posting Into the Void, we were interested in collecting data about the intersection of the digital suppression of sex workers and activists during the 2020 uprisings.

Digital suppression is growing, too. After Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced that no police officers would be charged with murdering Breonna Taylor, Coombes noted that Twitter abruptly began shadowbanning and locking accounts that posted tweets containing Breonna Taylors name. In some cases, Twitter accounts tweeting about her death were suspended. Twitter claims the suspensions were a technical issue and werent related to users posts. Twitter has given the same excuses to sex workers for years.

Surveillance technologies are being used more and more to hinder protest and demobilize movements for racial, gender, and economic justice. With sex workers being canaries in the coal mine for much of these state and corporate efforts, we are seeing in real time a mass cleansing of the internet where digital and sexual citizenship online are defined by sex worker exclusion, Coombes told the Daily Dot. For sex workers, the internet has never been free or open or safe, but with FOSTA/SESTA and now EARN IT, that exclusion from digital space is now quite literally written into federal law.

Shadowbans fundamentally target high-risk material. In a society antagonistic toward dissent, AOPs working with Black Lives Matter are becoming bigger targets for content suppression. Posting Into the Void isnt just a report revealing shadowbannings existence; its a forecast for a future that will soon impact everyone, sex workers and civilians alike, unless our political institutions are torn down and replaced with something more democratic.

We already have models of what happens when governments repress the internet and open discourse, Blunt said. Fascism.

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Report Says Shadowbanning Is RealAnd It's Suppressing Sex Workers - The Daily Dot

Twitter Locks Official Trump Campaign for Violating Terms of Conditions With Video of Hunter Biden – PopCulture.com

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Twitter locked the Trump campaign's official page for violating the site's terms of conditions with a video about Hunter Biden. According to Fox News, Twitter suspended the account over a tweet that included a video about Hunter Biden's alleged business dealings in the Ukraine. "Joe Biden is a liar who has been ripping off our country for years," the post's caption read.

Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh spoke with Fox News about the Twitter lock-out, calling it "election interference, plain and simple." He continued, "For Twitter to lock the main account of the campaign of the President of the United States is a breathtaking level of political meddling and nothing short of an attempt to rig the election. Joe Bidens Silicon Valley pals are aggressively blocking negative news stories about their guy and preventing voters from accessing important information. This is like something from communist China or Cuba, not the United States of America."

This is not the first time that a Trump account has been suspended, as Donald Trump Jr. had his account suspended in July. The President's eldest son was temporarily locked out of Twitter after sharing a video about hydroxychloroquine, a drug that had been touted as a miracle drug for coronavirus treatment. However, the drug was also known to have side-effects for some. There was not a general consensus among doctors that it was a viable therapy for those infected with the virus.

After his Twitter suspension, Trump Jr. sat down with Fox News' Tucker Carlson and shared his thoughts on the situation. "I've been saying this for a long time," Trump Jr. said. "I wrote my first book about justice and censorship coming from the big tech giants from California, as homogenous a group as you could possibly imagine. If they are censoring my account, they are censoring others and they've been trying to do this for a while."

He added, "I've been talking about the de-platforming, that demonetization of people that are preaching conservative values, because you have to note, this never happens to someone saying something that benefits the left. It only hurts conservatives." Trump Jr. also stated that he was not necessarily endorsing the claims made in the clip, but that he felt it the public should see as it as an opposing perspective to what "they've been force-feeding us for a little while."

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Twitter Locks Official Trump Campaign for Violating Terms of Conditions With Video of Hunter Biden - PopCulture.com

Facebook and Twitter Dodge a 2016 Repeat, and Ignite a 2020 Firestorm – The New York Times

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Since 2016, when Russian hackers and WikiLeaks injected stolen emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign into the closing weeks of the presidential race, politicians and pundits have called on tech companies to do more to fight the threat of foreign interference.

On Wednesday, less than a month from another election, we saw what doing more looks like.

Early Wednesday morning, the New York Post published a splashy front-page article about supposedly incriminating photos and emails found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Joseph R. Biden Jr. To many Democrats, the unsubstantiated article which included a bizarre set of details involving a Delaware computer repair shop, the F.B.I. and Rudy Giuliani, the presidents personal lawyer smelled suspiciously like the result of a hack-and-leak operation.

To be clear, there is no evidence tying the Posts report to a foreign disinformation campaign. Many questions remain about how the paper obtained the emails and whether they were authentic. Even so, the social media companies were taking no chances.

