How Long Before The DHS, FBI And The CIA Move On Substack?

greenwald  |  These moves by the U.S. Security State to commandeer censorship decisions on TikTok, accompanied by the hovering threat to ban TikTok entirely from the U.S., appear to be having the desired effect already. When we launched our new live nightly show on Rumble, System Update, our social media manager created new social accounts for the program on major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, etc. Each day, she posts identical excerpts from the prior night's shows on each social media account.

For Monday night's show, I devoted my opening monologue to documenting how reporting by mainstream Western media outlets on Ukraine and President Zelensky completely reversed itself as soon as Russia invaded in February. When one reviews the trajectory of how these media outlets radically reversed everything they had been saying about Ukraine and Zelensky, one can see the Orwellian newspeak — we have always been at war with Eastasia — happening in real time.

For years, for instance, mainstream news outlets in the West repeatedly warned that the Ukrainian military was dominated by a neo-Nazi group called the Azov Battalion, that the Kiev-based government was becoming increasingly repressive and anti-democratic (including ordering three opposition media outlets closed in 2021), and that Zelensky himself was not only supported by a single Ukrainian oligarch but he himself had massive off-shore accounts of hidden wealth as revealed by the Pandora Papers. And the U.S. State Department itself, in 2021, had documented a long list of severe human rights abuses carried out either with the acquiescence or even active participation of the Zelensky-led central government.

One of the video excerpts from our program that was posted to all social media sites, including TikTok, was this indisputably true and rather benign review of how media outlets, including The Guardian, had previously depicted Zelensky as surrounded by corruption and hidden wealth. To be sure, the excerpt was critical of Zelensky, but there is absolutely nothing even factually contestable, let alone untrue, given that the whole point of the clip is to show how the media had spoken of Ukraine and Zelensky prior to the invasion as opposed to the fundamentally different tone that now drives their coverage:

Shortly after posting this video, we were notified by TikTok that the video was removed by the platform. The cited ground was “integrity and authenticity,” namely that the video, for unspecified reasons, had “undermine[d] the integrity of [their] platform or the authenticity of [their users].” The warning added that TikTok "removes content and accounts that…involve misleading information that causes significant harm.” In a separate communication, TikTok notified our program that our “account is at high risk of being restricted based on [our] violation history” (the sole violation we were ever advised of was this specific video). As a result, TikTok warned, “the next violation could result in being prevented from accessing some feature.” A more ambiguous warning could scarcely be imagined.