truthdig | Those who challenge the dominant corporate narrative already struggle
on the margins of the media landscape. The handful of independent
websites and news outlets, including this one, and a few foreign-run
networks such as Al-Jazeera and RT America, on which I host a show, “On Contact,”
are the few platforms left that examine corporate power and empire, the
curtailment of our civil liberties, lethal police violence and the
ecocide carried out by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture
industries, as well as cover the war crimes committed by Israel and the
U.S. military in the Middle East. Shutting down these venues would
ensure that the critics who speak through them, and oppressed peoples
such as the Palestinians, have no voice left.
I witnessed and was
at times the victim of black propaganda campaigns when I was a foreign
correspondent. False accusations are made anonymously and then amplified
by a compliant press. The anonymous site PropOrNot, replicating this
tactic, in 2016 published a blacklist of 199 sites that it alleged, with
no evidence, “reliably echo Russian propaganda.” More than half of
those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the
sites were progressive, anti-war and left-wing. They included AlterNet,
Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig,
Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. PropOrNot
charged that these sites disseminated “fake news” on behalf of Russia,
and the allegations became front-page news in The Washington Post in a
story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’
during the election, experts say.” Washington Post reporter Craig
Timberg wrote in that article that the goal of “a sophisticated Russian
propaganda effort,” according to “independent researchers who have
tracked the operation,” was “punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping
Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”
To
date, no one has exposed who operates PropOrNot or who is behind the
website. But the damage done by this black propaganda campaign and the
subsequent announcement by Google and other organizations such as
Facebook last April that they had put in filters to elevate “more
authoritative content” and marginalize “blatantly misleading, low
quality, offensive or downright false information” have steadily
diverted readers away from some sites. The Marxist World Socialist Web Site,
for example, has seen its traffic decline by 75 percent. AlterNet’s
search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News is down 72 percent,
and Global Research and Truthdig have seen declines. And the situation
appears to be growing worse as the algorithms are refined.
Jeff
Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post and the founder and CEO of
Amazon, has, like Google and some other major Silicon Valley
corporations, close ties with the federal security and surveillance
apparatus. Bezos has a $600 million contract with the CIA. The lines
separating technology-based entities such as Google and Amazon and the
government’s security and surveillance apparatus are often nonexistent.
The goal of corporations such as Google and Facebook is profit, not the
dissemination of truth. And when truth gets in the way of profit, truth
is sacrificed.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN have all
imposed or benefited from the algorithms or filters—overseen by human
“evaluators.” When an internet user types a word in a Google search it
is called an “impression” by the industry. These impressions direct the
persons making the searches to websites that use the words or address
the issues associated with them. Before the algorithms were put in place
last April, searches for terms such as “imperialism” or “inequality”
directed internet users mostly to left-wing, progressive and anti-war
sites. Now they are directed primarily to mainstream sites such as The
Washington Post. If you type in “World Socialist Web Site,” which has
been hit especially hard by the algorithms, you will be directed to the
site—but you have to ask for it by name. Searches for associated words
such as “socialist” or “socialism” are unlikely to bring up a list in
which the World Socialist Web Site appears near the top.
There are
10,000 “evaluators” at Google, many of them former employees at
counterterrorism agencies, who determine the “quality” and veracity of
websites. They have downgraded sites such as Truthdig, and with the
abolition of net neutrality can further isolate those sites on the
internet. The news organizations and corporations imposing and
benefiting from this censorship have strong links to the corporate
establishment and the Democratic Party. They do not question corporate
capitalism, American imperialism or rising social inequality.
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