Within hours, Twitter banned all links to the Posts article, and locked the accounts of people, including some journalists and the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who tweeted it. The company said it made the move because the article contained images showing private personal information, and because it viewed the article as a violation of its rules against distributing hacked material.

On Thursday, the company partly backtracked, saying it would no longer remove hacked content unless it was shared directly by hackers or their accomplices.

Facebook took a less nuclear approach. It said that it would reduce the visibility of the article on its service until it could be fact-checked by a third party, a policy it has applied to other sensitive posts. (The move did not seem to damage the articles prospects; by Wednesday night, stories about Hunter Bidens emails were among the most-engaged posts on Facebook.)

Both decisions angered a chorus of Republicans, who called for Facebook and Twitter to be sued, stripped of their legal protections, or forced to account for their choices. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, called in a tweet for Twitter and Facebook to be subpoenaed by Congress to testify about censorship, accusing them of trying to hijack American democracy by censoring the news & controlling the expression of Americans.

Keep up with Election 2020

A few caveats: There is still a lot we still dont know about the Post article. We dont know if the emails it describes are authentic, fake or some combination of both, or if the events they purport to describe actually happened. Mr. Bidens campaign denied the central claims in the article, and a Biden campaign surrogate lashed out against the Post on Wednesday, calling the article Russian disinformation.

Even if the emails are authentic, we dont know how they were obtained, or how they ended up in the possession of Rudy Giuliani, the presidents lawyer, who has been spearheading efforts to paint Mr. Biden and his family as corrupt. The owner of the Delaware computer shop who reportedly turned over the laptop to investigators gave several conflicting accounts to reporters about the laptops chain of custody on Wednesday.

Critics on all sides can quibble with the decisions these companies made, or how they communicated them. Even Jack Dorsey, Twitters chief executive, said the company had mishandled the original explanation for the ban.

But the truth is less salacious than a Silicon Valley election-rigging attempt. Since 2016, lawmakers, researchers and journalists have pressured these companies to take more and faster action to prevent false or misleading information from spreading on their services. The companies have also created new policies governing the distribution of hacked material, in order to prevent a repeat of 2016s debacle.

Its true that banning links to a story published by a 200-year-old American newspaper albeit one that is now a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid is a more dramatic step than cutting off WikiLeaks or some lesser-known misinformation purveyor. Still, its clear that what Facebook and Twitter were actually trying to prevent was not free expression, but a bad actor using their services as a conduit for a damaging cyberattack or misinformation.

These decisions get made quickly, in the heat of the moment, and its possible that more contemplation and debate would produce more satisfying choices. But time is a luxury these platforms dont always have. In the past, they have been slow to label or remove dangerous misinformation about Covid-19, mail-in voting and more, and have only taken action after the bad posts have gone viral, defeating the purpose.

Oct. 19, 2020, 1:20 a.m. ET

That left the companies with three options, none of them great. Option A: They could treat the Posts article as part of a hack-and-leak operation, and risk a backlash if it turned out to be more innocent. Option B: They could limit the articles reach, allowing it to stay up but choosing not to amplify it until more facts emerged. Or, Option C: They could do nothing, and risk getting played again by a foreign actor seeking to disrupt an American election.

Twitter chose Option A. Facebook chose Option B. Given the pressures they have been under for the last four years, its no surprise that neither company chose Option C. (Although YouTube, which made no public statement about the Posts story, seems to be keeping its head down and hoping the controversy passes.)

Since the companies made those decisions, Republican officials began using the actions as an example of Silicon Valley censorship run amok. On Wednesday, several prominent Republicans, including Mr. Trump, repeated their calls for Congress to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that shields tech platforms from many lawsuits over user-generated content.

That leaves the companies in a precarious spot. They are criticized when they allow misinformation to spread. They are also criticized when they try to prevent it.

Perhaps the strangest idea to emerge in the past couple of days, though, is that these services are only now beginning to exert control over what we see. Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, made this point in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, in which he derided the social network for using its monopoly to control what news Americans have access to.

The truth, of course, is that tech platforms have been controlling our information diets for years, whether we realized it or not. Their decisions were often buried in obscure community standards updates, or hidden in tweaks to the black-box algorithms that govern which posts users see. But make no mistake: These apps have never been neutral, hands-off conduits for news and information. Their leaders have always been editors masquerading as engineers.

