Ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media? 

No, and that’s the idea. 

It’s a secret, bureaucratic group that nonetheless wants to decide what you read, see and hear online.

GARM, as it’s known, is an initiative from the World Federation of Advertisers, a cartel that exerts control over some 90% of global marketing spending — and it used (possibly illegal) big-bucks leverage to go after free speech online, per a bombshell new House Judiciary Committee report. 

The idea is simple. 

GARM pick out supposed bad websites that allegedly spread “disinformation.”

That word almost always means correct information on Hunter’s laptop or now-accepted arguments that COVID may have come from a lab or anything else that cuts against the Dem-dominated narrative. 

Then, under the GARM rubric, the cartel with its massive list of its big-company partners and huge ad agencies would work to starve those sites of ad dollars.

GARM is masterminded by a pseudo-fascist named Rob Rakowitz, who’s appointed himself mega-censor of everything people can read and professes himself frustrated by an “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” on speech issues.  

He and his jackbooted crew went after the familiar targets. 

Like Twitter: Hardly had Elon Musk taken it over before a GARM member was pushing for a boycott. 

And Facebook, which GARM tried to get to censor a Donald Trump campaign ad. 

Facebook told them where they could get off; Rakowitz whined that was “reprehensible.” 

Rakowitz even — insanely — went after Spotify for daring to host Joe Rogan’s podcast, though Rogan wasn’t taking ad bucks from any of the companies in GARM’s cartel. 

Rakowitz also hawked the now-discredited Global Disinformation Index, a London-based group of speech-haters who declared pubs like Reason, RealClearPolitics and The Post verboten — clearly because they lean right or libertarian. 

GDI was seemingly a source of the group’s target list. 

And the outfit was also the beneficiary of State Department bucks — yet another channel through which the White House tried to stifle free speech and thought.  

It’s all one big, ugly complex — operating juuuuuust outside the traditional boundaries of legally defined censorship, but nonetheless unmistakably censoring like crazy. 

With power-mad, middle-management nobodies like Rakowitz running point. 

The Judiciary Committee has done yeoman’s work exposing various tendrils of this ugly weed, and this newest release is just as important. 

As is its argument that GARM may have broken antitrust law with its Orwellian power-play. 

The disinfo warriors need to be called to account with whatever penalties the law allows.

No matter how long it takes. 

Otherwise, Goebbels-wannabes like Rakowitz (and the real disinformation they push) will win out. 

https://nypost.com/2024/07/12/opinion/fascist-creep-rob-rakowitz-wants-to-control-what-you-read-good-on-the-house-for-blowing-him-up/

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By Andrew Lowenthal

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984

For years the media, “fact-checkers,” and “anti-disinformation” initiatives told the public there was nothing wrong with Joe Biden. A few weeks ago, in the space of five minutes, they flipped. Rapid-onset dementia had struck the President and it was time for change.

The people who claim they can sort truth from fiction spent years lying despite the crippling obvious. What is more baffling is why so many people went along with it for so long. Was it fear? Complacency? Cowardice? An incredible level of discipline was enforced – that has thankfully now unraveled. Rather than debunking “misinformation,” Biden’s protectors often spread it.

In August 2020 the Aspen Institute coordinated a Hunter Biden laptop pre-bunk exercise that sought to suppress a true story to protect Biden’s wayward son and shield the President from major corruption allegations. A swathe of major media and Big Tech participated in that exercise, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Twitter, Facebook, and many more. Claire Wardle, former director of “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft (now the Information Futures Lab at Brown University) also participated.

In a letter allegedly organised by Anthony Blinken, 51 former intelligence agents claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian information operation” and Facebook, Twitter, and others suppressed the story on their platforms. Almost everyone now admits the laptop was real.

Or take Biden’s claim that “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” PolitiFact thought that may have been an “exaggeration” but reassured us that cases of the vaccinated getting Covid are “rare.”

The Party told you to reject the evidence not just of your eyes and ears, but your whole body.

However, perhaps the biggest lie was the years-long campaign to “debunk” suggestions that Biden was growing incapable of commanding the highest office in the land. PolitiFact was very diligent in “fact-checking” “cheap fakes” and other stories that alleged Joe Biden was senile, reassuring us that everything was fine.

The term “cheap fake” was coined by Britt Paris and Hunter Biden laptop denialist Joan Donovan. Donavan has long been a darling of the “anti-disinformation” field.

