No, Facebook is NOT “Private,” Their Censorship Arm is Government Funded

 “Facebook is a private company and can delete any pages they want,”  has been repeated ad nauseam since Alex Jones was wiped from its  platform. While it is certainly true that a private company can and  should be able to choose who they associate with, the idea that Facebook  is private is not accurate. 

For this reason, the recent purge of  hundreds of alternative media sites, including the Free Thought Project, was not only questionable, but unconstitutional. In May, after Americans were successfully whipped into a tizzy of  Russian hacking and meddling, along with the fake news hysteria, the  Americans begging for censorship craze came to a head when Facebook  partnered with the Atlantic Council. 

Facebook announced that it partnered with the arm of the council,  known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab that was brought on to help  the social media behemoth with “real-time insights and updates on  emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

 Apparently, Free Thought Project was one of those threats. Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council, so what, right? They  can do whatever they want and hire outside third parties to help them  police the platform they own, right? 

Yes, this is correct. However, the Atlantic Council is funded by government. The Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars  and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue  to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon,  Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs  like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri. 

The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists —  is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the  pharmaceutical industry, Google, the United States, the US Army, and the  Airforce. The “think tank” Facebook partnered with to make decisions on who  they censor is directly funded by multiple state actors — including the  United States — which voids any and all claims that Facebook is a wholly  “private actor.”   It gets worse. 

The Atlantic Council wields massive influence over mainstream media  too, which is why when this partnership was announced, no one in the  mainstream press pointed it out as the Orwellian idea that it is.  Instead, headlines such as “US think tank’s tiny lab helps Facebook battle fake social media(Reuters)” and “Facebook partners with Atlantic Council to improve election security (The Hill)” were put out to spin the fact that a NATO propaganda arm is now censoring the information Americans see on Facebook. 

They have even been caught engaging in the creation of actual fake news and no one in the mainstream has called them out on it. As Bryan MacDonald so aptly noted,  some of the stuff the Atlantic Council itself gets away with serves to  show its power over the mainstream media. 

For instance, when Ben Nimmo, a  one-time NATO press officer, and Atlantic Council board member, himself  ludicrously insisted grammar mistakes were “proof” that social media users critical of NATO were paid Kremlin trolls, and later when he smeared a  British man by labeling him a Russian bot, the popular press didn’t  bother to question whether he was a fit and proper person for Facebook  to engage as a censor. 

Even after the victim appeared on Sky News to  prove he was a real person. Thus, what should have been a warning of the  dangers of DFR Lab was essentially ignored. 

At the time, after Nimmo, instead of apologizing, wrote “interesting to see the real face of Ian56789, rather than the David Gandy one, at last (referring to his Twitter avatar). Not a troll factory account. Rather, a pro-Kremlin troll(definition  based on [sic] use of someone else’s picture, systematic use of Kremlin  narratives, and repetitive abusive behaviour),” WikiLeaks was the sole voice of reason, and challenged the lobbyist. 

“You  literally produced, with money from weapons companies and  dictatorships, a fake news story that spread all over the world,  defaming a very British retiree, who wants to reduce arms company  profits, as a Kremlin bot,” they wrote. “So who’s the paid troll?”   

This is the group Facebook is now taking direction from in regard to  who is allowed to post information on their platform. The Atlantic  Council has been proven to create fake news to slander people who have  an antiwar stance in an effort to keep their pro-war weapons companies  in the black. It is utter insanity. 

However, in today’s information war,  it is to be expected. Caitlan Johnstone, who has been a champion of calling out this censorship since the start, also pointed out several other reasons why Facebook is anything but “private.” 

Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from  the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How “private” is that?  Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook  censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a  corporatist system of government.

Indeed, unless we fight back in the form of sharing information  deemed “wrong think” by the censors, this problem will only continue to  get worse. We must continue to alert our fellow humans to this  censorship before it becomes the norm. We must use this recent purge as  our Streisand moment and turn this massive and blatant act of censorship  around as a tool to expose the tyrants behind it. Make no mistake, October 11, 2018 marked the day the battle over information became a war. If you are not on our email list, please sign up here. If you’d like to subscribe to our site to aid in the battle against the censors and receive special perks along the way, you can do so at this link.  We are also working with the folks from minds.com and have created a  platform on their uncensored network as well. You can follow us at this link.  We have been on Steemit as well. And Instagram too. We are also in meetings with software developers who are building a  platform that government will never be able to touch. Stay tuned for  more information on this move.