Whats happening now is simply that, as these companies move to rid their platforms of bad behavior, their influence is being made more visible. Rather than letting their algorithms run amok (which is an editorial choice in itself), theyre making high-stakes decisions about flammable political misinformation in full public view, with human decision makers who can be debated and held accountable for their choices. Thats a positive step for transparency and accountability, even if it feels like censorship to those who are used to getting their way.

After years of inaction, Facebook and Twitter are finally starting to clean up their messes. And in the process, theyre enraging the powerful people who have thrived under the old system.

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Facebook and Twitter Dodge a 2016 Repeat, and Ignite a 2020 Firestorm - The New York Times

Hoax that was Steele dossier – The Riverdale Press

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To the editor:

(re: Case closed in Russia collusion, Aug. 29, 2019)

The news blackout concerning new revelations about the Russian collusion hoax should not come as a surprise to anybody that read my letter last year in this newspaper concerning the topic.

The motive behind this political hoax was an attempt at damage control in the event that Hillary Clintons illegal email server had been hacked by the Russians. Despite being massively ahead in the polls, both Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic National Committee knew that if her 30,000 private deleted emails were leaked to Wikileaks, it would be a disaster for their party.

The setup of 27-year-old George Papadopoulos in a London wine bar by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, his intel officer Erika Thompson, and Israeli diplomat Christian Cantor, was to grill him about the conversation he had with the mysterious Joseph Mifsud. It was Mr. Mifsud who stated that the Russians had hacked Mrs. Clintons email server, collecting all 60,000 emails.

If this information proved to be true, the plan was to divert spotlight the publics attention from this sensitive information being leaked from her illegal email server to an evil plot by Trump and Putin to undermine her campaign for the presidency. And even if it didnt turn out to be true, it could be used to cast suspicion about Donald Trump by creating a dirty personal attack against his character.

Proof of my statement comes from the fact that the elected presidents first news conference was marred by reporters working for BuzzFeed, MSNBC and CNN quoting from the unsubstantiated Christopher Steele dossier. Clinton and the DNC would later hire Mark Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm to mastermind this hideous plot. They, in turn, employed Glen Simpson of GPS Fusion, who contracted retired MI6 agent Christopher Steele, owner of Orbis Business Intelligence.

Fact checking reveals Mr. Steele only lived as a diplomat in Russia between 1990 and 1993, and having retired from the agency in 2007, had been out of the intelligence gathering loop for nine years before he created his dossier.

I found it hard to believe that a person with such a profile could have any really important or reliable contacts in his contacts list after so much time.

At the same time these events were taking place, retired British diplomat Sir Andrew Wood was attending a conference in Halifax, Canada. It was he who informed Sen. John McCain about the Steele dossier, which would be picked up by David Kramer in London, and later given to FBI director James Comey, and later leaked by the DNC and news media.

And so was born the biggest, longest, most expensive political hoax played on the American people in our nations history. As a very close intelligence friend once said to me, the truth eventually comes out, even if it takes a long time.

But the biggest new twist in this passion play is the fact that Christopher Steeles main informative (operative) was Ukrainian-born Igor Danchenko, a lawyer who was connected to Russian intelligence. A fact that both the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller knew in December 2016 even before his investigation had even started.

I believe that U.S. Attorney John Durham will have even more questions and revelations about this political chicanery within the next couple months.

Lou Deholczer

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Hoax that was Steele dossier - The Riverdale Press

2016 sequel? Trump’s old attacks failing to land on Biden – Thehour.com

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President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

2016 sequel? Trump's old attacks failing to land on Biden

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump stood before a crowd in a state that had once been firmly in his grasp. There were fewer than three weeks left in the campaign, one reshaped by a virus that has killed more than 215,000 Americans, and he was running out of time to change the trajectory of the race.

He posed a question.

Did you hear the news? the president asked the hopeful crowd. Bruce Ohr is finally out of the Department of Justice.

There were scattered cheers in the crowd as the president then detailed the fate of a mostly forgotten, minor figure in the Russia probe that feels like a lifetime of news cycles ago.

That moment Wednesday in Iowa, a state Trump won comfortably four years ago but is now seen as competitive, underscored a fundamental challenge facing his reelection campaign: Its not 2016.

The presidents attempts to recycle attacks he used on Hillary Clinton that year have so far failed to effectively damage Democrat Joe Biden. And Trump has found himself dwelling more and more in the conservative media echo chamber, talking to an increasingly smaller portion of the electorate.

