by Elizabeth Vos, Disobedient Media:

One of the key concerns raised by the recent censorship of Infowars and Telesur is that, although the two outlets could not be more different politically and structurally, both were providing fair coverage of, or support to politically imprisoned and now totally isolated journalist Julian Assange. 

Since Assange was silenced in late March, his supporters continuously warned that if he were to remain unable to connect with the outside world, it would result in the silencing of the rest of us. They warned repeatedly and loudly that Assange was the last buffer between the establishment’s ire and total domination of social discourse, a canary in the coal mine of state censorship.

Unfortunately, we now see that those concerns were well-founded. The unelected Western power structure and its technocratic social-media-baron proxies coordinated the recent purge of Alex Jones’s Infowars within twelve hours on the same day, then deleted the Facebook page of Telesur, a Venezuelan news network, multiple times.

While Venezuelan news network Telesur had covered Assange for years, Infowars recently published a petition in support of the WikiLeaks co-founder. That Infowars and Telesur are vastly different goes without saying. However, it bears repeating that the significant bridge joining these two entities is their coverage and support of Julian Assange.

In 2014, Telesur English discussed Assange’s book, ‘When Google Met WikiLeaks,’ covering Google’s rise as a powerful tool of the military establishment.

Infowars recently published a petition in support of the isolated WikiLeaks Editor-In-Chief. Sine the petition was published on July 31, it has been signed by tens of thousands of supporters by the time Infowars social media accounts were suspended less than two weeks later.

Why would a single petition warrant such a massive overreaction from the establishment, given that Jones has been pissing so many people off now for over a decade?

The perceived threat might have originated with the fact that Jone’s petition was reaching hundreds of thousands of mostly Trump supporters, and therefore may have had a greater impact on Trump’s attitude towards Assange if it were to continue to be widely circulated.

In the week following the initial purge of social media accounts, the Infowars site also appears to have been taken down on a number of occasions. This would, therefore, interfere with the ability to sign or access the petition itself. This makes it seem increasingly possible that the strangling this petition’s reach that motivated the near-total censorship of Jones, first by limiting Infowars ability to promote it, and secondarily by attempting to take the site down as well.

Earlier this month, Disobedient Media was also hit by a smear campaign relating to the Russian hacking myth. While we cannot conclude that the attack was motivated by this author’s support for Julian Assange, we can state that it seems to have been part of an overall ramping-up of establishment attacks against independent and alternative media in recent weeks.

Amongst all of this censorship, it is worthwhile to remember that as of May this year, the Atlantic Council effectively dictates the censorship policy of Facebook, as decried by MintpressNews upon the announcement of the collaboration:

“The new partnership will effectively ensure that [the] Atlantic Council will serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a company press statement. With its leadership comprised of retired military officers, former policymakers, and top figures from the U.S. National Security State and Western business elites, the Atlantic Council’s role policing the social network should be viewed as a virtual takeover of Facebook by the imperialist state and the council’s extensive list of ultra-wealthy and corporate donors.”

It’s also worth noting the report by ZeroHedge: “The Council on Foreign Relation’s Richard Stengel, a former editor of TIME magazine, told an audience at a CFR event in late April called Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News that governments “have to” direct “propaganda” toward their own populations.”

On a video recording of the CFR event, Stengel can be heard stating:

“Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job. We haven’t talked about propaganda… I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

Why is this relevant to the Atlantic Council’s [marriage] to Facebook? Because Stengel was also named a “distinguished fellow” as part of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). This is the same lab which partnered with Facebook.

To recap: A former editor of Time Magazine who advocates nations using propaganda on their own citizens is a distinguished fellow of the same Atlantic Council lab that effectively dictates Facebook’s censorship policy.

All in the name of “strengthening democracy,” of course, which now reads as the cheap euphemism for power consolidation that it is.

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