In the words of Aspen Hunter Biden laptop pre-bunker Claire Wardle, the Biden cheap fakes are “the weaponization of context. It’s genuine content, but the context changes via minor edits. Anyone can be vulnerable with the right edit.” In fact, as recently as June 21 Wardle was carrying water for Biden. In a New York Times article that sought to debunk “misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his [Biden’s] age and abilities,” Wardle explained that “This isn’t a new narrative, it builds on an existing one, which tends to be much more effective.” Yes, adding more true information to other true information tends to make an argument more convincing.

Or take Rebekah Tromble, Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs and the director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University. According to Tromble “Biden became a main target of deceptive edits.” “These clips draw on a common trope about President Biden that’s popular among his detractors: He’s old, bumbling, and senile, meaning he’s incompetent and incapable of doing this job.” His gaffes and inability to speak clearly are unrelated to his cognitive ability, and are instead because “Biden grew up stuttering.”

PolitiFact is a project of the Poynter Institute which coordinates the biggest network of fact-checkers in the world, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). IFCN is funded largely by Facebook but also by the “Craig Newmark Foundation, the Koch Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the National Endowment for Democracy, Microsoft, and the Washington Post.” This is not a small fringe “fact-checking” outfit; it is one of the leading organizations in the sector.

Perhaps the name makes it clear – it is Politi(cised) Fact-checking.

Newsguard, a “disinformation” ranking service that can punish a news site’s advertising revenue through its rating system, has also been active. Power Line, a conservative online news outlet, alleges they were contacted by Newsguard in 2021 about their claims of Biden’s cognitive decline. In an email, Newsguard asked:

We’ve noticed that the site has repeatedly stated as fact in its article[s] that Joe Biden has dementia, both during the 2020 election cycle and since he became president. Why does the site make this claim without providing credible evidence that he has dementia?

Newsguard’s approach is particularly concerning because of its ability to impact the revenue of media outlets, and due to its strong links to the State Department and intelligence agencies – its board includes former CIA Director Michael Hayden.

If all that fails you can always blame the Russians. EUvsDisinfo, a European Union project to “forecast, address, and respond to the Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns” claimed reports of Biden being “senile” are “false” and are part of “pro-Kremlin disinformation.”

Mainstream media have also been a critical part of the lying machine, claiming recent videos that show Biden wandering off at a G7 event were “misinformation” or “cheap fakes” and are part of a concerted effort to “hammer the narrative that Biden is too old to be president.” PolitiFact also “fact-checked” the story with the usual line.

The list could go on and on and on but Matt Orfalea’s amazing “sharp as a tack” compilation puts the nail in the coffin. More “out of context” clips and “cheap fakes” according to the “anti-disinformation” “experts” no doubt.

What is the lesson? On one hand, censorship and suppression only work for so long. Reality will eventually catch up with you. However, it also tells us that a lot of people can pretend the emperor does have clothes, even when he is stark naked and half the court is screaming and pointing at the top of their lungs – also known as “spreading misinformation.” It seems there is an endless supply of “fact-checking” and “anti-disinformation” sycophants ready to bow and scrape before the mad king.

Ultimately it tells us just how corrupt the “fact-checking” and “anti-disinformation” industries are. Whilst there are an increasing number of people on the outside speaking up, internally cowardice and the silencing of critics have allowed a prolific level of corruption to grow. This is an across-the-board problem in the liberal and progressive spheres where pious bullies have shut down dialogue. This corruption has led progressives and liberals down a disastrous dead end. Barring a miracle, Trump is coming.

If there is any justice a reckoning is also coming for the “fact-checkers” and “anti-disinformation” “experts.”

Republished from the author’s Substack

Source: Brownstone Institute

https://www.activistpost.com/2024/07/biden-and-the-medias-anti-disinformation-campaign.html

THE SAME MEDIA DISINFORMATION WILL PROMOTE KAMALA TO GOD-ANOINTED STATUS....

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https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240726-trump-meets-israeli-pm-netanyahu-in-florida

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSJ5FcT-mU4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly5KmQObwRg

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Elon Musk has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), alleging that it organized an illegal boycott of X (formerly Twitter). Video hosting platform Rumble has joined the complaint.

The suit, filed in Texas on Tuesday, follows last month’s publication of a report by the US House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, which found evidence that GARM conspired to demonetize and otherwise harm “disfavored platforms.”

“We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war,” Musk said on X, above a post from Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski announcing he would join the case.