Fueled by personal grievance, the president has tried to amplify stories that diehard Fox News viewers know by heart but have not broken through to a broader public consumed with the sole issue that has defined the campaign: the president's management of the pandemic. Though firing up his base to turn out in huge numbers is a vital part of his campaigns strategy, Trumps insistence on fighting the last war has sounded alarms within the Republican party.

Theres probably no reason to change in his mind when he surrounds himself in an echo chamber where everyone always tells him hes doing great and hes always in front of adoring crowds who are cheering for him, said Brendan Buck, a former top adviser to Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner. Theyre running a campaign that tries to recreate the energy from before and there are many other factors that make that a fraught path to reelection.

In recent days, Trump's campaign has tried to weaponize potentially hacked emails about Biden. Trumps inner circle has been largely whittled down to the familiar faces of four years ago. A fundraising email sent late Friday was entitled Lock her up, the rallying cry against Clinton.

Oftentimes, it feels as though Trump is simply recycling old material.

Bidens repeatedly surrendered your jobs to China and other countries, Trump said last month in North Carolina.

Four years ago in Florida, the line was: Its one more way the Clintons have surrendered American prosperity to China and so many other countries.

And Sunday night in Nevada, he recounted again which states he won on Election Night in 2016.

Of course, Trump came from behind in the final stages of that campaign to win the White House. Four years later, his campaign expresses confidence that that attacking Bidens nearly five decades in Washington, along with unproven allegations of family corruption, can work again.

The presidents message is clear: he has accomplished more for America in 47 months than Joe Biden has in 47 years, said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. This boils down to a choice between a political outsider who has shaken up Washington and a failed career politician.

The Trump campaign believes it has a viable, if narrow path to victory. It has tried to repair his standing among seniors and suburban voters and believes the president can find his way to 270 Electoral College votes again by winning the Sun Belt battlegrounds - Florida, North Carolina, Arizona - while making a huge push in perhaps the most contested state on the map, Pennsylvania.

But some Trump allies and aides believe the campaigns inability to define Biden, while just resuscitating old talking points, is a failure, one exacerbated by a president who cant stay on message, according to four campaign officials and Republicans close to the White House not authorized to publicly discuss private discussions.

It also points to a campaign that has been unable to adjust to an election year unlike any in a century.

From the start of the pandemic, Trump sought to downplay the threat of the virus. His scattershot management threatened his standing among seniors, who are a key to his bases. His approach also squandered what is often a normal American instinct during a crisis: to rally around the flag and the president.

President George W. Bush campaigned for the White House in 2000 as a compassionate conservative. Like Trump, he lost the popular vote in his first race. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks reshaped his presidency, Bush pivoted to an emphasis on national security and ultimately won a majority of votes and another term.

When a crisis hits, and a leader grabs hold of the crisis, throws himself into it and as seen as the personification of how to get through it, crisis rebounds to the benefit of that person, said Ari Fleischer, who was Bushs press secretary. President Trump downplayed the crisis enough when he was then viewed as not handling COVID well and has reaped no reward.

Instead, Trump and his advisers leaned on their fog machine again, amplified by conservative media as it did during the Russia probe and the impeachment investigation. He pushed the Department of Justice to investigate members of the Obama administration and the federal bureaucracy for the investigation into the Trump campaigns possible collusion with Russia.

But a probe into unmasking, a common request by a government official for an intelligence agency to identify someone in contact with a foreigner under surveillance, ended with a whimper. And Attorney General William Barr has said John Durhams probe in short, an investigation into the investigators would not be completed before the election, which drew Trumps ire.

Last week, allegations about corruption by Bidens son, Hunter, were met with skepticism, in large part because of questions about the authenticity of an email at the center of the story.

The FBI began investigating whether the emails published by The New York Post related to the younger Biden are connected to a possible Russian influence operation to spread disinformation.

None of the efforts had the impact of Trumps claims four years ago that Clintons use of a private email server as secretary of state endangered national security and alleged she used her government connections to enrich her family. Nor have the Biden emails gained the traction of those hacked from the Clinton campaign and distributed by WikiLeaks.

The one place where the allegations have taken hold is in the conservative media.

Fox News and other outlets have, with regularity, amplified the presidents attacks on the Deep State and ran with unproven allegations against the Obama administration and the Biden family. That, some Republicans believe, creates an echo chamber with Trump, an avid cable news consumer, and convinces him that the storylines are more broadly meaningful than they are.

"Hes in the Fox bubble, hes not being effective against Biden, hes throwing stuff up against the wall, its not going to work, said Bill Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and director of Republican Voters Against Trump. But hes also an incumbent who is underwater because hes done a terrible job. No campaign is going to take change that.

And that bubble, some aides fear, has impacted Trumps message.

In 2016, Trump stuck to key broad themes on immigration, trade, corruption and political correctness and channeled his supporters grievances. This year, hes asking them to share his own.

This is a fatal flaw for Trump. He needs to speak to what the people care about, said Tobe Berkovitz, professor of communications and advertising at Boston University. Yes, its COVID, but all the issues spinning around the COVID, like the economy, like can my kids go to school, can I afford cable so the kids can be in on Zoom. That matters. Not this.

___

Lemire reported from New York.

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2016 sequel? Trump's old attacks failing to land on Biden - Thehour.com

Eyewitness to the agony of Julian Assange – Common Ground.ca

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Journalist John Pilger has spent the last three weeks watching Julian Assanges extradition trial at Londons Old Bailey. He spoke with Arena Onlines editor, Timothy Erik Strm and the result was first published in Arena (arena.org.au) in October 2020.

Q: Having watched Julian Assanges trial firsthand, can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?

A: The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with British justice, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five oclock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of security checks, including a dogs snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: I think I am losing my mind.

I tried to assure him he wasnt. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit.That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnsons Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. Thats a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then looked up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burkes notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. Thats why his punishment is so extreme.

The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassylook closely at the photo and youll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a political humour similar to Vidalsa judge gave him an outrageous50-week sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as heath care. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldnt say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr. Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the damage: Julians intellect had gone from in the superior, or more likely very superior range to significantly below this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and perform in the low average range.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, calls psychological torture, the result of a gang-like mobbing by governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that Assange is diagnosed with autism and Aspergers syndrome and, according to Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the worlds leading neuropsychiatrists, he suffers from suicidal preoccupations and is likely to find a way to take his life if he is extradited to America.

James Lewis, QC, Americas British prosecutor, spent the best part of his cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its dangers as malingering. I have never heard in a modern setting such a primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.

My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judgeor magistrate, a Gothic-looking Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is knownand the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen. Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed. The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to denigrate expert witnesses, while the defences examination is guillotined at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would be assured.

How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assanges work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardians David Leigh, now retired as investigations editor and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian scoop that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assangewritten behind their subjects backdisclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardians partnership. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.

Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didnt care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.

However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants.

Q: What are the implications of this trials verdict for journalism more broadly is it an omen of things to come?

A: The Assange effect is already being felt across the world. If they displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It doesnt matter where you are. For Washington, other peoples nationality and sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively surrendered its jurisdiction to Trumps corrupt Department of Justice. In Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided by police and journalists computers taken away. The government has given unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Assange must face the music. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is reinforced by its banality.

Evil, wrote Hannah Arendt, comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Q: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of whats at stake with Assanges trial?

A: I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the mainstream but not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies among the overpaid and undertalented, insecure in their pretensions of independence and impartiality.

I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first interviews at my home in 2010.

What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to dissent. The difference today is that the worlds imperial power, the United States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today. Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it. Little of this menace is reflected in the media.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial march through whole societiesthink of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the war on terrormost of it behind a faade of deception.

Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrorsthats why he is being persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.

The judges decision will be known on January 4.

John Pilger, journalist, author and film director, has won many distinctions for his work, including Britains highest award for journalism twice, an American Emmy, and a British Academy Award. His complete archive is held at the British Library. He lives in London and Sydney.

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Eyewitness to the agony of Julian Assange - Common Ground.ca

Op Ed: Submission: The Stalinist Show Trial of Roger Stone – The Published Reporter

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Roger Stone reacts outside his Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home after President Trump commuted his federal prison sentence. Photo credit: REUTERS/Joe Skipper.

QUEENS, NY Roger Stones trial was a Stone-cold case of abuse of justice and due process at a time when Americans are crying out for justice. Now, after his federal prison sentence was commuted by the president, thefeds are coming after him again. They never stop abusing justice to attack President Trump and his loyal Republican allies, in their failed attempts to undo what they couldnt do at the ballot box in 2016 and now in 2020, as voter enthusiasm mounts for our president.