“This is not a decision we took lightly, but it is a direct consequence of their actions,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in an open letter to all users, calling the behavior by GARM and others “a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue.”

https://www.rt.com/news/602252-musk-rumble-advertiser-war/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

    by Jonathan Turley

We have been discussing media rating systems being used to target advertisers and revenue sources for certain cites and companies. NewsGuard and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) have been criticized as the most sophisticated components of a modern blacklisting system targeting conservative or dissenting voices. I recently had a series of exchanges with NewsGuard after a critical column.  Now, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is moving forward in demanding documents and records from leading companies utilizing the GARM system, a company that I have previously criticized. It is a welcomed effort for anyone who is concerned over the use of these blacklisting systems to curtail free speech. However, time is of the essence.

The demand to preserve evidence went to various companies, including Adidas, American Express, Bayer, BP, Carhartt, Chanel, CVS and General Motors.

In my new book, I discuss the rating systems as a new and insidious form of blacklisting. Notably, Elon Musk has now filed a lawsuit against GARM and may be able to get more evidence out in discovery on the operations of this outfit.

It is an effort to strangle the financial life out of sites by targeting their donors and advertisers.  This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.

Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. GDI warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.

Once GDI’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the GARM, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.

Notably, Rob Rakowitz, head of GARM, pushed GDI and embraced its work. In an email to GARM members obtained by the committee last month, Rakowitz wrote that he wanted to “ensure you’re working with an inclusion and exclusion list that is informed by trusted partners such as NewsGuard and GDI — both partners to GARM and many of our members.”

GARM is being used by WFA to achieve what GDI failed to accomplish. The WFA site refers to Rakowitz as “a career change agent” who will “remove harmful content from ad-supported digital media.”

Rakowitz’s views on free speech are chilling and his work shows how these systems can be used to conceal bias in targeting the revenue of sites with opposing views.

Rakowitz has denounced the “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” and how civil libertarians cite “‘principles for governance’ and applying them as literal law from 230 years ago (made by white men exclusively).”

He appears to be referring to free speech. If so, it is deeply troubling. Some of us believe that free speech is a human right, not just an American right. Those “white men” include philosophers from the Enlightenment whose ideas were incorporated in the Framer’s view of inalienable rights like free speech.

The threat against free speech today is being led by private groups seeking to exercise an unprecedented level of control over what people can read and discuss.

Pundits and politicians, including President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, have justified their calls for censorship (or “content moderation” for polite company) by stressing that the First Amendment only applies to the government, not private companies. That distinction allows Obama to declare himself to be “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist.” He did not call himself a “free speech absolutist” because he favors censorship for views that he considers to be “lies,” “disinformation,” or “quackery.”

The distinction has always been a disingenuous evasion. The First Amendment is not the sole or exclusive definition of free speech. Censorship on social media is equally, if not more, damaging for free speech. Those who value free speech should oppose blacklisting systems, as was the case during the McCarthy period. Now that conservatives and libertarians are being blacklisted, it is suddenly less troubling for many on the left.

Rakowitz now wields massive influence over public discourse in this collaboration with corporations and groups like GDI. As was done to the left during the McCarthy period, blacklisting systems are now being used to control public access to information by choking off the revenue of sites.

The current anti-free speech movement is the most dangerous in history due precisely to this sophistication and the unprecedented alliance of corporate, media, academic, and government interests.

GARM and other media rating systems have been embraced by many who would prefer to silence opposing voices than respond to them. Rakowitz was wildly popular at Davos in calling for a “safer” Internet that would target dangerous sites much like GDI: “GARM has been officially recognized as a key project for 2020 within the WEF’s platform on Shaping the Future of Media Entertainment and Culture.”

The House committees are pushing forward with a sense of urgency. It is clear that the investigations in government-supported censorship and these blacklisting operations will end if the Democrats retake the house. It is expected that these companies will seek to delay any disclosures in the hope that the House will change hands and this system will again be allowed to recede back into the darkness.

Reprinted from JonathanTurley.org.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/the-garms-race-the-house-moves-forward-with-its-investigation-of-blacklisting-company/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23LMcDZoHrU

"I'm FINISHED playing nice, this is War!" Elon Musk goes on the attack | Redacted w Clayton Morris

X is suing advertiser groups for antitrust violations because they pressure advertisers to withhold their money from content that they don't like. We are cheering this one on!

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.