Roger Stone, senior campaign advisor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Trump, gave us a taste of some Stone Cold Truth askeynote speaker at one of the past Lincoln Dinnersof the Queens Village Republican Club. It was his personal account of the political establishments attempt to remove President Trump after he was elected in 2016 in the largest case of political espionage that makes Watergate look like small potatoes.

Stone, the loyal defender of our president, was prosecuted as a victim of a political witch hunt. He was arrested and a trial ensued for his crimes of standing up for President Trump and not caving in to the threats of his inquisitors of theMueller investigationaimed at sending him to die in the Gulag. This was a Stalinist show trial.

How do they justify the pre-dawn raid with more than 20 FBI agents armed with automatic weapons, with CNN, the American Pravda, filming the spectacle on nationwide TV, to arrest Roger Stone as the #1 enemy of the State? They dont even send 20 FBI agents to arrest a murderer. Without evidence of a crime, presumed guilty before the trial, which was fixed, the prosecution, fixed, the court, the judges, the jury, the media all of which were fixed, in an effort to get Stone to turn on the president, to lie, in order to collect evidence for Muellers Russia collusion witch hunt. They will do anything to overturn the legitimate election of Trump.

The special court of Salem Massachusetts convened the infamous Salem witch trials, where you could be accused, prosecuted, and hanged for practicing witchcraft whether there was evidence or not. An accusation of being a witch was enough criminal evidence. Accusations of being a communist in the McCarthy era could ruin your reputation and send you to prison. People have no rights in high government commissions and are judged guilty before the trial begins.

Stones alleged crimes were prosecuted in a fake government court replete withliberal activist JudgeAmy Berman Jackson,Obama and Hillary Clinton operativesacting as prosecutors, and a partisan jury.It was a bogus government investigation of a political prisoner, in a kangaroo court that found Stone guilty before the trial without evidence of a crime, where he had to prove his innocence by squealing on Trump.

The show trialwas based on the false premises that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a Russian asset, that Wikileaks is a Russian front organization, and Stone collaborated with WikiLeaks. This was the core of the failed narrative that the Trump campaign was in collusion with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election,all of which is 100% rubbish. WikiLeaks is a big thorn in the side of our government by publishing deep secrets they dont want American voters to know. Its a key part of our governments ongoing political war against our president, who poses a great threat to the Washington deep state, the globalists, the lobbyists, the special interests, and the Democrat party itself. They dont care about America, they dont care about you, they dont care about our Constitution, they dont care about justice. All they want is to preserve business as usual to maintain their own power and control.

So they went after Stone to confess to his alleged crimes, and tell his inquisitors what they wanted to hear, that Trump put him up to this. Smear Trump and youre off the hook. But Roger Stone is an American Patriot, and he would not lie to save his own skin. So they punished him severely.They sentenced a 67-year-old with underlying respiratory problems, to rot in a federal prison with coronavirus outbreaks, for 40 months which would have been a certain death sentence.

Cop killer Steven Chirsewas recently granted early release from prison due to the coronavirus epidemic.Criminals are being released in drovesin crime-ridden Democrat run cities. Murderers are being released. But Stone, with no prior record, is treated worse than a murderer. They wanted to send him to prison to die, like a political prisoner in Stalins Russia. Like the Soviet court system, criminals are let out, and if you dont fit their narrative, they send you to the Gulag. Theyre all Stalinists the Mueller Special Counsel investigation, the judge, the courts, FBI, CIA, the media they got rid of the rule of law and people who dont fit their narrative, to give the state absolute power.

They wanted to destroy a human life to get to Trump. You wouldnt want your worst enemy to go to jail with Covid. But where is the uproar from the silent majority? Why arent more good people demanding justice for Roger Stone, as the DOJ inspector general is now re-investigating his sentencing? Why werent more people screaming that the punishment doesnt fit the crime? Where are all the social justice lawyers, hypocrites that they are? Paging Clarence Darrow who famously said: You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other mans freedom?

Where are the good people of this country standing up for a person, whom they may not like, but still deserves equal justice, because it could be you next. Stone was framed and they sent him out to die. Stone received no justice, but the greatest threat is coming to all of us. You will not receive justice under the new Stalinist Democrat regime. We must all stand up for Roger Stone and true justice, and vote in the most important election of our lifetime.

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Op Ed: Submission: The Stalinist Show Trial of Roger Stone - The Published Reporter


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